The challenge

A specialist family law firm in Wales approached me to support its Marketing Executive, who was managing the firm’s marketing entirely on her own.

The firm had an ambitious Managing Partner with plenty of ideas for growth and new initiatives. The challenge wasn’t a lack of ambition. It was creating greater focus around which opportunities to prioritise, how marketing and business development should support the firm’s wider objectives, and what was realistically achievable with the resources available.

There was also no formal business plan in place for marketing to work from. One of my first recommendations was therefore for the Managing Partner to document the firm’s commercial objectives, growth ambitions and priorities. This gave us something concrete against which to build the marketing and BD plan.

The approach

My role wasn’t to disappear, write a plan and hand it back.

I worked alongside the Marketing Executive throughout the process, showing her how to develop a strategic marketing and business development plan while giving her enough space to research, contribute and make the finished plan her own.

We started with the evidence rather than jumping straight into marketing tactics.

Together, we reviewed the firm’s existing marketing and BD activity and undertook competitor analysis to understand how the firm was positioned within the Welsh family law market. This helped us identify a number of credible differentiators and develop clearer positioning and messaging for the firm.

The final plan deliberately establishes positioning before moving into marketing activity, with the competitor analysis used to test whether the firm’s differentiators were genuinely distinctive.

We then identified the firm’s priority Ideal Client Profiles and considered what mattered to each audience, how they found and selected family lawyers and which marketing and BD channels were most appropriate. Rather than treating every prospective client in the same way, the plan created distinct approaches for different client groups.

Creating focus

One of the most important parts of the project was turning a long list of ideas into a manageable set of priorities.

We structured the plan around three areas:

• Firm-wide marketing and positioning, including the website, LinkedIn, PR, awards and sponsorship.
• Marketing and BD by Ideal Client Profile, with different messaging, channels and activities depending on the audience.
• Priority growth projects, each with its own activity plan, ownership, resource requirements, costs and measures of success.

Crucially, we also identified what the firm wouldn’t prioritise that year. Several potentially good ideas were deliberately moved into the future pipeline rather than allowing the team to spread its resources too thinly.

This created a much clearer connection between the firm’s commercial ambitions and what marketing and BD would actually do to support them.

Making the plan deliverable

We didn’t stop at the strategy.

The plan considered the practicalities of implementation, including budgets, internal ownership, the time required from fee earners, external support and how success would be measured.

This was particularly important for a Marketing Executive working independently.

The finished plan gave her a framework she could use to prioritise requests, manage different projects and have more strategic conversations with the Managing Partner and wider team.

We also built in monthly, quarterly and annual reviews so that the plan could evolve rather than becoming a document that was written once and forgotten.

The result

The result was a comprehensive Marketing & Business Development Plan that both the Marketing Executive and Managing Partner could use as a practical roadmap for the year ahead.

More importantly, the Marketing Executive had been involved in developing it at every stage. Rather than being handed somebody else’s strategy to implement, she understood the thinking behind the priorities and had the confidence and ownership to take the plan forward herself.

When we presented the final plan to the Managing Partner, he was extremely impressed with what we had developed and excited about the direction it gave the firm.

For me, that was an important part of the success of the project. The objective wasn’t to make the firm dependent on an external consultant. It was to bring structure and strategic marketing expertise into the business while helping its existing marketer develop the skills and confidence to lead the plan herself.

Could your marketing and BD benefit from more focus?

If you have lots of ideas but need help turning them into a clear, practical marketing and business development plan, I can help. I can also work alongside your existing marketing team to build their strategic skills and give them the confidence to take the plan forward.

Get in touch to arrange an initial conversation.