How to build an in-house marketing team for your law firm

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Most law firm owners want more leads, but few understand the breakthrough comes from knowing who's running the marketing behind those leads.

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So you've built a legal team you trust. Now it's time to build an in-house marketing team you could depend on.

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Your law firm has unique goals that you're trying to hit. Let's unpack how a marketing team can not only help you execute on those goals, but push them forward.

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If you're still wearing the marketer hat in your law firm, let's talk because it's time to create a plan to figure out how to delegate that marketing work to either another person or a team of people to push those marketing results forward.

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So look, as you're trying to grow your law firm and execute the vision, obviously marketing plays a huge role in that. And if you haven't already learned how we view marketing, which is the convergence of advertising and sales, I recommend you go watch that video to better understand what that looks like. But as you're getting ready to do this, here's what I can tell you from personal experience. We've gone through lots of iterations and evolutions of this. So we started by working with a marketing vendor.

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And that's where most law firms sit, honestly, for the most part, in the entirety of their law firm, because the idea of building a marketing team doesn't necessarily come naturally for a lot of law firms. And so most law firms, maybe yourself, is working with a marketing vendor right now. Here's the problem with that. Marketing vendors, some of them are awesome people, maybe even generate good results, but in order for you to continue to scale and grow your firm,

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A vendor only has so many hours in a month that they can dedicate to any one firm, including yourself. And the problem is, is you're gonna get to a point in your law firm as you're scaling up, and I'm about to talk about the tiers of ownership and what that means for scaling up, where you outgrow the amount of hours and capacity that any one marketing vendor can give you. And let me tell you from personal experience, we've tried this. We've tried to outgrow the capacity that we can...

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push any one marketing vendor to, and it just ended up with us frustrated the whole time because we would try to grow and we'd hit a roadblock and we'd halt because we were at the mercy of that particular vendor and the amount of capacity they could give. That's when we started having internal conversations about building our own in-house marketing team. And what I can tell you now is after doing it and now running an in-house marketing team here with our company,

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Not only was it a great decision for us and pushed a lot of innovation ideas and results forward, but I want to walk you through what it looks like speaking from a practical perspective. This isn't just theory. This is stuff we do every single day and that's going to be able to help propel your law firm's marketing team forward. But I want to start with law firm owner levels because each law firm owner listening to this or watching this right now might be at a different level.

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So we view level one, which is the attorney level.

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By the way, we have a quiz on that. I'm sure we can throw that somewhere in the description. But level one law firm owner is the attorney. If this is you, when it comes to finding your first hire for a marketing team, you're not going to be hiring for a full-blown marketing team yet. A level one attorney is going to

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want to look for what we call a CIO or a Chief Inspection Officer. And let me be clear, a Chief Inspection Officer, because traditionally a level one attorney is still a level one law firm owner, still pretty small firm, Chief Inspection Officer is not going to sit squarely in the marketing role. Meaning that one person is not dedicated to just marketing. A Chief Inspection Officer is really there to be the checks and balances in just about every department.

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They're probably helping you pull data. This person's acting more as an assistant to you as a law firm owner, holistically across the firm, and marketing marketing data is one of the places that they're spending their time, but not the only place they're spending their time. So that would be the first person I would be looking for if I was a level one law firm owner, which to be clear,

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What we define as level one to give you a little bit more of a revenue range so you can start to determine there's other factors to this is kind of that zero to $7,5800 grand a year range. As you start to scale up into level two law firm owner, which we view as more of that $7,5800 to about $3 million range, this is where you can start to look for a more dedicated person to marketing.

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or what we would consider a marketing assistant. So this person would sit squarely in the marketing role. Their job would be to do a few things. They would be a, gathering and interpreting marketing data to understand it and make sure they're prescribing some solutions, communicating with all of your marketing vendors because at a level two law firm, you're likely still working with exclusively vendors for your

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or your Google LSAs or SEO, right? And so you need the marketing assistant to manage the communication and the direction with those marketing vendors. And so their role would be to do that as well as depending on where you're at with your vendors, they might even be able to deploy some marketing campaigns internally or manage some of your organic stuff. If you're doing organic social media, if you're doing podcast work, if you're doing just...

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like YouTube video posting, that marketing assistant could help be more of a community manager and really start to manage some of the socials as well. And as you're scaling up out of that level too, this is where you start to hit that point where trying to scale becomes very difficult with a vendor because now your team's running at higher octane. You've likely got more ideas, you've got more budget, you have more...

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movement happening from a marketing perspective and this is where you need to look to scale up your marketing team. So let me start by saying if that's you or you're in one of those positions and you'd like to learn kind of how to start to build up the team even just outside of this video, you could head to thelawfirmsecret.com. We'd love to show you a path on how to actually do this.

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from a practical perspective after doing it ourselves and doing this with other law firms. But if you're on your way up to level three, this is where you're gonna start to build your in-house marketing team. Now, I get the question a lot, does that mean I just instantly go out and hire everybody for my in-house marketing team? No, that's not what you do. In fact, that's certainly not what we did. So,

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What we did, we started adding people slowly over time to the marketing team. It wasn't like, okay, we flipped into level three and now we're going to go hire eight, nine people on our marketing team and fill every single role. That's not the objective. The objective is to find what the most high impact areas of your marketing need are and start to hire there. So for instance, if you're running, you know, a lot of

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Facebook advertising. And there's a lot that goes into it. You might want to look into roles like a copywriter for a first hire because of all the ad copy, the scripting, the landing pages, the scheduling pages if you're driving to self-schedule and having a copywriter come on. Or you might want to look into a media buyer that's going to really manage the actual

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distribution of your ads on Facebook or Meta, however you want to refer to it nowadays. And that would be one of your first hires. But you're going to be building this team up over time. And ultimately what you're doing is as you're building this team up, what you're going to recognize is you're going to start to have people rise up that demonstrate that they're really good at certain things.

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And so as you continue to build out your team, what's gonna end up happening is you're gonna need like a layer of management, if you will, between you and then all the other team members. And so this is where you're gonna have the three pillars of marketing, right? And I should say advertising in this sense. You're gonna have internal advertising, which is to your clients.

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anything that you're doing if you're marketing maybe a PI add-on or marketing another practice area internally, you're gonna have paid and that's gonna be all of the paid efforts you're doing, Google LSA, Facebook, Google Pay Per Click, anything you're doing from a paid perspective and then you're gonna have organic. And these are gonna become your three pillars in the marketing team. And I say marketing team because all of these combine both.

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and sales and you're have organic and what's gonna need to happen is you're gonna need to We're not gonna get into flow in this conversation Okay flow is a very big topic and we've got a lot of material about that on the channel But you're gonna need to find what we call a process leader for each of those departments So you're gonna have your internal marketing and that's gonna need its own process leader. You're gonna have

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a paid and that's going to need its own process leader. You're going to have an organic and that's going to have its own process leader. By the way, it's very possible in the beginning, all the lines get blurred with this. So one person may play a lot of these individual roles in the start. But as you start to scale and as you have leaders rise up on your team, you're going to be able to start to identify who would excel best in each department. And again,

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You might have people that are acting as the process leader, but also a team member on that team running a particular task. And all of these people then are going to rise up and plan. And we call it planning in retro. You're going to review your data from any given sprint period that you're running with a goal and figure out, did you hit the goal? If not, why? And then you're going to plan what's next.

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and all of this rises up. And so as you're starting to build out your internal marketing team, just like we mentioned in the last video, which I highly recommend you go to, you need to develop your North Star metric. What is your goal? Because as your marketing team comes on, not only do you need to be clear about what your goal is from a actual growth perspective for your law firm,

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Your marketing team needs to be crystal clear, but I would argue that not only does your marketing team need to know your goal, they need to know a more specific goal. And that specific goal, and you heard me harp on this in the last video, is they need to know that cost per appointment set goal. Your marketing team needs to know what that means. That's the North Star metric, cost per appointment set. That will help the team as a whole identify how well are the advertising campaigns running.

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how well is the sales team performing together to be able to determine how well as a marketing department are we running as a whole. And so they all need to get aligned on what that goal looks like to be able to move the needle forward. Now, I said I'm not going to get into flow, but as you start to bring each of these members of the marketing team on, you've got to have

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a very, very clear style for how you're gonna manage the team. It can't just be, okay, I brought a copywriter on, hey copywriter, go figure it out. That's not how it works. So although I'm not gonna deep dive Flow, what I want to mention is we use a system called Flow. And here's what Flow is comprised of. I just mentioned two of the things.

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As we brought our marketing team on, Flow is comprised of primarily, I'm going to say four elements, okay? A retro meeting, a planning meeting, a daily standup, and then individual one-on-ones. So the retro meeting is reviewing data from a particular sprint period. Usually in marketing, you're running one week sprints because you're trying to hit your weekly goals, right? Every firm might be a little bit different, but you're reviewing

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the data from your weekly sprint. This is where all the members of the marketing team will be on, including the process leader and the process owner. And you're figuring out, did we hit our goal? not, why? What did we miss? Your planning should be your process leader and your process owner together. This is now figuring out, okay, from our retro, here's what we know. Now we need to create a plan to go hit our goal for this sprint period.

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Here's what's going to change. Here's the plan that needs to be executed. Your daily stand up is going to be run by your process leader. And as a law firm owner, in the early days, you should be intimately involved in all of this. That's what we did early on, is we were involved in all of it. And your daily stand up is going to be accountability. Basically, okay, team member by team member. What was the goal? Did we hit it?

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What was in the way? And it's really about removing obstacles. Daily stand-up should be 15 minutes max. It's a quick check-in. Is there anything in the way today that as a process leader or process owner, we can remove and get out of your way to be able to allow you to work towards your goals? And then the one-on-ones, this is for the process leader to meet with individual team members on the marketing team for training purposes or just one-on-one conversations to do check-ins with them. So...

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Just to be clear, for us, this kind of removed a lot of like the quarterly reviews or the monthly reviews because we were doing it on such a regular basis through all of this, through standups, through our one-on-ones and identifying how each team member is doing and if they need any particular training that we're able to come alongside them on a one-on-one and that would help them continue to move the needle forward. But what we found to be true, to be able to really get efficient,

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is something we call a power hour. So here's the deal. As you start to grow your marketing team, it's very likely that you as the law firm owner, especially if you were doing some of these tasks prior to, it's very possible that you feel frustrated at times. And when I say frustrated, I mean because you feel like you can do all of the same work in half the time or less.

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And the truth of the matter is, the answer to that is probably true. You probably can. As you start to build a team, ends up happening as you're starting to dial things in is the team usually, and this is at no fault other than the manager, the law firm owner themselves, including us, we went through this, is the team usually gets inefficient. We're not making the best use of our time. an example, to run an ad campaign.

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when we were first starting this, sometimes to run a single ad set and get it out the door and get everything ready, it would take us a whole work week. And me, candidly, as the CMO, would get frustrated because I would feel what took us a whole work week, I could do in a morning. And that would be frustrating to me. But I recognize it's because we were scattered. There were team members that were in multiple different departments. They were helping

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for us events, just like for you, they might be helping workflow, they might be helping this team, this team, this team. And so everyone started getting scattered. They were working on their tasks to move toward the goal, but they got scattered. And the power hour helped center us. So what is the power hour? That was our secret weapon to maximize efficiency. The power hour was literally a single hour every day where the team is working on only that department's tasks.

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So for example, if we had an ad set, we need to get out the door, that power hour, you have the process leader, they're acting as a train conductor. They're saying, okay, copywriter, I need you to do this to get the task done. Okay, tech, head of tech, I need you to go do this to get the landing pages built. Okay, video editor, I need you to go complete this task. And everyone's there working together, which means you've got a real time feedback loop, especially,

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If your team is working remotely, a lot of law firms are back in office, but assuming your team is working remotely, this is even tougher because now you're trying to message people at certain times. Sometimes you're able to get them. Sometimes you're not. When you're in person on a team, doing this in office is even that much more powerful, but doing it remotely, it's a necessity because now you've got that real time communication loop. Now you, you know, if the copywriters got a question for the video editor or the copywriters got a question for the process leader,

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It's happening right there real time. They're able to get the answer to that question and then get the task done. And so what happened? Well, we went from taking a full work week to get a single ad set done to now we're able to get multiple ads that's done in a single day. And that's because marketing power hour, efficiencies in flow with the standup meetings, efficiencies in our planning and making sure we're reviewing our data properly. So why do I tell you all of this? The concept of building a marketing team is a big one.

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And it's one that's not gonna be fully covered in one single video. I'm just simply not gonna be able to walk you through every detail of how in a single video.

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But if you would like to better understand how to start to build out a marketing team for your law firm, we'd love to spend 10 minutes with you talking about how we might be able to do that. And you can head to thelawfirmsecret.com. We'll throw that link in the description below as well. And we'd love to chat a little bit more about how to implement this.

All right, so that was a lot of information, but now we gotta figure out as we now have our marketing team, how do we make sure they're as efficient and effective as possible? And we use a proprietary system we partnered with one of our clients, Bert Dean, are on called Flow.

Flow is a methodology, it's a management structure to make sure we're getting the most out of our team, make sure our team is happy. And so we personally use Flow in our practice, as well as many of the law firms that work with us as clients use Flow and theirs to be able to manage their marketing team, to make sure we're getting stuff done on time, on deadline, and getting the results that we need to get. So let's walk through how Flow looks in a practical sense.