Walker Clark Worldview

As I was reading the weekly feed of law firm press releases from Latin Counsel this morning, I recalled how few law firms bother with this time-honored, but largely overlooked marketing tool.

A press release is an excellent low-cost way to improve your firm’s “targeted” visibility. By “targeted visibility” I refer to the process of getting a specific area of professional expertise in front of the eyes and into the minds of a specific audience of clients and potential clients.

Our experience in Walker Clark, LLC, has been just the opposite of the old myth that “Nobody ever reads press releases.”

For one thing, we read them — hundreds of them — every week. Walker Clark has a highly specialized market research service for law firms and corporate law departments. This requires that we must be continuously researching legal markets and law firms in other jurisdictions. Sometimes the research is focused on identifying potential strategic allies or even potential merger partners. Sometimes we are advising a law firm or law department about potential local counsel in another country. The point is that we need specific, accurate, and timely information. Press releases are one of our major sources of detailed information about a law firm’s expertise, experience, and service capabilities.

The great value of press releases is that they can take your firm beyond slogans and assertions on your website or in your brochure. They can also improve the visibility of individual professional service providers in your firm. Thanks to the scope and self-replicating nature of the internet, press releases are also one of the most cost-effective marketing tools available. The cost of publishing a press release can be almost non-existent — less than the cost of printing a single copy of a brochure.

The return can be substantial. One of our law firm clients recently told me that a single press release was the decisive factor in their beating an equally well-qualified competitor for a major project finance engagement. In fact, the fees from that project were sufficient to cover the firm’s entire marketing budget — for three years!

Nobody reads press releases? Think again.

Norman Clark

For more information about Walker Clark market research services, or to learn how our firm can help you integrate press releases into your marketing strategy, please contact me directly by e-mail or by telephone at +1-239-466-8370.  (For security purposes, the e-mail link will take you first to a validation page on a third-party website.)

Tags: marketing

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 13:08 and is filed under marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.