The Rainmaker Blog : Law Firm Marketing and Business Development : The Rainmaker Institute : Stephen Fairley : Professional Legal Marketing

One very effective law firm marketing technique to find new clients is using speaking venues. There are many different speaking venues to consider, depending upon your experience, skills and abilities. Here are 7 to consider:

1) Be the moderator of a panel (either a panel of 3-5 of the partners in your firm or of 3-5 different professionals.)

2) Be the expert on a panel discussion.

3) Give a teleseminar (over a conference or bridge line.)

4) Create small, private, client-only seminars.

5) Participate in a joint venture with an organization or company who serves a similar market. These organizations or companies can include small community banks, groups of financial planners, chambers of commerce, networking groups, accounting firms, business consultants, psychologists, chiropractic groups, employee benefits companies.

6) Give a presentation or keynote to a trade association. (Fact to consider:  there are 135,000 trade associations in the United States, according to the Encyclopedia of Associations.)

7) Give a public seminar. (These are usually free; however, you may be able to charge since you’re a business.)

As you are creating your legal marketing program, consider using speaking venues to attract new clients.

In my next post, you’ll learn 13 factors that affect the law firm marketing success of speaking venues.

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Do you want to double your law practice, increase client referrals and make more money in these challenging economics times? Then subscribe to The Rainmaker Advisor Journal. To get your free trial copy, go to:  www.therainmakeradvisor.com

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Advertising is critical to the survival of your law firm, but not all advertising is equally effective. In these competitive times you cannot afford to waste your precious time and money making any advertising mistakes, so I’m going to share with you “The 5 Biggest Marketing Mistakes Attorneys Make in Advertising” so you can avoid them – and prosper.

1. Most ads are not meaningful. In a day your prospective client sees more than 5,000 ads, so your ad must be unique enough to catch attention.

2. Mass advertising is expensive. When you advertise, you need to obey the Law of 7 Touches. It takes exposing your ad to your prospective client 7 times before he or she is willing to do business with you. So you have a tremendous up-front cost. Added to that, you should expect to receive, in revenue, a minimum of 5 times of what you spend.

3. Ads are not effective in encouraging people to “take action.” And that’s what counts: the action your prospect takes to do business with you. Without that, your money and time is wasted.

4. Most law firms lack follow-up systems. You may have designed a great ad, it’s precisely-targeted and people respond. But then, nothing happens. Nothing happens because you lack a system to follow-up with the leads that come from your ad campaign. And the money is in the follow-up.

5. No tracking of real results. This is just as bad as not having a follow-up system. Without tracking real results, you have no idea what works and what doesn’t. And that means you’re likely burning through cash without much to show for it.

To learn more about this law firm marketing topic, and others, I encourage you to attend my 2-day law firm marketing boot camp called The Rainmaker Retreat. (See details below.)

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Are you trapped into working more and more, while enjoying your life less and less? There is a way out.  It’s called the Rainmaker Retreat. In this two-day marketing boot camp for small and solo law firms, you’ll learn valuable information and practical steps to take so you can better market your small or solo law practice. The next Rainmaker Retreat is scheduled for Friday, March 27^th and Saturday, March 28^th in Las Vegas. Register early and receive $200.00 off your registration fee and $800.00 worth of bonuses. To register or for more information, go to: www.RainmakerRetreat.com or call .

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As in anything you do to market your law firm, you need to be strategic and deliberate about it. For example, you can’t just throw up a website – no matter how good a website it is – and expect potential clients to come flocking to your home page.

You need to do things to increase your online visibility, improving your chances of having those potential clients find you. 

Here are some steps to improve your online presence using articles, ezines, press releases and blogs.

Step #1: Define a topic area germane to your practice and your target market.

Step #2: Write a 400- 750 word article about that topic.

Step #3: Submit that article online.

Step #4: Create a press release from that article, discussing that topic.

Step #5: Submit that press release online.

Step #6: Use a part of that article in your ezine and link to it online. (100 to 300 words)

Step #7: Then take that article and develop a blog post from it. (100 to 300 words)

Step #8: Submit a second press release announcing the article you just published based on the original topic in Step #1.

(This law firm marketing tip – and many others – I present at The Rainmaker Retreat. See below for details on the next one.)

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If you think . . . you can’t make more money and have the time to enjoy your life . . . you’ve never been to a Rainmaker Retreat. If you’re a partner in a small law firm or are on your own and want to grow your practice while enjoying the lifestyle you deserve, you owe it to yourself to attend a Rainmaker Retreat. In this two-day marketing boot camp for small and solo law firms, you’ll learn valuable information and practical steps to take to better market your practice. The next Rainmaker Retreat is scheduled for Friday, March 27^th and Saturday, March 28^th in Las Vegas. Register early and receive $200.00 off your registration fee and $800.00 worth of bonuses. To register or for more information, go to: www.RainmakerRetreat.com or call 1-888-588-5891.

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These days in the legal profession, it’s especially true you can’t be all things to all people. Not only do you have incredible competition but you’re also facing very savvy legal consumers.

So what’s a small law practice or solo practitioner to do?

Niche your practice. And here are 4 ways to do it:

1. Service Niche: labor/employment, complex litigation, immigration, healthcare, IP, etc.
   
   
2. Industry Niche: transportation, construction, energy, real estate development.
   
   
3. Geographic Niche: LA-based, Southern California, region around Chicago, Mexico.
   
   
4. Specialty-Market Niche: privately held companies, Fortune 500, physicians, white collar executives, blue collar construction workers, Spanish-only speaking, developers, commercial lenders.

I encourage you to take some time to seriously consider how you can niche your practice. It’s the way to stand above the competition and to attract more of your ideal client, helping make your practice more lucrative and your life more enjoyable.

(This law firm marketing tip – and many others – I present at the 2-day law firm marketing boot camp called “The Rainmaker Retreat.” To attend my next one, see below.)

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Tough times call for tough action. This is especially true today in small law firm marketing, when the competition is fierce, the client dollars tight and your bottom line precious. Get battle-ready now with a two-day marketing boot camp called the Rainmaker Retreat. You’ll learn valuable information and practical steps to take to better market your small or solo law practice. The next Rainmaker Retreat is scheduled for Friday, March 27^th and Saturday, March 28^th in Las Vegas. Register early and receive $200.00 off your registration fee and $800.00 worth of bonuses. To register or for more information, go to: www.RainmakerRetreat.com or call 1-888-588-5891.

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In these challenging times, it’s very tempting to want to serve everyone, everywhere, never turning down any client, frantically trying to build your client base with whoever walks through your door.

But that is counterproductive. To make more, you must do less.

Do less? Sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it? But I ask you to stop and think, just for a moment.

When you’re trying to be everything to everyone you end up being nothing to no one. And in your prospective clients’ minds, you become one of the many, many lawyers out there, a big legal blur. And if that’s the case, how are you going to attract any attention, much less attract clients you can serve?

The answer: specialize. Now I’m talking more than focusing on an area of law, more than earning a specialist certification through your bar association, although both of these are important.

What I’m talking about serving a specific niche (woman’s divorce attorney) or even a niche within a niche (woman’s divorce attorney emphasizing child custody).

The 8 Benefits to Positioning Yourself as a Specialist:

1. Significantly higher rate of referrals.
2. Can charge higher rates.
3. More opportunities to offer them more expensive services.
4. Better client retention.
5. Not perceived as a commodity.
6. Value is based primarily on credibility and expertise.
7. Better positioned to get positive media coverage.
8. Easier to dominate your niche.

With all of these benefits, it pays to spend time carefully defining what “specialization” means to you. Certainly, it must make sense from your experience, training and if there’s a need out there. For example, I know of some law firms that do real estate law are now adding “loan modification” to their offerings. That’s the specialization I’m talking about.

So the next time you’re tempted to take the next client who walks through your door because he has a pulse and is breathing, think: I must specialize.

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Are you trapped into working more and more, while enjoying your life less and less? There is a way out.  It’s called the Rainmaker Retreat. In this two-day marketing boot camp for small and solo law firms, you’ll learn valuable information and practical steps to take so you can better market your small or solo law practice. The next Rainmaker Retreat is scheduled for Friday, March 27^th and Saturday, March 28^th in Las Vegas. Register early and receive $200.00 off your registration fee and $800.00 worth of bonuses. To register or for more information, go to: www.RainmakerRetreat.com or call 1-888-588-5891.

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I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had attorneys come in and say, “I just gave this great presentation to my target market, and it was just fantastic. I talked to dozens of people afterwards and it was great. I got a bunch of business cards and a bunch of contact information.”

But the attorney never follows up on those people Many attorneys would say they don’t want to seem ‘pushy,’ or they don’t want to “bother” the other person.

The truth is, those excited people you spoke to are probably wondering why they haven’t heard form you. They expect to hear from you. And you can believe if they don’t want to be bothered, they’ll let you know.

To succeed in marketing your small or solo law firm, you must be persistent. It’s a numbers’ game, where you have to get in front of X number of people in order to get X number of prospects, then follow-up with these prospects X number of times to get a client. This goes against the grain of traditional legal advertising, but remember that traditional advertising no longer works.

And don’t give up and take a passive approach to building your practice. A passive approach is like waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for a knock on the door or waiting for a referral to come in.

Like it or not, to survive, attorneys have to get in the game. On average, it requires 6 to 8 follow-up attempts to get in front of a prospect, even a prospect who is interested in what you are offering. So in building your practice, you must take an active approach to marketing.

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If you think . . . you can’t make more money and have the time to enjoy your life . . . you’ve never been to a Rainmaker Retreat. If you’re a partner in a small law firm or are on your own and want to grow your practice while enjoying the lifestyle you deserve, you owe it to yourself to attend a Rainmaker Retreat. In this two-day marketing boot camp for small and solo law firms, you’ll learn valuable information and practical steps to take to better market your practice. The next Rainmaker Retreat is scheduled for Friday, March 27^th and Saturday, March 28^th in Las Vegas. Register early and receive $200.00 off your registration fee and $800.00 worth of bonuses. To register or for more information, go to: www.RainmakerRetreat.com or call 1-888-588-5891.

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You’ve worked hard in writing the best marketing copy out. You made sure you had a strong headline. You were careful to stress benefits potential clients would receive when they hired you. You even added some key facts to buttress your claims.

Congratulations, counselor. You’ve just made a very compelling case in the court of marketing. But you forgot to do one little thing. You forgot to tell the reader of your copy what you want her or him to do.

You forgot the “call to action.”

You see, it isn’t enough to lay out a compelling case, as important as such is. You’ve also got to tell your prospective client what you want him or her to do with this information. How you want that prospective client to act.

A “call to action” falls into two main categories, the “statement” and the “offer.”

The statement is something like: “Please contact XYZ Law Firm to find out more about pursuing your personal injury case.” This invites your prospective client to contact you for information.

The offer is something like: “For your FREE report on the “5 Deadly Mistakes Accident Victims Make in Reporting a Claim,” contact XYZ Law Firm.” This invites your prospective client to contact you to receive something.

For either of these two categories, there are three tips to help you make that call to action strong:

1. You can replace the word “free” with the word “complimentary.” No matter which way you say it, you must make clear that this is a no-obligation offer.

2. Clearly telling your prospective client what you want her or him to do lessens that person’s confusion and makes it more likely that he or she will act on your information.

3. Not only must you clearly state what you want, but you must be specific in what you want. The sentence “XYZ Law Firm offers free consultations to discuss your personal injury case” leaves the reader saying “That’s nice. But so what? What’s in it for me?” That’s because this sentence is a statement, not a call to action. It doesn’t ask anyone to do anything. To turn that sentence into a call for action, you would write something like” If you’ve been injured, take advantage of our free consultation to find out more about how XYZ Law Firm works to protect your rights.”

So the next time you write some exceptional marketing prose, whether it’s for your website, a brochure or an ad, don’t forget your “call to action.”

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Tough times call for tough action. This is especially true today in small law firm marketing, when the competition is fierce, the client dollars tight and your bottom line precious. Get battle-ready now with a two-day marketing boot camp called the Rainmaker Retreat. You’ll learn valuable information and practical steps to take to better market your small or solo law practice. The next Rainmaker Retreat is scheduled for Friday, March 27^th and Saturday, March 28^th in Las Vegas. Register early and receive $200.00 off your registration fee and $800.00 worth of bonuses. To register or for more information, go to: www.RainmakerRetreat.com or call 1-888-588-5891.

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