If you’ve already worked through the in-house versus outsourced options and decided on outsourced, the next question is usually the more practical one: what does this actually look like once you’ve signed up? Who does what, how often, and how do you know it’s working?
This article talks you through exactly that. Our in-house vs outsourced article covers the decision itself. This one picks up from there and explains how outsourced marketing management runs in practice, from the first few weeks through to ongoing support and regular reviews of impact.
What you’re actually buying
“Outsourced marketing” can sound like a vague catch-all, and a lot of firms come to it expecting either a single point of contact who does everything, or a sprawling agency team they’ll never quite get hold of. In practice, a properly run legal marketing agency sits somewhere in between: you get one lead who knows your firm, your partners and your patch, backed by specialists who plug in as the work demands.
Take a firm we’ll call Hartley Dunmore, a fictional but fairly typical example of a 20-partner regional practice with strong private client and commercial teams, no marketing hire and a managing partner who’d been fielding “have we thought about our website?” questions for two years.
What they needed was an experienced marketer who could act as their de facto marketing manager and just get on with most of it themselves: writing directory submissions, drafting a press release for a piece of local coverage, building out a content plan, sorting the social media. That’s the shape outsourced marketing management for law firms tends to take in practice. A single account lead handles the bulk of the day-to-day work directly, because lots of the day-to-day marketing activity – copywriting, PR, social, design, reporting – doesn’t actually need a different specialist for every task.
Specialists get brought in for the handful of things that genuinely warrant one: a web developer when the site needs rebuilding, a paid media specialist if the firm wants to run ads, an SEO technical specialist for anything beyond the basics. The firm gets continuity and a single point of contact for almost everything, with extra expertise pulled in only when the job actually calls for it.
How the relationship gets set up
The first month or two looks different from the rest of the engagement, and it’s worth knowing that so you’re not expecting full campaign output on day one.
It starts with creating a marketing strategy and carrying out an audit: what’s on the website, how it ranks, what the brand currently says about the firm, what competitors are doing, where the previous marketing effort (if any) left off. From there comes a marketing plan, setting out priorities for the first six to twelve months (and here at Consortium we work in three-month stints to keep focused and allow for flexibility). Only after that does delivery really start moving.
Access is the practical bit firms sometimes underestimate. Your outsourced partner will need logins to your website, your social accounts, your CRM if you have one, possibly your directory submission portals. Getting this sorted in week one rather than week six makes a real difference to how quickly things move.
The other early task is making sure the agency understands your tone of voice and your compliance position – SRA rules around advertising and client confidentiality shape what can and can’t be said, and a sector specialist will already know to ask about this rather than finding out the hard way three drafts in.
Retainer or project: the two ways this usually runs
Most outsourced marketing management is structured one of two ways, and the right one depends on what you’re trying to achieve.
A retainer is ongoing support for a fixed monthly fee, covering a set amount of time and a defined scope of work each month, for example content, social media, SEO maintenance, PR, directory submissions, reporting. It suits firms that want marketing to be a constant presence rather than something that happens in bursts. A family law firm building its reputation in a competitive city centre, for instance, might take a retainer covering monthly blog content, ongoing LinkedIn activity for the partners, and a quarterly PR push, because the value comes from consistency – showing up week after week rather than one big campaign and then silence.
A project is the opposite: a defined piece of work with a start and an end. A rebrand, new website or submission round for Chambers or The Legal 500. A firm merger that needs a unified identity sorting out fast. There’s no ongoing monthly commitment; you pay for the outcome and the relationship can end when the project does, or roll into a retainer afterwards if there’s an appetite to keep momentum going.
Of course it’s also possible to do both. A litigation practice might run a core retainer for content and SEO, then bring in project support twice a year around directory deadlines, when the workload spikes well beyond what the retainer hours cover. Knowing which model fits which piece of work, rather than forcing everything into one or the other, is usually the difference between a marketing spend that feels proportionate and one that feels either underused or stretched too thin.
What the scope of work tends to cover
The exact mix varies by firm, budget, priorities and agreement but outsourced marketing management for law firms usually spans some combination of: website upkeep and SEO, content and thought leadership, social media (LinkedIn especially, for partner-level visibility), PR and media relationships, internal comms or recruitment marketing if you’re hiring, and the BD support that helps fee earners actually use what marketing produces – pitch documents, event materials, that sort of thing. Directory submissions, awards entries and events are usually run as separate projects rather than folded into the retainer, given how concentrated that work gets around specific deadlines.
What’s worth knowing is that scope isn’t usually fixed forever. A firm on a retainer focused on content and SEO might, eighteen months in, want to ramp up LinkedIn activity ahead of a partner promotion round, or pull back on social media for a quarter while a fee earner is on leave and there’s less capacity to feed the agency stories. At Consortium, directory submissions and awards tend to sit outside the retainer altogether, run as a separate project when the deadline comes round, so they don’t eat into the monthly scope the rest of the year relies on. A properly run engagement flexes with the firm rather than locking everyone into the scope agreed in month one.
How communication actually works week to week
This is where a lot of the anxiety about outsourcing tends to live – the fear of paying for a service you can’t see or influence day to day. In practice, most agencies run on a fairly predictable rhythm: a monthly or fortnightly meeting to review what’s been done and agree what’s next, a shared content calendar so nobody’s surprised by what’s going out, and reporting that shows what’s actually moved – website traffic, social media engagement, press coverage, enquiry numbers where they can be tracked back to a campaign.
The firms that get the most out of this tend to have one clear internal point of contact – often the managing partner, sometimes an office manager or a junior who’s been given the marketing liaison role – rather than the agency trying to chase sign-off from six different partners on every piece of content. A second thing that makes a measurable difference: firms that treat the agency as an extension of the team, flagging wins, new instructions, or a great case result as it happens, get content and PR out faster than firms where the agency has to go digging for stories every month.
What to expect in the first ninety days
It is worth setting expectations here, because the first month is mostly audit, strategy and access – not much visible output yet, which can feel slow if you’re expecting immediate activity. Month two usually brings the first content live, the first social posts going out under the new strategy, and early SEO fixes landing on the site. By month three, there’s normally a recognisable rhythm: content publishing on schedule, a client newsletter launched, and the first reporting cycle showing genuine direction of travel rather than just “we did some things.”
Going back to our fictional firm Hartley Dunmore: by month four, the firm had its first piece of regional press coverage, a refreshed set of partner LinkedIn profiles actually being used, and a private client newsletter going out quarterly – none of which existed six months earlier, and none of which happened in the first thirty days. That timeline is fairly typical. Marketing that’s been outsourced still takes time to build momentum; it just builds it more reliably than marketing squeezed into the gaps of someone’s existing job.
Getting real value out of it
The agencies and firms that work well together tend to share a few habits, regardless of whether the engagement is a retainer, a project, or both. The firm responds to drafts and approval requests within a few days rather than a few weeks, because every delay on sign-off pushes the whole schedule back. The firm treats the agency’s reporting as a genuine check-in rather than a tick-box, asking questions about what’s working and what to drop. And crucially, the firm keeps feeding the agency real material – new cases, new hires, awards, sector developments – because no amount of strategic planning replaces having something genuinely newsworthy to write about.
This is also where a sector specialist earns their keep over a generalist agency. A firm that already understands how a law firm works and what actually resonates with a firm’s target audience doesn’t need to be talked through the basics every time a new instruction comes in. That familiarity tends to show up as fewer revision rounds and content that sounds like it was written by someone who’s spent time in the sector, not someone Googling it the night before.
Where this fits with what comes next
If you’re at the point of comparing models and budgets rather than weighing up the decision itself, our marketing management service sets out how we structure retainers and project work for law firms specifically, including what’s typically included at different levels of support. It’s worth a look if you want to see what this looks like with real numbers attached rather than in the abstract.
And if it would help to talk it through first – what your firm actually needs, whether retainer or project (or both) makes more sense, what realistic timelines look like for your situation – we’re always happy to have that conversation with no pressure attached. Call 01903 530 787 or submit an enquiry via our contact form below and a member of our team will be in touch shortly.