A Law Firm Marketing Plan You Can Run This Quarter

A law firm marketing plan that cannot be updated in a partner meeting is a brochure. Keep it to one quarter. Name the channels, the owner of each, the budget, and the number you will look at besides clicks.

What belongs on the first page

• Offer and geography. Which practice areas and cities you will actually staff if the phone rings.
• Intake SLA. How fast a new lead is touched, and who owns nights and weekends.
• Budget. Fixed ops fees versus pass-through ad spend. Do not mix them.
• Scoreboard. Organic leads, paid leads, and signed cases with source — not rankings alone.

If those four lines are fuzzy, the rest of the plan is decoration. Law firm marketing is the hub; this document is how you run it for ninety days. The sequence of work is in how to market a law firm.

Channel rows, not a wish list

Give each spoke one row:

• SEO — which hubs and blogs ship this quarter. Use the SEO checklist before you publish volume.
• Website — templates, speed, and intake forms.
• Local — GBP, NAP, city pages you will actually unique-ify. The GBP spoke is Google Business Profile for lawyers.
• Paid — search versus social, and whether PI advertising is its own campaign.

Skip the row if you will not staff it. A plan with eight channels and one marketer is fiction.

Budget that survives a partner meeting

Separate the managed work from media. Cadence MSO runs LawVert as ops plus documented pass-through. If the plan only shows “marketing: $X,” you cannot tell whether a bad month was creative, bid strategy, or a dead landing page.

Do not put a signed-case guarantee in the plan. Put a review date and the inputs you will inspect: speed-to-lead, cost per qualified intake, and which URLs produced the retainers.

Proof you can cite, and proof you cannot

Use your own Search Console and intake export. If you need an operator example, Conduit Law’s public numbers are on the case study — 7.61K clicks and 2.0M impressions in twelve months; 9.2× click growth from December to July; 162 organic-search leads and 66 SEO-attributed signed cases in the trailing year. Copy the measurement habit, not the totals. Markets differ.

A ninety-day cadence

1. Week 1. Baseline GSC, ads, and intake. Kill orphan campaigns.
2. Weeks 2–8. Ship the URLs and GBP fixes named in the plan. One paid test at a time.
3. Week 12. Review signed cases by source. Keep, cut, or rewrite the next quarter’s rows.

Write the next quarter on the same one-pager. Do not archive a 40-page PDF. If you want the same cadence under Cadence MSO, start with services or a strategy call.