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Marketing Advice for Firms That Want to Be Something to Everyone
Larry Bodine of Professional Services Marketing Blog has a summer-reading recommendation for law firms: Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail, which Bodine argues applies to law firm marketing. As Bodine writes:
[The Long Tail] proves that the day of the full-service, general practice law firm is over. Clients don’t want generalists, whom they see as jacks-of-all-trades, masters-of-none. They want an expert in their particular problem. This is very good news for litigation boutiques, IP firms and specialty practice firms. Clients want the needle in the haystack, the lawyer who knows how to solve their precise problems, and thanks to the Web, clients can find them.
So what's a ginormous firm to do in a boutique world? Bodine has this advice:
firms that market themselves as industry experts are “organizing around the market,” and presenting themselves in the way clients buy. It’s time to identify the firm’s high-margin, most profitable practices and start blogs about them. The prime example is Dennis Crouch’s Patently-O blog, which gets 50,000 visitors per week. The blog has brought in Fortune 500 companies and referrals from lawyers he’s never met. He makes a point about writing about client interests, not all the services the firm has to offer.
In other words, a large firm is better off presenting itself as a collection of experts rather than a conglomerate of lawyers. Is your firm taking this approach?
Posted by Carolyn Elefant on August 9, 2006 at 05:57 PM | Permalink
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