Your law firm is sick. A disease that afflicts your marketing efforts has taken hold, and it’s wreaking havoc on the firm’s health. In fact, the firm likely has more than one disorder, and the symptoms are getting more and more pronounced with each passing day.
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| What’s Ailing Your Law Firm’s Marketing? |
The good news is that, while these are serious illnesses, they aren’t a death sentence. It may take a major operation to treat your law firm, but it can come through it. Follow the prescribed treatment, and the firm will be back to full strength in no time.
Sound good? Okay. Let me tell you a bit about each of the possible diagnoses…
[Yup, we're carrying this metaphor through the
whoooooooole
article. Deal with it!
]
Disease #1: Being you-focused, not client-focused
This is a condition that can infect everything your firm does.
What’s worse: it’s easy to contract.
After all, you’re more familiar with what you do—your practice areas, your system for servicing clients, and so on—than you are with anything else. Often, this means you’re too close to your work to see that you aren’t addressing your clients’ needs.
There are a few telltale signs you can use to diagnose this illness.
- Look at your Web site. How often do you use “I” and “we” compared to “you”? For a lot of firms, this is an eye-opener—even when you talk about your clients, it might be in relation to your firm: “We help our clients achieve _______” and so on.
- Think about your home page. What client “pain” or desire does it aim to address? In the best attorney marketing, the answer will be immediately obvious—fear of being exposed to unnecessary risk, a desire to care for loved ones, and so on. In most marketing, though, the answer is… not applicable. Most firms build their home page around what’s important to them (practice areas, partners, and so on).
- Consider your advertising campaigns. How often do you talk about your firm’s brand rather than the benefits of hiring you? You aren’t Coca Cola. Chances are, spending money to build name recognition isn’t benefiting anyone but the ad agency.
- As Matt Homann suggests, read over your bio. How much of it is written because it’s what you care about, and how much of it addresses the real concerns your clients have?
The cure for this malady is simple at its core: put yourself in your client’s shoes and ask, “Why do I care?”.
This point of view forces you to identify the problems your clients face and address them. Furthermore, it will help you express your unique value proposition—the reason clients choose you instead of a competitor.
For an in-depth look at becoming client-centric, see the complete guide to marketing your firm on the Web. Nearly half the guide is devoted to understanding your ideal clients and communicating with them effectively in your marketing.
Disease #2: Ignoring lead nurturing & education
More of a chronic ailment than a disease, ignoring the nurturing process for your would-be clients won’t kill your firm—in fact, many firms continue on for years without realizing it’s a problem. During that time, though, this condition saps your strength and makes any marketing you do less effective.
The upside is that, when treated, you’ll be amazed at how much healthier your flow of business becomes.
To recognize this condition in your firm, ask yourself:
When a would-be client isn’t yet ready to hire you, what happens?
Often, the answer is that after a few weeks, someone maybe follows up with that person. If they aren’t ready to do business with you then, they probably fall off your radar.
There’s an alternative, though—a cure for this condition.
What if instead of crossing your fingers and hoping they come back to you, you helped them along the path to becoming a client? This doesn’t have to be pushy—most of your would-be clients are in serious need of education. Ask yourself: What’s involved in getting legal help in this field? Who’s a good fit for your help with ________? Are there pitfalls that people often overlook?
This education—whether sent automatically through an email sending service or by mail—will dramatically increase the chances that a prospect will turn into a client. Over the course of a few weeks, it allows you to build trust with the client and position yourself as the most helpful expert they’ve ever encountered—without bombarding the person with information about you & your offerings.
My free course on getting more clients for your firm goes into serious detail about this education strategy—what to offer your prospects, how to create it, how to incorporate it into your Web site, and so on.
Disease #3: Falling out of touch with clients
This third disease is a complication of the previous one. When you ignore the lead nurturing process, you’re also likely to ignore communication and ongoing education of existing clients.
The symptoms are easy to see: few referrals, and little repeat business from past clients.
After all, your clients are busy people—they don’t regularly run through a list of people they’ve done business with and think “Hmmm… do I know anyone who could use their help? Do they offer other services I might need myself?”.
That means the burden is on you to keep in touch. The remedy, then, is to stay in front of clients as much as possible. While there are a million ways to do this, a few are most effective.
- A few months after your work with a client is finished, give them a call. Ask how things have been going, and see if they’ve gotten the results they were seeking. You don’t have to ask for a referral directly (though you could)—just keeping yourself on their radar is valuable.
- Ask every client for permission to send them your monthly newsletter. (Micro-tip: don’t call it a newsletter. Give it a name indicative of the value the person will receive from it.) Use this newsletter for ongoing education about new services you can offer the client, or to share client success stories.
- Follow your clients on social media, and share things they’ll find interesting or valuable.
Disease #4: Ineffective (money-wasting) advertising
Wasting money on your firm’s advertising is by far the most socially acceptable of these diseases. After all, everyone’s heard that
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.
—John Wanamaker
Don’t waste any money on marketing that is not measurable. If you can’t measure it, don’t do it.
The trouble is, in this day & age, you can know “which half.” In fact, when you’re running your ad campaigns correctly, you’ll be able to only spend money when it generates a good return. (Hint: probably not that Yellow Pages listing.)
The treatment for this, then, is to put systems in place to rigorously track your advertising. Depending on the medium, that may be using Web analytics, a special phone number to call, a unique offer, and so on.
Disease #5: Not cross-selling or up-selling clients
This is an easy bug to catch. No lawyer I’ve yet met has naturally liked selling—after all, you went to school to practice law, not to “peddle your wares.”
The issue is that your existing client base is your best source of future work. Once you’ve done business with someone, you no longer need to build trust or establish yourself as someone who can help them. Your clients already believe that!
Often times, then, the key to getting more business from your clients is simply to ask. Where additional services make sense for the client, tell them. Don’t wait for them to do the research to come up with all the ways you could help them, because that will be a long wait.
Getting comfortable with cross-selling and up-selling other services requires a fundamental change in your attitude. Instead of viewing selling through the lens of the used car salesmen, look at it this way:
You have outstanding value to offer this client. You care about them, and you would be remiss not to offer to help them in whatever way you can.
When you approach it from this angle, your offer to provide greater service isn’t an attempt to swindle a client out of money—it’s a way of delivering something valuable to them.
Disease #6: Ignoring client satisfaction
This last disease is perhaps the most insidious. Unlike problems with your Web site or your advertising, you can’t examine client satisfaction directly for diagnosis. Nonetheless, when left untreated, this condition can destroy referral sources for your firm.
No one likes negative feedback. When a client is unhappy—with your communication, your delivery, your results, or whatever else—it’s easy to blow them off. “He’s a jerk,” you think, or “she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” That negative feedback, though, can be your biggest source of growth.
The treatment, then, is to learn from this criticism.
You should be examining negative feedback every quarter as a practice—reflecting on your clients’ satisfaction not just with your firm’s attorneys, but with the front-line administrative staff and anyone else in contact with clients as well. Your non-lawyers may have unique insights into what people complain about that you otherwise wouldn’t hear.
If you want to go a step further, you can survey your clients at the end of each engagement. Criticisms you receive here allow you to the chance to make things right before you mar your reputation in the client’s mind.
As Seth Godin says,
The complaining customer doesn’t want a refund. He wants a connection, an apology and some understanding. He wants to know why you made him feel stupid or ripped off or disrespected, and why it’s not going to happen again.
When clients express their displeasure, they’re giving you a second chance to make things right. If you can turn a bad experience into a good one for that client, you’ll gain a new, loyal fan. After all, the client has likely never received service like that.
There’s another benefit to client surveys. As you examine them, you may find patterns in why people are unsatisfied. You may get conflicting feedback—Client A says your frankness is your biggest asset, while Client B was offended by it. Or, you may find that certain types of clients (small businesses, single dads, worker’s comp cases, etc.) are consistently unhappy in ways you simply can’t change.
In those cases, you can look at the data to better refine who your ideal client is, and better screen out (or refer) bad clients in the future.