According to Dallas-based law firm content marketing guru Qamar Zaman, “small law firms must learn to integrate content marketing into their strategies more effectively if they want to stay alive today. There are so many resources that can help them ensure that they are generating the buzz needed to maintain steady sales numbers while staying within a reasonable marketing budget.”
This is true both for small firms and solo practitioners. Too often as attorneys we are either focused on rain-making or swamped with client work so marketing gets bumped to the back burner.
Whether you’ve got a solo practice or are partnered up with a few other attorneys, it’s important to look at the broader picture and understand that in order to serve your clients properly while maintaining a funnel of prospective clients, you need retain professionals to handle some or all of your marketing.
This is essential for Internet content marketing because few attorneys have the skills or the time to properly build an online presence at their websites and in social media that converts into qualified paying clients.
In my experience as a Dallas business lawyer who represents a lot of tech-related clients, it’s simply appalling to see the Internet activities of some attorneys who try to handle all of their own marketing activities rather than outsource.
From my perspective, the reason why this occurs is that most lawyers are taught about the law as a profession while the educational system skips the part about law firms being for-profit ventures that need to be treated as such in order to survive and thrive.
Who Should Do Your Law Firm Content Marketing?
Abraham Lincoln once said that a lawyer’s time is his stock in trade. Because there are only 168 hours in a week (including time for sleep), the more finite time you invest in activities other than the practice of law, the less service you’ll be able to render to clients and bill them for it.
Once you start crunching the numbers, it’s likely you’ll discover that outsourcing some or all of your law firm’s content marketing makes perfect sense.
Of course, when you do outsource, be sure to use a professionally prepared services agreement. If your area of practice isn’t business contracts (e.g. personal injury, criminal defense, etc.), you probably ought to retain an experienced business transactional lawyer to draft your law firm content marketing agreement.
