The best leads are referrals. They have higher conversion rates and better case values. Staying top of mind with past clients, building loyalty and giving people a reason to recommend your attorneys is smart marketing. Now is the time to start making sure the investment you made to generate past clients pays off. Continue reading “The Referral Rule: Past Clients Pay Off”
Month: October 2013
Identity Crisis!
Don’t stress. Get back to brand basics.
One of the most common mistakes among legal firms is trying to be all things to all people. Building a brand can help you stop this mistake in its tracks.
By now you know that you are in one of the most competitive business’s in the world. And depending on your legal niche, that competition could be amplified 10 fold. So in the middle of the masses of firms marketing to the masses, how do you stand out?
The answer is branding.
If you want to increase your credibility and caseload, we highly recommend going back to basics. Building your brand doesn’t have to be intimidating. By engaging in a brand exercise, you’re simply revisiting your firm’s history, values, reputation and intentions. Ultimately, you’re giving your marketing efforts a focus by answering questions such as:
What do you stand for?
What do you want to be known for?
What are your five core company attributes?
What is your niche within your niche?
What do people think of when they see your firm’s name?
If you’ve never had a conversation about brand, it’s not too late to start. Or if your firm is changing from what you thought you were a decade ago, now’s the time to think about re-branding. Whether you are in a micro-niche or the massive personal injury market, for example, it’s your job to dig down to the essence of what makes your law firm stand out from the competition.
It could be a novel approach to client services, a consistent method for solving a core problem, identification with a particular type of client sector, a corporate culture that shines from the inside out, a proven ability to obtain settlements in even the most challenging cases, etc.
If you can’t define a differentiators, re-define it.
That means create a way to say what you do and who you are—which may be nearly identical to a competitor—in a different, more engaging, more compelling way. In essence, position your expertise, service style, results, staff, resources or results in such a way that creates a new point of differentiation.
The more clear your brand, the more consistent and aligned your marketing will be. And, like anything, being focused and efficient pays off by stretching your spend. In the end, if you don’t know what you stand for, how can you expect clients to stand by you?
Answering the call!
What do you spend on advertising versus answering the phone at your law office? Step back for a moment and think about how much time and money you invest in making the most effective TV advertising commercial. The point is to drive traffic and make the phone ring, right?
But what happens when the phone does ring—and all your advertising efforts start to pay off. Do you have the right people in place to make sure that those phone calls convert to cases? There are so many nuances to answering the call, from your intake professionals’ tone of voice to the speed in which your office addresses inquires.
If you’re wondering why your advertising is making the phone ring but cases are not growing at the rate you projected, the missing link might be a greater investment in the speed, accuracy and creativity of your call center. Here are a few questions any firm should consider when making a strategic plan for over-the-phone intake:
- How knowledgeable are your call receptionists or call-center specialists about your law firm and its services?
- Do they need to read from a script or can they answer on the fly a variety of questions about your legal services?
- How fast do your intake professionals return a call? What happens after they’ve left one message for a caller?
- Are you accidentally turning away cases because you’re not probing further into a caller’s questions?
- How do you handle after-hours calls?
Often the firm that’s the quickest to return a call wins the case. Other cases are won by the intake representatives who are the most creative when examining a caller’s legal needs—ones that might not initially fit into a firm’s “box” of services. Sometimes it’s the offices that have a strict policy about multiple follow-up calls that ultimately win the business.
Remember, intake is not about you. It’s about the caller—a busy person who has a life. And work. And kids. And can’t always carve out the time to return your call within 24 hours. That doesn’t mean your firm should give up trying.
If you want to increase your case load and ensure your advertising efforts have legs, start thinking more strategically about answering the call. You might find that a little fine-tuning can go a long way.