Everyone knows that attorneys don’t work if they don’t have clients. While some attorneys are well known enough that cases simply show up on their doorstop or in their inbox, most have to market and advertise. Legal marketing, especially in competitive practice areas like personal injury, can be a challenge to balance the cost to remain competitive with other attorneys while also not spending too much on case acquisition. Attorneys can quickly find themselves either missing out on cases because their marketing isn’t hitting the mark, or acquiring cases at too high a price point and struggling with profitability within their firms. Even though the need is there (the word “lawyer” generates over 66 million searches each month), there’s always competition.
Because of the challenges of creating and maintaining an effective marketing plan, particularly for law firms who deal with additional ethical boundaries, it’s helpful to have a trusted support system of attorneys who are dealing with the same issues. A group program is ideal for attorneys who want the advice & support, the confidentiality, and the hard numbers from fellow members of the group who are willing to share. The Brain Trust Legal MasterMind program brings together lawyers nationwide into groups of non-competing attorneys who work together to better each other by sharing their experiences, mistakes, and successes. Below are just a few of the valuable lessons and insights that are explored in the BTL MasterMind program.
Frequently, attorneys have one of two reactions when they’re not seeing the return on their marketing spend that they want. First, they want to shut everything off because they don’t want to keep spending money for little return. Second, they want to spend even more because they think ballooning the budget is the only way to make the results better. Both reactions are understandable, but neither one is the ideal course of action. Yes, you’ll save money by not spending that marketing budget, but then you’re back where you started without any new cases coming in. And yes, you may get more cases by spending more, but that can quickly put you in financial straits because you spent more than you should to acquire cases.
The truth is, there are three important elements you can focus on that will help you streamline your marketing and give it a greater chance of success:
A focus on improving these three elements will lead to an overall rise not only in the number of leads and potential clients that reach out to you, but an improvement in the quality of those leads. Let’s discuss each one of them in more detail.
Many attorneys will genuinely say that they will take any kind of client who needs their help. While that is the right attitude in terms of service, it’s not entirely true and can get an attorney into trouble. For instance, no attorney wants a nightmarish problem client, or a client that refuses to pay or take reasonable legal advice. Those might be obvious, but the truth is, there are many things that make you an ideal attorney for some clients while being less than an ideal fit for others.
The good news is, some of those things might already be accessible at your fingertips through the information you’ve already gathered on your previous clients. Your case management system has a treasure trove of information about your former clients, and it can be used to sort out elements that your best clients have in common. It might be financial in nature, with most of your clients coming from a certain income bracket. It could be location-based, with the lion’s share of your clients coming from certain towns or zip codes. It could even be demographically based, with a majority of your clients being of a certain sex or ethnic or religious background.
Discovering this information is key to your marketing for two reasons. First, it allows you to see who you should be targeting with your marketing, so you’re not wasting money trying to get clients from places you traditionally haven’t previously. Second, it gives you an idea of what elements to lean on in the marketing itself, making sure that you’re appealing to the groups and communities that have already started to gravitate towards you.
Many attorneys either don’t see the value in branding, or they don’t understand the difference between marketing and branding. However, branding is one of the most powerful ways to raise awareness and get new cases. While branding is a kind of marketing, a lot of the marketing that attorneys do doesn’t include clear branding.
For example, a classic legal ad on the radio might sound something like this: “Were you or a loved one prescribed Somalazine between 1998 and 2007? If so, you may be eligible for compensation.” This is an example of marketing without branding. This ad only discusses a specific kind of case, with no mention of an attorney or law firm. If a person heard this and didn’t use that medication, it wouldn’t register to them at all. Marketing without branding is a missed opportunity.
When you have a defined brand as an individual attorney or as a law firm, that becomes a continuing element in all of your marketing. It can involve slogans, logos, jingles, any number of things that stick in the memories of potential clients. The power of great branding is that people know you before they need your help, so they will remember and reach out to you when they need your help.
One of the most valuable processes in the entirety of the legal marketing process is making sure to track your marketing efforts as closely as possible. For all the money you’re going to be spending on things like billboards, TV ads, social media, radio, grassroots efforts, and more, you want to get a clear image of what is working and what isn’t.
For example, you might be angry that you’re spending a lot of money and not seeing a return, when the majority of the wasted spend could be on one or two specific marketing efforts. If you knew which ones were wasting the money, you could cut those out, still get generally the same number of leads, and put the money you’re saving towards new efforts. But you can’t do that if you don’t know how each marketing angle is performing.
That’s why tracking is vital to your marketing success. There are many ways to keep track of your marketing efforts. For example, you could use a single dedicated phone number just for your TV commercials, and another for your website. That way, you can tell where the traffic is coming from when they call. Another option for tracking is to create separate pages for the marketing efforts; if you run an ad on Facebook, send the potential clients to fill out a form on a separate page from the people who click on a Google PPC ad. That way, you can always measure the number of leads coming in from any single source.
Once you have these numbers, it is much easier to see what your good performers are, which ones might need some work, and which ones to stop entirely. By combining the knowledge of your ideal client, the power of branding, and the hard data of how your marketing efforts are delivering, you will see a powerful shift in the number of quality leads coming into your firm.
The power of any MasterMind group is in its ability to provide multiple perspectives of experience. When you share candid details of your marketing efforts with 16 other law firms, you’ll get needed and valuable insights into what they’re already tried, what is working for them, what they stopped doing, and what they’re getting ready to try.
You’ll learn about budgets, tactics, and vendors that an attorney would never share with their competition because it gives them an edge, but they’ll share with you because that is the purpose of the group: to use transparency and vulnerability to make all parties better. If you’ve been looking for an opportunity to improve your marketing efforts, you can learn more about the Brain Trust Legal MasterMind program here, or you can call (855)743-1636 from anywhere nationwide to speak with a member of the BTL team to get more information.
