• By Laura Lee

Still holding out for the client fairy? A story of consistency and OUR most skeptical client.

Around the time I wrote this post declaring that legal marketing is not magic (…and to stop expecting it to be!), we recently started working with a very skeptical new client who was hoping for such magical results.

He’d been around the marketing block quite a few times, having worked with all of the gurus who made beautiful brochures, fun websites….and he even tried public seminars a time or two, to no avail.

Every time a campaign seemed to flop, he’d put the brakes on hard and look for better solutions to bring in more clients to his practice.   A totally natural response.

He was no doubt frustrated with marketing and made a comment to us that he was hoping to see more results after just a month or two of work.  I assured him that they would come, not because I’m a rockstar, but because it takes a solid formula of consistency, sweat equity and time to make a big impact on referral sources and prospective clients in the community.  He had to give it more time.

Fast forward to last week.  After spending much of the summer traveling, he reported on our monthly strategy call that September was pretty well booked with lunch meetings with key referral sources and prospective clients for new business.   Old (and very high-net worth) clients were coming back in for more work in droves—partly fueled by the fact that he was now staying in front of them regularly with electronic and print communications and creating top of mind awareness.

And, after making it through the typical doldrums of summer that practically all firms experience, he was able to hire someone else part-time to take more marketing off of his plate and work with us to ensure he was communicating with clients, prospects and referral sources even more regularly.

I hung up feeling very proud… not of myself or my team, but of HIM.  He is a brilliant attorney and a very neat person that more people SHOULD know about. It was HIS diligence and HIS commitment to CONSISTENT marketing that brought results.  He literally had to put blinders on to all the bright, shiny objects that came his way, got a routine going and watched the snowball effect take place.

I had a similar conversation with another client out in California.  Through consistent marketing, we were able to infiltrate all of the nursing homes in her area.  Not only did we land on their speaker rounds, but managed to build meaningful relationships with the staff.  Beyond our automated communications, SHE worked hard to connect with them in very personal ways that no other attorneys were doing (remember, this type of marketing makes the shift from “What’s in it for me” to “How can I be of service/value to you?”). Although initially very introverted and hesitant to do it, she has such a wonderful and caring personality that made this type of networking and relationship building a great fit for her.

So while in the beginning, and even now, the seminars in the nursing homes are not very profitable (they are mostly for the residents and not too many family members show up), she now gets a tremendous amount of referrals from the staff…which is what really counts.  She is favored over other attorneys in the area and keeping them out of her “territory” that she worked hard to claim.  The seminars are just the FIRST step.   A great legal marketing plan always has a bigger picture, massive follow up and multiple long-term steps to achieve practice goals.

I just wanted to share these two quick stories again to reaffirm that legal marketing is not magic.  It doesn’t have to be slimey.  It doesn’t have to be a “hard sell”.  You don’t even really need all the bells and whistles. It simply needs to be educational, reach your target audience on an emotional level and designed in such a way to elicit a response (whether that be for coffee, speaking opportunities or direct offers for appointments, etc.—depending on your ethics rules).

Would you like to talk about how we can help you save time on your marketing and help you turn ideas into action? Simply schedule a time on my calendar for a no-strings virtual cup of coffee.

• By Laura Lee

Making a Case for Hiring Out Your Legal Marketing Efforts

We’ve talked before about how a lawyer running a practice has to be a little of everything to everyone. In addition to actually using the skills that you went to law school to learn, you’re likely also overseeing nearly every tiny detail of running your business. When you’re busy juggling employees’ schedules, paying the utility bill for your office space, attending meetings—oh, and actually working with clients—it’s easy to put marketing on the back burner.

But, that’s a dangerous place for it. Your ability to do all of those other things relies on the fact that you have clients in the first place. You need to keep in touch with former clients, give great service to current clients, and reach out to potential clients. And you need to do it all simultaneously. That’s marketing.

Since good marketing builds a solid foundation for your law business, you either need to devote a lot of time to it or hire a marketing company with experience in law. That way, many of the activities that would otherwise fall to you can be taken off your plate. And, let’s be realistic, a lot of the marketing stuff that you “should” be doing, just isn’t getting done anyway. Am I right?

Let’s suppose that you make the argument that you do have the time to do your own marketing. I know a lot of lawyers that really enjoy marketing because they like talking and writing about their services. I love marketing too so I totally understand this! But, you need to be realistic; do you really understand the mechanics of marketing? Can you create your own professional-looking client newsletter using sophisticated design software? Can you use the right meta tags, URLs, and keywords to dominate Google? Do you have time to create brochures, fliers, e-books, white papers and other collateral that is critical to effective lead generation? If your answer is “yes” you probably do not have enough clients!

And, there’s the conundrum – not enough clients because you aren’t doing marketing well and not getting the professional marketing you need because you don’t have enough clients.

This is exactly why we created the Done-For-You program. We provide lawyers all over the country with professional marketing material that gets results at an absolutely rock-bottom price. All of the material is ready to customize, which they can do with minimal time invested. Then, they simply shoot it out of the door. Easy, peasy. 😉

So, how are you managing? Are you trying to juggle the many balls of running your law practice and letting the marketing ball fall helplessly to the ground? There’s really no reason for that. If you haven’t already, check out our Done-For-You program. I promise you that you will feel like a 50-pound weight has come off your shoulders!

Would you like to talk about how we can help you save time on your marketing and help you turn ideas into action? Simply schedule a time on my calendar for a no-strings virtual cup of coffee.

• By Laura Lee

Being held hostage by a contractor or service provider?

It never fails that when we start working with a new client, we discover some area where an old contractor or outside firm is holding their intellectual property hostage.

It may be a social media account or website hosting.  It could be access to a CRM or your email marketing platform.

The point is that you can NEVER be too careful when it comes to ensuring that you have long-term access and control of your various accounts.

Not long ago, we started working with a client who asked us to take over the management of his Facebook Fan page. It hadn’t been used in a while and they were ready to start posting more updates on behalf of the firm.

When we asked this attorney to make us an authorized “admin” of the page, it turned out he couldn’t. Lo and behold, a former employee had set up the page under THEIR personal name. That meant the attorney could no longer access the page and we were forced to start from scratch setting up new accounts and building up their fan base.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I can’t TELL you how many times we started working with clients only to discover that they did not own the hard coding or hosting of their website! Rather, the contractor or web company who set it up retained this control and if the attorney wanted to make any changes or use a different provider, they would lose their entire site!

In fact, this recently happened to a very good friend of ours (and a very brilliant attorney) who had to redesign her site from scratch after paying $10,000 for a beautiful site that she did not own and no longer had access to once she terminated her relationship with the designing company.

I shared the following tips with her in order to avoid this nightmare in the future, and I encourage you to use them as well to protect your intellectual property or online real estate.

1. Any accounts set up in YOUR name and on your behalf must be done using a central email address that YOU OWN. When we start working with clients, we set up a basic gmail account that the attorney has access to at any time. We use this gmail address when we make purchases, submit press releases, submit event listings, open new accounts, etc.  That way, the client has access to everything in one central location should we decide to part ways in the future.

2. Do not sign a contract for a website or hosting services unless you retain total control! I don’t care how pretty it looks or how fancy it seems; unless you own that html code, do NOT sign on the dotted line! Same goes for sites you “rent” too. It’s not the brightest idea to pay $2500-$5000 a month for a website that you CERTAINLY won’t have access too if you want to break up with the service provider down the road. For what you pay in one month’s “rent”, you could OWN a site with all the bells and whistles they are offering you.

3. Ensure social media accounts are set up using either your PERSONAL login or a central account like I mentioned in step 1.  This goes for Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, YouTube and even a hootsuite account—which is used to manage these profiles all in one place.

4. Retain ownership of your phone number! This may sound like a “duh” tip, but we recently had a client who learned this the hard way. When she decided to stop renting her office space, she learned that her phone number (which goes to the main switchboard of the building) would not be coming with her, nor would the receptionist be forwarding the calls.  I’m sure you could imagine what a nightmare this turned out to be.

A few proactive steps like these can save you from a TON of headaches and hassles when working with outside companies and independent contractors.

If you’ve ever found yourself held hostage, I’d love to hear your experience and what you did about it. Please feel free to leave a comment below.

Would you like to talk about how we can help you save time on your marketing and help you turn ideas into action? Simply schedule a time on my calendar for a no-strings virtual cup of coffee.

• By Laura Lee

Expecting magic vs. momentum in your legal practice

In most professional fields, people seem to equate the word “marketing” with “magic”. Maybe you’ve unknowingly done it in your practice, too. You create a marketing plan, hire the appropriate staff members, run some campaigns and nothing happens.

Sound familiar?

I know the frustration of this from personal experience. Typically around the second or third month of working with a new client, this becomes the topic of our private coaching calls. They express concern that their phone is not ringing off the hook, no one seems to notice what they are doing and it feels like their money is getting wasted in the process.

They are striving for magic, not momentum.

After effectively talking them off the ledge, I’m able to teach them how REAL, relationship-based marketing works. Typically it’s front-end loaded, requiring a small investment of time to lay a foundation in which you are REGULARLY reaching out to prospects and potential referral sources in the community.

It’s a further understanding that you can’t just swipe a cold mailing list of financial advisors or CPA’s from the Internet, mail to them one time and expect business like crazy. Instead, it’s recognizing the Rule of 7 at play and making a plan to constantly stay in touch.

And, especially when it comes to internet marketing, it’s understanding that the website you spent ZERO time marketing in the past will not show up on page one of Google just because you posted a blog or two.

You have to do these things consistently, usually over a period of a few months before you can accurately gage results!

So back to my coaching calls. Once I’m able to help the client see that business relationships and momentum are not built overnight (much like relationships in real life!), it never fails that within the next 30-60 days I’m getting emails from the SAME EXACT CLIENTS like this:

“I don’t know what happened but the largest nursing home in my
community just called. Said they’ve seen my name all over the
place and I was also mentioned by someone on staff. They’ve
invited me to speak to their residents. I had two similar calls this week for smaller speaking engagements. I’ve had zero invites prior to this”.

“I’m finally starting to get calls from my website and ranking all over the place. And not just waste of time calls before, but these are actually quality cases. Amazing how this works”

“We engaged a very lucrative client today. She inquired about our services a year ago but put it on the backburner. I started sending my newsletter and after reading it for the past two months, she knew she had to come in and get everything taken care of. She thanked us for the push…but I should probably be thanking you for the same”.

I encourage you to take a cold, honest look at your marketing expectations today. Are you expecting magic or are you realistically focused on building momentum and long-term relationships?

It’s wise to expect some form of ROI (return on investments) but make sure you are allowing the proper timeframe for that to happen. Just like you probably wouldn’t agree to marry someone after the first date, you also need to allow for proper “courtship” and “wooing” before a client is willing to fork over $5,000-$10,000 on your services.

Would you like to talk about how we can help you save time on your marketing and help you turn ideas into action? Simply schedule a time on my calendar for a no-strings virtual cup of coffee.