Over the years, direct marketers have pioneered techniques for getting the most out of their marketing efforts. They are the Bruce Lees of the marketing world, striving for minimal efforts with maximum effects.
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| What Lawyers Can Learn From Direct Marketers |
There’s a lot that’s worth taking away from this philosophy—both for your firm’s client acquisition and other aspects of your service.
“Only speak to your 8s, 9s, and 10s”
I first heard this advice from Tim Conley of The Foolish Adventure show, via one of the most famous direct marketers of all time, Joe Polish.
It goes like this:
Imagine you “score” every client lead you get, from the tirekickers to the people who are beating down your door to hire you. A 1 means the person will never do business with you; a 10 means they want to hire you yesterday.
A direct marketer will tell you to only pursue the leads you rate an 8, 9, or 10.
Put another way: unless you think it’s very likely a prospect will turn into a good client… don’t waste your time.
See, direct marketers know that there are thousands of 3s, 4s, and 5s. At any one time, you can find loads of people who could hire you, if the circumstances were right.
Maybe they’ll want to micromanage your work… Maybe they’ll focus on the cost of your services, rather than the value… Maybe they’ll take weeks to return your phone calls… but they could become clients.
If you focus on those 3-, 4-, or 5-rated leads, you’ll make bad decisions. You’ll spend time on things that don’t appeal to your ideal clients, or worse, things that drive away ideal clients. (Compromising your fees? Becoming a jack of all practice areas? These are things that will make it much harder to get clients you love, and a little easier to get clients that will make you miserable.)
Cultivating your firms’ reputation—and your future business, referral business, and so on—depends on delivering a second-to-none experience.
Let’s face it: most people won’t be a good fit for you, and vice versa. Instead of spending your time on would-be clients who just don’t get it, you could focus on the 8s, 9s, and 10s. Your marketing efforts will get easier, but so will your actual engagements. The 8s, 9s, and 10s are the people who will work with you year after year, send you referrals, return your phone calls, and respect your advice.
Doesn’t that sound nice?
Always have a response in mind—a call to action
Good direct marketers don’t do anything without suggesting a “next step” for the would-be client to take. This is known as a “call to action.”
This next step isn’t necessarily “hire me now.” The idea is simply to let prospects “raise their hand” and say “I want more.” In many cases, signing up for an email course is a great next step—it’s low-commitment, but it gives you permission to follow up with the lead.
In order for your call to action to succeed, direct marketers know you need a compelling offer—a reason for a prospect to raise their hand.
This could be any offer the prospect finds valuable, from a free ebook to a free consultation. The key is simply to show the prospect why it would be valuable.
For instance, suppose the response you want prospects to give you is to sign up for your email newsletter. Here’s how most law firms would offer this on their site:
Sign up for our newsletter below and we’ll keep you up to date.
I’m positively clambering to sign up. Aren’t you? (Sarcasm doesn’t translate well to text, but you get the point—not a compelling reason to sign up!)
What if instead you focused on the value your newsletter would provide? Something like:
Sign up below for weekly tips on protecting your legacy & caring for your loved ones.
That’s much stronger. For your ideal prospects—your 8s, 9s, and 10s—that will be much more appealing.
Measure, measure, measure
Where traditional advertisers are focused on nebulous things like brand perception, direct marketers want data. If they can’t show a positive return on investment for a particular effort, they kill it without hesitation.
So, the way a typical campaign works is:
- Try your best guess (such as an email, direct mail, or online ad campaign).
- Measure how well it works. What’s the ROI? If it’s good, go to Step 3. Otherwise, go back to the drawing board & try something completely different.
- Come up with a way to improve upon it, and go to Step 2.
That’s a great way to approach your firm’s marketing. (As Larry Bodine advises, “Don’t waste any money on marketing that is not measurable. If you can’t measure it, don’t do it.”) But it’s also useful for improving other areas of your practice.
What’s measured improves.
For instance, suppose you want to improve client satisfaction after an engagement. You could simply make the changes you believe are needed. After all, it will probably work.
If you want to be certain, though, you could measure—ask clients to fill out a quick, two-minute survey to gauge their feelings. Used before & after your new procedures go into effect, you could be confident in your decision either to leave your changes in effect or try something else.
(For more on this approach to testing & improving, check out The Complete Guide to Marketing Your Law Firm Online.)
See beyond the sale
A few years ago, I ran across a story of a direct marketer that really hit home with me.
In the article, Denny Hatch talks about his efforts to improve sales for a cookbook subscription service. The company was doing everything right on the marketing front—signups were as high as ever, but customers were canceling at an alarming rate.
What Denny found was that, in their zeal to get customers “into the system,” the company had lost sight of the experience of using their service. The carefully crafted welcome package, jam packed with the (free) reasons the customer signed up, was arriving after their “selling” packages—the ones that ask for money.
When the company fixed the new customer’s experience—delivering value before demanding a sale—they turned profitable.
This story illustrates something we all know… something that’s easy to forget.
Too often, once you’ve signed on new business, you coast.
Ultimately, though, you’re doing business with people—people who speak well of great experience, and keep to themselves about mediocre ones. That means the “sale” doesn’t stop once you get a Direct marketers are the Bruce Lees of the marketing world, striving for minimal efforts with maximum effects.contract signed. Cultivating your firms’ reputation—and your future business, referral business, and so on—depends on delivering a second-to-none experience.
If it takes accepting a small inconvenience to delight a client, accept it. The value of a happy client outweighs the cost.
Ignore the fads
I’ll leave you with a quote from Audrey Price-Dix, chairman of the Assegai Integrated Marketing Awards.
Direct Marketing is evolving every day; in some cases, it seems that we have come full circle. A few years ago, there was the rush to telemarketing, and then came the rush to the Internet. Now marketers are starting to understand that all of these—telephone, mail, Internet, e-mail, so-called “new media”—are simply alternative channels that enable direct contact with a customer.
That’s as true of marketing as any other area of your practice—regardless of the latest fad, the fundamentals remain the same.
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