Episode Notes

Zack talks with Marc Cerniglia, founding partner of Spotlight Branding, about building a marketing plan that works for your office. They dig into the 4 steps you can take to make your plan more thoughtful, effective, and evergreen. Additionally, Marc shares some strategies on how you can track your ROI, and how many of the activities you already do can fit into your overall plan.ย 

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  • 1:34. Who is your target market?
  • 7:57. Figure out your marketing categories
  • 14:29. Planning and projecting
  • 21:33. Monitor and optimize
  • 25:00. Keep your marketing plan up to date

Transcript

Announcer:ย 

Welcome to The Lawyerist Podcast, a series of discussions with entrepreneurs and innovators about building a successful law practice in today’s challenging and constantly changing legal market. Lawyerist supports attorneys, building client-centered, and future-oriented small law firms through community, content, and coaching both online and through the Lawyerist Lab. And now from the team that brought you The Small Firm Roadmap and your podcast hostsย 

ย Marc Cerniglia (00:35):ย 

Hey everyone, I’m Marc with Spotlight Branding. We’re a content marketing agency primarily for law firms. I’ve been running this company for a little over a decade, and I’m excited to talk to all of you today about how to build a marketing plan that actually works.ย 

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Zack Glaser (00:48):ย 

Mark, thanks for joining me. I know marketing may not be the thing that we went to law school for, but it is the thing we have to do if we want to serve our clients. We have to get our names out there, so I appreciate you being with us and helping us kind of pass on some really good, really deep information for our listeners here. And frankly, let’s jump right in. You’re talking about how to build a marketing plan that works, and I think every aspect of that sentence just trips up Lawyerist, I think, how to build a marketing plan and then certainly how to build one that works, but we’re also going to get into how to build one that works and continues to work. So if I’m a lawyer, starting to think about getting my name out there, trying to get clients, trying to get the right clients, what do I need to do? Where do I need to start?ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (01:34):ย 

Well, I want to mention too on this idea of a marketing plan that works real quick that I understand. I think a lot of attorneys out there, they’re tired of marketing that doesn’t work. And so I want to keep that theme as we’re talking today. And certainly there’s more to getting your marketing working in just a marketing plan, but we’ve kind of prepared for this podcast today. And I think we’ve got four main kind of steps that I think are going to really increase everyone’s chance of having a successful marketing plan. But that’s a great question you asked because before we even begin to build a marketing plan, we have to figure out, well, who exactly is our target market and what exactly are we offering them? Now, fortunately, and I actually think this is a benefit for law firms in a lot of other industries, everything is always about what makes you unique or what makes you special.ย 

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(02:25):ย 

And I’m not saying you can’t have that as a law firm, but to be honest with you, defining the target market and the message and what you’re doing, you don’t have to overthink it. If you’re a family law attorney in Dallas, Texas, you help people that are having family issues and are considering divorce or whatever it might be right now, maybe you decide, I know some people that specialize in divorce for men or divorce for women. Maybe you do have a special angle where you provide some sort of thing where you try to keep the couple together first. I don’t know. So if you got something like that, great, but let’s just make sure you’re really clear on what it is you do, who you do it for, and what you want them to know about your firm. But to be honest with you, I also think it’s important not to overthink that question as a law firm because people, the best example I like to give is if you know Zach, you needed heart surgery, do you need this powerful brand story behind your heart surgeon? Right? Serious, what do you want to know? What do you care about?ย 

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Zack Glaser (03:25):ย 

Can you perform heart surgery?ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (03:26):ย 

Not just that, but how good are you at it?ย 

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Zack Glaser (03:28):ย 

Yeah. Are you going to be good at this and can I afford to pay you?ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (03:33):ย 

And so we can talk about how that’s a piece of your marketing plan, credibility, expertise, establishing that through marketing is one of the many pieces, well, not many, but one of the pieces of a marketing plan. And so we’ll kind of talk about that.ย 

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Zack Glaser (03:49):ย 

I like that. I think a lot of people do get hung up on that because we all think we’re our own special little snowflakes and our offices are run differently. That’s why there’s 150 million different types of practice management software out there. But at the end of the day, you’re saying, if you’re getting a divorce, I want to know that this person can get this done and that I can pay them. And not necessarily, there’s not a lot that differentiates necessarily. So that’s interesting, but also this idea of, I think people get hung up on even figuring out who their client is. I asked my father one time, I said, well, who’s your ideal client? He said, everybody,ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (04:29):ย 

Yeah. There’s that old adage that if you’re targeting ev, everyone, you’re targeting no one.ย 

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Zack Glaser (04:34):ย 

And I get his point was, anybody that comes in the door, we’re going to try to see if we can help them. Sure. But we’re talking marketing here, not people just walking in the door.ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (04:45):ย 

Well, this is also a good segue into our actual talking points today, because I also think that marketing gets overthought, if that makes sense. Well, I mean, let’s just kind of dive in and I’ll explain what I mean if that’s okay. Yeah. But yeah, there is some very proven methods that law firms just need to be doing and doing well. Okay. My point is, and I’m going to kind of keep this thread going throughout our talk today too, you don’t actually have to be extremely creative or unique in the market. We’re talking about how you don’t have to be unique in your brand. You also don’t have to be extraordinarily unique in how you market either. If you are, it helps, but I’m trying to be very specific in my language here. You don’t need to be. Yeah, yeah. It’s not like you should only go to a networking event. If you have a really great unique elevator pitch that’s going to blow people away, it’s not like you’re like, oh, I know going to this bar event could be good. I could generate some referral sources, but I don’t know what my brand message is, so I’m not going to go, right. We don’t say that, but where we do that sometimes is with thinking, running digital ads, Google ads or something like that.ย 

ย ย 

(06:01):ย 

Or if I’m going to do some blogging or some social media, well, I got to figure out what my unique angle is going to be if I’m going to be on social media. No, you don’t. You just need to do those things and do them in the ways that are proven and there’s an element of showing up. So what I, I’d love to do here is just a minute is kind of jump into those few points, but do you have any other thoughts before we jump in?ย 

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Zack Glaser (06:24):ย 

I think really just that what you’re saying that we as lawyers are I think scared of marketing for different reasons, but I think certainly one of them is that many times we have this desire to be the best and special and different, and we want to tell that really interesting story. And we see these websites that are on best law firm websites or we see other websites from our competitors and we think, oh man, if I can’t do that, then I might as well not. I just think that, go ahead and do it mean there are some fundamentals what you’re talking about here.ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (07:05):ย 

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. So let’s kind of dive in. I was my hope in the next 15, 20 minutes is that the listeners can walk away with some very clear guidance on either how to build a marketing plan or how to modify their existing one. I’m sure we’ll talk about some very specific marketing ideas during this, but I want to go and let the audience know my goal in its own purpose is not to give you super specific marketing advice because the real win from today’s episode is trying to create an evergreen plan, something that you can continue to update over time and just tweak and modify as where if I give you a specific marketing idea that’s working today, it might not in six months. So my hopes really to create that kind of evergreen thing. But here’s step one, and I’ve got four, but the step one is you need to figure out your marketing categories.ย 

ย ย 

(07:57):ย 

So people might call these different things. My sources, my channels, my categories. You can label these however you want, but I think there’s a solid five or six that should always be there. And in no specific order, that’s going to be referrals, digital ads, so things like Google ads, pay per click, you’re going to want a events category, so any events that you might put on or sponsor. And then I think networking for a law firm should be its own category. Some might put that in events, but you might decide that events is me speaking or sponsoring or putting on event as where’re networking is, it’s like the bar associations I’m part of or the networking events. I go to trade business cards. So I could see those being two separate categories. And then a one that often I think gets missed out on is kind of like this nurturing category or I would kind of call it content slash nurturing because content is really going to be a nurturing strategy and there might be one or two other, I’m forgetting that that’ll come as we’re talking, but you know, could have an other category, just kind of a catchall for things.ย 

ย ย 

(09:08):ย 

But here’s why it’s really important to come up with these categories. And then I want to hear if you’re thinking of any that I missed or what you think. But number one, you want be able to over time diversify your marketing. You want be able to hopefully be generating your marketing in more than one place. It doesn’t mean that if you’re getting a lot of business through referrals, you don’t want to grow that, but there are other opportunities out there if you goal is to grow your firm. The other thing is not all of these categories are measured the same way when it comes to success. And so I always make this comparison. If you have a financial portfolio, most of us understand the idea that there might be a long-term investment and a short-term investment. And I don’t measure those portfolios the same way. And so if you look at these marketing categories like a marketing portfolio, not everything should be measured the same way. And we can talk about that in a minute because I think that’ll be helpful. But diversification, measuring properly. And then if nothing else, Zack, just being able to plan, let’s create some categories to put things in because when you picture this on a piece of paper, it’s a little bit easier to plan out when you kind of have some groups that you can put things in.ย 

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Zack Glaser (10:16):ย 

Yeah, it’s interesting that there’s referral events, networking in this kind of area, because I talk to a lot of lawyers that say, I don’t need to do any marketing or I don’t need to do any digital marketing or something like that. I get all my business through referrals. You are doing marketing, you just have it all in one channel, but you are doing marketing. That’s the thing is, or I put on CLEs or I go to events or something like that. Yeah, absolutely. That’s marketing. Have it be part of your plan.ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (10:45):ย 

Well, let’s use that example because I think almost every lawyer out there is networking or at least did at some point to build their practice. So it’s a university applicable example. And I want to say real quick, I think one of the key categories I did forget I would always have is email or email marketing as well. I think that’s most other things. I think you could drop into kind of a catchall other bucket, but I think email is important on that list. But let’s use networking as an example. So first of all, in a marketing plan, I would map out my intention to network and I would say, okay, quarter one, I hope to go to these things in quarter two, I hope to go to these things. And I tell you what here, here’s a really good tip for everyone listening. If it’s too far out or you just don’t know yet what’s going to be available or what you want to do, put a placeholder.ย 

ย ย 

(11:29):ย 

It’s Q three right now while we’re recording this podcast. So if you don’t know in Q four or Q one, what’s going to be available to you, you could still put on a marketing plan, attend one networking event a month or one a week. Just create a goal. It doesn’t always have to be exact, but let’s say you do this, great networking is on my marketing plan, I’m going to do it. Okay, well, the relationships there would probably then create referral opportunities. But what am I doing to cultivate those referral relationships, right? Okay. Now we start getting into the, I mean, one of them is the content nurturing category I mentioned, right? Okay. Putting out out blogs, putting out social media, putting out an email newsletter, which you could put under email if you wanted to, because the other thing, and this might drive people nuts if they’re O C D, but let me preface this with I’m OCD too, but here’s the good news.ย 

ย ย 

(12:25):ย 

What you put in the categories isn’t all that important. They’re going to be things where you’re like, oh, well, this could go here, it could go there, it doesn’t really matter. But the point is, when you look at this nurturing category, like this content category, the question you’re answering there is, when I meet people at a networking event, what am I then doing to continue to nurture that relationship? Is there, am I going to have lunch with people? Am I going to send people email newsletters? Am I going to have coffee with people? Am I going to send Christmas cards? And if you want to do Christmas cards and you want to have a category called print marketing, do that. Yeah. If you want to put S in your referral category because you feel like that’s about generating referrals, do that. So I just think that organization is helpful.ย 

ย ย 

(13:09):ย 

But the point is, when you look at these categories, you go, okay, when I go networking, I’m probably trying to surface strategic relationships. That’s my r o I, not how much money I made from networking. When I do my nurturing marketing, same thing. It’s not about leads. It’s about moving people closer to either working with me or sending me a referral. Right now, digital ads where we’re actually talking about something like Facebook ads or Google ads, pay per click, yeah, you’re going to judge those based on leads or if you want to have an SEO category, an organic category, people just kind of find you online, great, have that category, but you’re going to judge that category on leads, but you’re going to judge networking and nurturing. You’re going to assess those differently. And that’s why I think those categories are important.ย 

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Zack Glaser (14:03):ย 

And you would have different KPIs for each of those categories. So we’ve gotten our categories, gotten an idea of the things that we want to do with how do we plan for this? How do we actually start?ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (14:14):ย 

Yeah. So I would do this by quarter, and we’ve even got, I’ll mention it a couple more times. We even got a template if anybody wants to use it, just go to spotlight branding.com/ Lawyerist marketing plan,ย 

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Zack Glaser (14:27):ย 

And we’ll put that in the show notes as well. Yeah,ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (14:29):ย 

Perfect. We got a little template people can use and fill out. It’s going to have some of these categories on it, I think, as well as some blank space to fill it in. But on that template, we’re going to divide this up by quarter. So I think step one to planning, I’m sorry, step two is planning and projecting. Yeah, that’s step two. Step one’s, get your categories. Step two is planning and projecting. The first thing you’re going to want to do with planning and projecting is decide the period of time you want to plan for. I suggest quarterly and maybe trying to plan six months, nine months, maybe even 12 months at a time or four quarters at a time. Because remember what we said earlier, you can just put in placeholders kind of what I’m hoping to do down the road, but you just start filling it in.ย 

ย ย 

(15:10):ย 

And so if your listeners can kind of visualize this, imagine a chart at the top of that chart, you have columns that are Q one, Q two, Q three, Q four, and on the side you have rows that are your categories. So all you’re doing is you’re just writing in the things you’re hoping to do. Okay, plan, I hope to go to these networking events. I hope to start doing Google ads maybe three quarters from now. I know I can’t afford it yet, but I want to have it on my marketing plan. And you just start putting stuff in. I hope to write a blog once a week or once a month. I hope to send out an email newsletter once a month. I hope to post on social media daily, just put that in the plan. Maybe in quarter three, I hope to launch the TikTok account for my law firm. But there’s really no rules to what you put in there. But what’s the age old addage, Zack? Failing to plan is planning to fail.ย 

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Zack Glaser (15:59):ย 

Yes.ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (16:00):ย 

So just put stuff in.ย 

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Zack Glaser (16:03):ย 

Well, so specifically, this isn’t your content marketing calendar. You don’t have to have everything in pen and shaded really nicely and very, very specific. But what do you want to do? What kind of marketing do you want to do? I don’t want to say it’s a 30,000 foot view, but it sounds like a couple hundred foot view.ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (16:25):ย 

Because you can also get more sophisticated if you want to do this monthly, you could do that. If you want to start getting real specific, you can. But if nothing else, starting simple, just being like, all right, these are the things I want to do this quarter. If dates for things, great, you could put in dates and you could do this monthly if you wanted to. But the other thing you’re going to do, it’s not just plan, but you’re going to want to project, and there’s really two things you’re going to want to project. The first one is the cost. You’re going to want to project your cost because you want have a marketing budget. And I understand a lot of listeners out there, especially if you’re a solo, you might not have a big marketing budget, that’s fine, but I don’t care if the percentage is 3%, 5%, hopefully it’s more like 10% eventually of your revenue goes to marketing, but just kind of come up with a number.ย 

ย ย 

(17:11):ย 

And if you don’t have a lot of money, you’re going to trade time. And that’s okay too. I mean, some of you even might benefit from the mental exercise of putting the time commitment down. Okay, so for networking, I’m almost budgeting 10 hours a month to put into that, because right now I don’t have $5,000 to put into Google ads, so to some capacity budget, whether it’s time, money, or both, and just put that right there in the quarter for the category. And then at the top or the bottom, and we’ll have this on our template, but you just total it up. So now you’ve actually got yourself a marketing budget each quarter, even if you’re just penciling stuff in. And then the other part, and Zach, here’s the part that almost no one does. It probably deserved to be its own point. No one projects the results.ย 

ย ย 

(18:00):ย 

Okay? I always love this conversation of, well, how do you know if your marketing’s working or not? And the way I always answered is, well, what was it supposed to do? Okay, what was it supposed to do? And here, here’s the best part. If you don’t know, just guess. So let’s pick a couple quick examples. So if we’re talking about networking, maybe you have a goal of getting a certain number of business cards from every networking event you go to. Great. Write that down. And then for the quarter, maybe you had such success at your first few networking events that you could skip that last one because you kind of set a target right Now, certainly if we’re talking about Google Ads or something like that. Yeah, you probably want to have a real clear, yeah, so I’m spending a thousand dollars a month, I expect this number of leads or this number of clients.ย 

ย ย 

(18:42):ย 

So you can choose what that projection is like. Are you projecting leads? Are you projecting clients and engagements? But again, for some categories like your nurturing or your content, you’re not going to really project leads from that because stuff’s not generating leads. It’s more helping you stay in touch with your network. But referrals is a good one. How many ref, okay, yeah, here are your referral activities, but how many referrals are you hoping to generate? So even if you’re guessing, just write down what you hope that marketing accomplishes because, and I don’t want to jump ahead too much, but we’ll talk about in a second, but the reason that’s really key is number one, to make sure you have enough marketing in place. How do I know if I have enough marketing? Well write it down and guess what you think’s going to happen. But the second thing is when you’re monitoring that marketing, your projections are one of the ways you kind of know if it’s working or not. And if it’s not working, maybe it means your projections were just off, and that’s fine. You can adjust your projections, but maybe your projections were good. And at least now when you say to yourself, why isn’t my marketing working? What’s not working? You actually know what the contributor is to the problem instead of just knowing that overall it’s not working. Right.ย 

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Zack Glaser (19:59):ย 

Well, and I think more commonly, oh, well, I hope more commonly, I guess, is that you’re getting clients. You’re getting enough clients, but are you spending too much money to get those clients? You’re getting clients, you’re spending less money than they’re bringing in. Sure, great, awesome. But if we’re actually planning and projecting, and then kind of this next step, again, I won’t get to it, but if we’re thinking about those things, then we can say, okay, well, this isn’t not working, but this is working better.ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (20:30):ย 

And you then can reallocate time or money to those things. And look, I want to tell people, I mean, I don’t know if I’m throwing Spotlight branding under the bus here, or not a marketing agency, but the marketing we do for ourselves, you better believe that we’re guessing sometimes at the result if it’s something we haven’t done a lot of, if we’re going to an event for the first time, all right, we just went to the ABA tech show this past year we’d never been before. It was always a very expensive conference to go to.ย 

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Zack Glaser (20:59):ย 

It is.ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (21:00):ย 

We had to guess. We had to guess how many leads we thought we were going to get, how many clients. We thought, no, no. We had some facts what the attendance was going to be and things like that, but we just guessed. And that’s okay, because what I tell my team is it’s not about whether or not you get your guesses, it’s just about the exercise of being like, I think this is what this is going to do. And then you can look back and say, okay, is it doing that or not? And then you can adjust either your projections or you can potentially adjust the actual marketing you’re doing and doing other things. And that really leads us to step three, which is monitor and optimize. So now that you’ve planned your marketing and projected it, now you can monitor and optimize and all you need to do this is a really simple marketing.ย 

ย ย 

(21:40):ย 

You could do this once a week, twice a month. It’s just sitting down looking at that marketing plan and going, okay, the things that are active right now, how are those going? Okay, how are those going? And that’s probably a brand we talk a lot about traction, this idea of let’s just have traction. We don’t always know the answers, but if something’s not working, let’s at least know it’s not working. So we can try something. And zooming back out this idea of how do you create a marketing plan that works? This is one of the key parts. If you plan and then you monitor, then you can see what’s working and what’s not in real time, you can try things, even if you don’t have all the answers, you can just try things or you can talk to people that maybe are doing who have the answers and try those things. But part of how a marketing plan works is that you keep working it.ย 

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Zack Glaser (22:30):ย 

Yeah. Honestly, I want to juxtapose that to a marketing plan that doesn’t work, quite honestly.ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (22:38):ย 

One that doesn’t exist, I’m saying.ย 

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Zack Glaser (22:40):ย 

And that’s exactly right. It’s one that doesn’t exist. And what that looks like in reality is a lawyer going, we need to do Google ads. A lawyer comes into the office, they look at their assistant, or they look at somebody who does things for them and they say, we need to do Google Ads. Let’s go start doing Google Ads. And then they just do it and that’s it. And they just do it. Or they go hire somebody that is just going to do pay per click and that’s it. They don’t do any of this planning. They don’t figure out their categories, they don’t plan, they don’t project, and they’re certainly not monitoring, and they’re absolutely not optimizing. So the other side of this is that you just kind of go in and you’re just throwing money at the wall.ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (23:26):ย 

And I don’t know what everyone’s feeling out there listening right now, but if you’re feeling like this sounds like a lot of work, I think maybe we should speak to that real quick because I think that this can be much more efficient than it may sound the first time you do this is going to take the longest. But to be honest with you, I think you can knock it out in a couple hours if you’re fast about it. Best case, if you can block out a half day or even a day, great, you’re just filling this in. But you realistically could fill in some stuff real quick in an hour or two because this is a living document, right? Constantly. I mentioned that Spotlight Branding plans out a year at a time. 90% of that is penciled in. Yeah, it’s constantly changing throughout the quarter, not just for the present quarter, but the next one.ย 

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(24:17):ย 

But we have stuff penciled in, so we kind of have something to reference. So creating it the first time is really easy. Then you just need some sort of marketing meeting. You should be having this anyway, even if it’s just 20 minutes once a week or an hour every two weeks. And your agenda for that meeting is reviewing the marketing plan. What are we doing right now? What’s coming up that we need to plan for? And what did we do that’s finished that we maybe can look back at and say, how did it go? And then, okay, what needs to be different? What do we need to try? Is there anything we want to add to the marketing plan? Which is really, by the way, I mean, that’s it, because step four is keeping it up to date. And so you can use that same marketing meeting to keep it up to date.ย 

ย ย 

(25:00):ย 

Now, at Spotlight Branding at the end of every quarter, we also do take some time to reevaluate the plan as a whole. So you could also add a bigger meeting like that once a quarter. But if you’re honestly just meeting with this a couple times a month and keeping it up to date, and then at the end of the quarter you just tack on another quarter. So you always have that rolling year, but that’s it. If you create your categories, if you fill it in and you project, you monitor it, and you just always keep it up to date, I think a lot of people will be surprised how much progress they’ll make over time. And there’s little nuances that we talked about. Also, making sure that you’re measuring the right things, that you understand that certain things are meant to accomplish different things. But believe me, this is what really big companies understand about marketing. They plan, they monitor, well, first they organize their marketing, then they plan it, they monitor it, they tweak it depending on how it’s going, and they always keep that plan up to date. Believe it or not, that’s the secret sauce.ย 

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Zack Glaser (26:04):ย 

And that really fits in with Lawyerist’s mentality of relentless incrementalism.ย 

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(26:12):ย 

You get that thing done once, and then you just like that monitor, optimize, tweak, monitor, optimize tweak, and all of a sudden you’ve got this beautiful marketing plan that, I mean, technically it took you a year to put everything together and to make it exactly what you want it to be, but you’ve also had it working for a year while you’re doing that too. And so yeah, you have the three hours that you spent making it the first time, and then every other time is, it’s a quarter of that because you’re doing a instead of all of it. Yeah.ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (26:45):ย 

And if you want to look pretty in all of that, I think my team’s actually working on the template right now. So I mean, hopefully they make it pretty looking and all of that. But I mean, again, that’ll be @ spotlightbranding.com slash Lawyerist marketing plan. It’s completely free. There’s no strings. So if you guys just want a template that highlights some of this, and we’re going to have some sections on it for projections and things like that. We’re going to keep it really simple, but a lot of things we talked about are going to be on there. And there’s actually one bonus tip I want to give real quick, Zack, if I can. And I think we’re going to put this on the template as well. The bonus tip is you can also use your marketing plan to identify goals or initiatives or themes. So one of your things you might say, you know what?ย 

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(27:31):ย 

In quarter one, I really want to try to get more business clients. Maybe you do estate planning and you’re like, I want to start doing more estate planning for business owners. Great. You can put that as an overarching theme. It doesn’t necessarily go inside one of the categories. It’s kind of like an overarching theme for a quarter or for a year. But then you go your marketing plan and go, okay, how does this theme infuse what I’m doing that quarter? Should we tweak the ads? Should I tweak my elevator pitch when I’m networking? Should we create some more blogs or newsletters around that so that we kind of draw that to us? But it might be more of a certain kind of client. It might be raising your prices, it might be get more speaking engagements when you can identify these themes and these goals that are kind of on a macro level. And you can also write those down, and we can’t understate it, but the power of writing something down is really important.ย 

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Zack Glaser (28:29):ย 

You’re right, you’re, and one of the easiest ways that listeners of the podcast can go get this started of writing it down is just to go grab that marketing template. They’ll definitely get, at the very least, ideas of how to make this work. And it’s at spotlight branding.com/ Lawyerist marketing plan.ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (28:48):ย 

Yeah, no space or anything, the whole thing.ย 

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Zack Glaser (28:50):ย 

Well, Marc, I really appreciate your insight here, and I like the small steps forward, but really it’s kind of categorizing planning and projecting monitoring, and then keeping this thing up to date. And it really is that simple. So I appreciate you sharing all that information with our audience.ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (29:09):ย 

Yeah, happy to be here, and I hope everyone found the information helpful. And whether you used a template or you create this in a Google doc yourself or even on a napkin, I hope you give it a try. And please let us know, right? Comments on the podcast or social, wherever, let us know how it goes. That makes us feel good.ย 

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Zack Glaser (29:27):ย 

Absolutely will. And I want to do one last small plug for spotlight branding.com just in general, because you guys have a lot of educational material on the website, so if people just want to go and learn more, they can always go just to spotlight branding.com and get a lot of really good information there. So Mark, again, thank you for being with me. I always appreciate it.ย 

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Marc Cerniglia (29:47):ย 

All right, thanks. And if I can mention real quick, actually, if you go to spotlight brand.com/insider, that’s where all of our free resources, d I y workshops, nothing to do with being a marketing agency, everything to do with free resources, infographics, everything. So that’s our insider website. So you can also get to it from the homepage. But I appreciate that plug, Eric. Zack, thanks so much.ย 

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Zack Glaser (30:10):ย 

Fantastic. Absolutely. Alright, Marc, thank you. We’ll see you next time.ย 

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Announcer:ย 

The Lawyerist Podcast is edited by Britany Felix. Are you ready to implement the ideas we discuss here into your practice? Wondering what to do next? Here are your first two steps. First. If you haven’t read The Small Firm Roadmap yet, grab the first chapter for free at Lawyerist.com/book. Looking for help beyond the book? Let’s chat about whether our coaching communities, are right for you. Head to Lawyerist.com/community/lab to schedule a 10-minute call with our team to learn more. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not endorsed by Legal Talk Network. Nothing said in this podcast is legal advice for you.ย 

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Zack Glaser

is the Legal Tech Advisor at Lawyerist, where he assists the Lawyerist community in understanding and selecting appropriate technologies for their practices. He also writes product reviews and develops legal technology content helpful to lawyers and law firms. Zack is focused on helping Modern Lawyers find and create solutions to help assist their clients more effectively.

Featured Guests

Marc Cerniglia Headshot

Marc Cerniglia

Marc is a founding partner at Spotlight Branding. He is passionate about helping professionals understand the truths and myths about internet marketing, and educating them on how to get the most out of their marketing efforts. He is a proud graduate of UCF and earned his Masterโ€™s Degree in Business & Marketing.ย 

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Last updated August 7th, 2023