Bringing in clients for your law firm is hard work.
Even more difficult? Bringing in clients without a bunch of legwork on your part.
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| The Best Tools to Boost Your Law Firm’s Online Marketing |
That’s what makes a well-oiled marketing machine so attractive to the small law firms I talk to. If referral business has too many ups and downs to live on alone, the next best thing is to have a marketing system in place that just works—like your referral network, you want your marketing system to bring you clients without having to pound the pavement.
To that end, there are 5 tools that I use nearly every day, with nearly every client, that cut waaaaaay down on the time I have to spend, while also improving my results. Instead of spending 20 hours on work that will bring in 1 extra client a month, I can spend 5 hours to get 2.
Sounds good, right?
Let’s get to it, then.
WordPress — Price: Free
WordPress, in a nutshell, is a super-powered back-end to your Web site. It makes it easy for non-geeks to add new stuff to the site, or change what’s already there.
If Web sites were cars, the old way of doing things (pre-Wordpress) would be a 1971 Ford Pinto—old, hard to work on, and prone to explosions. A WordPress site, on the other hand, is a 2000 Honda Civic—ultra reliable, and super easy to modify yourself.
(In the words of Will Smith’s character in Men in Black II… it’s “old and busted” versus “new hotness.”)
WordPress can manage everything on your Web site—from the text on your home page, to your contact forms, your customer testimonials, your blogging efforts, and more.
Using WordPress, you can create landing pages for your firm’s advertising campaigns, or offer incentives for people to fill out your contact form. You can even use it to post to your Twitter & Facebook pages, or create & manage email campaigns.
Did I mention you can do all that without talking to your Web developers?
It’s no wonder WordPress has been installed over 66 million times, and is used by organizations as diverse as the New York Times, CNN, General Motors, eBay, Sony, Best Buy, and the GOP.
If you want to automate your marketing, you need to get your Web site on WordPress.
Google Analytics — Price: Free
If you have a Web site that was built in the last few years, it’s almost guaranteed that you have Google Analytics running on it.
But, I can also guarantee that you aren’t taking full advantage of it.
Google Analytics can give you basic information about your site, like:
- How many people are visiting the site (or some particular Web page) each month?
- What percentage of visitors turn into clients?
But there’s so much more your Analytics reports can tell you!
For instance, here are 5 questions your Analytics can answer that could seriously affect how many visitors to the site will turn into clients:
- Should we have a mobile-optimized site? (If more than, say, 20% of your visitors are on phones or tablets, the answer is yes!)
- Which of our online ads are most effective (and which wasting our money)?
- Where are our visitors located in the real world? (If you’re getting a million visits a month, but they’re all from Istanbul, those visitors aren’t likely to hire you.)
- How many visits does it take before someone contacts us? (If the answer is “more than 1″—and it almost certainly is—you need to have strategies in place for bringing people back to the site.)
- Is our site slow enough that it’s losing us clients? (Studies show that if a site takes more than about 2 seconds to load, visitors will begin to simply leave.)
- Customer.io Email Sending Service — Price: ~$30/month
What happens if someone visits your site, but isn’t ready yet to pick up the phone and schedule an appointment?
For most firms I see, the answer is “nothing.” (Or if we’re being really honest, “hope and pray the person remembers us when they are ready to schedule a consult.”)
I don’t know about you, but I don’t like leaving that to chance. As Alan Weiss says, “absence does not make the heart grow fonder; it makes the brain forget.”
So how do you stay on a prospective client’s radar until they’re ready to talk to you? Better yet, how do you build trust with them in the mean time, making it more likely that it’s you they’ll eventually choose to talk to?
The best way I know of is to keep in touch over email. And not just your typical “yep, we’re still in business” newsletter—I mean offering prospective clients something valuable. A free download (like an ebook) accompanied by an email course educating the person about the topic they’re concerned about fits the bill.
For instance, suppose you’re a personal injury attorney serving plaintiffs. The vast majority of your clients have never been involved in a personal injury suit, so they come to you knowing nothing about the process—what they’ll have to go through, or even whether they might have a case.
If you’ll be generous enough to guide them through this, you’ll make a fan for life.
That’s where your email sending service comes in. When someone gives you their email address for one of these courses, what happens? The answer is not “use Gmail to send 5,000 emails/month”! You’ll need an email sending service, which will allow you to segment your subscribers into different groups—maybe one group receives a course on personal injury, another learns about divorce, and so on.
This is literally set-and-forget—once you create the emails, they’ll be sent magically on your behalf to anyone who signs up.
Personally, when it comes to sending services, I use and love Customer.io, but there are a million other options, too (Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and AWeber are all popular). Customer.io isn’t the cheapest provider, but I (and every client I’ve ever worked with) get sooooo much value out of my email service that the difference between $10/month and $30/month is just pocket change.
Plus, Customer.io is the only service I know of with the flexibility that I believe is necessary to really be effective with email—for instance, I send some things to my whole list, some things to smaller segments, and something things to just a handful of people, all depending on what they’re interested in. Try doing that in Mailchimp… then, after you’re through weeping in frustration, you can try it in Customer.io.
Lucky Orange — Price: $10/month
Imagine for a moment that you’ve just redesigned your firm’s home page. It has all the bells and whistles, and it’s ready to guide your visitors down the path to becoming a client. But what if it doesn’t work, and your phone doesn’t start ringing? How will you know where things are going wrong?
That’s where Lucky Orange comes in. It’s a tool that lets you see heatmaps (where people are moving/hovering their mouse) and click maps (where they’re actually clicking) on your pages. (Actually, your $10/month gets you a million other features as well, but those are the really big ones!)
“Absence does not make the heart grow fonder; it makes the brain forget.”
– Alan Weiss
Why would you care about that stuff? Studies (like this one from researchers at Carnegie Mellon) have repeatedly shown that people’s cursors follow their eyes. So, if you look at a heatmap of your brand-new-yet-underperforming home page and see that the heatmap is dead cold over the page’s most important headline (or your big contact-us-now button, or your video, or whatever), you can be sure it’s because people just aren’t looking at it! So, you get your Web designer to move some things around, and you retest it until you find a design that encourages people to pay attention to the stuff that turns “tire-kicking” visitors into clients.
Like email marketing, this is one of those tools that delivers soooo much value that you’d be crazy to quibble over $10/month.
Amazon Reviews — Price: Free
“Amazon reviews?! But I’m not selling stuff!”
If you thought that, make sure you’re sitting down, because this is going to blow you away.
Picture this: you’re creating a Web page for your firm’s newest practice area. You know that the most important part of showing visitors that you can help them with their problems is by communicating the unique value your firm offers—probably starting with the headline. But you, as a lawyer, are probably waaaaay too close to the practice to understand your value to your clients.
(No one is immune to being too close to their work. If you’ve ever seen a firm’s Web site call divorce a dissolution of marriage, or a check a negotiable instrument, you know they’re too close to see things from their client’s perspective!)
Now, one way to figure out what your clients are experiencing, what they’re looking for, and what is uniquely valuable to them about your services is to go out and interview past clients—talk to them and find out how they describe their past problem and what benefits they found in your help.
But, let’s face it… talking to clients is time-consuming.
What can you do instead?
You check out Amazon reviews! Whatever area of law you’re trying to write about, there are a million books on the topic. For instance, if you’re writing about divorce, you might check the reviews for How to Do Your Own Divorce in California in 2013, where you would find this comment:
You really threw me a lifeline when I felt I was sinking.
Knowing that people feel like they’re “sinking” when considering a divorce, you might emphasize your experience, and the fact that you can handle all aspects of the case and thus put your client at ease.
When looking through these reviews, copy down key phrases into a “crib sheet” (you can just create a new Word document for this) and use those phrases verbatim in your writing. If a “client” (a reviewer) already used those words, you can bet that those exact words will resonate with future clients.
So how about it? What tools have you used that saved you time or amplified your results? Drop a comment below and let me know!
Free, instant access:
No-BS strategies for getting more clients
If you’re ready to start getting more clients from your Web site—clients that don’t require hours of legwork on your part to bring in—sign up for our free email course, Supercharge Your Firm’s Lead Generation.
Then, over the course of the next couple weeks, we’ll show you the exact techniques we use to build a well-oiled marketing machine that brings in clients while you & your firm sleep.