Your 2017 marketing strategy will help you achieve new goals and reach a higher level of success. But this assumes that you’ll be taking the necessary steps in creating and implementing that strategy.
A competitive analysis is a critical part of this process. It’s also one that many law firms overlook. It provides your practice with the insights that will inform your marketing decisions and lead to better results in the long run.
What is a Competitive Analysis?
A competitive analysis consists of the activities that let you identify and evaluate your industry competitors. It gives you invaluable information related to a wide range of factors including:
-Competitor strengths and weaknesses
-Search engine rankings and optimization strategies
-Target audiences
-Social media activity and engagement
-Target keywords
This and other information helps your law firm create a marketing strategy that positions it ahead of its competitors.
A properly implemented competitive analysis gives you the tools and resources that you’d otherwise not be able to use in developing your own marketing campaigns.
Implementing Your Competitive Analysis
A competitive analysis begins with identifying your existing and future industry competitors. It can be done from the perspective of both the clients and the competing law firm itself.
The client’s perspective helps you evaluate the strengths of each competitor as well as their weaknesses. You’ll understand why a competitor’s website, copy, offer, and other marketing strategies appeal to its target audience.
More importantly, you’ll see what doesn’t work, which helps you avoid common mistakes and unnecessary use of limited marketing resources.
Taking the competitor’s perspective gives you insight into the decision-making process that led them to use a given marketing strategy. This helps you develop your own strategy and anticipate what they might do in a given situation.
Analyze the services they provide, their online presence, market share, and potential impact on your own law firm’s marketing efforts.
Who are their target audiences, and what similarities do they share with your own? Try to determine the expectations of that audience and the ways in which competitors meet (or don’t) those expectations.
Benefits of Competitive Analysis for Your Law Firm
Along with informing your own marketing decisions, a competitive analysis allows you to determine your marketing budget. This is especially important if you need to allocate more resources to improve the performance of your campaigns.
But it can also make your marketing spending more efficient so that you maximize your results with minimal costs to your practice.
A competitive analysis helps you identify the areas that will provide the greatest immediate return. This might be a PPC campaign targeting new keywords or utilizing targeted advertisements through Facebook and other social media platforms.
You’ll notice areas that competitors are ignoring or have overlooked, which present opportunities for your law firm to gain traction and generate traffic to your website.
An analysis identifies areas of your marketing strategy that are being overtaken by competitors. Addressing these issues as quickly as possible prevents losses in revenue, search rankings, and other key metrics.
The strategy you develop for 2017 can provide you with a significant boost to your marketing results. But it must begin with a competitive analysis that creates awareness around the success and failures of competitors.
You can let us know what questions you have before starting your own competitive analysis in the comments below. Understanding how to implement this process is a big step in taking your law firm to a new level of growth.
