Your law firm has a marketing team. Is anyone actually leading it?

I’ve met plenty of law firms over the years with someone responsible for doing marketing, whether that’s a marketing manager, an executive, or occasionally someone who’s simply inherited the role alongside other responsibilities. In most cases, they’re certainly not short of things to do.

They have a website to keep updated, newsletters to produce, events to organise, social media to manage, and a seemingly endless stream of requests from partners who need help with presentations, directory submissions, sponsorships, or whatever else happens to be on their minds that week.

From the outside, everything appears to be working reasonably well. The firm seems visible, marketing activity is underway, and someone is keeping all the plates spinning. But when you start asking how that activity aligns with the firm’s wider business objectives, the answers can become less convincing.

And that’s where I think some law firms have a problem. They have people doing marketing, but nobody really leading it.

Marketing activity isn’t the same as marketing leadership

Having spent more than 20 years in legal marketing, I’ve seen how easily a marketing function can become reactive. Partners have ideas, departments make requests, and the marketing team does its best to accommodate everyone. Over time, the marketing plan becomes less about what the firm needs to achieve and more about managing competing demands from within the firm.

None of this is particularly surprising. Law firms are often partnerships, and partners understandably have strong views on how their departments should be promoted. The difficulty arises when nobody takes an overall view of those requests and decides which ones genuinely merit the firm’s time and money.

For example, a partner might want to sponsor an event because they’ve supported it for years, another might be pushing for more investment in SEO, and a third might want to launch a campaign promoting a particular service. All three might have perfectly reasonable arguments, but that doesn’t mean all three should automatically receive funding.

Someone needs to consider those proposals in the context of the firm’s business plan, growth ambitions and available resources. Sometimes that means supporting an idea, sometimes it means suggesting a different approach, and occasionally it means telling a partner that their proposal isn’t the best use of the marketing budget.

That’s not always a comfortable conversation, particularly for someone relatively junior who is expected to maintain good relationships with the very people they need to challenge.

It’s not necessarily the marketing manager who’s at fault

When marketing doesn’t deliver the results a firm expects, attention naturally turns to the person responsible. Perhaps they’re not sufficiently commercial, they don’t understand the business, or they’re spending too much time on activities that don’t generate fees.

Sometimes those criticisms are justified, but I think it’s worth considering what the firm actually employed that person to do.

If you’ve recruited a marketing executive with a few years’ experience to manage communications, organise events and coordinate external suppliers, it’s unreasonable to expect them to act as a marketing director simply because no one else is available to fulfil that role.

Developing a marketing strategy requires more than knowing which channels to use or how to run a campaign. It involves understanding the business's economics, identifying where growth is most likely to come from, deciding on investment, and having the confidence to challenge senior colleagues when necessary.

Those skills generally come with experience, and they’re not naturally the same skills that make someone an excellent marketing executive.

I’ve also come across situations where firms have perfectly capable marketing managers who would be considerably more effective with the right support. They’re good at what they do, understand the firm and have established relationships with the partners, but they’re expected to provide strategic direction while simultaneously managing an ever-growing list of operational responsibilities.

In those circumstances, recruiting another junior member of staff might ease the workload, but it won’t automatically resolve the underlying problem.

Start with what the firm is trying to achieve

One of the first things I want to understand when working with a law firm is what the business is trying to achieve. Not in vague terms about raising its profile or increasing brand awareness, but in terms of the work it wants to attract, the departments it wants to develop and the financial objectives it’s working towards.

If a firm wants to increase turnover by £1 million over the next three years, for example, that’s a useful starting point. We can begin to explore which departments have the capacity and opportunity to grow, what additional instructions might be needed, and where those clients are likely to come from.

That process can reveal some interesting contradictions. A firm might be investing heavily in generating conveyancing enquiries when the department is already operating at capacity, while another team with considerably greater growth potential receives relatively little marketing support.

Equally, the firm might be spending thousands of pounds to attract new clients while paying little attention to existing clients or the professional relationships that have historically produced some of its most valuable work.

Neither situation is necessarily the result of poor marketing execution. More often, it’s a consequence of marketing decisions made without sufficient reference to the wider business. Once the commercial priorities are clear, marketing activity becomes much easier to evaluate. Rather than asking whether the firm should be doing more on LinkedIn or spending more on advertising, we can ask which activities are most likely to help achieve its objectives.

It’s a subtle but important difference. I explore this in my book, Marketing Your Law Firm: What Actually Works, because I’ve seen how easily firms commit substantial marketing budgets before clearly defining what they’re trying to achieve.

Sometimes doing less marketing is the right answer

There’s a tendency in marketing to equate progress with activity. If results aren’t improving, the instinct is often to produce more content, attend more events, increase advertising or introduce another marketing channel.

I’ve never been particularly convinced by that approach.

In my experience, many law firms are already doing quite enough marketing. The problem is often that their efforts are spread across so many activities that relatively few receive the attention needed to deliver meaningful returns.

A firm might be sponsoring several events, maintaining numerous social media accounts, paying for directory listings, investing in SEO and producing regular newsletters, all without a particularly clear picture of which activities are driving new instructions.

Rather than adding something else to the list, I’d be inclined to examine what’s already happening and whether it deserves to continue. My clients are often surprised when one of my first recommendations is to stop spending money. Not across the board, of course, but on activities that are delivering little or no commercial value.

It might seem an unusual recommendation from someone brought in to improve a firm’s marketing, but I’ve always believed that making better use of the budget you already have is a more sensible starting point than simply asking for more.

That doesn’t mean every marketing activity must produce an immediate, measurable financial return. Building relationships, maintaining visibility and strengthening a firm’s reputation all have value, even when the results aren’t directly attributable to a particular campaign.

But there should still be a reason for doing them, and that reason ought to be connected to what the business is trying to achieve.

Sometimes the most useful contribution an experienced marketing director can make is to help a firm recognise what it can stop doing.

Does that mean every firm needs a marketing director?

Not always, and certainly not a full-time one.

For a smaller law firm, the cost of employing an experienced marketing director can be difficult to justify, particularly when there’s already a capable marketing manager or executive handling day-to-day work.

But there’s a difference between needing senior marketing leadership and needing someone in that position five days a week.

A firm might benefit from having an experienced marketing director involved in its business planning, setting priorities, managing the marketing budget, supporting its existing team, and ensuring that marketing performance is considered alongside other commercial measures.

That doesn’t necessarily require a full-time appointment.

It’s one of the reasons I’ve increasingly worked with firms on a fractional basis. It allows them to access the experience and strategic input they need without the cost of permanent employment, while their existing marketing team continues to manage delivery.

And in many cases, those existing employees benefit considerably from having an experienced colleague to work with, rather than being left to make difficult strategic decisions on their own.

Perhaps it’s time to ask a different question

If your firm’s marketing isn’t producing the results you’d hoped for, it’s worth resisting the temptation to immediately question whether you need a different agency, another marketing executive or a bigger budget.

Those might ultimately be the right decisions, but I’d start by looking at how marketing is being managed and whether there’s a clear connection between the firm’s commercial ambitions and the work being undertaken.

You may find that the people, suppliers and resources you already have are perfectly capable of delivering better results. What they’re missing is someone with the experience, authority and time to bring everything together.

After 20 years in legal marketing, including 14 years as Marketing Director at Mayo Wynne Baxter, I’ve come to appreciate that.

Sometimes the answer isn’t to do more marketing. It’s to provide better leadership for the marketing you’re already doing.

Could your firm benefit from experienced marketing leadership?

At Betterment Agency, I work with law firms that want a more strategic approach to marketing. If you’re questioning whether your firm’s marketing is delivering what it should, let’s have a conversation. Sometimes an independent perspective is all it takes to identify where things could work better.