I only know one song, but I sing it so well: good marketing needs specific goals. So…
Q1: How do we raise the group’s profile?
Q1a: Raise their profile with whom?
Even in retail, when everyone is a potential customer, you segment. Or you at least aim at a segment and hope for some bleed through to the 38 year old men who want to date the 19 year old women who are what the 29 year old women the ads are aimed at still think of themselves as. Wow. That sounded lots better in my head. Anyway…
Legal marketers looking to "raise the profile of a practice group" should first define their audience. That will help to start. Then you need to define what message they want to "raise" with that audience.
All that neat "think about your goals" stuff being said, though, here’s my 2 cents on the value of some stuff I’ve heard legal marketers propose over the years:
1. NPR. I am a huge fan of NPR. Give my own money. Go down at 6am on a Thursday and help with the fund drive. Have all the merchandising there from. Listen to it everyday. BUT… spend marketing $$$ on it as if a sponsorship was advertising? Never. If you want to give the station money as a charitable donation, that’s cool. If you want to do radio advertising, though… do radio advertising. In my opinion, NPR’s just not a good deal in terms of what you get for what you pay.
2. Business or trade magazine; ad buy is good. Editorial deal is better. One can sometimes lead to the other, i.e., in through the ad door, start talking to the ed folks. Most biz pubs are getting very creative with the "wall" between ad and ed. Sponsor a seminar (with two of the attys in prominent positions) on business topics related to the industry. Host a CEO round-table and pay for a decent A- or B+ speaker. You’ll look great yapping away with your clients, other C-band types and someone of decent fame.
3. Sponsoring local athletic events. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why you’d do this, unless you’ve got like 20 of your attys in the event and can "own" it. Otherwise, you’re a bunch of sweaty runners along with several hundred similarly sweaty folk.
4. Ads/sponsorship of live theatre/opera/symphony: Only if you’re trying to get on the board of directors for the theatre so that you can sit next to the potential client CEO at the board meetings who’s currently on the board. Target a company or two, drop $10,000 on advertising and or sponsorship, and you can probably get somebody on the BoD. If it’s just to do ads, don’t bother. Waste of money. If you do insist on doing ads in art programs, make sure you think about your brand positioning in terms of appropriateness to the venue. If you put out that you’re "kick-ass litigators who will stomp anybody who messes with our clients," then, perhaps, ads in the opera Playbill aren’t appropriate, as "ass kicking" and "La Boehm" don’t really match up logically.
5. PR and publicity: Ding! Ding! Ding! Good, answer! We’ll play. Of course "pursuing pr and publicity" is a whole other set of projects, some of which could conceivably fall under the aforementioned. Before signing on to this, though, I strongly recommend getting firm management to decide how much time they will REQUIRE people to put in, and how it will count towards measurable stats. IE, we want you to have 1,800 billable hours and 200 PR/marketing hours per year, and, no, you can’t substitute. At the end of every pr and publicity play, there’s a nice hole where a lawyer will need to fill in some time and effort. Without that, you have a marketing person standing around looking sad.
Like most legal marketing, raising the profile of a practice group requires clear goals, a commitment on time and effort from your attorneys, an organized plan, and a way to measure success. The nice thing about practice groups is that they sometimes have a mind of their own, separate from the mind of the firm. If the practice group leader is hungry, help feed him/her. You can use the successes with one group to convince other groups to participate more fully in the future.