The Attorney Marketing Center--Earn More. Work Less

19 ideas for your blog or newsletter

February 28, 2022 by David M. Ward

Looking for something to write about? Here are a few ideas to prime your pump:

Share the good news

Talk about good things happening in your world, for you, your firm, and your clients. Awards, settlements or judgements, new hires, new offices, being quoted in a news story, anniversaries or milestones (subscribers, followers), exciting new projects.

Business changes your clients need to know about

Are you modifying your billing practices? Changing office hours, opening a new office, adding technology, expanding into a new practice area or market, or doing anything new that clients need to know about?

Monthly recap

Tell folks what you’ve done and what you plan to do or focus on in the coming weeks or months. Are you writing a book? Creating a series of videos? What have you done? What are you planning to do?

Upcoming dates people need to know

Deadlines, reminders (e.g., to update documents), upcoming changes to law and procedure, holiday closings, and other dates clients and prospects need to be aware of.

New content

Anytime you create new content——articles, reports, checklists, forms, videos—alert your readers and followers, tell them how to access it, and how they will benefit from consuming it.

Success stories, testimonials, endorsements, reviews, mentions

What positive things are people saying about you? Don’t keep them a secret.

Tip of the day/week/month

What do your readers need to know? What do you recommend? How can readers do something better or faster, save time or money?

Recommended resources

Your content can simply be a recommendation and link to other content: websites, software, tools, businesses, professionals, productivity methods, books, videos, channels, courses. . .

Market news

What’s happening locally or in your niche your readers might like to know? Is there a new business in town? Is something shutting down? Expanding? Adding new products or services? New laws or regs? Petitions to be signed? Meetings, networking events, opportunities to socialize?

Great deals

Are any of your business clients or referral sources offering a discount or special offer? Any new loyalty programs? Spread the word.

Promote their event

Do you have a client or referral source who will be speaking, signing books, or conducting a webinar? Share the details with your list and encourage them to watch, listen, or attend.

A survey or poll, or results thereof

It doesn’t have to be your survey or poll, just something that might interest or affect your clients and readers. Invite them to give their opinion, vote for their preferred choice, or see what their colleagues or neighbors have to say.

Statistics

How many do, how many don’t, what are the trends, and what does it mean? Could be for your practice, your state or county, or your field. it could be your own findings or re-posting from another source.

Social media updates

Have you added or removed any channels? Changed your bio, or added new photos? Are you planning to do a “live”? Did you interview anyone notable? Were you interviewed? Is there someone you suggest your followers follow?

A roundup of your most popular articles or posts

Give readers a chance to consume content they might not know about. Let them know what others are clicking on, commenting on, or sharing.

Get personal

Share your opinion about world events, changes in the law, trends in your target market’s industry. What’s going on in your practice or personal life readers might be curious about?

Answers to FAQs

What do clients and prospects and new clients ask you? What does your audience ask you when you speak?

Case studies

Problem, action, solution. What did a client want or need? What did you do? How did it turn out?

Where will you be?

Announce your upcoming speaking engagements, networking events, panel discussions, webinars. Promote the event, encourage readers to attend and to tell others.

Save this list, add to it, and use it when you need ideas.

For even more ideas, go here

Filed Under: Blogging, Newsletters

How to talk to a prospective client

February 25, 2022 by David M. Ward

You’re speaking with a prospective client. You ask questions to discover what brought them to you so you can tell them what you can do to help them.

Slow down. Too much, too soon.

Yes, ask questions. You need to know what they want or need, but before you go down that road, there’s something you should do first.

Make them feel good about their decision to contact you.

They’re probably nervous. They don’t know you or trust you. They’re worried about their problem and how much it’s going to cost to do something about it.

So you want them to relax. See you as someone they can talk to. Someone who wants to help them, and not just because they’re going to pay you.

We’re talking about building rapport.

This isn’t terribly difficult to do, if you’re willing to take a few minutes to talk to them before you put on your lawyer costume and demonstrate your super powers.

Make them feel comfortable and respected. Make them feel good about their decision to contact you.

Start by seeing them “on time”. Ask if they want something to drink. Treat them like a welcome house guest, not a walking checkbook. Ask if they had any trouble finding the office or parking or how their day is going.

Yes, small talk.

When you are both seated, ask them to tell you about their situation. Give them your undivided attention. No phone calls or texts. Make eye contact, listen to them, take notes, and don’t do anything else.

Ask follow-up questions to fill in the blanks. Take more notes. Taking notes shows them that what they’re saying has value and you want to hear it.

Let them do most of the talking. If they’re angry, let them get it out. Make appropriate noises or comments to validate how they feel.

When they’ve told you their story, repeat the salient points back to them. (Refer to your notes). Give them an opportunity to hear what they told you and how it sounds, and clarify and add things they might have forgotten.

Then you can shift into problem-solving mode. Tell them the options and ask what they’d like to do.

During the conversation, listen for “commonalities”—things you or your other clients have in common with them. Kids, school, pets, industry or market, or what they do for fun.

If you have something in common, mention it. It might be as simple as saying, “Me too” or “I love that show”.

People like to do business with people who are like them, or who represent people like them. Don’t underestimate the value of shared experience.

Finally, thank them for coming to see you and confirm the next step, even if that’s “I’ll email you a proposal” or “Let me know what you’d like to do”.

You probably do most of the above, maybe all of it, most of the time. But when you’re busy or distracted, it’s easy to forget something or let the client see you’ve got other things on your mind.

But this is their time, not yours. So make sure you get yourself out of the way and let them have center stage.

Filed Under: Client relations

Better today than yesterday

February 24, 2022 by David M. Ward

A legal career is a long journey. You start out as a new puppy, trying to find your legs and learn about the world. Everything is exciting and new, and nothing is easy.

I remember those days. Figuring out the forms, learning how to talk to clients, negotiate, write documents, litigate, and do all manner of important things for the first time.

It was difficult, but I only had a few clients and plenty of time to figure things out. I was young and hungry and scared, but I enjoyed the newness of it all.

If you’re at this stage, cherish this time for what you are learning and who you are becoming.

As I got busier, I entered another phase, with bigger problems to solve, more clients to juggle, and much longer hours. I was busy, but I wasn’t making much money. I still had a lot to learn, especially the business of practicing law.

I got serious about marketing, made changes, and brought in more clients and bigger cases. I was able to hire more help and while I was busier than before, I no longer “lived” at the office.

If you’re at this stage, appreciate all that you’ve done to get here and the many discoveries and adventures that lie ahead.

One day, I realized things were just working. I had money, lots of work and lots of help, and I knew what I was doing. I was busy but not busier than I wanted to be, and I was happy that I could continue doing it without the struggles of days gone by.

If you’re at this stage, congratulations. You made it to the top. Your career is in high gear and you have options. You can continue to grow and take things to an even higher level or you can re-direct some (or all) of your resources into other things—business, investments, philanthropy, writing or speaking, or fun.

Wherever you are right now, whatever phase of your journey, you are precisely where you’re supposed to be. Appreciate where you are and where you’ve been, and get excited about where you’re going.

Filed Under: Career satisfaction, Inspiration

Send in the clones

February 22, 2022 by David M. Ward

Some marketing goofball tells you to create a description of your ideal client. You sit down to do that and come up with some ideas.

You want clients with lots of money and lots of legal problems. Or you want clients who know a lot of other people with legal problems. Or you want clients who are easy to get along with and readily follow your advice.

Or you want all of the above.

You go through the exercise and make a long list of things you want and some you don’t want. You describe their industry or occupation, their market or niche, and other demographics.

Eventually, you come up with a profile. “There, that’s my ideal client.”

Very nice. Now you can optimize your marketing to attract more of these perfect specimens.

Sounds like a plan.

But there’s another plan you might want to follow, especially if you’re not sure what you want or how to describe them. Maybe you’re new to all this, or maybe you’re still not convinced you need to spend time on this exercise.

Fortunately, there’s another way you can go about this.

Sit down with a list or database of your current or former clients and point to the ones you consider your best clients. Your favorites.

Who paid or pays you the most? Who has the most work for you? Who sends you the most referrals, the biggest and best cases, or the work you most enjoy doing?

Don’t think too much. Go with your gut. And then narrow your list to no more than 30.

Pretend that marketing goof asked, “If you could only have 30 clients and would have to farm out everyone else, who would you choose?“

Once you have your list, study it and the people and/or businesses on it, and reverse engineer it.

What do these clients have in common in terms of industry or market, needs or wants, demographics, or other identifiable characteristics?

How did they find you? Why did they choose you? What do they like about you and what do you like about them?

Write down what you see and you have a profile of your ideal client.

Later, you can add to or modify that profile, to add different markets, practice areas, or other descriptors.

But you might not need to do that. Because you’ve already got a great list of clients you want to clone.

How to choose your ideal client and target market

Filed Under: Marketing legal services

Content marketing is a waste of time

February 21, 2022 by David M. Ward

Prospective clients don’t want to read or listen to an attorney talk about the law. They don’t want information, they want help. Attorneys should spend their time doing legal work, not writing blog posts and articles or recording podcasts and videos.

Many attorneys believe this. But is it true?

Sorry, it’s fake news.

More than anything, prospective clients want information. They have questions and go online looking for answers—about their legal situation, their risks, and their options. Or, they know they have a problem and go looking for an attorney who can help them with that specific problem.

Many attorneys say they are the best choice. They’ve got a lot of experience, satisfied clients, and they want to help. That’s fine, but most prospective clients (and the people who refer them) want more.

It’s all about information. Because if it’s not, how are they supposed to know what to do and which attorney to choose?

Your content shows them you know the law and have handled this type of problem before. The information you provide and the stories you tell about other clients you’ve helped prove it.

Your content builds trust and helps people understand why you are the right choice.

Prospective clients get answers to some of their questions. They see you have experience and you are generous in providing this information. They hear your “voice” and get a sense of what it would be like to work with you.

Your content not only attracts prospective clients, it sells them on hiring you.

So no, content marketing is not a waste of time. Nor is it difficult to do.

You write (or hire someone to write) blog posts, articles, reports, ebooks, and/or record podcasts, videos, or presentations, and you disseminate this. Prospective clients find your content and consume it, see why they need to do something, and why they should hire you or connect with you to learn more.

Your content also has a long shelf life. Something you write today might bring you search traffic and leads and new clients five years from now. You can also re-use and repurpose your content into other formats, for different markets or for different legal situations.

Content marketing also gives you great posture. It’s inbound marketing. People come to you.

And when they do, if they’re not yet ready to hire you, your content can help build a list of prospective clients, allowing you to stay in touch with them, remind them you’re still available to help them, and continues to show them why they should choose you.

Email marketing for attorneys

Filed Under: Content creation Tagged With: content marketing

Big shots focus on the big picture

February 18, 2022 by David M. Ward

You are a leader. Even if you are a one-person band, you are the guiding force in your practice or career.

You should do what leaders do.

You should spend most of your time and energy focused on big picture strategies that help you achieve your goals.

Most lawyers don’t. Most lawyers spend their days doing client work and mundane tasks, not building for the future.

Leaders lead. They choose the destination, the tactics and tools, and create an atmosphere that attracts and supports others who accompany them.

Leaders focus on

Strategic planning
Casting vision
Creating culture
Building relationships
Improving reputation
Professional development
Personal growth

The leader understands that the firm delivers professional services, but is also a business and must be profitable. The leader continually seeks ways to increase revenue and decrease expenses, to ensure the firm’s viability and future growth.

The leader prefers to grow the business by hiring new people, creating new marketing alliances, and expanding into new markets rather than putting in more hours.

Yes, someone has to see the clients, draft the documents, and win the cases. Sometimes the leader does that. Sometimes the leader delegates much of that to their team. Sometimes the leader delegates all of that to their team while they focus on the big picture.

As you look at this list, think about how you spend your time and ask yourself how much of it you spend doing what leaders do.

Filed Under: Law office management, Leverage, Personal development, success Tagged With: leadership

Planning your day

February 17, 2022 by David M. Ward

Some people say they don’t need to write a to-do list, they can remember everything they need to do for the day.

Maybe they can. Maybe they have just 3 or 4 things they need to do and they do pretty much the same things every day.

But most people are busier than that.

Can you remember all of the calls you need to return tomorrow? Do you know what your email inbox will bring, which new cases or clients will show up, which issues you will have to deal with?

Every day may be basically the same, but every day is different. And if you don’t write things down, you won’t remember.

The value of a written list, however, isn’t just the list itself. The value is in the process of making the list.

Writing a to-do list forces you to think about your goals and obligations and choose your priorities for the day or week. Thinking and writing leads to clarity and clarity leads to commitment, and what good is a goal or obligation if you’re not committed?

Writing things down also decreases anxiety. You know what you will do that day, and what you won’t do. You know you won’t forget something important, or be overwhelmed with too many boxes to tick.

You’ve already thought things through and you can focus on execution.

When do you make this list? You make it before your day (or week) begins. When the current day is over and you are no longer “executing,” you plan the following day. Give yourself ten minutes each afternoon or evening to review your calendar and your other lists and decide what you want tomorrow to look like.

And write that down.

Now, here’s the million dollar secret to making your list work for you instead of the other way around.

When tomorrow begins and you’re working your way through your list and calls and emails and letters come in, when you remember other things you need to do, don’t do them.

Write them down on the list for tomorrow or later in the week or next week.

You have a list for today. Work on that list today.

If you finish today’s list and you have time, you can look at tomorrow’s list and start working on it. But only if you want to.

It’s your decision. Your list works for you, not the other way around.

Filed Under: Productivity

Adventures in dictationland

February 16, 2022 by David M. Ward

I’m not a dictation-only kind of guy. I enjoy typing and do most of my writing that way. But there’s something liberating about being able to sit down, flap my gums, and have the words appear on the page, and when I dictate, I’m able to crank out a lot of them.

For a long time, I used DragonNaturally Speaking to dictate on my Windows desktop. I recently retired that computer in favor of a new laptop and haven’t installed Dragon. When I want to dictate, I’ve been using Google Voice Typing, which is fast and accurate, at least for me. The only drawback is that you can only use it via the Chrome browser and I use Brave as my default.

A few days ago, I downloaded a free app called LilySpeech (Windows only) and have been trying it out. It uses Google’s servers for transcription and seems to deliver equally impressive results.

The advantage of LilySpeech is that I can use it anywhere on Windows—in any browser or app, including Scrivener, which is something I wasn’t able to do with Dragon. Right now, I’m dictating this into Obsidian, and it works like a charm.

On iOS, Siri dictation works well but times out after 30-40 seconds. I tried Google Docs Voice Typing, both the app and via Safari, and it also times out. But who knows, I may be doing something wrong.

The Drafts app (iOS, Mac, Android) does dictation well. I just tested it on my iPad and it didn’t time out, even after several minutes of continuous speaking. (If you get different results, try launching a new document via the widget instead of the app.)

When I started practicing, I would dictate and record and have a secretary transcribe it. Today, many attorneys record and upload to a transcription service like Rev.com. But unless human transcription is required, I’m a proponent for letting technology do it.

There are many other options for each platform that seem to deliver varying degrees of speed and accuracy. If you’d like something that’s cross-platform and can be used via the web or an app, I recommend giving Otter.ai a try. They have a generous free plan and the paid plan is reasonable.

Otter has a couple of killer features to recommend it. It allows you to transcribe a conversation, identifying each speaker by time stamp. Very handing for interviews and meetings. Otter also adds punctuation (at your option), meaning you don’t have to dictate it.

So, over to you. Do you use dictation? What apps or process do you use on desktop, web, and mobile?

I’m all ears.

Filed Under: Productivity, Writing Tagged With: speech to text, voice dictation

Marketing leverage

February 15, 2022 by David M. Ward

When it comes to marketing your practice, if you’re not growing as quickly as you would like to, you might stop and ask yourself if you’re making things harder than they need to be.

You can use your back and legs to lift a boulder, straining and struggling, huffing and puffing, or you can use a lever to make the bolder easier to lift.

You can use a lever in your marketing, too.

Instead of trying to find clients one at a time, doesn’t it make sense to find a few influential people who have the phone numbers of those clients on speed dial? Why not direct (some of) your marketing efforts towards the people who sell to, advise, or otherwise work with the kinds of people and businesses you would like to have as clients?

You already know this works. You know professionals, business executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and others who are influential in your target market. Some of them have sent you referrals. Some have introduced you to people who have asked you to speak or asked to interview you for their podcast or have asked you to write for their blog.

You want to know more people like this.

Because they can help you achieve your marketing goals in a fraction of the time than you could on your own.

It might take time to develop those relationships, but they can bear fruit for decades to come. They can also expedite your growth as they introduce you to other centers of influence in your target market.

Where do you start?

Step One: Identify them

That’s easy. They look a lot like your existing referral sources and business contacts. Start by identifying categories, by profession or business, industry or niche, and by other factors.

Once you have a list of categories, identify individual candidates. Talk to the people you know and ask them who they know who fit that description. Or hit up your favorite search engine and find their websites.

Step Two: Contact them

Also easy. Ask your existing contacts to introduce you, or pick up the phone and introduce yourself. Most have their phone number on their website.

Step Three: Build a relationship with them

This is where the rubber meets the road. This is what takes time and effort.

But not as much as you might think.

We’re talking about a business relationship, not courtship and marriage.

You talk to them, find out more about what they do, and tell them a bit about yourself. And you explore ways you can help each other (and each other’s clients or customers).

You find out if there is any synergy, and chemistry. And you see where it goes. Which is no doubt what you did when you built relationships with your current business contacts.

The key is to be willing to help others without the expectation of getting something in return.

When you do that, when you approach this with an open mind and heart, you build trust and open doors to new opportunities.

Where will it lead? Maybe nowhere. But if just a few of these new contacts want to work with you, it could be the start of a new and exciting chapter in the story of your career.

How to identify, approach, and build relationships with influential people—step-by-step

Filed Under: Leverage, Marketing legal services, Referral sources, Relationship marketing