The four best tactics to attract new clients

Following on from my colleague’s post on how to create effective content despite time and budget constraints, this article looks at the wider issue of which tactics to adopt to attract new clients.

Content marketing should certainly be one of them. But what do we mean by content marketing and how effective is it in attracting new business?

Content marketing can cover a wide range of outputs including newsletters, articles, social media posts, firm reports, videos, podcasts, speeches and webinars/events.

In a world where professionals are under time and costs pressure, choosing the most effective tactics is crucial.

So, let’s start by reference to one of the pioneers of big law consulting. Thirty years ago, in his seminal work Managing the Professional Service Firm, David Maister, a Harvard professor, revealed his hierarchy of marketing tactics for professional services firms seeking to bring in new business. Maister divided tactics into three areas: the first division; the second string; and “clutching at straws”.

Much of it holds true today so I have repeated the league table below with some updates in red based on the emergence of global directory rankings and social media, which did not exist or were very much in their infancy when Maister delivered his verdict.

The First Team

• Seminars
• Speeches at industry events
• Proprietary research
• Articles in the client-oriented press

Second String Tactics

• Networking at community and social events
• Newsletters
• Webinars

Clutching at Straws

• PR and publicity
• Cold calling
• Direct mail/unsolicited email
• Brochures/brochure websites
• Advertising
• Large, ballroom-scale seminars
• Rankings and ranking announcements
• Sponsoring sports and cultural events

Maister lists his top tactics as seminars, speeches, proprietary research and articles in the client-focused press.

Why are these the best tactics? Because they all offer value to a client or prospect at no cost. They provide insights on how to solve problems or offer new ideas or facts without asking for anything in return. They help you consider how to tackle a challenge or take advantage of an opportunity demonstrating the value the firm can bring to a potential client.

• Seminars and in-house events stand out as perhaps the strongest tactic of all because as well as providing the opportunity to share insights that are useful to your target audience, they also grant you in-person contact with them. If you divide the room into breakout groups to discuss the content, this allows you to involve multiple partners in small groups who can find out where prospects have challenges, needs and issues which can lead to work opportunities. Maister emphasises that the event should be small scale for this reason. We organise meetings for 20 buy-side attendees, with five partners, which creates new connections, and allows for close engagement and the chance to follow up on legitimate concerns of the companies present.

We have placed webinars, which did not exist in Maister’s time, in the second string because, even though they can provide useful insights, they tend to be less effective for business generation as they lack the personal element and are less interactive. Professional services providers need personal contact with prospects if they are going to get new instructions.

• Speeches at industry events can work well in that there will be prospects in the room who are facing the issues that you cover in your presentation. It is good to try and qualify the people attending your session by offering to share your full report or other materials, or by inviting people to a follow-up workshop. You then screen out those in the room who are not interested in finding out more about you and your firm by asking prospects to take a small step to leave a business card or click on a QR code on your last slide.
• Proprietary research can drive good thought leadership though, as my colleague Stephen said, it can be expensive if you set out to generate data from your research. Whitepaper style reports may lack original data but through them you can present the cogent views of expert commentators around existing data (including but not exclusively the views of your own partners), which can fulfil the brief in assisting companies to understand their challenges better or highlight challenges they were not aware of. This can work in a cost-effective manner for both existing clients and prospects.
• The final top tactic for Maister is articles in the client-oriented press. He was writing in the 1990s when traditional trade and business media were one of the only ways besides the firm’s own mailing list to reach out to audiences. That has changed and, these days, social media can be an effective channel to reach clients and prospects but you need the content to be aligned with the business challenges mentioned above for it to be effective.

Social media and email can be used for the dissemination of links to longer form analysis and content that delves into areas of concern and pain points of prospects. Using social media to announce rankings to a company that has never engaged you falls into clutching at straws tactics. It shows no concern for what a prospect’s problems and challenges might be, so it is very unlikely to have any influence on a prospective client. While I appreciate that may not be the prime motivation (though some firms do think it is good marketing), the overuse of this tactic tends to have a wearing effect. If you want to shout out to staff, you can use internal sources.

I remember at a legal awards we organised, one in-house counsel saying that you would think GCs and their teams did nothing to make a deal happen given the song and dance some firms make when they win awards.

Use social media primarily to talk to external contacts and share useful content that demonstrates you understand how you might help them. This can include rankings if you are trying to lure in new graduates, for example, but add the context i.e. include a link to an interview with a recent graduate who has joined the ranked department. Don’t just issue reams of self-congratulatory posts. As Maister says, boasting does not sell, especially if buyers of legal services do not rate the awards or submissions in question.

Second String Tactics

In the second string is networking e.g. at social events, clubs or events, because for every rainmaker’s legendary story about landing business on the golf course, such business development requires extensive investments of time, with no guarantee of results. Better to attract prospects by showing you understand the challenges they are facing than by mingling at networking drinks in the hope you might find somebody with whom you can swap cards who might have some work to push your way. The randomness of card swapping at the IBA’s Annual Meeting in Paris last year was a good example where firms were pushing cards into our hands without even asking what we did.

The other element highlighted by Maister as a second-string tactic is newsletters. The issue here is that newsletters are generic, so they don’t offer the opportunity to show your value to a prospect on a key issue. They tend to include case summaries which are not interpreted for clients but simply written up as matters of record.

Although we now have client alerts sent by email rather than printed newsletters, these still have the weakness of being generic and repeating the same information as a bunch of similar firms. As Maister says, if the content is tailored or written to include the views of a client (e.g. a case study), then as a client alert it can be a lot better than one summarising a new decision by the courts.

We send out content by newsletter but where we differ from the scenario envisaged by Maister is that we include interviews with in-house counsel and law firm marketing leaders (which is not generic content), and we track openings and how the content is being consumed by our audience. Some of our clients still prefer to consume content from a newsletter rather than from social media, but Maister’s key point is that it is the quality of the content that matters. Newsletters fail the test if they are not covering topics which interest clients and prospects, something which is more likely to happen when a publication is produced regularly and needs to be filled with content.

Clutching At Straws

Despite the First Team tactics set out above, we find many of our clients put PR, rankings and social media announcements ahead of these when it comes to attracting new clients. As Maister says, PR and media mentions might be good for your mum to see but they will not do much for your bottom line.

Before any PR executives jump on social media to denounce this denigration of their work, PR does play an important role, for example, in recruitment and in brand awareness. And while it can do no harm to be mentioned in media or featured on television, and it can be a very positive way to raise awareness of your firm, it is about priorities and results.

This article is about what works best in terms of generating revenue and returns on marketing investment, and PR is in the third division well behind events, articles and proprietary research.

If you have time and resources for PR but are not organising events or producing useful reports, then you need to rethink your strategy. If you have time and resources for all of these then that is great but make sure you invest more in the First Team and less in the Clutching At Straws tactics.

Others which fall into the latter category include large-scale firm events (as they lack the opportunity to focus on a curated room of 15-20 prospects); advertising (content marketing has emerged because people have become more averse to having ads pushed in front of them); and brochures.

A lot of international firms have dropped these in favour of maintaining a website that is part brochure and part knowledge bank, providing useful content to clients and prospects. We do have national law firm clients who ask us to revamp brochures for their practice areas but, despite our advice, many insist on listing every service under the sun and asserting claims which are not substantiated.

Better to demonstrate your value through case studies or client testimonials than to use anonymous quotes from directories. In fact, better to drop brochures altogether and make your website the only source of information on the firm. It saves time and resources, is easily updated, is a more sustainable option than printing brochures, and can link to useful content and guidance on your site. And you don’t need to spend budget and time revamping a whole series of brochures each year.

But while such firms will spend a lot of time and money on preparing directory submissions, advertising with directories and producing brochures listing those rankings, they spend very little time on events, producing reports or putting together articles that could give new ideas and knowledge to both prospects and clients.

Rankings can be a useful validation but, in terms of marketing, they are a Clutching At Straws tactic. They should never come ahead of the First Team, where you can demonstrate your understanding and knowledge rather than asserting it through third-party research.

Firms should be doing their own research with clients. In our next post, we will examine the best tactics to nurture and develop existing client relationships, of which client listening is a key part.