What most law firms don’t have is what Professor Byron Sharp says is “mental availability.” And the reason they don’t have it is usually because they squander their marketing budget on what’s called the short.
What’s the Short?
What’s the short? Possibly the biggest empirical data set we have as strategists and those in marketing comes from the work of Les Binet and Peter Field and they came to the conclusion that when all is said and done, effective marketing is essentially made up of 2 counterparts, the long and the short.
The short is like fishing with dynamite – you’re targeting clients who are already in crisis mode, desperately searching for legal help at 2am. It’s your ad copy screaming ‘call now!’
What’s the Long?
The long is the long game, it’s the marketing work that is all about making potential clients aware of your firm before they need you. It’s the stuff that your inexperienced marketing coordinator, your CMO or your half-baked marketing agency says, “we’re not getting any leads from this, let’s kill it.”
Now, I might sound a little critical of the short, but I’m not. Of course if you’re a law firm wanting to stay alive, you need the short to deliver leads today. But, you equally need the long.
Here’s the Problem
Here’s the problem: Most law firms are massively overweight on short-term activation and painfully light on long-term brand building. The data from Binet and Field shows that the optimal split between long and short should be about 60:40 in favour of brand building. But when I look at most law firm marketing budgets, it’s more like 90:10 in favor of short-term lead generation.
Why does this happen? It’s simple really. Short-term tactical marketing is easier to measure. You can see the leads roll in. You can count the clicks. You can measure the cost per acquisition down to the penny. And in a profession obsessed with billable hours and measurable outputs, this kind of immediate gratification is seductive. Even though most law firms aren’t tracking this data well. Topic for another day!
What Your Law Firm is Missing
But here’s what you’re missing: The long game is what makes your short game work better. It’s what Binet and Field call the “multiplier effect.” When you invest in building mental availability – making your firm the one that comes to mind when someone needs legal services – your short-term activation becomes dramatically more effective.
Think about it. When someone searches for “compensation lawyer near me,” they’re going to see a bunch of Google ads. If they’ve never heard of any of the firms, they’re going to make their choice based on whatever limited information they can glean from an ad. But if they recognize one firm, they’re more likely to engage. And the long is the stuff that the big players do in correct ratio to the short. And, its why they win every day of the week over smaller firms. That’s the reality! And despite your messaging on your website that says, we’re cute and cuddly, smart and aggressive, cheap and cheerful, whatever it is, market share lies with the big firms that have the long dialled in.
Short-sighted firms think marketing is about generating leads. It’s not. It’s about generating preference. The leads follow naturally when you’ve built preference.
A Problem on Top of a Problem
The other problem with being too short is that it makes you vulnerable. For example, when everyone’s playing the same Google Ads game, it becomes a race to the bottom. The cost per click goes up, the conversion rates go down, and you’re constantly having to outbid your competitors just to stand still.
And it’s about to get much, much worse. Let me share some sobering data with you. Google Ads CPCs have shot up 47 percent in just the last five years. Think about that for a moment. You’re paying nearly 50% more for the same click than you were in 2018. And that’s before we factor in the perfect storm that’s brewing.
You’ve got AI-driven ad tools like PMAX and Advantage+ stripping away control from marketers and making life particularly unpleasant for less sophisticated media buyers. Google is rolling out ads in its AI overviews. OpenAI is eyeing ad placement inside ChatGPT. And if you’re a US law firm, with the TikTok ban – where do you think all those ad dollars are going to go? Straight into an already overcrowded digital advertising market.
Also, let’s not forget that Google might be losing market share to AI tools for the first time in its history. When that happens – and it will happen – expect the cost of those remaining Google clicks to go through the roof as advertisers fight over a shrinking pie.
This isn’t just a temporary blip. This is a fundamental shift in the digital advertising landscape. And if your firm is overly dependent on short-term digital activation, you’re setting yourself up for a very expensive future.
What to Do About It
Here’s what you need to do:
- Audit your current marketing spend. If you’re spending more than 50% on short-term activation, you’re doing it wrong.
- Invest in proper brand tracking. You need to know if you’re building mental availability in your target market.
- Stop obsessing about immediate ROI. The most valuable marketing activities often can’t be measured in real-time.
- Think about your distinctive assets. What makes your firm memorable? What could you own in the minds of your potential clients?
- Play the long game. It takes time to build mental availability, but once you’ve got it, it’s a powerful competitive advantage.
If you’re all short and no long, you’re setting yourself up for failure. You’re making your marketing more expensive and less effective than it needs to be. You’re missing out on the multiplier effect that comes from building genuine mental availability.
And its a huge opportunity, because the long is invariably played by the big firms because they understand it, and they know it works and they know that for the most part, their smaller competitors won’t commit to it.
