(Webinar Slides) Kickstart Your Legal Marketing In One Hour

Editor's Notes

1. I started my legal career as a secretary in a personal injury firm, planning to teach English at the high school level. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that I didn’t like group projects or poster boards and a masters in education requires a bunch of both! So my former bosses encouraged me to go to law school. I worked full-time, went to law school at night and ate what I called, the dinner of champions – a snickers bar and a diet Dr. Pepper for the better part of 4 years. While working at the firm I developed an interest in marketing, I loved the idea of being able to bring in more clients and was thrilled to think that with the right campaigns, I might not have to talk to the guy who “had a personal injury” or “wanted to sue 7-11 because I almost drank a soda that had glass in it”. But the problem was … (next slide)
2. Which wasn’t fun at all. It is really hard to make a smart decision when you are feeling pressured and unsure. I often felt like what we were really doing was responding to the sales person’s pitch just because they approached us, not because we had a plan or knew what we were doing.
3. In fact, it often felt like our marketing choices were made with our fingers crossed and the hope that things would work. Which is a terrible way to buy anything, let alone something as expensive as marketing. Heck, you don’t buy clothes you can’t return without trying them on. But we did, because we didn’t have a good resource to help us plan our marketing or make smart choices. And I am sure I am not the only one on this webinar who has purchased marketing “hoping” it would work or felt like they purchased snake oil marketing at one point in time or another. (Pull up polling question)
4. I can honestly say that at my old firm, those first couple of years where I was making marketing decisions or contributing to our marketing choices, it felt like number 3 – more times than I’d like to admit. About 5 years into my time with my old firm, we decided to hire a company to redo our website. They had worked with Sony Vizio and John Mayer and they were doing some really cool things for their time. We were going to have an amazing, super sexy website. That was it, that was our marketing plan. Yellow page ads, sexy website, networking. TA DA, we’d have more clients than we could handle … but that’s not quite how marketing works. Which we learned the hard way. So, I started to get educated. And by working with the companies recommended by our website designers, attending an presentation I could and ultimately going to work for a Mass Tort Marketing Company, I really fell in love with marketing.
5. So I am here today, to share what I’ve learned along the way. To take the fear out of marketing and ensure that you don’t make another marketing decision with your fingers crossed. Sure, marketing is more of an art than a science, but good marketing advice is like a paint by number canvas, you can pick the colors and change up how things look, but if you follow the guide, you will wind up with the general picture you purchased. So today, in the next 40 minutes or so, you will learn: Hold on tight, we are covering a lot but I will be sure to leave time for questions and answers at the end of todays presentation.
6. The only way you can do any of the things I just mentioned is you have to know what choices you have in your marketing. Despite what some marketers may say, you’ve got a TON of choices when it comes to marketing your firm. Here are a few of your choices:
7. Ok, so it isn’t realistic or even smart to try and tackle all of those channels at once, you have to be strategic. So I’ve narrowed the list down to 4 non-negotiables: - In person networking – it costs relatively little and offers the potential for the quick creation of clients and revenue. It also give you the opportunity to hone how you describe your practice Website – Everything online and often in print will point back to your website, you need to make sure it is up to stuff! Blog – less formal, gives you a chance to share your personality, connect with your clients LinkedIn Profile – THAT’s where your collegues are check you out most
8. We all know that making uninformed marketing choices can feel a bit like this picture … you’ve just got your hard earned money flying out the window. So in addition to knowing where your money is being spent, you also need to know how much money you have to spend on your marketing, because it will really influence the channels you take advantage of.
9. There isn’t a right or wrong answer here. Most businesses spend 6 – 9% of their annual revenue on marketing. Attorneys tend to be much lower, closer to 3 – 4% but what is important is knowing what your marketing budget is. Because the availability of funds really plays a part in your marketing choices. I am going to walk you through some Free Marketing channels, some lost cost marketing channels and some medium to high cost marketing channels.
10. Now, it is also important to know WHO your perfect clients are and WHERE you can most easily reach them but target markets take up a huge chunk in week 1 of our legal marketing 101 course, so we can’t unfortunately touch on that much today. Suffice it to say that knowing your perfect clients well also makes marketing so much easier. For today, think of your perfect client, someone you are currently working with or have worked with in the past and when I run through these marketing channels ask yourself, would I be able to connect with John or Tina there? Would they respond to that kind of marketing? Ok, so free marketing channels …
11. Social media marketing is extremely popular right now and can be a very effective way to market your firm. Just keep in mind that the website you are using to promote your firm are things you don’t actually control. So Yelp charging for marketing or hiding reviews can hurt your reach, Facebook encouraging businesses to boost their posts or pay for sponsored ads can effect who sees your posts. Social media should be Social!
12. … once you pick a new marketing channel or identify which of the 4 non-negotiables you need to improve, it is time to vet your service providers to make sure you are getting the most out of your marketing budget and aren’t buying snake oil.
13. Often, the sales person isn’t the person who will be doing the work for you. As a result, you’ve got to ask questions about the process and working together. This isn’t a time to pretend you know everything, there is no way you can and if you pretend, a dishonest marketing person will use your bluffing to their advantage or will get annoyed with you. Think about it, that client you have who read a couple of articles online and thinks he or she knows everything about practicing law, you LOVE working with that client, right? No you hate it, you want your team to know you are interested and engaged but not micromanaging or a know it all.
14. Once you’ve decided to work with a company or tackle a marketing project in house, you must track your efforts and progress. Otherwise you will just wind up like this guy. You keep trying to hit a target and you can’t because it just keeps moving.
15. Your tracking system doesn’t have to be fancy, it CAN be, but it doesn’t have to be! These are a couple of easy charts we’ve used here at Write Law and that our students can use when they participate in our DIY classes.
16. I REALLY encourage everyone to track their marketing and track it regularly. That way you know what is working and what isn’t. We track everything pretty religiously here so when we saw a spike in our website traffic on Tuesday and didn’t know where it came from I was really surprised, it turns out, that an email promoting this webinar had gone out and we didn’t know about it, so we had an nice unanticipated bump in our traffic. Speaking of websites, let’s talk a bit about legal websites.
17. You never want to mess around with someone else owning your domain name. Make sure that it is yours 100% and that you control it.
18. So when I mentioned my old firm working with that super sexy design firm, what I didn’t mention was we learned a hard lesson just as we were about to launch the site, they called us one day and said “Ok, we are ready for your content” and our response was “what content” and they gently told us they were web designers, not copywriters and didn’t have ANY experience with writing copy for a law firm site. Shoot … we didn’t have any experience writing for a law firm site EITHER! We were told we had two choices: But I have always loved writing, I have a BA in Creative Writing from UCSD and figured this would be a good chance to try my hand at copywriting. The website company hooked me up with an SEO company and a copywriting company and they taught me the ropes. It was a blast! I found a way to use my writing background and my background in law, together!