Why your small firm can't afford to disregard advertising

Some large firms have built strong client bases on the back of mainstream advertising, but it can also be a key part of the marketing mix for smaller players, writes Trish Carroll.

Law firms and advertising usually do not go together like bacon and eggs. They should, though, especially if yours is a consumer-centred law firm. What is a consumer-centred law firm? These firms are focused on meeting all, or some, of the everyday needs of ordinary Australians, including advising on:

• personal injury and work-related ill health;
• divorce, domestic violence and relationship breakdowns;
• making, changing or challenging a will;
• selling or buying a house;
• disputes with employers, tenants, landlords, neighbours and relatives;
• general crime, unfair treatment by police and police action; and
• debt and solvency issues.

The list above represents the backbone of the service offering of most sole practitioners and small firms. Sole practitioner firms in NSW constitute about 87 per cent of private firms, a statistic I expect is mirrored in other states and territories. With few exceptions, small firms do not use many elements of the ‘marketing mix’ – that is the term given to cover the set of actions, or tactics, that a business uses to promote its brand (products and services) in the market.

Marketing clout

Contrast this to consumer firm behemoths Slater & Gordon, Shine Lawyers and Maurice Blackburn Lawyers. These firms use all components of the marketing mix to support a crystal clear market strategy. Each firm knows exactly what sort of clients they want to attract and what sort of services those clients need.

Every aspect of how they promote themselves is targeted to their core market and that market is enormous, which is why they use the same type of promotional strategies as other successful consumer brands; for example, supermarket chains, insurers and telecommunications companies. They need to get their message out to the masses because they are selling to a mass market. They use above and below the line marketing:

• Above the line – mass media methods for targeting larger and more general customers through television, cinema, print ads and outdoor advertising;
• Below the line – targeted to individual consumers (or sets of consumers) using media relations, search engine marketing, social media marketing, content marketing and events.

Last financial year, Slater & Gordon spent almost 15 per cent of its annual revenue of $908 million on advertising and marketing, while Shine Lawyers spent about 8 per cent of its $136 million revenue on such marketing. In Shine’s 2017 half-year investor presentation, it reports that its new marketing campaign is delivering new files, enquiries and improving conversion rates.

Last year, both firms faced, and continue to face, pressure because of poor share price performance, but advertising and marketing budgets were not slashed from the previous year. Instead, they increased their marketing expenditure. It was not this expenditure that caused the share value decline.

Maurice Blackburn is not a listed entity, so it is hard to know what it spends on these activities, but it is reasonable to assume it would be a large sum. Maurice Blackburn’s website says that it is Australia’s leading compensation and social justice firm and We Fight for Fair is its tag line (another marketing term that is used to describe a short, memorable phrase that companies use to summarise their value proposition; for example, Woolworths uses The Fresh Food People).

Last year, Maurice Blackburn launched a campaign involving a 105-second film, narrated by TV and stage actor Michael Caton, entitled Your Right Is My Right.  This film was designed to help people who have never experienced social injustice learn why social justice is important in a fair and just society.  In Campaign Brief, a creative advertising trade magazine, it reported that the film was originally intended for a digital audience (below the line) but the firm decided to go above the line and the campaign aired on channels 7, 9 and 10 with a focus on Victoria and Queensland.

Small firms think big

There are much smaller consumer firms than these three and they are use marketing tactics intelligently. For example:

• Brydens Lawyers was once a small firm operating in Sydney’s working-class western suburb of Liverpool. Today it has 10 offices in NSW. Its tag line is Protecting Your Future. The firm was a long-time supporter of NRL team West Tigers. In 2015, Brydens became a major sponsor and signed up to a three-season, multi-million-dollar deal, as reported on the Wests Tigers’ website. It also has partnerships with other NRL clubs and runs free legal advice clinics on these clubs’ premises. It ran seven clinics in May 2017 alone.
• Stacks Law Group is another firm that has evolved from Get Stacks for Your Compensation to Partners in Life. According to its website, reform in the early 2000s within the legal profession was the catalyst for Stacks to think strategically. Today the firm is a network of locally owned, independent law firms operating in 25 locations in NSW, the ACT and Queensland.
• Law Partners, Personal Injury Lawyers has embarked on a major magazine advertising campaign, as I found out when flipping through WHO Weekly and Women’s Day at my hairdresser’s. Since that happened, I have noticed Law Partners billboards dotted on many of the major roads I travel down. Law Partners has 15 offices in NSW, seven in Victoria and one in the ACT.

If you are a small consumer-centred firm, your firm may resemble the once common corner store competing with large supermarket chains. Some of the large consumer-centred firms mentioned here may even be your firm’s equivalent of Woolworths or Coles.

If so, you need to consider what impact they will have on your practice and think, plan and act differently, just as the firms singled out here have done.

Trish Carroll is the principal of Galt Advisory, a firm focused on helping law firms devise and implement successful marketing and business development strategies. She can be contacted at trish@galtadvisory.com.au and wants you to know that she has no shares in Slater & Gordon or Shine Lawyers and has never had any dealings with the other firms named in this article.