Marketing Planning

The Value of Strategic Marketing

In an increasingly crowded marketplace where competition for clients grows more intense every day, law firms must think and act strategically at all times. Among other key decisions, firm leaders must allocate scarce marketing resources to ensure that every dollar spent contributes to firm growth or other key priorities.

Our team helps create plans that achieve your firm’s strategic growth objectives and simultaneously build your brand equity. Based on a deep understanding of key audiences, including clients and recruits, successful plans differentiate you from competitors in ways that align with your clients’ and prospects’ priorities. They build brand awareness, increase business development opportunities, and ultimately drive revenues.

Our Experience

Our consultants have extensive experience creating marketing and business plans that drive profitable growth for law firms. Our advice is informed by our extensive research into the views and behavior of law firm clients; by the data we collect about best practices in professional services marketing and business development; by our analysis of the plans of Am Law 200 firms; and by the insights shared by the chairs, managing partners, and marketing executives who participate in Zeughauser Group Leadership Roundtables. We have built successful plans for entire firms, practice areas, sectors, and specific geographic markets. Our clients range from highly specialized boutiques to some of the world’s largest, most diverse law firms.

Our Approach

The plans we create are tailored to meet the strategic growth imperatives and brand-building needs of your firm. We consider the clients you aspire to serve and the practices, sectors, and geographic markets in which you are or aspire to be market leaders. We design marketing plans to enhance client relationships that have the greatest potential for growth and to attract the most promising new clients and recruits to the firm, and we pride ourselves on our ability to build consensus and achieve results. We consider our plans successful when every marketing and business development dollar a firm spends has the potential to contribute directly to its growth, profitability, and brand equity.

Steps in our process include:

  • Performing extensive diligence, including conducting internal and external stakeholder interviews
  • Analyzing the competition
  • Leading interactive sessions to help create and build consensus around the plan
  • Communicating the plan to key internal constituents

In addition, we are often asked to work with marketing and business development teams to implement plans and ensure they are ultimately successful, including identifying and managing outside resources involved in their execution.

Why Law Firm CMOs Are Taking on More Diversity Responsibilities

Corporate clients increasingly are demanding diverse attorney teams and legal advice on their own diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) efforts. Mary K. Young observes that chief marketers are increasingly tasked with ensuring companies get a diverse team of attorneys, that their diverse lawyers are being promoted in the media and retained in-house, that law firms’ internal DE&I efforts are being promoted to attract new clients, and that companies are getting the proper legal advice surrounding their own DE&I efforts.

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More U.S. Law Firms Embrace Shortened Names, Dump Ampersands

Several U.S. law firms have rebranded to abbreviated names this year, with Quarles & Brady becoming one of the latest to debut a shortened name and updated logo. Mary K Young observes that the shift to shorter law firm names is far from new and has been happening for about three decades. The shift towards shortening firm names probably started with the trend towards law firms getting bigger and following more traditional marketing principles.

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Managing Brand Equity When Law Firms Merge

Mary K Young writes about the process of law firm mergers, the growing urge for firms to combine, the sensitivity around post-merger firm names, and retaining brand equity.

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