The beginning of your public relations campaign looks very much like the beginning of any marketing campaign. Start by asking yourself four fundamental questions:
1. How do you want to be viewed? What type of practice do you want to promote? What areas of your practice do you need to market? How do you want to be used by your potential clients? What kind of lawyer do you want to portray yourself as? Are you an aggressive litigator? A compassionate attorney who holds your clients’ hands?
2. What types of clients do you want to reach? Where are you getting your clients? Where are the best places to get new clients? Through other attorneys or other professional referrals? From the public at large? You need to understand where you can reach potential clients so you can focus your PR campaign on targeting them.
3. What are you comfortable with? How much time can you commit, and what are you interested in doing? A PR campaign won’t work if you’re not comfortable, so you have to be at east with PR elements in order to be successful.
4. Where are you clients and targets getting their information? Ask everybody whom you want to do business with what they read, what events they go to, and what organizations they are a part of. Find out as much as you can about where your prospects get their information. If you don’t, you’re really missing out on where you could be implementing PR. Not only do you have to know what you want to say, but you have to get a really good idea about where you should be putting that information.
For more tips, check out our marketing seminar “Benefitting from Public Relations.”