Lawyer Marketing GuyLets Understand the Marketing…!

Can television advertising be profitable for my firm?
Do you sometimes wonder: Is television advertising really profitable for law firms? Or, do lawyers buy television advertising to stroke their egos, with profitability being a secondary concern?

Other questions about law firm advertising present themselves: How does the potential return-on-investment for television advertising compare with the potential return for other types of advertising? If television advertising can be profitable for law firms, how can you, as an advertiser, make sure you build and place the best possible advertising content in front of the viewers who are most likely to respond favorably to your message? How can you determine how much advertising to buy, where it should be placed, and how often it should appear?

Profitable Television Advertising

In order to make television advertising a profitable marketing vehicle for your law firm, you need a working understanding of three closely related things:

1. Media
2. Advertising
3. Things that Motivate People to Respond Favorably to Law Firm Advertising

Once you have a working understanding of these media marketing fundamentals, you can select content for your television advertising that influences viewers positively. You will also be able to make profitable return-on-investment media placement decisions.

Because these key elements – media, advertising, and things that motivate people – function in concert, a useful understanding of any of these three elements cannot be gained without understanding the other two. It will serve us well to examine the three key elements in concert.

A Few Notes About Style:

People read newspapers and magazines; people watch television; people listen to radio. Whether reading, watching, or listening, people are assimilating content while they are doing their reading, watching, and listening. These terms, “reading,” “watching,” and “listening,” become burdensome if every time the process of assimilating content is expressed as “people reading newspapers and magazines, people watching television, or people listening to the radio.” In this paper, people assimilating content from any media shall be referred to as “viewers.”

“Media” is a plural word, gaining acceptance in popular usage as a singular word. To most ears, “media are” sounds awkward. It is, however, correct.

A Note About Content:
Movies, books, even live theater, are media. However, for the purposes of this paper, information about media that traditionally do not deliver advertising content, such as books and movies, will be excluded.