A subscriber asked me, “What’s the number one question you get asked by lawyers about getting clients?”
That’s simple. They ask, “How do I find the time for __________ [marketing]?”
And that’s an interesting question.
Because you don’t find time. You take it, from something else. You give up something you’re doing so that you can do something else.
But you only do that if you want to. And clearly, many lawyers don’t want to.
Many lawyers see marketing as something they have to do, not something they want to do. One reason is that they don’t see the connection between doing the (marketing) activities and getting results from those activities.
With most marketing activities, you don’t get clients immediately. It takes weeks or months. Marketing is a process. You get your best results from the cumulative effect of your efforts.
One blog post or article doesn’t equate to one new client (usually), but if you post 50 articles this year, next year you might see three or four new clients per month.
Sometimes a single marketing activity can bring in a lot of clients in a short period of time. Your new ebook, for example, might get favorably reviewed and/or go viral, especially if it is properly promoted. But because it takes a lot of work to write and promote it, and the results of that effort won’t come for many weeks or months, if they come at all, many attorneys put that idea in the “maybe” file and never do it.
Lawyers are used to a monthly payoff, (when they bill their clients). They work, they get paid. Life goes on.
Even contingency fee cases also follow a predictable pattern. Since most cases settle most of the time, the attorney knows that he’s only a matter of months or perhaps a year or two away from getting paid.
Not so with marketing. With marketing, you don’t know what will happen. You don’t know if you will get any results out of it, or when.
In fact, the best strategies, like building relationships with the right people, take lots of time, and there is no guarantee that you will get anything out of it.
Of course lawyers don’t like uncertainty. They don’t want to waste their precious time. They don’t like to delay gratification.
What’s the solution?
The law of averages. Write enough blog posts, network with enough people, do enough advertising, or whatever, and while some things won’t work, others will. Some will have a small payoff, some will be a bonanza.
Do enough marketing, do it long enough, and your practice will grow.
But you have to know this in advance to be willing to invest time in marketing.
When you know this, everything changes. You see marketing not as something you have to force yourself to do but something you look forward to doing because you know what’s coming.
When marketing is no longer an extra appendage but a fully integrated part of your daily work flow, you will never again ask, “Where do I find the time?” You might ask, however, “Where do I spend all this money?”
For a simple lawyer marketing plan that really works, get this
