Posts Tagged ‘law firm marketing plan’

What is the best way for a solo practicing lawyer to advertise for new clients?

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

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.

Trends in strategic marketing for law firms

Monday, July 7th, 2008

Setting the stage for lawyers:

Trends in strategic marketing for law firms

 

Janet Ellen Raasch

 

Janet Ellen Raasch is a writer and ghostwriter who works closely with lawyers, law firms and other professional services providers – to help them achieve name recognition and new business through publication of articles and books for print and keyword-rich content for the Internet.  She can be reached at (303) 399-5041 or [email protected].


 

 

Imagine that you have arrived at a theater where the stage is set but the actors have not yet made their appearance.  You can anticipate a lot about the play just by looking at the set.  It is bright and cheerful?  Dark and gloomy?  Modern, traditional or old-fashioned?  Before the actors have even opened their mouths, you have formed a pretty strong impression of what’s to come.

 

“I like to use this metaphor to explain the role of institutional marketing at a law firm,” said Norm Rubenstein.  “The lawyers are the actors – the individuals who ‘make the sale’ of legal services.  The marketers are the set designers and directors – the individuals who set the stage and orchestrate the process in order to facilitate the ‘sale’ of legal services.

 

“If a law firm’s marketers are doing their jobs right,” said Rubenstein, “potential clients have formed a pretty strong positive impression of a firm, practice group or lawyer before they even start to ‘talk business.’ If they are not doing their jobs, potential clients will have no impression at all – or will be swayed by the impressions of others.”

 

Rubenstein is a partner in Zeughauser Group (www.zeughausergroup.com).  He is a former national president of the Legal Marketing Association and has served as CMO of three global law firms and as a consultant to many others.  Co-presenting at this event was Melissa Hoff, also a partner with Zeughauser.

 

Rubenstein and Hoff discussed strategic marketing trends for lawyers and law firms at the monthly educational program of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the LMA (www.rockymountainlma.com), held in Denver June 10 at Maggiano’s Little Italy.

 

“Over the past 20 years, there has been a great shift in the roles and responsibilities of legal marketers – mostly due to an increasingly competitive and global marketplace,” said Rubenstein.

 

“In its early days, legal marketing was purely promotional.  Practitioners engaged in a wide range of random activities to promote the firm, its practice areas and its individual lawyers,” said Rubenstein.  “Marketers were not expected to examine the big picture.  Those with the inclination to do so rarely had the time.

 

“Today, at the best firms, legal marketing has become strategic,” said Rubenstein.  “Senior practitioners make a scientific study of the market — and use this information to generate a marketing plan supported by the appropriate legal products, pricing, placement and promotions.  The best legal marketing programs demonstrate the value of ‘market pull’ over ‘product push.’”

 

According to Zeughauser Group research, there are at least ten “best practices” that differentiate successful and strategic law firms from their less successful counterparts.

 

“These best practices do not constitute a ‘menu’ from which law firms can pick and choose a few items,” said Hoff.  “Rather, they are a prescription.  The healthiest law firms incorporate at least some elements from each of the ten best practices.”

 

1.  A strong, differentiated identity.  The successful law firm has achieved affirmative, unaided, top-of-mind name recognition in its targeted service niches.  “A strong, differentiated identify correlates with short-listing, which correlates to increased business opportunity and, potentially, increased revenue,” said Rubenstein.  “The successful law firm markets with a purpose – it has a carefully crafted brand.”

 

2.  Competitive intelligence.  The successful law firm uses the Internet to gather and analyze competitive intelligence – on an ongoing as well as a situational (in preparation for an interview, for example) basis.  “CMOs tell us that the next position they are planning to add is a market researcher or an analyst,” said Hoff.

 

3.  Client service and retention.  The successful law firm creates multi-disciplinary client teams and engages in formal client satisfaction and loyalty programs.  “When done effectively and acted upon, client satisfaction interviews build loyalty and yield extremely useful information,” said Rubenstein.  “We predict a significant uptick in formal CSI programs over the next few years.”

 

4.  Face-to-face business development.  The successful law firm understands the importance of relationships in “sales” – and the fact that the best relationships are created and nourished in person.  “Good individual coaching can help your lawyers develop their face-to-face business development skills,” said Hoff.

 

5.  Constant communications.  The successful law firm communicates constantly.  External communications focus on creating awareness in the marketplace.  “Members of your external target market should be contacted in some way – other than via documents or bills — at least 12-20 times each year,” said Rubenstein.  “These contacts should be personalized whenever possible.”  Internal communications focus on sharing information about the market and the firm’s activities in the market.

 

6.  Technology.  The successful law firm uses technology like CRM systems to archive and share information.  “Software that can search all of a firm’s existing systems — mining them to unearth otherwise hidden relationships – may end up as a well-received alternative to CRMs,” said Hoff.

 

7.  Measure success.  The successful law firm finds a way to communicate the value of marketing internally and to test the efficacy of its strategies.  “Law firms cannot calculate traditional return-on-investment for marketing programs in the same way that corporations do,” said Rubenstein.  “Instead, create, monitor and internally publicize proxy measures like readership studies or Web site page hits to assess impact.”

 

8.  Skill-building.  The successful law firm provides ongoing business-development training for lawyers as well as marketers and other law firm business professionals.

 

9.  Program integration.  The successful law firm understands and integrates all three areas of marketing practice in a continuous strategic loop:  branding and communications, business development and sales, and client service and retention.  “All three are essential to a successful strategic marketing plan,” said Hoff.

 

10.  Marketing culture.  The successful law firm embraces a marketing culture all the way from the top down – making lawyers accountable for their activities and rewarding performance.

 

“The day when an entire law firm could be ‘fed’ by the activities of a few rainmakers is long gone,” said Rubenstein.  “Today, every lawyer must be expected to make a contribution to the development of new business – using the tactics that best fit his or her own personality and the culture of the firm.

 

“For one lawyer, this might be public speaking or involvement in a trade group,” said Rubenstein.  “For another, it might be publishing or teaching.  For another, it might be personal relationships.  For another, it might be creating and maintaining a blog or a wiki — or perhaps carefully mining a social network.  For each lawyer, at least one tactic will be a comfortable fit.”