Having an in-house marketing manager for your law firm in addition to retaining an ad agency seems redundant, doesn’t it? After all, isn’t a marketing manager’s job to handle all aspects of your law firm’s marketing? So, wouldn’t it be duplicative to pay an ad agency for the work your marketing manager is supposed to do? However, in practice, a marketing manager really can’t do everything a full service ad agency can do. But your marketing manager can really help your law firm’s marketing perform well by working closely with your agency.

Who Keeps Track of Your Law Firm’s Advertising?

Did you have a tough time answering that question? If so, your firm could use a marketing manager. Your marketing manager should always know what tactics are implemented and how those tactics perform. By keeping better track of your firm’s advertising, you will be better equipped to talk with your agency and develop more specific strategies to improve your marketing efforts.

Better Understanding = Better Creativity

Where a marketing manager really pays off is in relaying a better understanding of your firm to your advertising agency. The more an agency knows about your firm and your practice, the more educated they are to develop marketing strategies that fit your firm and your market. While advertising agencies are able to do competitive research and understand the media landscape, it can be challenging to take the pulse of a client and understand a firm’s personality. Ad agencies can also have a difficult time understanding what a firm’s goals and objectives are and whether those goals and objectives are being met without a point person.

Relationships are Key

At the end of the day, relationships are paramount for the success of any business venture. Without a symbiotic relationship with your advertising agency, your law firm’s marketing could suffer. Marketing managers help aid the information sharing that goes on between your firm and your ad agency and can help come up with ideas and tactics for your firm’s marketing campaign. Marketing managers are especially important in law firms where the partners don’t have time to keep track of their own marketing efforts. If no one in your firm is keeping track of your marketing, then how do you measure success? For ideas on how your firm can better track its marketing efforts, contact Network Affiliates today.

The last impression you leave with your current clients is extremely important. They are officially going out into the world as either a brand advocate or a brand antagonist for your firm. Firms have the power to sway clients’ opinion, but very few take the necessary steps to do so. It is all about what you leave them with.

Give them something to talk about

Write a sincere letter explaining your appreciation for their business, and your sincerity for their recovery to a normal life. Take it a step further and express your desire to help others in similar situations. Provide them with links to sites where they can express their experience. If you are worried about getting more negative reviews than positive ones, this gives you an opportunity to reevaluate your client services.

Tell us how you really feel

Give them an opportunity to tell you how you can better assist them. This can be done on camera or via email. If you send them a survey via email, make sure it is mobile compatible (browsed easily on a phone). The majority of your clients use their phone as their primary resource to access the Internet.

Follow up

There are several email platforms that allow you to schedule emails. Utilize these platforms to send a follow up email after a client’s settlement, just to make sure everything is going well. This is an extremely valuable way to build brand loyalty.

It is so easy to move on to the next client only to forget about the money and time you invested to get the client before them through the door. Nurturing those past-clients results in referral business, which means better quality cases; plus it makes everyone in the office accountable by measuring their current client approval rate. Contact Network Affiliates today to learn more about what your firm is leaving behind.
 

Why Should I Keep In Touch With Past Clients? This is a question that should be common sense among lawyers, but it still isn't. For whatever reason, attorneys still operate very transactionally. This means they assume that when you are done handling a client's case, that is the end of that relationship, for all intents and purposes. It's almost like a fast food sort of mentality where you serve that person once and you move on to the next case like nothing ever happened. Not keeping in touch with your past clients is a huge mistake and is costing your firm money.

Referrals are the life blood of your law firm- It seems like we've said this a hundred times in this blog at this point, but it bears repeating; referrals are the best cases your firm can get. These cases cost you little or nothing to receive and most are well qualified and worth a lot of money. Where do you get these referral cases from? Your past clients. You can't get these cases if you aren't staying in touch with your past clients. So, how should you keep in touch with clients that have been satisfied with the work your firm does?

CRM still works- CRM is a great way of staying in touch with your past clients. Sending brochures and newsletters to past clients still works well and will help your firm win cases. If your firm doesn't want to kill any trees, your firm can send out your newsletters via e-mail. Sometimes, the simple gesture of sending a card is enough to distinguish your firm from others. Birthday cards, thank you cards and holiday cards are all still effective. We suggest, however, sending out cards for holidays where cards aren't as common. Thanksgiving is a good example. If you know your past client was a veteran, a card on Memorial Day or Veteran's Day might be appropriate. Really, the sky is the limit and any of these activities will help your firm develop more referral based business.

Social media was tailor made for keeping in touch with clients- Social media is a sector where few law firms are active. Having an active social media presence will allow your past clients to engage with your law firm and keep your firm top of mind. This results in more referrals for your law firm. Having positive reviews on Yelp and engaging with reviewers is another way to keep in touch with past clients and develop more referral based business. Your firm can also post testimonials online or videos discussing situations you have helped clients out with to show how your law firm can help. This is a new frontier for attorneys and is still maturing. Learning how to develop referral based business online can only help your law firm grow its business.

Choosing just a handful of ideas from this blog post and implementing them will make a difference for your firm. The question is, how many of these ideas are you willing to implement? Don't bite off more than you can chew. Start small and then add more to the solid foundation you have built. Referral cases are the best cases that come into your office. You owe it to yourself and your firm to do a better job in obtaining these cases. To discuss how to best keep in touch with your previous clients, contact Network Affiliates today.

When thinking of PR, many law firms still think of press releases and articles in a newspaper. While press releases and free publicity based articles can still be important components of a PR campaign, PR is now a wider category than ever before. As such, it is important to know all of the ways PR has changed and how it can impact your business.

For starters, press releases aren’t just aimed at newspapers anymore. Press releases can be distributed online and syndicated to various websites all over the Internet. When writing these press releases for distribution online, make sure that you have a couple of keyword rich links back to your legal website. This will have a huge positive impact on your SEO as your website will be receiving quality links from reputable, highly trafficked websites. Furthermore, having articles in news outlets will help keep your firm top of mind with people who read those online publications that your press release is featured in.

Anymore, PR also includes social media. Think about it; has there ever been a better way to keep in touch with the general public than on Facebook? With Facebook, you can push out relevant information about your law firm’s involvement in the community in a matter of seconds. This information is then pushed to all of your lawyers’ friends’ and fans of your firm’s Facebook page where their friends can see it. If the friends of your firm’s friends want to push that out their friends, they can do so. What this all means is that your content, if relevant and interesting, can spread virally so easily with social media. This makes it a wonderful PR tool whose power has never been seen before. Also, it’s free, which is amazing considering how many people your firm can reach with the mere click of a button.

Now some of you may be wondering, “How do I manage my PR when someone says something negative about my firm online?” That’s where reputation management comes into the picture. You need to have a handle on what people are saying about your firm online. If you don’t know what people are saying about your firm, your law firm may be vulnerable. Don’t just try and ignore this conversation. Get involved and truly listen. Then, engage with those individuals and improve the reputation of your lawyers and law firm. Some tools you can use to do so are Social Mention, Topsy and Kurrently. Search your firm’s name on those sites and see what is being said. If you see anything negative, you should respond. This will improve your brand image and increase the positive word of mouth about your firm while minimizing the damage of any negative sentiments. While this may not directly bring cases in the door, it will help with keeping your firm top of mind and will help to generate more referrals in the long haul.

PR isn’t just newspapers and simple press releases anymore. It’s all about relevant content, using the Internet to leverage this content and knowing what is being said about your firm online and managing the conversation. If you are trying to improve your firm’s PR and don’t know where to start, contact Network Affiliates today.