Your local high street might be home to an eclectic mix of retailers from charity shops to coffee houses, but on Gillingham’s Watling Street there’s a new face – will writing and estate planning business Pembroke Wills.
So why, when most will writers are based at home and spend a lot of their time travelling to visit clients, would Pembroke Directors Robert and Gill Phipps choose to open a high profile office in town offering – quite literally – a shopfront on to the street?
Pembroke Wills Director Robert Phipps explains: “Having spent 18 years working from home, building a business and growing our reputation as trusted advisors serving Gillingham, Kent and the South East my wife Gill and I decided that it was time to take some office space. The business was growing, we were employing more and more people and we wanted to take some office space so that the team could work together in the same place and we could offer a nice working environment.”
Rather than take the trip out of town to a soulless business park with security staff and sterile business units, it was Gill who suggested looking at an empty shop on the high street in Gillingham as a potential base for the business.
It’s a decision that’s paid off in spades. Robert reports an increase in inbound enquiries since moving to Watling Street. He puts some of it down to an increased physical presence in the local area. “We’ve always been very focused on the local area,” said Robert. “We advertise in the local magazines and papers and have even made an appearance on our local TV station a couple of weeks ago. When the phone started ringing more and more we’d ask new clients why they contacted us.
“If it wasn’t due to a recommendation from a friend or from another professional adviser it was because they’d seen our branding on the shopfront and perhaps also recognised it from seeing a local advert or possibly by finding our name via an online search. It’s the combination of all of those things which is bringing in new work.”
Pembroke Will’s decision to put their branding out there in the public eye in a very physical way – Robert jokes that the office is by some traffic lights so people don’t have a choice but to look at the frontage – is perhaps in some ways brave.
It does, however, demonstrate the importance of having a mix of marketing activities when promoting your business – and doing them consistently and well. Doing one thing such as just advertising locally is likely to have some success, but when combined with a mix of planned marketing activity that enhances and continually builds awareness with your target audience, that’s when the enquiries really start to flow.
Contact Rachel Booth at Solve Legal Marketing for a free, no-obligation discussion about how to generate new enquiries for your will writing business; email rachel.booth@solvelegal.co.uk or call 0800 1337127.
We can’t wait to see what your Christmas window dressing looks like Pembroke Wills team!
This article was submitted to be published by the Solve Legal as part of their advertising agreement with Today’s Wills and Probate. The views expressed in this article are those of the submitter and not those of Today’s Wills and Probate.
