Law Firm Marketing Plan: Do it For Your Family
I have been writing business strategy articles for a long time. I have been helping lawyers build lifestyle law firms, law firms that enable you to live life on your terms, for a few years. But the other day I realized that I may never have told you WHY this is so IMPORTANT to YOU.
Not too long ago I was a different person.
As a leader in a large consulting company I was constantly on the go. I attended meeting after meeting and focused on significant marketing problems. My team and I handled issues like: Positioning a pharmaceutical product that was coming off patent protection, winning a politically charged labor campaign, beating an iconic consumer products company in a category they dominated for a decade, and selling luxury products in a time of economic uncertainty.
This was a prestigious job (I met with the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies regularly). It was a job that paid well.
But I was miserable.
My personal life was in shambles. I was divorced, lonely and growing older and fatter by the day. I knew I had to change things or my life was going to spiral downward at a rapid pace. So I volunteered to help small business owners on the weekends. It turns out, I was pretty good at helping them build successful businesses. And that is when my whole life changed.
One afternoon I received a call from a friend who was a lawyer. He asked me if I would meet with him and some of his colleagues. It seems they were having trouble attracting clients and they thought I could help.
I agreed to meet with them and help them not only attract clients, but help them attract the right clients. This means I helped them attract clients who would respect their expertise and pay a fee premium to work with them.
Within six months my law firm group (we started with five lawyers meeting in my living room) had doubled. The lawyers who participated from the beginning had grown their law firms an average of 37%...in just six months.
But the real news came from their ability to source clients who valued them at a very high level. These clients respected their time and their ability and they paid the lawyers a fee premium. This meant more money from less work. This meant more time with their families and more time for themselves.
Now that I have been doing this for a while I have been able to refine the business development process into an effective and efficient system. This is the Legal Marketing Fast Start System I released a few weeks ago. This system enables me to help more people than I ever could in a one-on-one setting. It enables me to help great lawyers help themselves by developing a law firm that delivers great clients to your doorstep.
This Legal Marketing Fast Start System covers the exact topics they did not teach you in law school. It helps you build a stable of great clients who will gladly pay you the fees you deserve.
Take a look at the Legal Marketing Fast Start System today.
Don’t do it because I am asking you to.
Don’t do it because today is the last day to get a substantial discount.
Do it because you deserve to be happy.
Do it because you deserve to have a law firm full of great clients who pay you what you are worth.
Do it because you deserve more free time with your friends and family.
There is an ancient Roman proverb that says “Fortune Favors the Bold”. Be bold.
Take control of your future and visit: http://LegalMarketingFastStart.com now.
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EmailTarget the Center of Influence with Law Firm Marketing
There is one law firm marketing strategy that is so simple and so powerful yet almost no attorney is using it.
It is a strategy that is requires a little creativity, a little commonsense and a lot of persistence.
I call it the center of influence strategy and it can make the difference between having a good law firm and having a great law firm.
This is how it works:
For Lawyers who Target Consumers (Criminal Law, Family Law, Trust and Estates Law, etc.):
Every community has people who are well respected and influence the decisions of a great many people. Individuals in roles such as members of the clergy, individuals who run community centers, people who occupy positions of authority, media personalities, etc. These are the people we are targeting with this strategy.
For Lawyers Who Target Businesses:
We are targeting decision-makers. Most often I recommend we target the top person in the company (the CEO or owner).
There are three elements to this strategy:
Element One: The Introduction
Every two weeks you write this person a letter. In that letter you highlight the issues that the community/industry is facing and you discuss how you can help prevent bad things from happening to good people. Your call to action in the letter is to ask the reader to contact you for an educational briefing on the particular problem you are good at solving. It is important to note that you are not soliciting business. You are asking for an opportunity to present information that will help them understand and prevent the problem themselves.
A good example comes from criminal law. Criminal defense attorneys conduct this presentation with members of the clergy. The topic is: ‘How to Keep the Children in Our Community Safe’. The presentation is about preventing kids from joining gangs and committing crime by enrolling them in after school activities.
Element Two: The Presentation
This portion of the strategy can be an in-person talk or a webinar that is delivered to the influential individual. It contains statistics and data that highlight the problem. It also appeals to the individual to help solve the problem.
Element Three: The Offer
This is the call to action. You now ask the influencer to invite you in to speak to his/her group. You can offer to speak frequently (monthly, quarterly, annually). You give a talk on how to prevent the bad things you see in your law practice.
After these talks you continue to stay in touch with the influencer and you remain available to speak as often as he would like you to do so.
You will be amazed at how many referrals you can source with this strategy. If you do it right, this strategy will position you as a person who cares about the community/industry and is willing to do something to give back.
In reality, it is always in giving that we receive the most.
Marketing for Lawyers: Time, Money, and Effort
The challenge of resource allocation and marketing for lawyers is something that surfaces regularity among my clients. It is more relevant when we talk about how much time should be spent with each form of media and specifically with each marketing vehicle.
These days lots of people are pouring resources into the Internet. They’re spending their time and money on search engine optimization, social media and pay per click advertising. All of these things are excellent vehicles in marketing for lawyers. The trouble comes when this is the only form of media the lawyer is using for marketing. (Remember the Internet is still a form of media, just like speaking or magazine advertising, writing articles or a billboard.)
Diversity of media is not only important, it is critical to the success of any law firm marketing plan. Here is a formula I share with my clients for marketing diversity:
Ideally, no marketing vehicle would be responsible for more than 10% of your lead generation and no media would receive more than 10% of your time, money and effort. This forces you to have at least 10 different ways to attract clients and spread your effort and your dollars across all ten of them.
How does this work?
Let’s say you have 10 hours each month to spend on marketing. This simply means you spend one hour on each of the tactics in your marketing plan. If you have $1,000 to spend on marketing, then you spend no more than $100 on each tactic.
When it comes to marketing, if you diversify your time, money and effort, you will source your clients effectively and keep the pipeline flowing.
Attorney Marketing Takes Away the Sting of Losing
The sting of losing a client never goes away completely. But attorney marketing does help keep the pipeline full of good qualified prospective clients.
This means that if one client leaves (or a prospective client elects not to work with you) you have an opening for another qualified client to step into.
If you are anything like me and you hate losing, then having many new clients waiting to come to work with you is helpful at getting you past the disappointment of not closing the last deal that walked through the door.
Attorney marketing also makes you less needy. This is always a good thing.
You never want to sign up a client because you NEED them to work with you. You should only sign up a client because they are the right client for the way you practice law.
Attorney marketing helps you get to that point. But it requires time, energy and focus.
How Good Lawyers Can Attract More Clients
Isn’t it frustrating when you meet someone who is a mediocre lawyer but has more clients paying higher fees than you do?
We see this all the time. Nice guy. So-so lawyer. Lots of clients.
What is his secret?
Maybe he is an Internet wizard or maybe he has hundreds of bus stop benches plastered with his photo and phone number all over town. Maybe he was on TV or on the radio. Maybe he uses some kind of lawyer/client matchmaking service.
One thing is for sure, he knows how to get clients even if he doesn’t know which table to sit at in a courtroom.
Did you think going out on your own was going to be different?
Did you think you’d hang your shingle and clients would suddenly find you?
Did you think your reputation would have great clients beating a path to your door ready to pay high fees?
Sometimes the best lawyers wind up sitting in their office waiting for the phone to ring.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The secret the mediocre lawyer with all the clients knows is that you must have a dedicated system to attract new clients. There is a sequence of steps you must follow and a specific mindset necessary to attract clients.
But you do not want just any clients. You want the right clients. Clients who understand the need for hiring a good lawyer. Clients who understand the value of the service you provide. Clients who can and will pay your fee without hesitation.
Wouldn’t it be great if all your clients were just like your best client? That’s not only possible, it is reality if you know who your ideal client is, where to find him, and how to develop a message that he will respond to.
During the past four years I have worked with over three hundred lawyers. The work I did with these attorneys centered on developing a system that, once implemented, would help them attract clients with greater consistency. Together these attorneys and I tested and re-tested everything. We fine-tuned our work until we had a system that could be implemented easily, in a short time and could run under the direction and guidance of office staff.
I used to introduce this system slowly to clients when I worked with them on an individual basis. But I can only work with a few clients in that setting and there is more demand than I have available time. In addition, many lawyers wanted to work with me but they could not commit to paying my substantial fee.
I knew I had to introduce a cost effective, easy to implement alternative. So I broke down my client attraction system into a series of action items anyone can implement. I describe each action in detail and I have even provided videos that walk you through the theory and the action. I have made it as simple as possible to develop new business.
The best part of this entire system is that it comes with a lifetime guarantee.
If you follow the steps as I outline them and you are not happy with the results, you can return the system to me for a full refund. Today, tomorrow, five years from now, whenever. If you are not happy with the results, send it back and receive a refund.
This system is exactly what you have been waiting for. It is the key to developing business while still handling the day-to-day aspects of being a lawyer.
If you would like to learn more about this patent pending business development system visit: http://www.LegalMarketingFastStart.com
Systems separate the people who are consistently successful from the people who catch lightening in a bottle once in a while.
You deserve success. You deserve to have an office full of clients who pay the fees you set, without haggling.
You are worth it. Find out more at: http://www.LegalMarketingFastStart.com
Lawyers No Longer Need To Embrace Marketing Uncertainty
One of the biggest challenges facing lawyers today is need to develop new business while handling matters for their existing clients. This busier you become, the less time you have for marketing. Once you complete the work for the client you no longer have marketing momentum.
This has been an issue for lawyers in small law firms since the beginning of time. And there never was an easy answer…until now.
Dave Lorenzo, a law firm marketing expert and the Chairman and Founder of Rainmaker Lawyer Consulting has developed The Rainmaker’s Fast Start Marketing System. This system is designed to be implemented in 30 days and it will help smooth out the peaks and valleys in your law firm marketing.
The system comes with a lifetime guarantee and it also includes a $100 implementation rebate. That’s right. You read that correctly. You receive $100 just for implementing the step-by-step plan in the system.
The Rainmaker’s Fast Start Marketing System is guaranteed to revolutionize law firm marketing.
For more information call Kary Cheda (305) 904-1223 or visit: http://www.LegalMarketingFastStart.com
Legal Marketing Is Not Your Ticket To Get Rich Quick
Only about ten percent of the lawyers who come to me for help with legal marketing really understand the time and effort required to establish the systems that deliver clients on demand. Most lawyers want to read a book, go to sleep and wake up with lots of clients. Unfortunately, it does not work that way.
In case you stumbled upon this article by searching for legal marketing and get rich quick, let me outline some of the marketing strategies attorneys employ and the amount of time they take to effectively source quality clients.
Today we are going to examine three of the more popular marketing methods attorneys attempt to use to get rich quickly.
Networking
This is a broad term that is used to define everything from meeting people in line at the supermarket to attending events to joining a formalized group that meets specifically to pass new business leads. This is a highly effective way to develop business. The key to success with networking is to develop a relationship based upon trust with a person or group of people. Once they know what you do, and they trust you, if they come across someone who needs your services, they will refer you to them.
If you join a formalized networking group like BNI or LeTip or something set up by your local chamber of commerce, it will likely take you at least six months to develop relationships that will deliver qualified referrals to your law firm. And that means six months of meeting with the individual members, learning what they do and referring them business FIRST. In networking, if you do not give you will not receive.
Search Engine Optimization
This is the big magic bullet out there today. Many lawyers think they can get an SEO expert to work on their site and it will immediately deliver great traffic and fantastic clients. This is not true. Good search engine optimization involves creating new content regularly. It also involves establishing relationships with other people who own websites and having them quote your content and link to your website. It also means writing about things people are searching for.
You can hire someone in India or the Philippines to link your website to others in the hopes of boosting your search engine ranking. Many lawyers do this. Unfortunately Google recently changed their algorithm and it now puts weight more heavily on content freshness as well as links. This is not terrific news for outsourcing SEO.
In the best case scenario, you are looking at eight months to one year before you start to see your website on the first or second page of Google IF YOU DO EVERYTHING CORRECTLY.
Public Relations – Getting on Television, Radio or Quoted in the Paper
This could be one of the most misleading forms of legal marketing out there. Yet you never hear anyone bash their PR person. Know why? Because the PR person delivers results but the media does not. What does this mean? I will explain.
Typically, a public relations expert will charge a law firm about $2,000 per month to pitch them around (offer them as experts for commentary on the news). A good PR expert will get you on television, radio and in the press offering commentary as an expert. Unfortunately, in most cases, that does not get you any business. It will boost your credibility. It will feed your ego. But it will hardly ever result in business walking in the door.
In terms of time it takes to work here is how I break down public relations: A good public relations professional can get you in the media immediately (within 10 days). However unless you have a way to make an offer to someone while you are being quoted or unless the media is targeted at a specific audience, new clients will hardly ever come directly from public relations.
Summary
Each of these forms of media can be used effectively to source new clients. There are three things you need to know before you employ them:
1). Systems must be developed for each of these forms of media. As standalone tools they are relatively ineffective for long term relationship development. If you plug each of these forms of client attraction into a system, they will work and they will deliver clients to your law firm.
2). Much trial and error is required in employing each of these strategies. If you have not successfully used them before and you are trying to use them on your own, you will have to be patient as you learn what works and what does not work.
3). None of these marketing methods works fast. You can get started quickly. You can begin doing things correctly immediately and you may get a few new clients as a result of increased activity. But there is a cumulative effect. If you use each of these forms of media as part of a system and you do so over the long term, your client attraction will begin to snowball. This happens because you are not only targeting your client base but you are also targeting your referral sources and you are doing so with a consistent message with great frequency.
There is no get rich quick form of legal marketing. If you have patience and you are persistent and you get good advice you will succeed. The key lies in getting started and finding someone who is qualified to help you build systems.
Select Your Clients and Control Your Destiny
In speaking with a brand new client yesterday I was once again reminded why law firm marketing is a necessity and not a luxury.
My client was providing me with some details of the type of matters in her portfolio. After she described each case she would always make a comment about how this client was not ideal for her practice. Eventually, I stopped her and asked why she would continuously select clients who were not ideal and with whom she did not enjoy working.
She paused for a long time.
Her answer was typical. She said she took the clients because they found her and she did not want to turn away work.
This is not unusual. In fact, this is typical. This is the way most lawyers find clients. The client shows up and the lawyer takes them.
Law firm marketing allows you to change that dynamic. It allows you to target specific clients or referral sources and educate them so they bring you the best matters/clients.
While many lawyers view marketing as an unsavory, back-slapping, fast talking, salesman type function; effective ethical law firm marketing is a tool smart lawyers use to control their destiny.
How To Make Time For Law Firm Marketing
When you work with clients all day long and when you give people frank, direct advice about something they feel strongly about (their law firm), you are bound to have a few people disagree and push back. This is nothing new for me. I not only have to make good recommendations, I have to sell them to my clients so that they believe in them and act on the advice I deliver.
Sometimes the very premise of taking ANY action at all is the challenge. Sometimes I stumble upon a client that will not take action on any marketing or business strategy initiative because they just do not have time…or so they say.
All of us make time for things that are important. If a member of your family is getting married, you make time to go to the wedding. If your child is in a school play you make time to go see her perform. If you tell your grandmother you will drive her to the store in the middle of the day, you stop what you are doing and you drive her to the store.
We keep these commitments for two reasons:
Reason 1: The pain of not keeping these commitments is significant. Not only will we cause pain to someone else if we do not follow through on these commitments, we will cause pain to ourselves. This pain comes in the form of guilt and shame.
Reason 2: We have made a promise to someone else and we have a need to follow through. Humans have a psychological need to be consistent in word and deed. Our actions must match our words. If they do not, we feel conflicted.
This brings us back to the lawyer who says he does not have time for marketing. This is not a time management problem. It is a perception problem. The lawyer who cannot make time for marketing simply does not understand the consequences of inaction.
If you miss a deadline in court you face sanctions. If you miss a marketing deadline, nothing happens… or so it seems.
Marketing gives you choices. If you have several clients waiting to work with you, you can choose not to accept some of them (particularly the ones that are difficult). If you have clients waiting to work with you, you can raise your fees. If you have clients waiting to work with you, you can hire staff to help lighten your personal workload. The key is to have clients waiting to work with you. And this is the importance of marketing. When I try to sell you on taking action, I am selling you on your future. I am motivating you to change your habits and add marketing to your weekly action items.
You deserve to make more money. You deserve financial freedom. You deserve to control your future.
If you are ready to take the next step I will share the secret to that commitment with you. If you are ready, I will show you how you can make time for marketing and how doing so can change your financial future.
If you are ready I can give you the key to unlock the door to the future you deserve.
If you are ready…
How To Raise Your Fee and Have Your Clients Love You For Doing It
One of the ways I work with attorneys to improve their income is by helping them implement value-based pricing. Whenever I survey my clients, this one topic is identified as the most valuable thing they discover in working with me. It is also the single biggest factor in law firm marketing. After all, if you can get your clients to see your services as incredibly valuable, you can make more money per client. This means you need to see fewer clients and do less work to make more money.
Here are two stories that illustrate my point (the names have been changed to protect the newly-reformed):
Intellectual Property Lawyer Triples his Income Overnight
Pat is an intellectual property attorney who came to me complaining about the number of hours he worked. His biggest complaint was that he was working on too many small matters. Since there are no small matters, only small fees, I delved into his client list and we made some adjustments.
It seems Pat was filing about five trademark applications per month for his clients and charging $1,500 each. His justification for this fee was: “This is what everyone else charges.”
The first adjustment we made was to Pat’s mindset. When a business owner owns a trademark he owns an asset. This is a thing of value to his business. It helps build equity. This means filing a trademark application and having it approved is making a sound investment (not unlike investing in Real Estate or the Stock Market).
But that is not all Pat’s clients are investing in. They are also investing in a relationship WITH HIM. (This was a new philosophy for Pat). This investment in the relationship means that all the work done on this matter would be covered by one fee (less the government filing charges). If it took 20 revisions to get the mark approved, Pat would resubmit the paperwork 20 times. Once the client invested in Pat, he would not need to spend another penny on this matter.
Finally, we added the glue that cemented the relationship between Pat and his clients. We offered three years of monitoring to protect the trademark from infringement and we offered LIFETIME consultations on this trademark INCLUDED in the fee. This means ten years from now, if someone has a question about this particular trademark, they can call Pat and he will answer their question for free.
The outcome: Pat was able to move from charging $1,500 for filing a trademark application to charging $4,997 for a trademark application.
The Will To Bill
Joe is a Trust and Estates attorney. He came to me complaining that people would not pay more than $500 for him to write their will. He said this was all he could charge since everyone else in town was charging that fee.
After interviewing Joe I learned there were three other documents that were critical to setting up a sound estate plan. I also learned that Joe’s average client revises these documents at least once during their lifetime. Finally, Joe told me that most of his clients only learned of advantageous changes in the law when he brought them up.
Under my guidance, Joe immediately stopped offering the drafting of a will as a standalone service. Instead, he began offering his clients a long-term relationship that included the drafting of all estate planning documents, the review of twelve different kinds of legal contracts (including mortgage documents, auto financing agreements, leases, basically any document that bound his client to an investment of $1,000 or more) and two estate planning meetings per year.
Overnight Joe went from being the guy who writes the will to becoming a trusted family advisor.
How did this affect his income? Well, remember that Joe was charging $500 for the drafting of a will? Now he charges $2,400 per year for his Concierge Legal Service. And oh, by the way, he went back to his clients who paid $500 for their will and he was able to sign up more than half of them to the new relationship.
There are a couple of significant points to make about these stories:
First: You may think this is not applicable to you and your law firm. If you do, you are DEAD WRONG. This is applicable to every attorney in every law practice. We have even used it for litigation. I have given you two examples – one in a business to business setting and one in a consumer setting. There is absolutely no value in thinking that you cannot use this model in your law firm. You absolutely can.
Second: You need to wake up. Your clients do not pay for the documents you draft. They do not pay for the time you spend arguing with your opposition. They do not pay for the research you do. They pay for your expertise, they pay for your guidance, and they pay for the privilege of HAVING A RELATIONSHIP with a great lawyer.
If you want to discover the dozens of ways you can elevate your status in the eyes of your client (and charge higher fees) give me a call today.
