You probably see a lot of things that you can do so that you succeed, but there is a very important other side to that. There are sure-fire ways to fail and if you don’t know what they are, you’re not going to know how to avoid them.

1. You will fail if you do not commit to your marketing. If you’re not going 100%, then you’re not going to get anything back. When people tell me that marketing doesn’t work, I usually take a moment to ask them what they were doing. Sometimes they have the right idea (sometimes they don’t have any idea at all) but a flawed follow-through.

Think of it as a knit hat that’s unfinished. If there’s a giant hole in the hat, it’s not going to keep you warm. In the same way, if there is a giant hole in your marketing, it’s not going to work. You have to give it your all before you can start to expect incredible results.

2. Pride will get you diddly squat if you don’t match it with humility. The reason the best marketers in the business are where they are is because they let themselves fail. They learned from their mistakes. You can’t learn from your mistakes if you don’t accept the fact that you can make them. Test marketing is a big deal and when one of your ad’s ROI comes back poorly, don’t look at it as “marketing doesn’t work” but instead, look at it as “This particular ad did not work. What can I improve?”

3. One of the best possible ways to fail is to do everything on your own. You’re an attorney for heaven’s sake. You’re already working around 50 or more hours a week, don’t put all of the marketing onto yourself. Find someone - or even a few people - who can do that work for you. It will save your sanity and your law firm.

This way, you can have the marketing team focused on marketing your firm and you can focus on actually running it.

4. The most absolute way that you can fail at marketing is if you simply give up. If you look at it as time and money wasted instead of looking at it as a continual growing experience. Seeing marketing as an expense is a mistake in and of itself. Yes, it requires time and money but it’s not something that you can simply let fall by the wayside. This is an incredibly important part of being a lawyer that some people just never grasp.

How are you going to work with people if they don’t know you’re even there?