In my last article, I mentioned the need to put a system in place to increase your visibility as a lawyer. However, creating a platform to increase your visibility is not enough if you then say something that turns prospects away from you.
Many lawyers understimate the importance of their marketing message or simply don't work on it very well even if they do think it is important. Some reasons for this include:
- No feedback system in place to understand what prospects and clients really want in terms of information or guidance before they have to pay for expensive legal services;
- Making messages too complicated for prospects to understand;
- Not appealing to the recipient's self interest, and assuming you know what their key desire is;
- Failing to establish credibility by ignoring the value of case studies, testimonials or pointing prospects towards information and resources that address the ‘what is in it for me? question;
- Not making the messages provided compelling enough to get the readers to act in a specific way.
This list is not exhaustive, but it does show some of the common mistakes made by lawyers when presenting themselves to prospects.
Getting over the ‘message-market' mismatch is key – you have to say something that promises to deliver what your target market wants most. You should not assume you know what is going on in the minds of readers. Quite often, you will be wrong or miss the one or two things that compels them to talk to other lawyers.
Some lawyers have started to use content marketing strategies to try and build relationships with prospects. This is a good step, but should be done carefully. You can easily overwhelm readers by providing too much or complex content, and not make it easy for them to understand how they can overcome their fears. Once again – you need to refer back to the 5 points I made earlier that contribute to the failure of marketing messages and address each point.
How the message is delivered is also important. Lawyers need to think of a variety of ways to communicate with prospects. Most importantly, these should direct prospects readers towards information they are looking for or to get them to sign up for something (such as a seminar).
There should be no assumption that the tactics used offline to complement any web marketing strategies or communications should be different. Everything should be congruent in terms of achieving a specific goal – getting prospects to take action immeditely.
Once the right messages have been crafted, it is important to have an effective lead capture system in place in order to win in the current economic climate. That is the subject of my next article.
About the Author:
Eria Odhuba helps lawyers implement new online business models to attract more clients to their practices, giving them the chance to be succesful and enjoy the things they would like to do but can't because they have no time or money. |
