Speaker 1: 0:05

How big actually is my market and how would I even know? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen and today we're diving into a pretty crucial topic assessing the market size for your legal services. Now you might be wondering why market size matters. We've been told size doesn't matter. And isn't it enough to have clients in a steady workload? Why do we need to assess this top of the market that you're in? You just want to know what's going on, and if you don't know how big the market really is, you can't really do any of that fun stuff like launching new things. And you also can't say you're winning your own market because you have no idea, because at the end of the day, for pretty much every law firm, save for a very few specific practice areas, what we're doing is running a business and we're selling something, and understanding how big our market is is like having a roadmap for our business's growth and potential success. We serve the clients we serve today and that's great, but this is about the opportunities of tomorrow. Now we talk about all kinds of different marketing strategies on the podcast here and different ways that you can apply your time and money to generate more clients. But the thing I really just don't talk about enough is that deciding to do or not do something should be supported by real data, and you should generally only go do something in marketing if you have a specific game plan to generate revenue from that activity. And when we create those game plans, we need to have an understanding of our market size, to allocate resources effectively, to set realistic growth targets and just to make smart decisions about where the potential is in our business. If we know how big the market is and what the market looks like, it just gets infinitely easier to prioritize things and ensure that our marketing dollars are being spent where they're going to make the most impact. So let's kick things off.

Speaker 1: 2:15

Let's make this one short. Let's get right in and talk about what market size actually means. Market size is essentially just the total demand for your legal services within a specific market. This could be geographic. It could even be a group of people within a geographic area. It depends and it helps you figure out how big the opportunity is for your firm and where you should focus your efforts. And when we're talking about the market that you can actually service.

Speaker 1: 2:41

There are really three key components of that to consider. There are three sort of types of markets. The first is our total addressable market, or our TAM, t-a-m, and this is the entire market demand for a specific service, assuming no competition or other constraints. This is the biggest possible pie you could have. So we'd be looking at TAM, for water bottles is how many water bottles everybody in New York City buys every year. That's our total market, no restrictions, no types of water bottles, sizes, different additions, additives, that kind of thing Just all the water bottle sales. Total addressable market. Number two is our serviceable available market, and this is the portion of the TAM that your firm can realistically target based on your expertise, your location and your resources. So again, in our water bottle example, we are only selling maybe really small water bottles and there's only a certain percentage of the market that wants to buy small water bottles. A lot of people want to buy big water bottles or square water bottles or water bottles that are shaped like other things, and for our little water bottles there's a specific serviceable market. And then we have number three, which is the serviceable obtainable market. So this is the slice of the Sam that you can capture. This is considering our current capabilities and our competition. So if we have that tiny water bottle market, this is the number of tidy water bottles or the number of people who we can sell, considering our current capabilities and our competition. So, if we have that tiny water bottle market, this is the number of tiny water bottles or the number of people who we can sell those tiny water bottles to, given where we are in New York City and how our distribution works and all those other factors. And of course, those aren't particularly relevant for a law firm.

Speaker 1: 4:19

But you can see how we're scaling back each definition. The first one is the big pie. Then we cut off a little bit and it's how much we could actually service based on our expertise, based on where we are within a city or within a market and the resources we have to handle these issues. And the number three is what we can do right now. So this is what's obtainable, based on what we have right now. And usually we're trying to get the obtainable market to go towards the available market and ideally we'd want all of those to go to the entire total addressable market. But that's a hard thing to do.

Speaker 1: 4:54

And these three glorious pieces of jargon they do sound a little bit like a VC's last words. They're really useful, though. They give us a lot of insight into potential growth and revenue opportunities, even at this very high level, and, of course, with all of these. So you can break these down much more specifically. You can go by specific service and by area, and you can understand what the market is for each individual thing that you offer. So, just as an example, if you're a divorce firm, in this scenario this could be uncontested divorces, contested divorces, child divorces, child support, child custody, property division all the specific things you do and then if you do a specific service within divorce, you can have a market for that individually as well.

Speaker 1: 5:35

You can break these markets down for each of these services as deep as you want to go, and that will help you understand where you either stand in your market or what the market looks like for something new. And by understanding where your firm stands in the market, you can make informed decisions about okay, should we expand this? Should we enter new markets? Should we double down on the existing ones? Should we add a new feature to this, this strategic approach? What it ensures is that your efforts are aligned with the market's realities. If we're not aligned with reality, we can't really make decisions and actually do things that will lead to growth. And so, now that we understand what market size is and why it matters, let's explore some practical methods to actually assess it for your legal services, and we're going to talk about three ways you can do this and a bunch of different tools you can use. These are not all going to be in the show notes, so I'll try to speak clearly and you should take notes.

Speaker 1: 6:35

So first, we can collect a huge amount of data online, and I usually use two ways to do that. First is by looking for legal industry reports and databases, and we can access a lot of legal industry reports that provide insights into market trends, client demographics and even emerging legal needs. These reports are usually pretty specific to a practice area and a region, but they can be pretty useful, and examples of this are things like the ABA's annual reports or specialized reports from platforms like Lexis or Westlaw, and you can also use market research firms like IbisWorld or Statista, which is available online, and they have pretty detailed analyses of legal markets as well. And then I like to use something to analyze trends and patterns. Usually, I use a couple of tools for this, but one that I really like to use is Google Trends, which helps me analyze search interest over time for specific topics. So we can really look into identifying trends or using that data to try and forecast future demand.

Speaker 1: 7:37

But we can do this with a lot of different things over a lot of different time periods and in a lot of different regions. It's Google's data, after all, and on top of that I like to use tools like SEMrush, ahrefs and Moz to see which keywords related to the services are gaining traction. So we can see some of that from trends. But then we can get more specific data from those SEO tools because they can give insight into search volumes, competition levels and we can even use the free Google ads keyword tool for this to get a little bit of an idea of who is already on the Google results page, and we can also go into our own historical client data here, so we can use this.

Speaker 1: 8:15

It's really a goldmine if we have enough and we can analyze past cases, try and identify patterns, client needs, service requests, things like that to extrapolate what kind of market we're looking at. And with all of these data points, you probably already have a pretty good picture of what's going on. I mean, you've been on 15 websites now and you understand how much there is. But if we're really going to sell something because that's what this is about at the end of the day this really just isn't going to be enough. Sure, there may be lots of online interest and maybe there are tons of filings for a specific type of case in your area, but while that does usually mean that there is a market for what you're interested in doing, it doesn't mean we have the full picture of the need in the market and how the people in those statistics actually think about purchasing this service. So, really, what we want to do next is something you're kind of already doing is some surveys and interviews. And if you spend a lot of time with clients, you can do less of this because you're already going to be hearing from the clients on a pretty regular basis. But if, like me, you're a little bit removed, you're spending more time on marketing, you're spending more time on the business, then it's good to engage with the clients a bit more to understand the dynamics of the demand in the market.

Speaker 1: 9:27

And actually, the surveys I mentioned, those are kind of a way to cheat this without talking to people. And so, number one, yeah, conducting surveys. We can design these surveys to collect feedback, maybe from existing clients, about their needs, about their preferences, about their level of satisfaction. You've probably heard of NPS surveys before, and this can help us identify needs for improvement or for potential service expansions, so that we can understand what the clients really want. And we can even use these automated tools for things like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms. We can create and distribute these, and it takes five minutes to set these up. It's really easy, and we can even, in some cases, incentivize participation with little rewards or by highlighting how the feedback is directly beneficial to improving the services.

Speaker 1: 10:15

And then we can do some interviews. So if you're sitting with clients a lot, this is something you may want to have somebody else do so that you can get a different perspective. They're not just talking directly to you, but we can use these interviews to understand client needs and expectations. We're doing the same thing in the surveys. We're doing the same thing the whole time. This is another strategy to get really good information. So conducting these one-on-one interviews with clients allows us to dive way deeper into their needs and expectations. They tell us what they thought was going to happen, what they felt actually happened and we can use this qualitative data to uncover the little nuances that surveys might miss. And when we can record and analyze these interviews. You can even use them as video reviews on your website, but we want to record them so that we can go back and look through them and identify common themes, unique insights and little tidbits of information like this that can inform the strategic decisions we want to make, because in this process, yes, we're going to gain all of this exceedingly valuable information about what motivates our clients, what they like and what they don't like. More importantly, about the whole process of buying legal services and how their perception of your product influenced them to buy or not buy. All of this is something we can immediately start implementing. This feedback is super valuable and even if we're not ready to start selling something new, we can use this information to start building that new idea.

Speaker 1: 11:41

And now, last but not least, to get that little last piece of information about the landscape of our market. We need to do a little bit of competitive analysis and we're not going to go too deep on this because it's something I'm planning on talking about more in the future, but it is a really crucial piece of the puzzle. So what we want to do here, number one, is study our competitors to figure out the overall demand in the market. So we can look at what our competitors are offering, their marketing strategies, their client bases, who's hiring them and this helps us estimate the size of the market that they're serving and starts to identify some trends. And we could use tools like SimilarWeb, spyfu, semrush that I mentioned. These can all provide insights into competitors' website traffic and keyword strategies to understand what they're doing online. And on top of this, we could just go to an industry conference, we can go to networking events and we can talk to people firsthand about what they're doing and how they're positioning themselves in the market. You'd be shocked by how forthcoming people are with this information. They want to share, they want to brag and they want to tell you how they're trying to beat you, but they're essentially just giving you a roadmap on how to beat them.

Speaker 1: 12:50

And the number two thing we can do here is identify gaps in services offered by competitors. So look at what your competitors are offering and find the areas in between. Are there niche areas that they're not covering that could align with your expertise? Find out, and you can even look at their online reviews, the feedback about competitors, to figure out what those clients didn't like about that firm. If there are pain points that those clients are having, you can address those. Maybe your competitor isn't, but you can. At the end of the day, you don't want to just be copying everything your competitors do. So figuring out the things they don't do is actually a really good way to carve out a unique position in the market and capitalize on these unmet needs.

Speaker 1: 13:35

But regular market analysis is really essential for staying competitive and relevant in this ever-evolving legal and general business landscape, and I know I waffled on this a little bit up top, but doing this analysis is really important. Whether you're launching something soon or even if you're not being proactive and constantly monitoring the market trends, or at least consistently monitoring them and understanding these client needs. This is really critical to helping you identify new opportunities for either new things or doing better at the things you already do, and for identifying potential threats to your business early on. This lets you adapt your strategies quickly enough to stay aligned with demand and make sure you're not left behind when things start moving fast, and the regular analysis of your market helps you make informed decisions about expanding practice areas, investing in new technologies or just making adjustments and tweaks to your marketing tactics, because in this world, where change is really the only constant we have, ongoing market analysis is one of the major keys to agility and sustained growth. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out RosenAdvertisingcom for more Thanks.