Founder and managing director of Strategic Alliance Marketing Group, Deborah Dodson was recently featured in Attorney at Law Magazine discussing a problem she sees frequently among growing law firms nationwide: marketing spend is increasing, but oversight and accountability are not keeping pace.
Deborah sees a widening disconnect between marketing activity and business performance. With more than 20 years of experience spanning marketing, business development and growth strategy, Dodson works with organizations, with a focus on law firms, to scrutinize vendor performance, challenge recommendations and determine whether individual investments actually function as part of a coherent growth strategy.
According to Deborah, “Your law firm may not have a marketing budget problem — it may have an accountability problem.”
A complex marketing mix can make it difficult for firm owners to answer some very basic questions:
• What is actually producing qualified leads and, ultimately, paying clients or cases?
• Are the marketing initiatives working synergistically toward one overall goal?
• Where are services overlapping or competing?
• Where is money being spent without a clear return?
“We’ve created an environment where nearly every marketing channel can produce numbers showing that it is working,” Dodson says. “The harder question is whether those numbers demonstrate that the business itself is benefiting.”
As firms invest across SEO, paid Google ads, paid media, social, PR, AI, often with multiple vendors, it becomes increasingly difficult to see what is actually driving results — and where dollars may be wasted or services may overlap or even compete with each other. With internal personnel attempting to coordinate an increasingly complex marketing scope, the intended synergy is often lost in the mix.
Deborah was pleased to contribute her perspective on how law firms can create greater accountability around marketing decisions and make sure their investments support the firm’s broader growth strategy. Thank you to Attorney at Law Magazine for including me in the conversation.
Read the article here.