6 Proven Tips for Marketing Your Law Firm

Are you growing as fast as your competitors? Here are six tips and strategies to help any law firm market itself better.

#1 Don’t Ape Your Competitor’s Marketing

Law firms are great at one thing: copying each other.

What works for the firm across town or across the street can look attractive. They’re getting results with it, so why shouldn’t you? That may be a trap. If you produce marketing that looks, sounds, and/or says essentially the same thing as your competitors, you could be wasting your money.

It’s tough to differentiate yourself when you decide to follow in a competitor’s footsteps. People who have been seeing their messages may even give them credit for yours.

The more things look and sound the same, the less people pay attention. It all becomes noise. It’s human nature to look for what’s different, not the same.

Imagine a parking lot with 99 white cars and one red one. Which car will consumers lock in on?

Most marketing dollars are spent creating noise. Don’t let those dollars be yours. Do something different and separate yourself from your competitors.

#2 Take Time to Build Your Brand

If a consumer doesn’t remember you, you are effectively invisible. The first step to being memorable is to be persistent. If you truly want a powerful brand, you need to be patient. Choose something and stick to it. Double down. Be relentless.

Consistency of marketing means many things.

• Always be marketing – don’t disappear from view. Keep rowing the boat, or you’ll leave the door open for other firms to step in.
• Follow the idea – More on this in tip #3!
• Be visually consistent – Every marketing piece should not look completely different. Make every ad your ad.
• Be tonally consistent – This is also called a “brand voice.” Say things in a way unique to your brand or firm and maintain the tone.
  

#3 Have an Idea and Make It Interesting  

Most successful advertising and marketing campaigns are built on an overarching idea. This helps you create a consistent message and means your marketing dollars are all marching in the same direction and to the same beat.

An idea can be almost anything. It can be a guiding principle that’s never communicated directly, like, “We do more for clients than any other law firm.” It can be a tagline like “Just Do It.” It can be just about anything you can imagine.

To help you understand what makes an idea work, here’s a formula to guide how you conceive and evaluate messages and ideas:

What does that look like? Here are a few (very) classic examples. We’ll use them from the same industry so you can see apples to apples.

This is Volkswagen’s classic “Lemon” ad. It is an example of an expected visual – a car in a car ad – with unexpected words. Lemon? Why would a car company label its product as defective in the ad? Because it’s intriguing.

The idea behind VW advertising at the time was to be counterintuitive. They were competing with, at the time, American cars that were very large, luxurious, and generally unreliable. They wanted to be counter-culture, and that carried the brand forward for decades.

Another classic example is this well-known ad from Volvo (of which there were multiple versions). It features expected words. A headline about how durable a car is in heavy traffic isn’t surprising. Showing the car wearing a heavy truck like a hat as a visual? Unexpected. Surprising. Interesting.

Volvo’s idea was always to be a safety leader – everything else came second. In that way, their idea was narrower than VW’s, but it was still the core of their marketing for decades.

If your message is not interesting, why would anyone pay attention to it?

Once you’ve settled on a core idea, adhere closely to it in messaging – even if you get bored with it. You will get tired of the idea long before consumers will. You are probably the only person who wakes up every morning and thinks about your firm. You see your ideas and messaging daily, while consumers encounter them much, much less frequently.

Try not to succumb to self-imposed “marketing fatigue.” Be patient. If you genuinely believe in the idea, give it time to work. If it works, allow it to continue. Let consumer sentiment or market changes influence your decision to shift gears, not the fact that you’re tired of it personally.

#4 Don’t Trust Your Gut Over Objective Tools

Having a good idea and killer messaging is only half the battle. The other half is choosing media, spend, reach, repetition, and all the other production, timing, and media-related decisions every marketer has to make.

And while you may choose your idea and associated message based on gut instinct, the rest should be handled much more scientifically. Test your marketing relentlessly with the tools you have available. Measuring helps you find out if your gut is right.

How will you measure the effectiveness of your messaging? Your firm’s processes and software can help in this area. If you collect your firm’s data and your software integrates intake and marketing data, you can generate detailed reports telling you which marketing initiatives are producing quality calls. This also enables you to test new initiatives against the ones that work to refine your message and improve your response rate.

#5 Online Reviews Are Worth Their Weight in Gold

We live in a review economy. Most people aren’t just going to call you out of the blue. They are going to research you online. If you have no reviews, that’s a missed opportunity. If your reviews are bad, that’s a problem.

Those Google burns to your brand may never heal. What program do you have in place for asking happy clients to submit reviews?

#6 Always Ask Your Clients Questions

At intake, ask clients how they heard about you. Why did they call you? Why did they choose you? At the end of a case, ask them more questions. How can you improve? What was their favorite part of your service? If they could change one thing about the service, what would it be?

Things can always improve. Go with what works, but don’t be complacent. Optimize your messaging (and processes) by asking the right questions to the right people at the right time.

GrowPath: Built to Take Your Marketing to New Heights

Getting detailed marketing reports to help you grow your firm used to be easier said than done. Not with GrowPath. GrowPath’s powerful analytics suite means you can choose what you want to see and then have it rendered in easily understood, insight-packed graphs and charts.

In addition to the awesome marketing reports, some popular GrowPath reports include:

• The Intake Analyzer – see where the calls, cases, and intakes are coming from and make more informed marketing decisions
• Settlement Posture Dashboard – see the cases that are close to settlement and disbursal and see how their final values compare with initial estimates and offers
• Settled Cases Report – See the source of the firm’s income, review by case type, policy type, and carrier, and correlate settlements with marketing sources to find your ROI

Knowledge is power. Data without analysis is just information. GrowPath helps you convert your information into powerful marketing insights that can drive growth for your firm.

Need to escape from your bad software? Schedule a 15-minute demo…before your competitors do!