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Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

I was recently coaching an attorney 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, as I ask dozens of attorneys every week, “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.”

Law Firm Marketing Key 1: When It Comes to Referral Relationships Take an Active Role

There is a 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 and trained over 6,000 attorneys and the ones who are the best rainmakers are the ones who make at least 3-4 contacts with potential referral sources every week.

Action Step: Take 2 minutes and scan your contact list. Select 15 to 20 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 a goal of having three 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. 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.”

Law Firm Marketing Key 2: Increase the Frequency of Your 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 lawyers: Set up a Google Alert for a specific phrase that would be of interest to your referral sources such as “becoming a rainmaker.”

Collect interesting articles and 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.

Several of my clients have doubled and tripled their referrals in 6 months using this simple technique to stay in front of his referral sources on a frequent basis. You can set up a Google alert at: www.google.com/alerts

Law Firm Marketing Key 3: Focus on Serving Not Selling

When you meet with referral sources don’t make the mistake of dominating the conversation. You are there to listen and learn, not hear yourself talk. Any attempt to sell them on your services will be a complete waste of your time and theirs.

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.

Attorneys who want to become top 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.

Incoming search terms:

• www thetexascriminallawattorneys com/houston-criminal-lawyers (8)

Lawyers who want to market their firm could learn a lot from journalists about how to make the most of one basic news item.

Most journalists find themselves writing the same story over and over again because when there’s very little around that’s genuinely new, the media has to find new angles on old stories to fill their papers and bulletins.

That’s why so many of the stories you see in the media are merely variations on a theme that has been explored many times before. Solicitors who want to give their law firm marketing an extra push can use the same approach.

They should be able to get several bursts of publicity from the same story if they play their cards right.

Three times for emphasis

One good way for solicitors to get publicity is by commenting on changes in the law. To get the most out of the story, however, you should aim to tell us about it at least three times – preferably more than that.

The format for this is very simple:

tell us what’s going to happen with this new change in the law;
tell us again when it’s happening; and
tell us yet again when it’s happened.

The drill

This is how it works in practice.

As soon as you hear of a proposed change in the law, whether in draft legislation or a government statement, fire off a press release to your local media warning what will happen should such a proposal come into force. It doesn’t matter whether you are for or against the proposal. As long as you can argue that it will affect the public one way or the other then the media are likely be interested.
Then in the week that it’s due to come into force, you will have another chance to market your law firm by sending off another press release updating your views. It doesn’t matter if your views haven’t changed. You can say the same things again and still get coverage because, by now, several months will have passed and the fact that the law is coming into force makes it news again.
Then, a few months later, you fire off yet another press release saying what effect this new law is actually having now it’s a reality. You might argue that it has been a failure and should be scrapped immediately. Or you might say it’s been a triumph and more people should come forward to your firm to get the full benefit of what it has to offer.

It gives you three bites at the same cherry, but in fact there will probably be far more opportunities than that if you exploit other landmarks in a bill’s passage such as first and second readings, amendments and so on.

Don’t worry about saying more or less the same thing several times with just a few modifications. Journalists have been doing that for years as a way of meeting deadlines and filling column inches. It has never bothered them and neither should it worry anyone wanting to market their law firm.

Law firm internet marketing is important for all types of attorneys but is especially important for personal injury attorneys.  Lawyers in cities large and small are among the most searched for professionals online.  In fact hundreds or even thousands of potential clients are searching for attorneys every day in every city.

Potential clients are going online and searching for attorneys.  They are looking at the first two pages of results in Google, Yahoo and Bing and visiting the websites of the attorneys that come up.  They will make an appointment with one of those attorneys.  Law firm Internet marketing can make sure that your firm is under consideration.

There are different forms of online marketing for attorneys.  The most important ones to understand are: Search Engine Optimization (SEO);  Pay-Per-Click Campaigns (PPC); Online Public Relations (PR) and Social Media Marketing (SMM).

SEO is the most cost effective form of law firm Internet marketing.  SEO is group of tools and practices that get your website to naturally rank in search results when potential clients are looking for an attorney.  Consumers equate search ranking with quality so being highly ranked will help provide your firm with prestige in the eyes of those searching for an attorney.

PPC campaigns have more immediate results than SEO, however, unlike SEO, you have to pay a fee every time someone clicks on your ad in the sponsored section of the search results.  PPC also lacks the prestige of natural SEO rankings.  A PPC campaign should be temporary while an SEO campaign is undertaken.

Online public relations is a good form of law firm internet marketing because it can add consumer confidence.  As people search for an attorney and find articles and news stories that include the name of your law firm they will feel more confident in your abilities.  Press releases and articles distributed online will get your name in front of perspective clients.

Social Media Marketing, focusing on social bookmarking, can also get your firm seen by potential clients.  The more often people hear and see your firm name the more confident they will be in your abilities.

The most effective law firm Internet marketing includes a combination of these services.

Incoming search terms:

• www thetexascriminallawattorneys com/houston-criminal-lawyers (8)

If your law firm marketing plan follows typical law firm marketing strategies employed by many other practices, you are failing miserably and you know it. Yet other firms out there have a steady stream of clients in and out of their offices. You see them every day: consistently busy and constantly entertaining new clients that afford them wardrobes of expensive suits and prestigious new sports cars.

You see them making it work; making their firm all it can be. You’ve got to do something to make your practice successful, too.

The accounting firm featured on the cover of the business journal in your waiting room is well-known nationwide. The CEO of that firm emerges from the elevator. Your heart leaps as he heads your way. Forget about it! He’s heading for the law firm down the hall, just they way they all do. You won’t even get a second glance.

Once again, you feel like shoving everything off of the coffee table with a frustrated swipe of your fists. You grit your teeth and glare at the neighboring law firm. What are they doing that you aren’t? You’re sick and tired of being out done, but don’t know how to fix it. Here are several law firm marketing mistakes you may be making and what you can do to fix them.

* You have failed to convince them of the value your service gives to them specifically. Solution: Go back and do more research on your target market’s “points of pain.” Use more of these in all of your conversations with prospects.

* They don’t trust you. Solution: Develop a list of specific things you can do to build your credibility. Examine your personal image: your clothes, your mannerisms, your listening skills. Analyze your business image: your office location, your office furniture, the quality of your stationary, your business cards, etc.

* They perceive your cost out weighs your value. Solution: Either temporarily

reduce your price or immediately find ways to significantly increase your

perceived value.

* They don’t believe your benefits or values because you haven’t demonstrated

them. Solution: Find a way to give them a FREE sample of your services.

* Their risk seems too great. Solution: Find creative ways to reduce or eliminate

the risk of working with you.

* They don’t feel like you listen to them. Solution: Stop talking so much during your presentation (lawyers often talk too much when they are either nervous or feeding their ego). Ask more questions. Develop a list of questions to ask prospects. Work on reading their body language. Use active listening skills and reflective feedback. Use the 25/75 Rule. A good attorney talks less than 25% of the time during the initial interview. They ask good questions and then listen 75% of the time. The interesting thing is that prospects will feel you are more competent the less you talk, the more you listen and the better your questions are.

* Prospects will not hire you when they don’t want you, don’t believe they need you or can’t afford you. Solution: Cut your losses and move on. They are

currently NOT in your target market.

If you are tired of buying the cheap suits off the bargain racks and driving the foreign economy car that gets great mileage and matches the car the old retired woman down the street drives, then do something about it! To be a winner you must act like a winner and that includes successful marketing techniques.

There are professional, skilled services out there that are in business to help you successfully employ law firm marketing strategies to make your practice a success. It is time you contact one to get the help you need.

Incoming search terms:

• www thetexascriminallawattorneys com/houston-criminal-lawyers (7)

Designed for Justice is a small website design and search engine optimization company targeting law firms nationwide. They offer PR and Marketing for Law Firms, helping to boost their public visibility on the internet. Their marketing strategies are aimed towards creating well optimized websites that deliver organic traffic and attract new clients to local law firms.

Local search engine strategies for these small businesses are a must. Local search engine strategies target high traffic keywords within multiple cities and states. The key to securing great organic traffic from local searches is to achieve a broad optimization, having many first page rankings over just a few keywords. The idea is to blanket the industry because localized searches are likely to vary more person to person.

Online searches for services and products have grown tremendously in the past 5 years. Today Designed for Justice is providing law firms with 21st century advertising with search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is not a pay-per-click format. Instead SEO experts utilize clean HTML, Keyword Rich Content and Backlinking. To be number 1 in a search engine you do not have to pay, Google ranks your website based upon relevancy of content, accessible code and the number of inbound links you have.

If your law firm does not have a well optimized website that is producing leads, or you have never invested in SEO you are already behind your competition. SEO has been the forefront of the internet. The top search engine, Google is already worth more than IBM and Microsoft. Google has become the leading provider of websites to the world. With 86% of the market share of their competitors Google also has the #1 spot in traffic hits daily. The most astonishing statistic is the amount of households, 46%, searching for products and local services online.

Designed for Justice has entered the SEO business and is helping local law firms and lawyers in the Tampa Bay area achieve top rankings for an affordable price. Experts in Website Design, Optimization, Content Writing and Backlinking this company has the ability to double your organic traffic in no time.

Visit the Designed for Justice website today :

Website Design for Law Firms, Website Optimization for Law Firms and Web Sites for Law Firms.

A client looking for legal assistance today has to make a tough choice. The options available to him are numerous and he really can’t choose between them because they all seem to be promising him the same thing. What can you, as a lawyer, do to make his quest easier? Simple, create a brand for your law firm.

With reference to law firms, Branding is how you want your clients and prospects to perceive your law firm. A successful brand is a differentiator, the relevant and positive attributes that makes you stand apart from your competition. These attributes should help your client or prospect to make a decision and enhance your firm’s value in their mind.

The differentiating attributes for your law firm could be Price, Size, Practice areas/specialties offered, Response time, Geography/market presence, Expertise/experience, Client list and others. However, make sure your differentiating factor is not just a claim but a long lasting, honest, relevant, demonstrable and unique attribute in your target area. Don’t confuse it with an advertising slogan.

Internet marketing can play a major role in almost all aspects of Branding, especially brand communication (visibility and publicity). For identifying attributes and to test your positioning, you could float an email or website based survey on the intranet. Similarly, for competitive research too, you could use search engines and other online marketing tools. Finally, for communicating your new Brand positioning, the internet is one of most cost effective and targeted mediums, allowing accountability and extensive reach.

A good brand can bring you very clear benefits, higher fees and subsequently higher profits. An exhaustive UK study had concluded that brand recognition in professional service organisations, including law firms, is worth a 10 to 20 percent premium in fees. More recently, the 2006 most valuable law firm survey, conducted by Intangible Business, also concluded that better branding results in higher profitability. Specifically, it found that Linklaters, Freshfields, Slaughter and May had higher lead generation profitability due to their strong brands. Arguably, all magic circle law firms in London, which have had a strong brand identity, command higher fee premiums. You might be worried that Branding is a time and cost intensive exercise, suited only for large law firms. But fortunately this is not the case. In fact, by using the latest technological resources, like internet marketing, you can cut down on your branding costs significantly and build your law firm brand in considerably less time. Using the various online marketing tools, such as a website, e-newsletters, and blogs, you can spread your branding across different mediums. You just need to make a start.

To find out more on how to brand your law firm and utilise technology to do so effectively, visit www.legalimarketing.co.uk.

Incoming search terms:

• www thetexascriminallawattorneys com/houston-criminal-lawyers (7)

DataFlurry is known in their industry for amazing law firm internet marketing and search engine optimization services.  The owner has created a tips list for law firms and lawyers to utilize for improving their search engine rankings on the internet.  DataFlurry was nominated for top 10 SEO companies of the year for 2008 by Promotionworld.

Joel McLaughlin wrote the below column to help attorneys grab top google search engine rankings for their website with easy web promotion tips. Helping them capitalize in their niche market locally.

When it comes to internet marketing for law firms, lawyers and attorneys – these individuals need to learn a few tips in order to make a major impact towards obtaining top search engine rankings and online leads from Google.

Your website must have a good hierarchy designed with pages for every major area of practice.  You should also create a page designed for each specific city or state of practice. This will help to obtain the broadest array of search opportunities.

Your website should also have each and every important page linked to from your home page. Search engines place a large amount of relevance on how deep pages are and how often they are linked to.

Linking internally and externally should include major keywords pertaining to keyterms you wish to rank high for.  For example, if you are a California attorney offering personal injury and wrongful death services, you should make sure that internal links within your website and links pointing to your website use anchor text like shown below.

Los Angeles California Personal Injury Services (this link should point to your personal injury page)

Los Angeles California Wrongful Death Services (this link should point to your wrongful death page)

You need to have an on-site blog and 1 or more off-site blogs, depending on how much competition you are up against. The on-site blog will be used to show the search engines that your website is always changing (at least once every 2 weeks) and the off site blogs will be used for link generation!

I recommend using blog sites that help you easily promote your blog with tags.  What I mean is that you should obtain your blog from a powerful blog website that gives you the option to promote your blog using the host software website’s popularity. Choosing the right blog software will most likely determine whether you succeed or fail.  If you contact us for a free consultation I will share my recommended info with you.

The external blogs should be updated at least 1 time per week and should include 3-4 links in each blog post pointing to your website. If you have more than 1 blog not hosted on your website, you should also link these blogs together within the blog posts and on the blog navigation.

These tips should help attorneys to gain a competitive advantage to beat their competition. Hopefully this post has helped!

DataFlurry

Joel McLaughlin | We offer innovative Law Firm Internet Marketing services. 602-626-7423

Burbank, CA (PRWEB) – Americans spend over 150 billion dollars a year in legal fees. That kind of money means that the business of legal representation is big and there are a lot of people doing it. The number of female attorneys has grown dramatically in the last two decades alone while the number of personal injury lawsuits has expanded well beyond expectation.

90% of all lawyers practice within metropolitan areas making the concentration of competition for personal injury cases intense. The days of hanging up your legal shingle and waiting for the customers to come hobbling through the door have long gone. Yellow page ads are all but dead while the use of television and radio marketing comes with a heavy price tag and has almost zero accountability. In addition to traditional marketing being more guess work than analytical science, utilizing these avenues to generate truly qualified clientele is challenging at best and expensive in the least.

Internet marketing has outpaced traditional methods of advertising while bringing an unlimited amount of information with each campaign at costs that are far below print, TV and radio. Personal attorneys who traditionally take cases on a contingency basis do not always have the funds to spend on Search Engine marketing that is a crap shoot for results and then provide little if no information on its success or failure. As every PI lawyer knows, there is nothing worse than putting in hours of work only to see the case crumple with no pay off.

Appreciating this concept as well as understanding the intimate nature of Internet marketing for law firms, the experienced staff at iMajestic (www.imajestic.com ) have developed a marketing program for the world wide web that fits perfectly into any personal injury lawyer’s idea of how business should be done. Just as PI attorneys do, iMajestic introduces 100% Guaranteed Pure Performance based marketing and SEO.

The idea is simple: get results before getting paid.

iMajestic knows the rules involving internet marketing for attorneys. They understand what it takes to not only create marketing campaigns that generate qualified traffic, they are so confident in their ability to do it that they will do all the work to get results before accepting compensation. The relationship between personal injury attorney and internet marketing company becomes complete since both parties work in the same methodologies.

iMajestic’s CEO puts it this way:

“With over 80% of search engine users favoring natural search results, companies of all sizes understand the magnitude of elevated, high natural search rankings for their prospects and are spending a significant amount of their marketing budgets in-advance of and prior to redeeming results. We want your business, regardless of size and budget and are willing to go to work for you without the burdened up-front fees for internet marketing.”

The message is clear; a Internet marketing company that charges personal injury attorneys lots of money up front without any kind of guarantee of success does nothing but takes without giving anything of real value in return. If there is one thing that iMajestic understands more than how to generate internet traffic, it’s how lawyers and PI attorneys want to see results before having to spends thousands of their hard fought dollars to do so. This is why they have developed specialized lawyer website marketing and attorney SEO marketing programs that address the specifics of the personal attorney and legal services industry.

For more information about this revolutionary approach to Internet marketing and business relations go to www.imajestic.com or contact them direct at 1-866-851-2402.