Episode 166 – How Lawyers Can Diagnose Potential Client (Lead) Problems

Leads are the Life Blood of your law practice and of course, you want to get a lot of them. But you have to be sure your marketing is producing the right kind of leads, getting more (low level) clients isn’t (always) better.

So you need to think through and ask yourself, “Who is my ideal client?” “Where they are?” and “How can I get them?”

When you’ve thought through the kind of leads you want, your ideal clients and where they come from, your law practice will grow and prosper. Find out more about this in the audio below. Make sure you subscribe and post a review.

 

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Today I’m going to talk about how to diagnose based on what kind of clients you are getting and how many you are getting. How you can make improvements to your law firm. The first thing to do is to be able to track who is calling you and what source they are coming from. That’s probably for another podcast on how physically to do that but this one is to tell you once you are tracking where your phone calls and your emails are coming from accurately, not just I think or people say this or that because people don’t always speak the truth or even know where they came from.

They’ll say I came from Google or the Internet and that may not be true at all. So you definitely want to track them accurately but once you are, what is your situation? Are you getting not enough leads? If not, okay fine but what are you getting what kinds of clients are you getting calling? Where are they calling from? Are they calling from the areas you want them calling from or are they calling you from towns and cities that aren’t relevant to you? from other states? What kinds of things are they telling you over the phone? Are you getting a lot of tire-kickers or price shoppers? Are you getting a lot of people that have piddly cases that wouldn’t be of use to you? Not relevant stuff.

Are you getting good people that maybe don’t call often but have serious legal issues that you can help? What kind of people are calling you? Are you getting more men or women calling? Young or old? What kinds of calls are coming through and it’s worth paying attention to this in detail because it’ll tell you where to go next and what to do. So even if you have a low volume of calls, look at what you are getting and if you need to look at 6 months of it, fine. If you get a high volume, then you can look at just the past 3 months, for instance. That’s fine too.

So what happens if you have certain things going on, what can you do? Let’s say you are a divorce attorney and you are getting a lot of people that want to do uncontested divorces but you don’t make a lot of money from that. You want people with high net worth, long-term marriages, that kind of stuff. Now, we can look at that. What kind of content do you have on your website? What kind of articles? Do you have articles on just the basics of divorce or do you have articles for high net worth of individuals? Those people usually own businesses, they may be in long-term marriages. Do you have articles that talk about that? Perpetual alimony, spousal maintenance?

These people tend to have grown children, so children may not be a factor. What’s the age demographic of the people that you are looking for? They are not going to be in their 30s, they are probably more likely to be in their 50s. Again, they’ll have companies, what industry? So they are going to be self-employed. How does that affect divorce? Division of assets is going to become very important. So you’ve got to know your customer profile or who you want and create articles on your website and videos and marketing promotion type stuff that speaks specifically to that kind of person.

If you do that, you’ll start getting more of them because Google will see that content on your site and on YouTube and on Facebook and wherever it needs to go. People who are attracted to that kind of stuff, that fit that profile will say, “That attorney does exactly what I’m looking for. That’s my situation. I’m going to call them. You can’t just hope that by ranking through a keyword or two, that it’s going to solve your problems and get you the cases you want. It won’t. For instance if your keyword is Houston divorce lawyer, again what kind of divorce?

Long-term marriage or short-term marriage, self-employed, divorce with bankruptcy in it, divorce with domestic violence implications, divorce for company owners, all these things that cannot be compressed just into that keyword. So that’s why you have content on your site that specifically speaks to these kind of people. Let’s say you do criminal defense. as you know, within criminal defense there are many things. Traffic tickets which aren’t worth much, DUI which could be okay, there’s sex crimes which pay quite a bit, there’s domestic violence, there’s theft crimes, there’s assault, there is a lot in there. What are you putting out there that you want to attract?

Do you want to attract murder cases? Are you older and you just want to deal with misdemeanors only? Do you want to do felonies? Death penalty cases? Do you like domestic violence? Do you hate doing sex crimes representation and refuse to do it? So whatever you put out there will come back to you. It’s not just a Fu fu mantra or saying, it’s actually true. Google and YouTube and Facebook and all these web properties, whatever you put out, they will put out to your audience and that’s what your audience will see and that’s what they will respond to.

This is really at the heart of diagnosing where you are and what kind of leads you are getting and what kind of leads you want to get and making a change that actually happens for you. You can’t force it, just because you hire another marketing company doesn’t mean it’s going to happen, focusing on a few keywords is certainly not going to make it happen. I think you understand why now. So you’ve got to have a plan where you’ve got to take action. So this is my suggestion for you. If you just want more clients, fine but a better typical response is I would go deeper. You want more clients, great. What kind of clients do you want? Do you want just more low level ones or do you want more high level ones? Okay, that’s very different from just wanting more clients.

Who wants a whole bunch more tire kickers? Who wants a whole bunch more $100 traffic tickets? Who wants a whole bunch more uncontested divorces? Some do but many don’t and if you consider that low end junk that you don’t want or accident cases that will barely pay you anything after 3 years of work, then don’t target it. Target the good stuff and this is how you do it. So if you need any help doing this in your firm, email me Richard.Jacobs@speakeasymarketinginc.com or call (888) 225-8594. Thank you.

 

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