Law firms are marketing legal services with social media including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest and others.
Are you feeling left behind because you don’t have the time to interact with all of these social media sites?

The question is do you really need to market your law firm on all of the social media sites or even on any of them. After working on cases and speaking with clients all day, do you really want to share content and interact with followers on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+?

You can outsource your social media content sharing but that can be a disaster if you pick the wrong firm. Social media marketing is one area where you shouldn’t look to save money if you don’t have the time to do it yourself.

Many inexpensive services which provide social media content sharing are in foreign countries. These services often provide extremely poor content with spelling and grammatical errors. This type of outsourcing can not only turn off your followers but can harm search engine optimization efforts.

If your law firm provides legal services to the general public such as personal injury, criminal defense, family law, etc., social media may be beneficial but will require a lot of time to generate followers and cultivate your following. Unfortunately, social media can be more time-consuming for lawyers providing services to the general public because more social media sites are available for this.

Corporate law firms can have an easier time since they generally have more employees with someone who can be assigned to take care of the social media marketing. Additionally, corporate law firms can just use LinkedIn.

John Boitnott, in his article published at Inc. suggests that law firms only need to use LinkedIn and Facebook but I think LinkedIn is more important. The article highlights the mistakes you can make with social marketing.

How much time do you need to spend and how much time can you afford to spend? I have a Facebook page but I haven’t had time in last two weeks to even look at it. If your planning on doing your own social media marketing, I have an article at Top10GoogleResults.com providing information on the number of times per day and the best times per day to share content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn & Google+.

 

 

 

Do you have marketing and testimonial videos on your law firm website? You should! 90% of users say a video about a product is helpful to their decision process.

Video marketing is very different than a TV commercial.  A TV commercial is usually a 10, 15 or 30 second advertising spot while video marketing is a longer video commonly used for marketing on a website and social networks like Youtube, Facebook and Linkedin.

Videos made for marketing have entirely different goals, messages and lengths. As with advertising on TV, the message is crucial. The message in a marketing or testimonial video must engage the viewer. Fail that and you wasted your money.

The inspiration for this article was an article I read, written by a producer of attorney videos.  He described the 3 elements to consider when producing lawyer marketing videos.

He says the first element is to engage your target clients.  This seems obvious but it’s usually ignored by lawyers who seem to think their name and results are the only message that matters.  The truth is that potential clients have no idea who you are and they really don’t care about your results.

However, the example given in the article showing how to engage target clients was not good, “…if you are a personal injury attorney create videos on the steps your clients should take if involved in a car accident.”  This is seen on almost every attorney website and doesn’t provide any information people don’t already know.  It will bore potential clients and certainly won’t engage them.

What to avoid:

• Don’t provide common sense information that most people already know
• Don’t talk about yourself or brag about your law firm or your cases.

No one cares about you but everyone wants to know what’s “in it for them”, so how do you engage potential clients?

What to include in website marketing videos — Tell potential clients:

• What you can do for them
• How you can help them
• Answer a question the client may have when they call you
• Answer a question the client may have about their case

Testimonial videos should also demonstrate how your law firm helped your client. This dramatic video testimonial shows how the lawyer helped the caller in her time of need after an accident.

A great example is this video produced by Today’s Esquire (TodaysEsquire.com) which accomplishes these points in under 4 minutes. This video will engage potential clients and is likely to result in a potential client caller the lawyer.

Questions answered in your video should be those that affect your client personally and has nothing to do with you. Take a minute and look back at the questions your previous clients asked you, from your first contact and throughout the case.

More great example are Gerry Oginski’s videos (LawyersVideoStudio.com) such as “Pain & Suffering-How Do You Explain It?”  It asks a question that can even make a lawyer watch it.  Gerry’s video will engage potential clients.  Go ahead, watch it!

 

I received a Technolawyer e-newsletter promoting an article, by Lee Rosen, revealing the secret to charging flat legal fees. The secret is to make your fixed expenses variable. One of the expenses suggested to be changed to variable is marketing and ostensibly, advertising.

The article stated: “Now we’ve achieved variability on our marketing expenses. We have no contracts related to marketing. We can start or stop our marketing on a moment’s notice with no penalty. It’s quick and easy.”

While it can be advantageous to have variable expenses, decreasing marketing expenses when revenue is going down is a disastrous idea.  This will reduce revenue even further both now and in the future.

Reducing your advertising and marketing budget will cause your law firm (or any business) to fall further behind and allow your competitors to gain a substantial advantage.  When revenue increases, you will have to start all over again.  Additionally, all previous work and investment in branding will have been for nothing.  In a bad economy, this is precisely the time to take advantage of lower marketing costs.

Fixing marketing costs can be a huge benefit. When entering into a large five figure advertising spend on TV, I committed to a 12 month budget to fix the cost of media. This allowed me to pay the same known cost for media every month.  Otherwise, I would have faced huge increases, or have been forced to temporarily discontinue advertising, because of temporary changes in media demand such as elections.

A far better idea is to keep office overhead low by looking at every item in the expense budget to find less expensive alternatives; increase efficiency; and become more creative with marketing.  It’s a good idea to look at what is actually being spent as well as looking at the budget because there are often expenditures not seen in the budget.

One area of both personal and business expenditures which rarely gets any attention are small expense items.  Every so often, I look at my check register and find that I have been paying monthly fees for items as little as $20-$50 per month which can be reduced or completely eliminated with a newer, different or free service.  Reducing small expenses can substantially help a small business.  For a large business, the number of small expenses really gets forgotten and can add up to a substantial amount.

I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional to dictate everything for my law practice and all the content on approximately 300 websites including everything on LawyerAdvertisingBlog.com.  Just using Dragon NaturallySpeaking has allowed me to save the cost of at least one employee.  I switched from an expensive CRM software service to Zoho CRM which is almost identical, free for three or less users, and less expensive than the competition for more users. There are many great free open source software products which can substantially reduce costs such as OpenOffice.org which provides the functionality of the Microsoft Office suite.

In the early 1980s after law school, I went into my father’s business which was a diamond manufacturing (cutting) company. That was a very bad time for the diamond industry. At some point, my father decided to close the business. I took over the office and reduced the fixed expenses by 90%. For instance, I eliminated an expensive jewelers block insurance policy and one of the two expensive alarm contracts by moving the diamonds from our two office safes to an outside protected fault which was inexpensive. Additionally, we had an entire floor so I rented space to a television production company. As part of the rental agreement, I fired my receptionist and had the television production company hire her.

I have done the same thing with my law practice.  In addition to reducing overhead costs, I have found many ways to run a more efficient law practice and spend less time accomplishing the same results which results in increased revenue.  From conducting litigation to settling cases, I found ways to accomplish the same results with less time.

Instead of cutting your advertising and marketing budget, think of ways to cut other parts of your budget and increase your advertising and marketing budget to get more business.