You may have heard the saying, “the money is in the follow-up,” and when it comes to legal marketing, I promise this is true. So with that said, here are four easy steps you can take after each live speaking event to ensure each prospect is still receiving regular “touches” from your firm:

1. After the event, compare the initial registration list to the names of those who were in attendance.

2. From there, break those names down into three categories:  those who took your offer at the event, those who were in attendance but didn’t take your offer and those who registered but didn’t attend–then create appropriate follow up sequences. The follow up sequence should include multiple touches in various ways (email, phone, snail mail) for the best results.

3. If the free gift you offered requires fulfillment, be sure to distribute your materials promptly while you are still fresh in the prospect’s mind, or outsource this to a company that will make sure that happens.

4. Add all new leads to your house list and maintain consistent, friendly communication with them via both email and direct mail.

As you can see, the hardest part of this maximization effort is automating the follow-up process so you can contact your prospects long after the event has taken place.

Infusion is my personal automation software of choice because it allows for segmented lists and very specific follow-up campaigns designed to motivate prospects and get them to say YES to your services.

But don’t let not having a good email marketing/ contact management system stop you from getting started with this!  Either bite the bullet and make the investment into one (which is money VERY well spent), or use an excel spreadsheet or some good ole’ fashion tickler systems.  Either way–just get started communicating with your leads from speaking engagements in the New Year.

There are many reasons to start a blog, and the ROI  (return on investment) you can expect will always vary depending on what industry you are in and what your end goals are.

I get so frustrated when I hear marketing professionals tell attorneys that the ultimate goal for their law firm blog should be “building a community” or a “nurturing a tribe,” and that this end results will be measured by the number of subscribers the attorney gets each week.

Let’s get real for a minute.  Most people will not visit a law firm website unless they have a pressing need and are looking for answers.  They either want help from an attorney or want to know how to take care of the matter for themselves.  Unless your posts are really engaging or entertaining (which they may be), rarely will you find loyal readers who will devour your content day after day.

So what is the purpose of a blog as part of your overall legal marketing strategy? Here are just a few reasons to consider:

1. It helps your site rank better in search- Google loves fresh content and that’s what a blog allows you to provide.  As you write blog posts that include your keywords and provide useful, relevant content for prospective clients, the more likely that your information will move up and be found by those prospects on Google’s first page.  Any SEO person will tell you that having a regularly updated blog is a critical piece of your SEO strategy.
2. It helps to affirm your expert status- Your blog is a opportunity to showcase your expertise to potential clients thinking about picking up the phone and calling your firm.  It also allows you to showcase a bit of your personality and whether or not you are able to explain complicated legal topics in a way your prospect is able to understand.
3.  It increases the chances you’ll be found by the media- Many journalists start their research by doing a quick Google search to see who is already talking about the subject they plan to cover.  If you’re already showcasing your expertise or offering unique opinions through your blog, there’s a good chance you’ll get called to comment on that issue.  We’ve had quite a few clients contacted for stories this way.
4. It’s a great entry point for your lead generation “funnel”-  If your blog is ranking well and pulling in visitors from the search engines, you can then leverage this traffic by offering readers access to your ‘free report’ or lead generation piece so that they are now on your mailing list and you are able to communicate with them for FREE via your ezine on a regular basis.
5. It’s easier to share your content via social media- There’s only so much you can say about a subject in 140 characters, so linking back to a blog post is a great way to spread information about an important subject and drive more people back to your law firm site.

So if you don’t have a blog yet for your law firm, just bite the bullet and get one before the end of the year!  It’s a very important part of your overall marketing strategy and something you’ll want to hit the ground running with in 2012.

Remember, if you have questions about how to set up a blog for your law firm or how to utilize your blog for maximum results, we are here for you!  Just email help @ legalmarketingmaven.com or leave a question in the comments section below!

I don’t know one attorney who does not feel this way—and, quite frankly, it’s a legitimate concern.

You’re spending a bunch of money and time to put on a speaking engagement or workshop and it’s only natural to expect some ROI for your efforts.

So to increase the chances that you get the outcome YOU want, try these 4 FREE strategies to get more publicity and registrations for your next speaking engagement:

1.   Send an email to your database:  Let your clients, prospects and referral sources know about your upcoming events and encourage them to forward the information any friends or family members that may also need help.

2.   Canvas your town with a great flyer:  Make a great flyer with a strong call to action and have someone on your staff put it on bulletin boards or drop it off at all the places where your target market hangs out around town.

3.   Submit the event to online event calendars:  Many newspapers and TV stations have online calendars dedicated to promoting local events.   For the most part, these submissions are free and give you a great opportunity get in front of new people with your events and workshops.

4.   Write a press release and pitch local journalists-  If you know of a journalist who covers the topic you will be speaking on (i.e. senior issues, parenting issues, tax issues), write a press release  and ask him or her to cover the event.  You can also pitch your release to hyperlocal sites (i.e, patch.com) that like to publish events and any information beneficial to local citizens.

So there you have it—4 FREE ways to increase registrations to your next live speaking event or workshop.  Give them a try and be sure to come back and leave a comment about the results you get from these easy strategies!

Here is tip that will increase your Google relevance and will cost you absolutely nothing.  It starts with these 3 steps:

• Tweet
• Like (Facebook)
• Comment

To begin, you’ll develop a network of colleagues, peers, and friends who all agree to promote each other by Tweeting, Liking and Commenting on each other’s blogs and videos.  When you are planning to post a blog or video, let your group know to be expecting it so they can read and respond.

Let’s say your financial advisor Mary has 200 followers; John, one of your best clients has 4,000; CPA Sam has 500 and insurance broker Sue has 6,000 followers.  If each of them Tweets, Likes and Comments on your post; you have just been placed in front of almost 11,000 people with no extra work and for free!

As Google’s algorithms do their complicated and scientific thing, key factors in ranking include key words and reviews.  Those Tweets, Likes and Comments help you increase your relevancy and rankings and cost you absolutely nothing!

To recap, develop a network of people who will Tweet, Like and Comment on your blog content (and you will do the same for them) in order to increase rankings in Google searches.  Doing those small things will translate into higher rankings, more visibility and more business.
 
 
 
 

Free, Low-Cost and NEW Marketing Strategies to Increase Leads, Referrals and Publicity for Your Law Firm

I’ll say right off the bat that our team invests a TON of money each year staying on top of data and learning the most effective ways to market your firm online–and off.

There have been a number of BIG changes this year that can really impact the amount, and quality of traffic, coming to your law firm site.  These methods are simple, CHEAP (…and in some cases FREE), and right now are barely being used by your competition.

I invite you to join me on September 22nd and come hear what they are.   Here’s a quick sneak peak of some things I’ll cover:

•    Cheap and low cost marketing campaigns that are working NOW and how you can implement them in your firm.
•    The 3 R’s of relationship-based marketing and how doing these things on a regular, consistent basis will increase your leads, referrals and live speaking opportunities by up to 90%!
•    The new “online marketing secret weapon” that grabs immediate attention and converts like CRAZY, which hardly anyone (including your competition!) knows about.
•    Insider PR secrets to getting free publicity and regular news coverage for your law firm–without spending 6 (or even 5!) figures on a PR agency.
•    How to streamline and simplify your marketing efforts so you are “putting butts in seats” without having to take your focus away from legal work or the things that make you the most money.
•    Why it’s so important to be posting regular, optimized content on your website–and short-cuts to help you do this if you’re pressed for time.
•     ….and more!

I guarantee you will find this webinar to be content rich, educational and that you will pick up a handful of strategies that you can implement immediately in your firm– no matter what practice area you are in.

At the very end of the call, you will also have the opportunity to learn about Legal Marketing Maven’s Done-For-You monthly marketing package for estate and elder law attorneys.  This is a comprehensive solution for busy small and solo attorneys who want RESULTS without a huge time or financial investment. At the request of many, we will also SHOW you some of the past materials we have created.

There is no obligation to purchase this package and it’s not for everyone either–so please feel free to join us for the fr’ee training and stay on to hear more about the program if you’re interested.

If you’re not, simply hang up after the lesson.  No pressure, no hassles,
no never-ending sales pitches. That’s our promise to you.

So are you ready to join us?

Just go to this page and enter your name and email.  This will allow us
to send the private call-in number and webinar link directly to your inbox
upon successful registration.

See you then!

Laura Lee

Saying these things will almost always land your press release in the trash and alienate you from the particular publication or TV station you are trying to target in the future.

Here they are:

1. The word “publicity”. We all know that the point of reaching out to local media is to score free publicity for your firm, but if you actually say that in your press release or pitch, your story will never see the light of day.  You would be amazed how many lawyers craft pitch letters saying, “dear so and so, I am reaching out to you with hopes to secure media coverage or publicity about our firm”. FAIL.

2. Anything that resembles a blatant advertisement for your firm -  The media’s job is to run unique, interesting and timely stories for their audience, not just cover small businesses in the area, just because.  You should be pitching with this in mind and offering real story ideas or useful tips (i.e. 5 Ways to Avoid Financial Strain When Caring for Aging Parents or Getting Your Legal House In Order Before The New Year), and not just asking them to run a glorified advertisement about your practice (ex. Please cover why we are so great or what kind of results we get for our clients….).

3. “I’m really busy so please schedule an appointment with my secretary so we can talk further…”- Yes, you are busy, but so are producers and journalists.  If getting a hold of you for an interview is like pulling teeth, they will almost always move on to the next credible source.  So if you are serious about adding free publicity as part of your overall legal marketing strategy, don’t drop hints that you might be hard to work with or get a hold of in the future.

Know of any other “kryptonite” words or phrases that have backfired on lawyers in their media pitch or press release in the past?  Be sure to share your experiences in the comment section below!

HELPFUL RESOURCES:  Have you tried to score free publicity for your firm in the past with little or no success?  Or are you a total newbie in the world of Public Relations and need some help creating timely PR pitches or campaigns that WORK?

If so, check out our Do-It-Yourself PR Kit that will give you in-depth strategies, tools and sample press releases/pitches that are guaranteed to land you coverage in the press in no time!

And if you are an estate planning attorney, be sure to check out our Done-For-You Monthly Marketing Campaigns here. Each campaign comes with a custom press release written by PR professionals that are designed to get RESULTS.  This can be purchased as part of the overall package here or a la carte each month, here.

Curious how well these materials really work? Here are just a few links to interviews or TV segments featuring attorneys who have used our done-for-you marketing materials or DIY PR training programs in the past few months:

Nancy Chillag, Interview with CBS

Darlynn Morgan, LA Parent

Heather Chubb, Sacramento Bee

Steve Worrall on NPR

Don’t wait to get your hands on these important training materials.  Slash your advertising budget in half and start getting the local newspapers and TV stations to promote your firm for you!  It’s easy when you know how, and these materials will show you exactly what to do to see results!

Perhaps your phone isn’t currently ringing with invites and the thought of cold-calling organizations gives you the creeps.  Instead of letting it deter you from speaking all together, think of it as a chance to give our favorite LM2 multi-step technique a try:

1.    Target ONE specific group or organization- It could be non-profit organizations, moms clubs, nursing homes, companies that host regular “lunch and learns,” etc.

2.    Gather all necessary contact information- You can manually compile the contact information of local groups you want to target or work with someone to compile the full contact information of every group or organization within a 25 mile radius.

3.    Warm them up with a mailing- This can be an email or a physical mailing explaining who you are, what you’d like to present, and most importantly, how inviting you to speak will benefit their particular group or organization (never forget to address the issue of “what’s in it for me!”).  Adding a lead generation piece or free guide to this mailing will supercharge your efforts.

4.     Follow up with a phone call- Now instead of “cold” calling, you are simply following up to make sure someone received your letter or marketing materials.  From there you can gauge whether there is interest in having you speak or work with their organization in some capacity in the future.

It’s a great technique that works in just about every practice area.  Just be sure not to neglect that follow up phone call (even if you have to ask your secretary do it for you!) as it often makes the difference between having your materials collect dust on someone’s desk to getting your speaking opportunity booked and confirmed.

As I’m sure you have heard this week, the south was hit hard with horrible tornadoes. My thoughts and prayers are with everyone in the South after the horrible storms that moved through leaving devastation in their path. I know from experiencing tragic losses during Hurricane Andrew how devastating Mother Nature’s fury can be.  I hope you and your loved ones were spared and my company will be donating 10% of our revenues next month to the relief efforts.

It makes me think about emergency plans, and my post that I did a while back on that subject, if you missed it you can read it here.  If you do not have an emergency plan in place for your business, I encourage you to do it, you never know when an emergency could strike, and as scary as it is we are seeing natural disasters becoming more and more frequent. ??Please feel free to leave a comment on that post or shoot me an email with any tips or resources you have for emergency plans, I’d be happy to compile them and share them with the readers.  I’m sure by putting all of our heads together we could come up with a plan that fills in most gaps!  Again this is all about creating a system that you would follow should the unthinkable occur .

Last week, I also interviewed Nate Hagerty and we discussed the importance of Social Media marketing and how to convert the time spent on those platforms into clients in the door.  If you missed the call, we have set up a replay page at http://www.lawyersocialmedia.com.  Nate gave his formula for successful implementation of social media marketing (it has proven results for his CPA firms) so be sure to go listen to the call if you have not already done so. I think you’ll also be very surprised by what Nate shared is the most important component of social media marketing – and I’m sure it isn’t what you think!

We also discussed what I feel is one of THE most important pieces of your marketing plan, and that is consistency!  Simply put, having a system in place so that you know it is getting done.

Nate and I did a little digging into some of the sites of the lawyers that registered for our call, both by signing up for their newsletters (for those that had them) and also by checking out their social media profiles (again for those that had them or we could find).

The results were that for most, when we signed up for a newsletter, we received a simple thank you note – sometimes – and that was it.  There were some social media profiles that were really doing a good job, but others that hadn’t been updated in a very long time, almost looking abandoned.

Is that what happens with your marketing?  You get gun-ho coming up with campaigns, putting yourself out there on social media, doing speaking engagements, etc…and then business picks up and you get busy doing the client work.  Leaving no time for the marketing, I call this the marketing merry-go-round.  I see it quite a bit, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

In order for your marketing to be effective it must be consistent.  You must be in front of your prospects all of the time, because you never know when they are going to decide that now is the time that they need your service.  And when they need that service you want them to call YOU not the new lawyer down the road that has suddenly gotten on their radar.  ??It’s all about relationships, and relationships have to have consistency.

They want to know, like and trust you and the like and trust factors sometimes can take a while to build.

Here are my suggestions (bare minimum) for keeping a consistent marketing plan going:

• Weekly Email to your list
• Daily Post on Social Media (not always about you but to drive conversation)
• Monthly Print Newsletter (you need to be getting in the MAILBOX of your prospects)
• Regular Videos – Multi-media marketing is important as it allows your prospects to “see” you and it is great for SEO
• Monthly press releases – you probably won’t get picked up every month but keeping in regular contact with your local media with timely advice and articles establishes yourself as the expert, and when you are picked up and your prospects see you in the news it is certainly a credibility boost that money can not buy.
• Blogging regularly – you must be updating a blog regularly if YOU want google to take notice of you, and let’s face it people are going to Google to find professionals to work with.

This can all be systemized so that it is happening on a regular basis without much effort from you at all.  I know this hard for a lot of lawyers to believe, but you have got to let go of the concept that YOU must do everything. Delegate these items to key team members.  If they need training we are happy to help or you can contact us to learn more about how we help law firms implement consistent, educational-based marketing into their firms.

If you are an Estate Planning or Elder Law attorney you may want to check out our DFY package that will give you all of the content you need on a monthly basis to begin getting a marketing system in place in your firm right away.

If this is an area you are struggling with and you would like to schedule a no-obligation 20 minute strategy call with me to brainstorm some next steps, please reply to this email and we’ll set something up.  There is nothing I enjoy more than helping lawyers get their ideas out of their head and into concrete action steps!

And yes, social media CAN be just that.  However, it is also much more importantly the new media way of marketing.  People are no longer turning
to the yellow pages or ads run in newspapers and magazines when they
are looking for a service provider.  Instead they are going to their network,
their “social network”.  And YOU need to be there!

The question then becomes about how you show up once you are there.

I see a lot of lawyers making what I consider to be three huge mistakes.

• Setting up an RSS feed ONLY and just feeding the content from their blog onto their social media profile.  While this can be good for SEO, it is not doing much to build you a following of local prospects and leads.  Nor does it usually generate any interaction.
• Building relationships with other lawyers but neglecting looking for prospects and potential referral sources in their own back yards to build relationships with that will turn into real ROI for the time they are investing in “new media” marketing.
• Not realizing that social media contacts (fans, followers, connections) are worth FAR less than email and direct mail contacts. And failing to set up systems by which they *leverage* social media to build these much more valuable lists.

Next week I am hosting a teleconference and will be interviewing Nate Hagerty, who is helping CPA’s do just that, systematically use social media to get local clients from social media into the doors of their practices.

If you want to learn more about how you can use this “new media” for marketing your business and not have it suck up tons of your precious time without any ROI.  Join us!

It’s a free call, and we will send a replay but only to those that register
http://www.lawyersocialmedia.com

To your success & productivity!

Laura Lee

Does Legal Marketing Maven also help with implementing the marketing materials? I don’t have enough time to do it myself.

Yes!  We are an implementation company!  The DFY packages were put together to help lawyers that have in house staff (or virtual teams that they are working with) so that they didn’t have start every month from scratch.  But we will happily put together an implementation package that meets your needs, just reply to this email and schedule a complimentary strategy session with me to explore those options.

Do all of your DFY materials focus on general estate planning (or focus on one particular niche)? I am an elder law lawyer, will it work for me?

Our DFY materials are eclectic and focus on estate planning for the young and old, we try to incorporate basic estate planning, elder law and administration into our materials each month because we believe your practice will benefit from serving clients in all stages of their life.

Do you have DFY materials for other practice areas? I am a bankruptcy lawyer and would love materials like this for my law firm.

Currently our DFY materials are only for Estate planning attorneys however, we are planning to launch 2 new practice areas this year.  If you are interested in these types of materials for your practice area please reply to this email and let me know what that is, it will help me determine which 2 areas we will roll out next.

If you need the services now, let’s schedule a time to chat about what your needs are and create a custom package that will meet your needs.

Does Legal Marketing Maven work with lawyers in other practice areas?

Yes!  We privately work with clients in a variety of practice areas – personal injury, medical malpractice, bankruptcy, business law and family law.  Our services span a wide range including but not limited to:

•    Development and execution of direct response marketing campaigns
•    Web writing, Copywriting and Blogging
•    Teleseminars and Webinars
•    Landing Pages/ Squeeze Pages
•    Email Marketing
•    Newsletters
•    Infusionsoft Management
•    Autoresponders
•    Search Engine Optimization
•    Social Media Marketing
•    Article Marketing
•    Reputation Management
•    Press Releases and Public Relations
•    Marketing of In-Person Events/ Conferences
•    Creation and Launch of Lead Generation Pieces
•    Book Writing
•    Ghost Writing
•    Product Launches

I’m happy to schedule a complimentary strategy session with you to discuss your marketing needs and let you know how we could be of service.

Have a question that wasn’t answered here, please let me know – simply email help@legalmarketingmaven.com and I’ll get back to you shortly.

Want to schedule a time to chat?  Simply email help@legalmarketingmaven.com and we’ll get something scheduled.

LL