When I worked for an online marketing agency that specialized in pharmaceuticals, there was always a balancing act when “Pharma Company A” and “Pharma Company B” both hawked products for “Indication X”. The party line was:
We only work with one company for any specific indication.
Challenges:
- Drugs originally approved for Indication X getting approved for Indication Y
- Indication X drug delivered orally now being delivered intravenously
- But Pharma Company A is a more important partner and they just came out with …
The reality: corners were cut, pseudo-silos were disregarded, and knowledge from one company’s “restless leg syndrome” drug strategy always managed to inform the drug strategy for another company’s “restless leg syndrome” drug strategy. It happens. Humans is humans. But it’s dangerous.
This is why I get itchy when I see online marketing firms whose websites proclaim We Specialize In Online Marketing For Law Firms! This may sound great — if you’re a lawyer (generally speaking, lawyer-brains and marketer-brains point in different directions) you’d be inclined to think
YES. Just what I need. They know what they’re doing.
But let’s dig a little deeper — they might seem to know what’s up because they’ve taken best practices from every client they’ve ever worked with. Which means they’ll steal your best ideas and share them with the next law firm they work with — which may very well be your competitor. It’s not intentional nor is it malevolent … but humans is humans. (Lawyers don’t re-invent the wheel every time they handle a case; neither do marketers.)
There are ways around this. An online marketing firm in Austin, Texas only works with one law firm type in any one metropolitan area. This is an elegant fix and I approve. If you decide to work with a firm that specializes in a vertical, ensure a non-compete so that they don’t share your best practices with the next guy. This is especially important if you’re hiring a paid search marketing partner; imagine:
- You hire SEM firm to buy terms like “employment discrimination lawyer NYC”
- The SEM firm tells prospective clients that they are “expert marketers for employment discrimination lawyers”
- The employment discrimination law firm two floors up from you hires the exact same SEM firm (!)
- The SEM firm starts bidding on “employment discrimination lawyer NYC” for the guy two floors up, too!
Now you’re in a bidding war with the guy two floors up. Who wins? The SEM firm, in general — they’re taking a percentage cut of your paid search spend for themselves (depending on the arrangement; I’ve found that SEM firms who hawk to law firms are astoundingly opaque in their fee disclosure, which I find mind-boggling and rude). So if your spend goes up, what do they care?
Two things to do before hiring that “industry-specific” marketing partner:
- Ask questions to see if they’re going to work for your direct competitor two days from now
- Establish non-compete clauses to protect yourself
Or, you can always work with transparent firms like thinking/marketing. Sure, you can get an 80th percentile marketer who’s pretty good because all he does is Market X. Or, you can get a 99th percentile marketer — someone who understands marketing so deeply that she can bring to bear best practices across all industries to help your company and/or firm dominate the market. I honestly believe that either approach can work, particularly if you bear in mind the caveats mentioned above.
(For the record: thinking/marketing cannot work with any other criminal defense law firms in New York City until further notice.)
