Episode 183 – Why Marketing Your Law Practice Is Rightfully Complex

Marketing is hard and complex. Consider the multidimensionality in how we do our marketing to find attorneys who want to work with us. We build our list, keep it updated, send out email newsletters, create useful content & PDFs, do Facebook marketing, Twitter & LinkedIn marketing to generate leads. We send out physical newsletters, speak at conferences, do phone consultations and the list goes on.

Same goes for your law firm. It takes a lot to market your practice, not just one thing. Some attorneys think that if you do good work, you’ll automatically be ranked on top of Google and people will automatically come to you. Unfortunately, that’s not true. You cant be one dimensional, you cant rely on Google rankings alone. I’ve shared the key marketing efforts you need to focus on to grow your law practice. Listen to the audio to find out. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast and post a review.

 

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Today I want to talk about multidimensionality in your marketing. What does that mean? Well, it takes a lot to market a practice. It’s not just one thing. Let me give you an example of how we do our marketing and just what it takes for us to find attorneys that want to work with us. We send out an email newsletter several times a week that has to be written, sort of the topics besides that. In order to do that, we have to build a list. So we have to find attorneys that are willing to receive emails in various states and cities and all that and exclude the ones that may be in states or cities where we are not likely to get them. Maybe in Montana or more remote areas where there’s maybe not enough money or the attorneys really don’t practice that much.

There are some places like that in the United States. We have to make sure the information is correct, the emails are right, emails change all the time. When we do send the emails sometimes they bounce. Again, sometimes people’s emails change, people may retire, They move, they say they are not interested, there are spam filters and all that. So that’s one big thing we do. Then we have Facebook Marketing, we put up ads on Facebook, we have to make offers on things that we think attorneys will be interested in, that will be useful to them and relevant and helpful. We have to come up with a copy of that stuff, we have to play fair. We have to choose who, where, what and when and how much budget to advertise.

If an attorney such as yourself decides to download something and listen to it, we track that and then we want to get into contact with him to see if there is any interest. We do that. Then we start looking at twitter. We have tested some advertising there, we have tested some on Linkedin, we now do a physical newsletter that gets emailed out to a portion of the list that looks interested, you know, somebody may be getting lots of mail. I speak at conferences, that’s important, the legal conferences that come up. I’ve got to fly out there and do consultations by phone. There is quite a lot that goes into marketing Speakeasy. How is it relevant to you? Guess what? Same thing applies to your law practice.

If you are hoping that I’ll just rank number 1 for these keywords, Los Angeles Personal Injury Lawyer, Houston Divorce Attorney and you think it’s over and done with and that you are going to get all these clients and life will be good, well unfortunately, it’s not nearly that easy. What does it take for a law firm to really excel? It takes quite a bit of content meaning articles on their website to cover all facets of questions that people have about the law. You can’t just have one generic article and hope that it’s going to serve everyone that comes to your website. You better be answering the dozens and hundreds of questions that people have because if you don’t, your competitor’s website will. Believe me they will.

Some of them are our clients and some of them are definitely savvy enough to put tons of articles and content on their site. Then there are reviews. The 4 big spots are AVVO, your own website, Yelp and Google Maps or Google+. Do you have reviews on those places? Do you have positive reviews? How many reviews do you have versus your competitors? It’s extremely important; people rely a lot on online reviews when gauging whether to hire somebody or to even call an attorney and look at them. I do. I know you do when you go out to eat. Not all of you but I’m sure a bunch of you look at reviews for restaurants. Do you want to try the Mexican restaurant that has 2 stars or would you rather go to the one with 4 and a half stars? Do you want to go to that Starbucks down the road that has one star because they are so bad or do you want to go to the one that’s a bit further away that has 5 stars where the people are really great. Same thing with dry cleaners, attorneys and CPAs, it doesn’t matter.

Reviews are huge. What else can we have? How about press releases? How about appearances on TV or in magazines or in related local media? Do you have that? Are you Board Certified? Do you have Field Sobriety training? Do you have Family Law certification? If you are in injury, are you a Million Dollar Advocate? There’s accolades, there’s badges, all those things go into crafting your image online. Do you have those? Those are important and those take time and effort to get. Your website, does it have a modern design? Does it look old like it hasn’t been updated in years? Is the copyright up to date? Are your terms and the privacy policy up to date? Do you constantly work on your site or is it sticky with growing cobwebs with no addition to content in the past 6 months or an year? Does it look right? Does it navigate well on mobile?

Mobile is now 70% of all website visitors and climbing. It’s getting to saturation but it’s now the predominant way. If I use a tablet, an iPad or if I use an iPhone, what if I have an android or a Windows phone? Can I see your site? Does it look garbled? Are things on top of each other? So that’s important to realize too. Now, you have all that, what about You Tube? Do you have videos there? How about referrals? Do you send out a newsletter to past clients? And on and on and on. So it takes quite a bit to effectively market a law practice. You can’t just do one thing. You can’t just rely on Google rankings and you certainly can’t be one dimensional if you want to proceed.

So if you want to know how you are doing compared to how you should be doing in order to get the business that you run at that level, to get to the next level and beat your competitors, call us. We can do a strategy session where we’ll go over your marketing and find holes in it or opportunities to improve and point those out to you. Then you can decide if you want to have us do it for you or you want to do it yourself or you can have your current vendor do it. Your choice. To do so, it’s a 15 minute phone call, call (888) 225-8594 to schedule it or email rj@speakeasymarketingnc.com

 

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