If a professional poker player managed your law office, one of the first things he would do is talk to you about hand selection. He’d show you, mathematically, why you should play the hands where the odds are in your favor and, unless you’re planning to bluff, fold the rest.
Play the odds. You’ll win more hands and the hands you win will have bigger pots. The hands you lose won’t cost you as dearly.
In college, I played a lot of poker. Most people didn’t know what they were doing. They’d play just about every hand, often going “all in” merely because they could. By the time the game broke up, they almost always went home empty handed.
You don’t want to do that. You don’t want to waste time and money in your marketing. You want to maximize your wins, minimize your losses, and go home a winner.
Playing the odds starts by choosing the right clients to target. Instead of targeting “anyone” with a legal problem you can solve, as most lawyers do, let your competition fight it out for the bottom eighty or ninety percent of the market while you target (and win) the better clients at the top.
If networking is a mainstay of your marketing, instead of spending your time at generic meetings (e.g., chamber of commerce, local mixers, referral groups, etc.), where you meet professionals who can’t send you much business, or the right business, choose small organizations comprised of your ideal clients and the people who can refer them.
If you advertise, don’t bid on the same keywords as your competition hoping to outspend them. Bid on cheaper “long tail” keywords that target smaller niche markets.
If you rely on “one shot” marketing, hoping to turn first-time website visitors into clients, you’re leaving too much money on the table. It’s much more profitable to capture visitor emails and stay in touch with them and convert them over time.
To be successful in marketing, you don’t need to the best player. As long as you play the hands where the odds are in your favor, and avoid the hands that aren’t, you’ll do just fine.
Marketing is more effective when you know The Formula
