Lawyer Marketing GuyLets Understand the Marketing…!

#1 Lead Your Marketing with the Highest ROI Vehicle

• Of the hundreds of marketing vehicles which one offers the possibility for the highest return on your investment? Invest in the highest-ROI vehicle first. Only after you have saturated your highest-ROI vehicle should you move forward to your second-highest-ROI vehicle.
• Monitor and modify frequently. Any time your ROI slips, adjust your message or the delivery mechanism. After adjusting, if you don’t see a return to high ROI, withdraw your funding and invest in the next highest ROI vehicle. Review frequently.

#2 Understand the Difference Between What you Offer and What People Buy

• You offer services; people buy solutions to their problems. (Proctor and Gamble sells shampoo to people who want clean hair.)
• Go deeper. (People want clean hair because…)
• People buy perception, not reality.
• Express your services in terms of what people buy (security, confidence, experience, loss protection, value, likelihood of success, understanding, etc.).

#3 Understand Who Buys Your Stuff

• Understand who buys your stuff. Business people? Other lawyers? Consumers?
• Define your audience from every possible perspective: socio-economic, geographic, image-sensitivity, age, risk-sensitivity, etc.
• If your firm provides services to more than one group, design unique marketing strategies (messages and delivery vehicles) for each group.

#4 Define and Target Your Audience

• Before you design any marketing communication, know who wants or needs your services-know your potential customers intimately.
• Design your communications to meet the needs and desires of your potential customers.
• Speak to only one customer at a time.
• Buy media that reaches your target audience, not media that reaches the largest number of people.

#5 Design Your Marketing Around Problems and Solutions

• People hire lawyers to solve problems, or to prevent a problem from occurring. Design your marketing so that it is clear—you solve problems.
• In print advertising, use the headline to present a problem. In the subhead, provide the solution.

#6 Define Your Unique Market Position

• Why should somebody hire you rather than your competition? Be realistic.
• Brand your unique market position (e.g., “the insider,” “always here,” “the lawyers’ lawyer”).
• Find ways to communicate your unique market position in an irresistible fashion.

#7 Be Faithful to Your Unique Voice

• Once you have created your unique place in the market, stick with it: actively and intentionally grow your brand. Remember, people buy things (including services) because of their uniqueness, not because they are like other things.
• When you stand apart, you get noticed. (Don’t follow others.)

#8 Make Yourself Easily Accessible

• Create an image of warmth and availability. (Too many law firms create images that focus on prestige and tradition. Granite walls may create the image that you’ve “made it,” but if those walls get between you and your potential clients, your marketing will have to work a lot harder to generate new clients.)
• Create marketing-only telephone lines for your office. Publish a unique number in all of your advertising so when that line rings, everybody knows it’s a prospective client calling.
• Create a welcoming, we-are-here-to-please-you message both within your office and in all of your external marketing.

#9 Know Your Resources

• How much money do you have to invest in marketing? How much time do you have? Allocate your resources to achieve the maximum return on investment for your marketing programs.
• If you have more money than time, hire a consultant with a track record of success and give her a budget. Step out of the way and monitor results.
• If you have more time than money, pursue marketing programs that are time-heavy and money-light. (Direct contact, seminars and workshops, networking, volunteering, public relations, practice brochures, publishing, trade services, etc.)

#10 Know Your Competition

• Your firm is not the only firm actively pursuing new customers. To win the lion’s share of the pie, you must know what your competition is doing. You must be more aggressive. You must be smarter. To edge out the competition, you must know what they are doing, and you must play the marketing game better than they play the marketing game. When it comes to generating new clients, the second choice never gets the telephone call.

#11 Keep Egos and Marketing Separate from Each Other

• Your marketing is not about you; it is about what you can do for potential clients better than anybody else.
• If you create a marketing message that makes you look good, throw it away. Even Charlie knows people don’t want tuna with good tastes.

#12 Don’t Design Marketing Communications to which You Think You Might Respond

• You are not your potential client. Your potential clients don’t think like you think. They don’t even like the same food you like! Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking that if you like a marketing message, potential clients will like it too.
• Don’t design an ad layout or direct mail piece so you will like it. Too many truly great marketing pieces have been left on graphic artists’ tables in favor of less powerful pieces because the client liked the lesser piece, and did not see or understand the value of the powerful piece.
• Don’t look at your marketing messages through your eyes. Take your marketing messages out to others for their opinions. (If you take your marketing messages to your staff or to your spouse for “more objective” opinions, you will get more, and varied, opinions, none of which will be much more valuable than your own. The only person whose opinion counts is the potential clients’. Think of it this way: Don’t ask your wife and staff what flavor of ice cream the kid standing on the street corner likes the most. You may love your wife and your staff, but they don’t know what flavor of ice cream that kid likes any more than you know. Ask the kid.)

#13 Don’t Buy Statistics

• Most people who sell advertising have compelling statistics that demonstrate buying their advertising vehicle is a prudent choice. Ignore these statistics; they mislead. If you need to rely on statistics, get them from an unbiased source.
• Statistics are not clients. (Nobody has 1.9 children.)

#14 Tell the Truth

• Always.

#15 Adopt a Winning Attitude

• The return you get on your marketing investment is influenced by your attitude. Create and maintain a great outlook every time you participate in building content, designing marketing material, or buying media. If you discover you have a bad outlook on a day you have scheduled yourself to work on your marketing, reschedule.
• Go all out, as though you are designing your future. You are.
• Plan to win. Big.

#16 Never Advertise From Fear of Loss

• Advertising decisions that are motivated by fear (“some other firm will get these clients if I don’t advertise here”) will almost definitely result in poor returns.
• Advertising decisions that are motivated by possible gain tend to produce? gain.

#17 Sell Only the Best

• If you decided to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door, wouldn’t you research to find the best-value, best-performing vacuum cleaner on the market, and then get a job with that firm? Your advertising will always reflect your beliefs about your firm. If you don’t believe you can offer the best value and performance, your advertising will reflect that.
• If you can’t offer value and performance, change.

If you abide by these seventeen time-tested marketing principles, your marketing cannot stray too far from success.

Names are important. Names can make or break advertisers. Do you know what an MRI is? Did you know that, in the early days of this medical science, we had NMRIs? What is the difference between the old NMRI and the new MRI?

Nothing. The name was changed from NMRI to MRI because people were afraid of being tested by a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Indicator. (“Nuclear” refers not to atomic energy but to the nucleus of the cell, which is charged magnetically to get a picture of what is going on.)

Did you know there is no chocolate in “white chocolate.” White chocolate, which is a combination of butter (or oil) and sugar, was commonly called “almond bark.” Almond bark was not very popular until the confections industry renamed it “white chocolate.” Now, it seems white chocolate is everywhere.

Have you noticed that the GOP no longer uses the term “global warming?” Instead, they use the term “global climate change.” The public does not seem to be very alarmed about global climate change; it’s weather.

Simple word changes can make huge differences in perception and, down the road, in attitudes and action.

That is why many lawyers choose to be called attorneys. The public often perceives lawyers as the “bad guys” and attorneys as professionals.

What does the public think about “personal injury lawyers?” It is not pretty. How about a name change that better communicates what PI lawyers do?

Personally, I like the term “negligence attorneys.” A lot of people don’t like to sue — that is until they have a good reason to. Negligence may be a better reason to sue than personal injury.

People get hurt; it is not always somebody else’s fault. However, when we sue for negligence, it is clear who the “bad guy” is.

I say let’s become “negligence attorneys.” The term clearly defines who the good and bad the guys are.

What terms do you use in your marketing that might serve you better if you change a word or two?

Search engines are huge. They’re important. They’re useful.

Let’s start with what I’m talking about when I say search engines. Search engines are web applications that crawl the web indexing text. Search engines allow users to search the index by keyword, and provide links to matching resources.

Directories are also lists of internet resources, but they are manually entered by a person (rather than the automatically crawled by search engine spiders). Directories also allow users to search an index by keyword.

Because people use directories in the same way as search engines, they are often lumped together as search engines. There is also confusion because Yahoo started out as a directory, but added crawl-based search in 2002.

The business of search engines is fascinating.

The race in the search engine world is going faster and faster, with the giants adding new tools and services left and right.

Google just launched a new cost-per-impression and targeting for Ad Words beta, and a personal search tool in beta – allowing users to keep a detailed history of their past searches. Yahoo launched My Web in beta on Wednesday (4/27), boosting their personal search history service. Google’s IPO was the hottest news in technology since the 1990′s.

And the usefulness of search engines is mesmerizing.

According to the January, 2005 Search Engine Users study by Pew Internet, 38 million American adults use a search engine every day.

We use search engines to find definitions too modern to be in the dictionary.

We use search engines to find an exact address.

We use search engines to research geography, history, and astrology.

We use search engines to see photos of landscape designers’ prior work.

We use search engines to learn all about Britney Spears.

We use search engines to find a lawyer when we have no referral.

People often like to do a little reading about an attorney to establish an image of who the attorney is. We want to see what kind of a relationship we can have with the lawyer before calling with him or her.

This is a good reason to have a website. And a good reason to market with search engines, so people can find your site.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has many parts – advertising (sponsored links and pay-per-click ads), directory submission (paid or unpaid), and search engine optimization (SEO – where your site’s copy, design, code, and structure make it easier to get higher results in search engine queries).

Each of these factors of SEM is valuable, but you need to evaluate your business goals to see which are right for you.

Paid advertising is often a good way to jump-start your search engine rankings.

There are a lot of attorneys on the web, and attorney directories have been marketing on the web for a long time, so they hold the highest organic rankings. Findlaw is everywhere.

It takes time to get organic rankings on search engines, and in directories.

While directory administrators are reviewing your submission, and before the web crawlers have found and indexed your site, you might use sponsored links and pay-per-click ads to get your site to be listed on the first two pages.

And since most users don’t look at results past the second page on a search engine (iProspect’s Search Engine User Attitudes Survey), you really want to be on the first two pages.

If you provide valuable information (and my first recommendation is that you do – include links to resources, for example) you might even get a link or two from an outside site. And those links boost your organic rankings on many search engines.

Submitting to directories can not only allow your site to appear in directory results, but some search engines also use directory listings to determine the rank of their crawled results. Some directories allow you to submit your site to them for a fee, some simply require that you do your research and submit to the proper category.

Within your site, there is a lot you can do to boost your organic ranking. You can optimize your site’s copy to utilize competitive keywords for your practice, so crawlers associate those keywords in their index with your site.

You can optimize your sites design, code, and structure, to enable those spiders to crawl through your site quickly and efficiently. Building search engine optimization into your site is becoming standard, but it’s best to make sure your web designer is on top of it.

Using search engine marketing, you can help get your site on search engines so people who need you can find you.

Print Media: Traditionally, print media, though an information-focused media, have a very heavy advertising component. As a general rule, newspapers and magazines format with a 1:1 advertising to information, or “editorial,” mix. (In traditionally-formatted newspapers and magazines, for every column inch of information, there is a column inch of advertising.)

As a result of this content mix, when people read newspapers and magazines, they expect to see advertising. Frequently, people read newspapers for their advertising content. Sales, movie listings, tire pricing, classifieds, and coupons are valuable and integral to the make-up of newspapers. Many travel, health, fashion, and sports magazines are purchased for their advertising content as much, or more, than for their information or entertainment content.

Advertising in print media – be it in newspapers, magazines, or yellow page directories – is often welcome; it is certainly expected. Though no publisher of note has tried it yet, industry experts have long held the position that were the advertising content to be removed from magazines and newspapers, readership would drop precipitously.

Broadcast Media: Contrast the way viewers feel about advertising in print media with the way viewers feel about advertising in broadcast media. When viewers watch television, they are doing so because they want to be entertained or, in the case of news or talk radio, informed. These viewers are decidedly not looking for advertising content.

Viewers see television and radio advertising as intrusive.

How do viewers respond to advertising in broadcast media? They hate it. Oft times, they switch channels, or get up from the sofa to take care of a quick chore. To say the least, viewers avoid advertising in broadcast media. Witness the rapid growth of commercial-free radio programming such as Web radio and XM Radio and the new generation of digital recording devices designed to edit out television advertising