Did you have a productive year? Work on interesting, profitable matters? Create successful client relationships? Enjoy time with work friends and colleagues? Hopefully you had it all and you want to make 2025 equally successful. To build on 2024 in 2025 you need a marketing/business development plan.
The planning process begins with a look back at 2024 to determine activities to expand upon and initiatives to reconfigure. Your plan should be both practical and effective. It should be a summary of strategies and tactics that you can realign, eliminate or expand as needed. It summarizes your choices so that you can refer to them whenever you reach a marketing or business development choice point.
2025 should build on your 2024 activities record. To ground your 2025 plan, you need to assess which parts of your 2024 networking, outreach and business development activities were most important to your success and which were failures.
Focus on 3 areas:
Try to be as specific as possible because this analysis will be the foundation of your 2025 plan.
Your goals. Begin your assessment with a review of your 2024 goals. Which ones did you achieve totally, which partially and which ones not at all?
Your target(s). Did you focus your efforts on specific geographic areas or specific needs or kinds of business or type of person? How successful were you in creating connections between your targets and your message? Were you able to create target personas––a blend of the key characteristics of your ideal client?
Your personal networking initiatives. An effective way to look at your own activities is to focus on activities related to networking groups such as bar associations, local mixed business groups, groups your targets belong to, etc. These group activities provide a convenient way to address many objectives simultaneously.
Goals. Begin your 2024 review by deciding which goals should be given more attention in 2025 and which ones should be revised or dropped completely. Consider whether your changes make room to add complementary goals. If the circumstances of your practice have changed radically, do you need to switch direction and create a whole new set of goals?
Targets. Once you have established a set of goals it is time to address your targets. Here you want to think broadly. Who is in your target market? Why are they part of your market? What is the context in which they make decisions that lead them to need your expertise? How might their decision-making context change in 2025?
Is anything happening in your own work world that suggests the need for a change in the location, needs or characteristics of your current targets? Are any new laws going to impact your practice area? Could local, national or international economic forces impact your target market’s perceptions or actions? Has your competition changed in any way?
Your own networking. Review your networking group activities in detail to ascertain the best venues for you. Do you prefer virtual or in-person meetings? In what kinds of situations are you most comfortable? Do you prefer to connect directly with members of your target market or indirectly through referral sources and marketing-generated word of mouth?
Will technology-driven changes in the legal field require you to upgrade your marketing tools? Does your website need refreshing? Does it continue to speak to your audience?
Do you need training in new techniques associated with videos, podcasting, content “drip” campaigns?
An effective way to assess your networking initiatives is to create a table that allows you to contrast and compare the advantages and disadvantages of each group you belong to. In the table, list each group on the rows, and their characteristics in the columns. Then, supply the following information for each group:
Tie all three areas of analysis together in a SWOT analysis [S = your strengths, W = weaknesses, O = opportunities, T = threats]. Create a two column by two row chart with strengths and opportunities in the top two boxes, weaknesses and threats in the bottom two boxes. Then put each of the key pieces from your tri-part analysis in its appropriate box. You now have a concise view of your competitive landscape. Using it as a conceptual strategic basis, you are now ready to draft your 2025 plan.
For example, suppose you have a strong residential real estate practice focused on the buying and selling of homes in your greater geographic area. You foresee two areas of potential weakness: a rise in housing costs and a dearth of housing inventory brought on by anticipated increases in taxes. You also see consolidation in the real estate brokerage community due to company mergers, which may mean increased attorney competition for broker relationships.
Noting these potential changes in the competitive landscape, you decide to focus more on the broker community. You plan to join their industry group and become active at both the state and local levels. This will increase your competitive strengths by enhancing your visibility with a primary source of business, and, by providing relevant knowledge─updated information on industry concerns that you can address in your social media marketing content.
Go back to the three initial areas of analysis. Update your goals for the year making sure to keep them grounded––or, specific, doable and measurable.
Then review your target market, changing the priorities to reflect the changes you have noted in their decision-making context. Remember to always strive for target niches since it is easier to really know and understand the buying triggers for a smaller, more homogenous group of people.
Finally, review your networking focus and areas of participation. Returning to the previous example, to increase your visibility in the broker community you might decide to not only join their organizations but also to become a member of their program committee and find opportunities to be part of some of the programs. When you do parallel 2025 financial planning, remember to include the marketing/business development costs in terms of both time and money to be expended.
The result of your assessment and analysis should be an increased understanding of your goals and targets and how they can fuel your practice growth. You should also understand both your personal weaknesses that you need to tackle and the larger environmental threats you need to address.
