There are two ways you can validly look to approach a legal marketing strategy:
- Omnipresence – be on every channel as often as possible; or
- Focused Dominance – be on a limited number of channels, but work towards being the best.
Both have their pros and cons.
This article sets out why you should consider ditching your attempts at omnipresence, and focusing for a time on one or two primary channels.
Omnipresence Is Exhausting
This may not be as much of a factor if you're a mid-size law firm or larger with an in-house marketing team and a significant budget.
But for most solo practitioners and smaller firms, the fact is that managing a dozen different content and social channels is actually pretty hard to do well.
Managing multiple posting schedules, content styles and types, platform preferences, engagement (commenting) channels, hashtag usage (or not), and the many variables that go into maintaining a valuable presence on 10 different platforms is simply more difficult and time consuming than doing it on 1 or 2.
Pretty logical really.
And while a dedicated full time person might be able to achieve that (depending whether everything needs to run through a committee or not), it's still going to consume a lot of resources.
Focused Effort Means Better Execution
Hopefully you'd agree that, generally speaking, someone who specialises in a particular area is generally going to have a greater degree of skill and knowledge at executing in that area than someone who generalises.
After all – a tax lawyer usually knows more about tax than a general business practitioner. The latter still has a decent tax understanding, but it's not the same calibre.
Let's apply that to our marketing efforts.
You have 150 points to spend. In order to excell in a given channel (say, blogging for your law firm) you probably need to spend 60-70 of those points.
Spreading your efforts across multiple channels inevitably means you spend 15 points in email, 15 points in content, 15 points in podcasting, 15 points in facebook and so on.
The result being that while you theoretically are “present” on those channels, your efforts (and therefore your results) could well be sub-optimal compared to what would happen if you spent 80 points on blogging and 70 points on email and left it at that.
Focusing on one or two major channels allows you to train, practice, and execute to a higher degree of both quality and quantity on the given channels.
It Allows for Greater Connection
Focusing on fewer marketing channels inevitably means you will spend more time on those channels.
Whereas, commonly, trying to spread your interactions across 10 different platforms is going to mean adopting a third party tool of some kind, singling out some major areas of marketing effort means you will spend more time on the given channel.
For some this is slightly less relevant – spending more time on your blogging or podcasting platforms doesn't necessarily give you greater chance to interact.
However more time on LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram is going to mean you are finding and taking more opportunities to actually engage with people on those platforms. You will be interacting, commenting, responding and gaining more momentum over time using a focused approach. You will learn the shortcuts and “hacks” to speed up your methods, understand more of those weird platform-centric phrases and lingo that hang around, and grow more and more part of a given community.
This, after all, is a big part of the known liked and trusted strategy and one which is difficult to do if you're too busy playing around with your overly complicated posting schedule to ensure that your latest piece on DeviantArt doesn't get lost because you were trying to learn how to use Untappd (a beer drinking platform, if you're wondering).
So… Where to Focus?
In our world the only sane place to focus your attention from the beginning is on owned assets.
Usually that means “not social media”.
Why? Because social media platform owners can change the rules whenever they want, so unless you're happy risking your entire audience and all of your content being deleted, your best to stick with stuff you can keep.
That means your website content, digital assets like video and audio, and an email list.
There will be a time to expand your efforts in the future of course, but if you're going to start somewhere and have the time to dedicate to doing it (that is – you're not in a big hurry to drive cash flow immediately) then that's where to start.
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