Lawyer Monthly Magazine - February 2020 Edition

How To Get Clients Using Powerful Content In today’s highly competitivemarket, with firms experiencing slowing growth in fee income and continued pressure on profit margins, every lead counts, Jason Ball, Founder of B2B marketing agency Considered Content tells us. Although more firms experienced fee income growth in 2019 – 89% of the top 100 compared to 84% in 2018 – the average growth levels dropped from 8.3% in 2018 to 5.9% in 2019, according to PwC’s latest Annual Law Firms’ survey. It also revealed that firms have reduced their marketing and business development spend: 1.9% of fee income was spent on this in 2019, down from 2.5% the previous year. But, done well, marketing can have a direct impact on new business leads by arming prospects with information and instilling confidence, to convert them into paying (or higher paying) clients. There are two things to consider before getting started. First, who are you targeting? The 2018 Law Firm Growth Enablement survey, by Intapp and Calibrate Legal, surveyed marketing and business development professionals at firms ranging in size from fewer than 50 attorneys to 2,500+. More than 70% of new business came from existing clients, and 10% from referrals. While these figures were gathered in the US, it’s not a stretch to assume it’s a similar story in the UK. Understanding this will help you plan the distribution of your content. Directing it largely at your existing client base is also significantly cheaper than running brand awareness-raising campaigns to find new clients: you’ve already got their contact details after all. The second consideration is how clients ‘buy’ your services. Remember the people to whom you’re selling your services also have to sell your services internally to their own. In B2B, there are almost always other people involved in the purchasing process 24 WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM | FEB 2020 Special Feature Written by Jason Ball, Considered Content Jason Ball is Founder of B2B content marketing agency Considered Content. He has previously worked with Simmons & Simmons, Barclaycard, Google, EY, HubSpot and Grant Thornton.