5 Principles of Law Firm Marketing Success
Having trouble figuring out the most cost effective law firm marketing methods? It's important to avoid hundreds of hours and much effort lost through the mistakes of trial and error. Stumbling and fumbling around is a sure-fire way to waste lots of time and money in the world of professional law firm marketing.
If you don't know the secrets of law firm marketing, you give competition a huge advantage. Don't beat your brains out trying desperately to learn statistics or market trends. Get some good advice from a professional with a proven track record of law firm marketing success.
Here are 5 principles of law firm marketing that will get you started in the right direction. Look for ways they apply to your current campaigns.
People: Identify your target market. Analyze the characteristics of your best and worst clients and determine why they need your services. Look for a niche you can serve.
Product: Pinpoint what services you provide and how you can best present these to your prospects. Put yourself in their shoes. Ensure they know exactly what services they will receive.
Positioning: Study the competition. Learn why you are different from your competition and educate your prospects about why they should hire you and no one else. This convinces clients to do business with you and no one else.
Packaging: This is an important marketing strategy. Project an image that makes people want to work with you. Think about the image that best represent you and creates interest in prospects.
Place: Make sure that a prospective client can find you when they need your services. Build an online presence. Try networking with othe professionals. Give presentations or seminars. Determine which methods work for you when finding new clients. Make your marketing plan an efficient machine.
These 5 principals lay a firm foundation on which to build your law firm marketing plan. A realistic appraisal of them will tell you where you are as opposed to where you want to be. If you are not sure where to go from here, consider retaining the services of a law firm marketing professional; it's not an expense, it's an investment in your practice and yourself.
3 Keys to Reaping the Rewards of Relationships
I was recently coaching a law firm partner at a small east coast law firm who was lamenting how slow new business has become in the past few months. As we talked, I asked him, “What have you done in the past 3 months to build relationships with potential referral partners?”
He mentioned going to lunch a few times and speaking with a couple over the phone when they made a referral to him. I asked him to open up his Outlook contact database; there were more than 200 non-client contacts in it including: accountants, financial planners, angel investors, business brokers, and private investment bankers.
Here's the 3 keys I shared with him to develop the relationships in his “golden Rolodex.”
Step 1: Take an Active, not Passive, Role
There is an old Jewish saying “A man who has friends must show himself to be friendly.”
Don’t wait for someone to take the initiative and contact you— be the first to reach out. In the last few years we have coached & trained more than 6,000 attorneys and found the top Rainmakers are the lawyers who make at least 3-4 contacts with potential referral sources every week.
Action Step: Take 2 minutes and scan your contact database. Select 12-15 names of potential or current referral sources and send them an email or better yet, pick up the phone and call them with an invitation for lunch or coffee. Set up 3 face-to-face meetings per week for the next month.
Here's a sample script: “It’s been a while since we’ve connected. I was wondering what your schedule looks like for the next week or so. I'd like to get together with you for lunch or coffee, just to catch up—my treat. Let me know what dates would work better for you.”
Step 2: Increase Frequency of Contact
Try as we might, it’s difficult with our hectic schedules to meet with every potential referral source on a regular basis. Here's one strategy I teach my coaching clients: Set up a Google alert for a specific phrase that would be of interest to your referral sources such as “becoming a rainmaker.”
Collect articles and websites that might be of interest to your referral sources. Keep them in a separate folder (Referral Articles). Once a month pull one out, print off a bunch of copies and attach a brief handwritten note on each copy (“I thought you might enjoy this article.”). Enclose your business card and mail a copy of the article to all of your referral sources.
One of my clients built his network of strategic referral sources from less than 5 to more than 300 in 2 years using just this simple technique to stay in front of his referral sources on a frequent basis. He now has a multi-million dollar practice.
Step 3: Focus on Serving Not Selling
When you meet with potential referral sources don’t make the mistake of dominating the conversation. You are there to listen and learn about them, not hear yourself talk! Any attempt to “sell” them on your services will be a complete waste.
Look for ways you can serve them and their clients by connecting them with other resources or pointing them in the right direction regarding a legal issue. Ask a lot of questions about their business. For example:
• How did you first get started in your line of work?
• What are some of the major trends in your industry?
• What kinds of challenges do you face?
• What do you like best/worst about your job?
• And here's the most important question: How will I know if I'm talking to someone who's a good referral for you?
Educate them about your Ideal Target Market and how you can benefit their clients only after you have carefully listened to them.
Rainmakers don’t wait for the door to knock or the phone to ring or the referral to come in. They take the initiative, stay in touch, and focus on serving their referral sources, not selling them a service.
Remember, people will forget what you tell them. They may even forget your name, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
Interested in learning more about how to be a Rainmaker for your law firm?
4 Tips for Setting Goals for Your Law Firm Marketing Program
One of secrets of highly successful attorneys is that they make time to plan for the future of their law firm. We recommend meeting at least once per quarter with your senior partners (even if you are the entire partnership) to evaluate your achievements, set new goals and work on your law firm marketing plan for the next quarter.
I was recently coaching a partner in a small west coast practice about their law firm marketing plans when he said, “I'm not sure I see a point in setting goals because everything seems to quickly conspire against us and we easily get so caught up in the day to day operations of the firm that we don’t have time to focus on our goals. Then by the next time we meet, the priorities have all shifted."
Perhaps you can relate. It’s easy to set goals; the hard part is staying focused on them long enough to accomplish them and to make them big enough to be meaningful.
Here are 4 tips to creating your law firm marketing plan, staying focused and achieving your goals:
1. Ask someone to hold you accountable. Accountability is key when it comes to keeping your commitments. Whether it’s your business partner, an attorney in a different firm, or one of our law firm marketing business coaches, set up a regular time to meet with someone you trust and who has your best interests at heart and request they keep you accountable. Simply knowing that they will ask you about your progress every week can make a big difference to a lot of people.
2. Make sure your goals are S.M.A.R.T. goals. This often used acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-oriented, and Timed.
A good goal needs to incorporate all of these criteria. It is not sufficient to say “I want to be a millionaire.” That statement may be measurable, but does not include time frames, it does not lay out a specific game plan for how you will accomplish this goal, and it may not be realistic for you at this point in time.
An example of a SMART goal is: “I want to meet 4 different potential referral sources every month for the next 6 months, educate them about my firm, and ask them to send me business.”
3. Make your goals smaller. While this may seem contradictory at first, we have found that sometimes setting a goal that’s so big that it feels unreachable actually kills your motivation. Break your long-term goals (“I want to be a millionaire.”) into smaller ones that you can reach on a regular basis (“I want to get my law firm’s website launched in the next 60 days”).
For example, gaining 50 new law firm clients within 12 months may sound overwhelming, but this works out to about 1 per week. If you only convert 50% of prospects who come to your office into paying clients (because you have tracked this information) then you only need 2 new people to walk in your door per week in order to achieve your goal.
4. Focus on the right goals. Whenever I have a coaching client that goes more than 2 weeks without achieving the goal they set in their coaching session I start asking questions to determine if this is a goal they really feel passionate about. If there is no commitment to a particular goal it will be very difficult for most people to devote time to accomplishing it.
• Do you really want to grow your law firm?
• How fast?
• How big?
• Over what period of time?
• What do you believe this will give you?
• A sense of accomplishment?
• More freedom?
• More stress?
• More power?
Before you commit time, energy and resource to a goal, make sure it is something you truly care about and that will make a noticeable difference in your practice.
Don’t just measure how many phone calls come into the office daily. Measure what percentage of people you spend time talking to are qualified prospects versus just the usual suspects.
Don’t just measure how many “unique visitors” your website receives. Measure how many website visitors actually pick up the phone and call you or email you for more information.
Law Firm Marketing Boot camp: Experience the Results
Jeff Zinder is a highly successful civil litigation lawyer and partner at Zinder and Park in North Hollywood, CA. Even though he has practiced for over 30 years and built a multi-million dollar law firm, he still felt uncomfortable with many of the marketing techniques other lawyers used to attract more clients.
This is a common struggle in the field of law firm marketing. At The Rainmaker Institute, we lead dozens of business development seminars for lawyers across the country. This past June, Jeff Zinder attended the Rainmaker Retreat, a two day live legal marketing boot camp led by Stephen Fairley, CEO and Travis Greenlee, President of The Rainmaker Institute.
The Rainmaker Retreat is specifically designed to help attorneys at small law firms understand how to attract more and better clients using proven, step-by-step marketing strategies. This is not a theoretical, feel good program. It’s built on 4 principles:
• Building referrals through purposeful relationships
• Automating your law firm marketing system
• Leveraging the power of the internet to attract highly qualified clients
• Maximizing your return on investment for all your marketing dollars
Jeff Zinder reports the Rainmaker Retreat law firm marketing seminar showed him “not just the need to market, but how to do it and feel ethically comfortable that what we are doing shows the best of our profession, the best of my abilities, and the best of what our law firm has to offer without any regrets.”
Paul Cheng, a Pasadena lawyer had a similar experience at the Las Vegas Rainmaker Retreat. He believes that “in a few years, everybody is going to be taking this course as one of the foundations of law firm marketing. And, anybody who hasn’t taken the course isn’t serious about marketing. There are plenty of continuing legal education courses I’ve gone to and I’m sure all attorneys feel this way, they are usually very boring and you don’t really learn much that is applicable right away. The Rainmaker Retreat was totally different. Today I’m learning things I’m going to immediately apply as soon as this weekend is over.”
This November we are scheduled to present the Rainmaker Retreat business development program for lawyers at two locations: New Jersey, and Las Vegas. On October 26-27, we presented the The Los Angeles law firm marketing program, which was sponsored by the Los Angeles County Bar Association, one of the largest county bar associations in the nation.
Researching Your Legal Competition
According to the American Bar Association, there are currently 1,143,358 active attorneys in the United States. With thousands of law firms offering exactly the same services, and with the expanding role of globalization in the legal arena, it is critical for these legal professionals to know very specific key details about their competition.
With an abundance of legal referral sources on the internet, there is no excuse for the legal professional who knows very little or nothing about his competitors.
Regardless of how unique you believe you and your services are, there are many other law firms doing exactly what you do and offering exactly what you offer. You should educate everyone in your firm about your competitors and clearly explain to them the reason why prospects should hire your firm instead of your competitors.
The top 5 (of many) details every attorney should know about their direct competition are:
1. Who is their target market?
2. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the firm?
3. What kind of marketing avenues they use? (direct mail, internet websites, direct sales, networking events, email, print medial, radio, infomercials, TV ads)
4. What the press and media says about them? (research articles written about them, interviews with their partners)
5. How has their law practice has been going in the last six to twelve months?
Here's a simple tip I use to keep track of my competition: Let Google doing the work for you by setting up a Google alert. Just put the name of the partner or law firm into the search feature (be sure to put it in quotes “law firm competitor”) then enter your email address. I recommend you select a “Comprehensive” search and have Google email you only “as it happens,” not daily. Keep a file on your computer under “Competition.” This can also become invaluable to you litigators out there when you need to do some quick research on your competition. Hint: you can also use this to keep track of your biggest accounts and yourself.
More than 6,000 lawyers across the country have attended our Rainmaker seminars to learn specific ways to market their law firms, find better clients and generate more referrals.
For dozens of other tips, techniques, and proven strategies, I recommend attorneys check out our intensive law firm marketing boot camp, the two day Rainmaker Retreat program. We offer it 4-5 times every year around the country.
3 Ways to Set Your Law Firm Apart from the Competition
At The Rainmaker Institute, we have worked with over 6,000 attorneys from hundreds of law firms across the country and one of the questions our clients struggle the most with when it comes to marketing their law firm is “How do I differentiate my law firm from my competition?”
In Practice Made Perfect, our 12 week business development program for attorneys, we cover 10 specific ways to differentiate your services. Here are 3 of them:
1. Create a micro niche. In these days of hyper-specialization, it’s NOT about “mass marketing.” It’s about “micro marketing”—creating a micro niche that best positions you as a specialist. If you developed a tumor on your brain you would go to an oncologist specializing in neurosurgery, not a general practitioner.
It’s the same way with law firm marketing. You must position yourself as a specialist, not a generalist. One way to do this is by focusing on a very defined niche. For example an intellectual property attorney could say, “I concentrate on helping inventors and owners of small software development companies in Los Angeles with less than $1 million in revenues protect their intellectual property and develop creative ways to generate multiple revenue streams from their invention.”
Creating a micro niche, or focused target market is critical to your success as a small law firm. You should be able to easily fill 1-2 pages with all the specific information you know about your target market.
If you're struggling to nail that down, I recently wrote a special report to help. To get your free copy of the “Target Market Inventory” all you have to do is email us at: TMI@RainmakerRetreat.com
2. Focus on solutions and results. Too many attorneys try to sell their legal services. Attendees at my Rainmaker Retreat 2 day law firm marketing boot camp program are surprised when I tell them that people don’t buy legal services! People buy solutions to their problems. They buy results, not your services.
When meeting with a prospective client emphasize the benefits you offer to clients and the value you bring through your specific expertise with their kind of legal problem. Discuss the results you have achieved for other clients, but be careful not to overstep the ethical boundaries or promise results based on someone else’s case. There's an old adage “Facts tell. Stories sell.” While your colleagues may be thrilled to know all about how you found a loophole for your client, don’t forget to meet the needs of your client by focusing on the solution.
3. Build an online presence. The internet has changed everything when it comes to law firm marketing and how consumers select law firms. Many attorneys either don’t realize or aren’t willing to admit that most savvy individuals will check them out online before they ever finalizing their decision. I was recently talking with Angela Nielsen, CEO of OneLily, a website development firm for lawyers, discuss how she read over 70% of law firms now have a website, yet half of them only came online in the last 24 months. That’s astounding!
For less than most attorneys make from landing a 2-3 clients, your law firm could have a strong and growing internet presence with a new website, a blog, articles, and press releases.
Travis Greenlee, the president of The Rainmaker Institute, recently mentioned how he helped a client go from only appearing on 2 websites (one of them was her own) to a few thousand in less than 90 days.
If you search for my name, “Stephen Fairley” on Google.com, I currently appear on over 300,000 websites. In upcoming posts I'll share with you some of my “secret strategies” for rapidly building your online presence.
In our upcoming Practice Made Perfect, a 12 week business development program for lawyers, we show you step by step how to use several proven low-cost strategies to rapidly increase your online presence.
The 4 Biggest Problems Marketing Your Law Firm with the Yellow Pages
I recently came across Dennis Kennedy’s blawg post titled Seven Legal Technology Trends for 2007: Widening the Digital Divide in Law Practice. In his post, Dennis gives a great overview of some of the growing trends in the legal industry including the dramatic decline in the use of yellow pages, often the primary source of law firm marketing for attorneys.
The 4 biggest problems I see in using the yellow pages to market your law firm are:
1. There is no way to measure the results. If you're going to spend money on advertising, at least make an effort to track the results. This can be as simple as having a separate phone number for each of your law firm ads. But don’t rely on self-report by prospects because this is notoriously inaccurate.
2. They are often written by the yellow page sales person, the same person who also created the one for your competitors. Take the time to write your own solid ad copy or even hire a copywriter from www.elance.com, but don’t use your sales person!
3. There is no clear “call to action.” Note to self “Free Consultation” is NOT a call to action. Every law firm marketing their services will give you a free consult. It has to be more than that. You must have a clear and compelling reason why they should pick up the phone and call you (more on this later)
4. Yellow page ads fail to differentiate your law firm from thousands of other competitors. With over one million attorneys in the country, there are thousands of lawyers in every major city who provide the exact same services. When a consumer turns to the yellow pages for a lawyer they are actually encouraged to call multiple firms to try and get the “best deal” or the “biggest promises.” You may know this as the “dialing for dollars” mentality. A big part of law firm marketing is creating several powerful reasons that educate consumers why you are different from other law firms. If someone were to ask you, “Why should I hire you?” what would you say?
