When it comes to reaching would-be clients for your law firm, a lot’s changed in the last few years.
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| How to Get in Front of Your Law Firm’s Potential Clients (The Smart Way) |
It’s not enough any more to have a good reputation and a Yellow Pages ad—clients are searching the Web, reading blogs, and hitting social media to find out who they should hire. What’s a small law firm to do?
There are 3 key areas you should focus on when you’re trying to attract new clients:
- Differentiation (so that ideal clients see you as an exact match for their needs)
- Communication with old clients (for referrals)
- Online exposure (for new traffic from across the Web)
Here’s how this works:
Differentiate your firm for a happier, more profitable practice
Imagine this: you’re an old, wizened business owner looking to sell your successful home improvement store and retire to a California beach.
You know you’ll need an attorney for the acquisition, and you come up with a couple of recommendations from your contacts.
How do you decide between these two—assuming you trust each of the recommenders about the same?
Jessica K. Jacobson, Attorney at Law: 10 years of experience, specializing in mergers & acquisitions of small, family-owned businesses.
Robinson, Cooley, Leitch, & Murphy: 40 years of experience, general practice handling everything from divorce to criminal defense to M&A.
It’s a no-brainer, right? You go with the person who’s made your exact need their life’s work… not the firm that “dabbles” in the area. Who cares about “years of experience” if it’s in areas that don’t matter to you?
(Incidentally, the same goes for any practice area—all else being equal, a general practitioner will always get beat out by a specialist… even if the quality of work they do is the same.)
By working with your firm to choose a niche, you’ll be better equipped to target your ideal clients, because you’ll be able to articulate clearly why your firm is the best choice for them. Likewise, because of your focus, they’ll be much more likely to find you on their own.
As time goes on, you’ll get better and better at helping clients in your niche get exactly what they need. You’ll know the unique challenges they may face, and you’ll get good at staving off problems before they occur… all of which feeds your referral machine.
Stay in touch to keep the referrals flowing
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating… Absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder, it makes the brain forget.
The more you can interact with your past clients—whether it’s sitting down to lunch, catching up over the phone, or sending a monthly newsletter—the more referrals you’ll receive.
Most of the people you connect with won’t be in contact with a great prospect for you every day. But that makes it all the more important that you keep in touch over the long haul, so that when they do hear of someone who could use your help, you come to mind immediately and they can make the connection for you.
To cultivate these referrals, you can:
- Make it a habit never to eat alone. Invite past clients to breakfast or lunch. Let them know what you’re looking for, and see how you can help them. It doesn’t have to be with legal services—maybe you can refer them to a great preschool for their kids, or even just suggest a TV show they’ll love.
- Send a monthly newsletter, packed with things your clients will find valuable. That absolutely does not include the outcome of the latest big-name case, but it may include a story about a client success, or spotlighting a book, service, or tool they might find interesting.
- Send physical mail. Whether it’s just a seasonal greeting card, an excerpt from something you’ve written, or another client success story, having a physical reminder of your firm around can help keep people thinking of you.
Get the word out on the Web
There are 3 big ways to get people to your Web site: from a search engine, from an advertisement, or from another site.
Organic traffic & SEO
When it comes to getting so-called “organic” traffic from the search engines—that is, traffic for which you aren’t paying advertising fees—search engine optimization is the name of the game.
I can see you shudder now. But don’t worry. I’m not suggesting you try the next crazy scheme to outsmart Google—that stuff never pays off in the long run anyway.
No, true SEO (what I call “honest” SEO) is all about creating great content and telling lots of people about it. The key is simply picking the right content.
For your site (whether we’re talking about your blog, main pages, whatever), your goal is to target search phrases with little competition. Generally, that means going after “long tail traffic“—traffic from less common, more specific search terms (think “springfield slip and fall attorney” rather than “personal injury lawyer”).
By creating hyper-specific articles on those topics, you can capture traffic that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to compete for. See my article “Creating Content for the Long Tail” for a detailed guide on putting this strategy in place.
Paid traffic & advertising
Free traffic from your SEO efforts is awesome, but it takes time to get going—expect it to take 6 months to a year to make a meaningful impact on your business.
In the mean time, you can pay for visitors to your site—through advertising.
By running ad campaigns with Google, you can pay for traffic from specific search terms (like “personal injury chicago”). When done right, this is a money machine—you pay $x, and make $2x (or $3x or $4x) later.
The downside, of course, is that it’s really easy to lose a lot of money doing this wrong.
For a whole lot of detail on how to get your ads right, check out my guide to getting started with Web advertising. In the mean time, though, I have a few high-level tips for how to avoid wasting money.
- Track your return on investment. Your Web site should be set up to monitor how many people are coming in via your ads, how many are turning into leads (via a contact form or phone call), and how many are becoming clients. Unless you can track all 3 of those, you’ll have a hard time improving things (or even knowing if what you’re spending is worth it).
- Write super tight, user-focused ads. If your ads waste space with your firm’s name, your tagline, or any other “branding”-type copy, you’re wasting money. Instead, make your ad hyper-relevant to the search terms it’s shown for. That brings me to my next point…
- Write different ads for different search terms. People searching for “business litigation” are not in the same mindset as people searching for “business formation”—don’t try to cater to both with a general “business law” advertisement. Instead, create separate ads that are highly relevant to the (tiny group of) keywords they target.
- Send traffic to dedicated landing pages which directly match the ad the person clicked on. That is, when I click an ad for “business litigation st louis,” don’t send me to the home page of a St. Louis-based law firm. Instead, take me to a page on how your St. Louis-based firm can help with business litigation in particular. There should be nothing else on that page that would distract me from my task—no discussion of other services, no links to extraneous pages, etc.
Referral traffic from your publicity efforts
The third variety of site traffic is known as “referrals.” These happen when someone is on a different site, then clicks a link to go to your site.
While it’s very difficult to build a Web strategy based primarily around referral traffic, it can make for a great supplement to other sources. In fact, over time, you may find that traffic from certain sources produces a disproportionate number of clients for you, because those people come predisposed to trust you as an expert. Depending on your practice area, that golden goose could be anything from business journals, to “mommy blogs,” to investment news sites—you never know until you try.
So, how do you get featured on other Web sites? Two ways:
- Using a media connection service (like Help a Reporter Out or Media Diplomat). These services allow reporters, authors, and bloggers to connect with expert sources for their projects. It never hurts your reputation to be cited for a major news story, and you can outsource the monitoring of these sites to your assistants.
- Using your personal network. You can write a guest blog post on other business’s Web sites, or deliberately connect with influential people on the Web, with an eye toward promotion in the future. (For an in-depth look at how I connect with these influencers—without being awful and spammy—check out my free course on getting more clients for your law firm.)
In theory, you can use press releases to get this media coverage as well. In my experience, though, the results are generally less than stellar—you’re better off spending your time on the tactics above.
The secret to success: Take small steps every day.
If you’re serious about getting in front of more prospective clients, it’s going to take work… and there’s no such thing as an overnight success.
Instead, what here’s what it takes to succeed in the long run:
Make consistent progress every day.
That sounds crazy simple, but it’s much more difficult to put into practice. How many people do you think try one of the strategies above, but give up 3 weeks into it? This stuff isn’t rocket science—the reason more people aren’t getting more business from these tactics is because they’re hard to practice consistently.
If your goal is to get 2,000 visitors a month to your Web site, you’ll do it by getting one visitor at a time. You’ll get one visitor at a time by creating a blog post every week, or refining your ads, or responding to reporters. The key is simply to never give up—it may take 6 months or a year before you see a meaningful impact in your business, but eventually, you’ll see compound growth, and that little impact will turn into a major source of clients.
(Want more on this topic? Check out Jeff Olson’s book The Slight Edge, or host a “Business Book Review” of it with my friend Shawn Kinkade.)