I am located in the Philadelphia area and I am trying to seek any clients to represent. What is the best resources and avenue for a young attorney to market themself to get new clients?
James Greenier (Law Firm Marketing Expert): Excellent question as I am sure this is on the minds of many attorneys fresh out of law school, or experienced attorneys starting a new law practice due to the changes in the economy.
My advice to lawyers is to spend their time wisely and not try to do everything to market themselves. You will wear yourself thin trying to stay organized and you will have poor results. I see this mistake all of the time. Many attorneys will try one idea then move on to another and repeat this process without making any great strides in client development. The point is you should find 3-5 different marketing strategies that are proven to work and stick to them.
What works in lawyer advertising?
When a lawyer beings a new practice or is starting a new year it is very important that you do not fall into the HYPE TRAP. Social networking is a great example of that. I have been marketing our company on many of these sites and have wasted a ton of time. I wish I had spent my time more wisely on the proven techniques I am about to cover. Is social networking a complete waste of time? No, but it shouldn’t occupy a significant part of your time investment in advertising your law practice.
Law Firm Marketing Plan
Determine a short term and a long term strategy. Your law firm marketing plan should cover ideas and strategies you can do each day to:
#1 drive new business in the door today.
#2 build a huge lead generation machine for tomorrow.
Short Term Law Firm Marketing Ideas:
1. Pay Per Lead Services for Lawyers offer the best way to make the phone ring instantly. The price is typically around $40 or so dollars for a lead. Make sure the Pay Per Lead programs are designed to have the client call you directly to avoid fee sharing issues. The price is actually pretty good considering the cost of advertising on search engines is about $15 or more for a click and it often takes several clicks to generate one call.
2. Law Firm Article Marketing – Writing and submitting articles to websites such as Law Firm Articles and other article websites is a great way to generate leads because the content is positioned within the search engines, the articles typically get indexed very quickly, the articles stay on the site for as long as you want, and best of all it is free. I recommend submitting at least 1 article per day.
3. Law Firm Directories – Law firm directories are really great opportunities if you can find the directories that have great exposure and few attorneys listed. I recommend typing in a few different key phrases such as (I will use Dallas, Texas DUI as an example) “Texas Lawyer” “Texas Attorney” “Texas DUI Attorney” “Dallas DUI Lawyer” etc… Look for websites that are showing up multiple times. Visit the sites and see how many attorneys are listed. If you find 5 or fewer paid attorneys you are in luck and should inquire about pricing.
4. Pay Per Click Advertising for Lawyers – An Adwords campaign on Google or a Paid Inclusion program with Bing or Yahoo will generate new business for you instantly. I recommend performing a lot of key word research to obtain the best keywords to use. You want to start with at least 500 key phrases to keep the overall cost per click down. You are going to want to review your clicks each day to see which clicks are converting into leads. Set up a web page with a specific telephone number dedicated to your Pay Per Click campaign to measure results. Keep in mind it takes about 30-50 clicks to generate a good lead for your law firm.
Long Term Law Firm Marketing Ideas:
1. Get a Real Lawyer Website! – Your website has the potential to generate the most leads for the dollar. Let me say that again… YOUR WEBSITE has the potential to be the best lead generation strategy. The biggest mistake I see is a law firm going cheap on their website. They use the cheapest website designer or get one of the low cost or free websites from Yahoo or Godaddy.com. Trust me, you are going to ruin your domain forever by doing this. After about 1 year, the average law firm has their website address on over 100 different items such as Bar directory, newspaper ads, letterhead, advertising, business cards, brochures, etc. It is such a mess when you make the mistake of building a “business card website.” Do not do it. The cost of damaging your domain with the search engines and losing the ability to rank it high in the search engines is by our estimates between $350,000 and $1 million dollars in legal fees. DO – wait until you can afford or are ready to develop your law firm website with an expert who understands SEO and content development.
2. Begin a Practice Specific Blogs – Blogging has been around for many years but there seems to be a lot of misinformation about how lawyer blogs work, the type of content you should write and how to generate business off of a lawyer blog. A custom lawyer blog, if design and search engine optimized correctly, can generate very high searhc engine positioning and generate enormous volumes of leads. We set up and teach our clients how to run a successful lawyer blog to generate leads for their law firm. We also help write their content as well.
3. Hire a Legal Content Writer. Hiring an attorney to write content for your website on a frequent basis is a very cost effective way to generate leads for your law firm. Adding regular articles and FAQs to your blog or website will generate new clients for a fraction of the cost of TV, Yellow Page ads, or Pay Per Click. Visit LegalContentWriters.com.
At Lawyer Success, Inc, we generate substantial business from our website(s) without spending a lot of money. Our website generate 10-20 calls per day from highly qualified prospects. This is done through our website solution service. If you want to do it right for a few hundred a month and generate the same results call us at (769) 218-6099.
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