Did you know that 96 percent of respondents to an Attorney at Work survey report that they use social media, 70 percent report that they use social media as part of their overall marketing strategy, and 84 percent say that they are on LinkedIn?

They don’t teach you about marketing your law practice in law school. If you started your law career at a big law firm, you probably didn’t learn about marketing your practice there either. You were probably so busy working on the partners’ clients, that you did not even realize how important it was to learn about marketing.

A law firm is a business, no question about it. As a business, you need to get out in the market, generate leads for possible clients, and see if you can convert those leads into paying clients. Sounds easy, right?  Of course not. Like most things, effectively marketing your law firm is much “easier said than done.”

The only thing constant is change, and that certainly applies to the world of digital marketing for law firms. Though we might think that it is a source of frustration to have to continue to shift approaches to get results, that is actually what marketing is all about.  In order to get noticed, you need to do something novel, or show how you are different. Thus, marketing is actually engaging in the never-ending battle of changing course, reinventing yourself, and finding new ways to get the attention of the customers you seek.

Let’s look into the rearview mirror for a second. “Back in the day,” as they say, legal advertising was done in an analog world. That meant, beyond cocktail parties and word of mouth, legal marketing could mean bus stop bench ads, billboards, radio spots, or ads in the local newspaper. For those who have practiced long enough to remember, internet marketing was either non-existent or just in its nascent stages about a decade or so ago.