It’s no secret that the demand for digital marketing in the legal industry has skyrocketed in the last couple of years. Has this increased demand grown beyond the capabilities of your in-house team or the fee earner or business professional tasked with overseeing the firm’s marketing efforts? If so, then it might be time to consider outsourcing your legal marketing!

Here are five reasons to outsource all, or some, of your legal marketing functions:

1. Benefit from a team with diverse skills (& opinions)

No individual is capable of doing everything by themself.

Are you a solo marketer working in-house at a law firm? Or are you an attorney or business professional with split responsibilities? Do you sometimes you feel like you’re on an island and responsible for not only doing everything by yourself but also coming up with ideas by yourself?

When you outsource your legal marketing, you have access to a fully stacked team of professionals with a variety of experiences. Each team member brings their own range of skills and expertise, meaning multiple experts are focused on your success, not just one (likely overwhelmed) person.

Not only does this team provide you with a diverse skill set and diverse backgrounds, but it also provides you with an opportunity to workshop your ideas and receive different viewpoints.

At LISI, we are big fans of the “better together” approach, and with an outsourced marketing team, you can get better outcomes by taking a team approach to brainstorming, strategy, and execution.

2. Expand your marketing technology toolbox

Outsourced marketing teams tend to be “technology agnostic,” meaning they are willing to work with the platforms that you already have deployed in-house. However, if you are seeking new providers and/or don’t know which technologies are right for you, your outsourced marketing team can help you sift through the options and will often have preferred tools they can implement. Not to mention they can help streamline the implementation and configuration, and guide your efforts to succeed.

Oftentimes those tools have a cost associated with them. To purchase each individually can add up quickly. But when you have a team of outsourced marketing professionals, they may cover the cost of tools they use to execute your marketing.

Some common examples of marketing tools include:

• Social media, including HubSpot and HootSuite
• Graphic creation and design, including Canva and Lucidpress
• Video and audio editing, including Wondershare Filmora and Descript
• Video recording and streaming, including Zoom and StreamYard
• The Adobe Creative Suite, which encompasses many of the categories listed above (and more) but is so powerful that it gets its very own bullet point.

Digital marketers never travel empty-handed. Think of an outsourced team as your marketing “Mary Poppins” with a bag of tricks and some magic up our sleeves.

3. Save time & money

Most marketers in professional services firms wear multiple hats. Some days (hours?) you may be a marketer. Others you may be a business developer. For some, you might also be an attorney, a paralegal, or a legal assistant. Outsourcing alleviates the challenge of having to do it all yourself instead of billing time.

An outsourced marketing team is focused solely on marketing. They are creating and executing marketing plans day in and day out, learning what works for law firms…and what doesn’t. They don’t have to switch gears from writing a brief to marketing, or put marketing to the side when they go to trial.

Serving your clients is important. But so is keeping a full pipeline of prospects. By outsourcing some or all of your marketing, it frees you up to focus on what you were hired to do. It allows you to bill more, produce more, and see more results – both in the courtroom and in your sales funnel.

Plus, when you outsource marketing, you do not have to pay health insurance or a 401K, or worry how to keep things moving when they go on vacation. Outsourced legal marketing teams make sure you are covered.

4. Be strategy-driven instead of task-driven

Marketing encompasses a lot – websites, public relations, search engine marketing, social media, branding, swag, advertising, thought leadership, content marketing…you get the idea. Oftentimes, marketing then becomes reactive, rather than proactive. You end up getting bogged down in the task-driven work, which does not leave time for the more strategic parts of marketing.

Experienced marketers know that having a well-organized, strategic plan can cut through the task list – and drive results. Outsourced marketers understand its importance and are there to do the heavy lifting for you. By creating a strategy-driven marketing plan, your marketing efforts will become more organized, more efficient – and therefore more effective.

Emergencies and a deluge of day-to-day tasks will always come up. But when you have a plan – and a team – you do not have to carry the burden alone, allowing you the time to focus on other strategic measures for growing your practice, or your firm.

5. Following best practices & staying “in the know”

An outsourced marketing team is always in the know. Why? Because we make it our job to stay on top of the newest developments, trends, and opportunities. With an outsourced marketing team, you get multiple individuals who are each staying up-to-date on the latest trends in their discipline. And, just like attorneys chat with other attorneys about developments in the law over lunch, an outsourced legal marketing team is talking about developments in digital marketing pretty much all the time.

Having a full team of legal marketing professionals allows us to stay abreast of best practices in all aspects of digital marketing so you don’t have to.

The digital marketing landscape has evolved exponentially, and now your marketing options are nearly limitless. Whether you are part of an in-house marketing team, a solo marketer, or an attorney who also oversees marketing, you can benefit from the contributions of an outsourced marketing team. Outsourcing some or all of your marketing efforts is cost-effective, efficient – and gets results.