Over many years, the comprehensive study of successful marketing for lawyers has revealed ten proven principles upon which each firm should begin to build its marketing platform:

1.People: Who is your Ideal Target Market (ITM)? Who are your best and worst clients; how much do you know about them? What makes your clients choose you to work with? Without a clear understanding of the people you are targeting, your legal marketing efforts will be doomed.

2.Product: Which services do you provide? How do you describe your services to prospective clients? What does the client perceive they are buying from you?

3.Positioning: Know your competitors! Who are they? What makes you better or different than your competitors? What do you offer prospects that no one else can? If you don't know who/what "you're up against"; legal marketing will be difficult, to say the least.

4.Packaging: What does your law firm marketing image "say" about you and your company? What type of image do you want to present to prospects? High end? Low cost? Impersonal and corporate? Friendly and personal?

5.Place: Where do prospects find out about your firm? What techniques do you employ to find new clients?

6.Price: No legal marketing can be successful without understanding the importance of pricing. How do you price your services? What's the competition charging? How can you convince prospects they're getting "more for their money" working with you? Where do your prices fall in terms of price range? Are you the most costly, the least expensive or somewhere in the middle? How can you earn top dollar and keep more clients?

7.Promotion: Are you marketing your services to the right prospects? What legal marketing techniques do you utilize to weed out the good clients from the bad? What types of people are responding to your promotions?

8.Persuasion: Legal marketing requires persuasion; sometimes a good deal of persuasion. How do you convince "lookers" to become "buyers"? How much time and effort are you putting in to building long-term relationships with clients? How do you go about relationship-building?

9.Performance: Is your client turnover rate high? Why? Law firm marketing and referral sources simply cannot succeed without client retention. How do you identify your best clients? What types of things are you doing to keep them happy? If you are not putting in the effort to keep your valuable clients, there are many other firms that will be waiting in the wings to take them away from you.

10.Plan - Answering the first nine questions will enable you to take the first steps toward developing an Action Plan for successful law firm marketing.

Following these ten principles of legal marketing will significantly increase your chance of success.