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I recently heard one of my favorite songs – “Once in a Lifetime” – by the Talking Heads that has a refrain of “Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.”  This refrain is a perfect metaphor for those lawyers looking to leverage new marketing techniques to drive business for their firms.

I’ve gotten several calls recently from law firms who are looking for the “next big thing,” and granted, there are a lot of next big things out there – social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.), Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM), Digital Asset Optimization (DAO), 1to1 Marketing, etc.  Make no mistake - new approaches to marketing, advancements in the web and rapid adoption curves are creating a lot of opportunities for intrepid early adopters.  For the record, at BARD, we blog, tweet, are on Facebook and are LinkedIn.

This said, when looking at new marketing approaches, realize that none of them is a silver bullet, and just like networking, email marketing, sending out printed newsletters and all the other “old” marketing approaches, successfully leveraging any of the new marketing techniques requires commitment.  There’s no sense in tweeting if you only do so once a week, or creating a LinkedIn account where you only have 10 contacts.  The same goes for all the other new techniques.  While early adopters often receive a short term benefit from being among the first, over the long term, those who get benefit from their marketing efforts – new or old – are those that leverage the tools better.

Same as it ever was.

John Sailer, BARD Marketing

Nothing Says Success Like….

This post is not about how you need to spend a lot of money on marketing but rather on some of the things that many attorneys (and other professionals) do that scare off clients, or don’t exactly help your brand.

First things first- your email account. Nothing says success like having an email account such as JDoe@aol.com. Can you not afford an email account for your business?

AOL and other personal email account addresses are fine…for personal email, but not for creating a successful impression of your law firm. Getting a dedicated email account for your law firm is easy, and you don’t have to be an IT wizard to implement it.

Next thing - what about your business cards? Do they look like professional business cards? Do they have a logo? Is your website listed? Or do your cards look like you designed them yourself and printed them on your laser printer?

Whether in the hands of a potential client or business partner, business cards can either make a powerful impression or make no impression at all. Invest in business cards that stand out. Also remember that people often want to research. Make sure you put your web address on the business card.

Is your website old? Just having a website may have been enough 5 years ago. This isn’t the case anymore. Most people are web savvy and daily website usage is common for most of your prospective clients and partners. An old, dated, or sparse site sends the wrong impression.

Spelling & grammatical errors. You can’t have them in any marketing materials. I’ve seen websites where the attorney’s name was misspelled. I’ve seen holiday cards where the holiday itself was misspelled. The reality is that having spelling errors on your website says that you aren’t detailed oriented - a big problem for a lawyer. If you have someone else (a paralegal, an associate, or a marketing firm write your copy) – read it critically.

Satellite offices. An obvious growth strategy is to expand geographically, and an easy and low cost way to do so is to open an “Intelligent Office” or “Executive Office” in the target location. While doing so may help you expand your reach, meeting a prospective client at your satellite office doesn’t necessarily instill confidence.

Obviously, we all do many things that don’t necessarily create a favorable impression on our prospective clients. Try to look at things from the perspective of your target audience. You only have one opportunity to make a first impression.

-John Sailer, BARD Marketing

OK, I’ll be the first to admit that I am not a huge fan of the yellow pages as a primary means of advertising for law firms.  Don’t get me wrong-they have brought value for several decades, and really, the yellow pages were one of the first outlets for “attorney advertising”.  

 

My blog today isn’t about bashing the yellow page directories, but about my shock when the most recent copy of my local yellow pages (Yellow Book for Boca Raton Florida) arrived at my door.  It is probably two-thirds the size of the Yellow Book from last year.  I made a few calls and heard similar stories from clients and contacts across the state and across the country.  While I am happy that the yellow pages are smaller – and they are now more “eco-friendly” - this trend clearly substantiates the fact that phone directory usage is in a sharp decline.

 

As Jay Leno said in a recent Tonight Show Monologue -“The yellow pages is for the three people who don’t have the Internet.”  While Leno’s quote is a gross exaggeration, the fact is that more and more advertisers are leaving the yellow pages because they don’t see the return to substantiate the investment.  Reports from independent agencies have placed yellow page decline at 30% over the past four years. 

 

With this said, directory sales people are as aggressive as ever, packaging the yellow pages listing with listings in online directories, pay-per-click campaign management and other services to entice clients into renewing. Many of these additional services are overpriced, are commodities or are of dubious value.  When it comes to your yellow page expenditure, the wise choice may be to reduce it substantially, in a similar fashion to how the books themselves are shrinking.

 

John Sailer, BARD Marketing

One disturbing trend that we’ve all seen over the last several months is intake as many established, successful law firms has slowed substantially - the phones just aren’t ringing.  Obviously, the current environment is incenting firms to do everything possible to be more efficient and save money.  Whether due to the economy, tort reform (for PI firms), more intense competition, reliance on phone books and websites, or other factors, many of these firms end up downsizing. 

In a South Florida Daily Business Review Managing Partners Survey taken in October, 25% of firms surveyed stated that revenue per partner was not meeting expectations.  This percentage increased substantially when the question focused on revenue per attorney. 

There are many ways to interpret these results, but one thing that is obvious to me in speaking with these firms (and many others) is that many firms don’t have a strategy to improve the revenue performance of these “underachievers.”  That is, if a partner or associate in the firm is labeled an underperformer in regards to achieving their individual revenue goals, there isn’t a plan to help them improve their performance.  Worse still, many of these firms don’t have strategies or programs to ensure that partners and associates are productive from the start - either you bring in revenue or you don’t.  And right now, the slow economy and other factors are placing additional pressures to ensure that everyone is bringing in revenue. 

Now, we all have to ultimately create value to receive a paycheck, but it’s interesting that very few firms help to ensure the success of their partners and associates from the get-go.  Many firms don’t have regularly scheduled internal communications. Few have discernable brands, instead relying on their partners’ and associates’ individual books of businessмебели. “Sales Training” is non-existent, and firm marketing is sporadic.  It’s no wonder that many attorneys fail in developing new business in these environments.

As business leaders, we all have to do what we have to do to keep our firms profitable, however, putting the tools in place to assist your partners and associates in their business development efforts will help your firm thrive in bad times as well as good, and enable you to weather the storm rather than downsize to reduce costs.

The bottom line is that you need to take an active approach in ensuring that all your shareholders, partners, associates and all employees have the skills to successfuly bring in new business. The current economy just highlights this fact.

 

-John Sailer, BARD Marketing

 

The 2 Golden Rules of Planning:

• The Plan is the plan until the plan changes
• Any Plan beats no plan

As we get closer to the end of 2008, it’s time to start thinking about budgeting for your marketing efforts in 2009. In an ideal world, your 2008 marketing plan worked to perfection and creating the ’09 plan is simply a matter of tweaking the current plan. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case, and in fact, many law firms don’t specifically budget for their marketing efforts, but rather carry out ‘hit or miss’ marketing activities sporadically throughout the year, and spend discretionary funds over the course of the year. Obviously, this is not the ideal way to manage your law firm as a business. Imagine if the Chief Financial Officer of General Electric told his CEO that he wasn’t sure how much GE was going to budget on Marketing for 2009, but instead was going to “play it by ear.” He wouldn’t be the CFO for long. So, why is your law firm any different?

There is no question that a focus on marketing is needed to maximize your revenue. Regardless of the state of the economy, your competitors are marketing their firms and you need to as well. As importantly, assuming you are spending money on marketing efforts, if you don’t budget, it’s impossible to identify your true ROI, and you are probably throwing money away.

A good starting point for the budgeting process is to prioritize the activities that you want to focus on in the coming year. A good place to start is by gathering the costs of the individual marketing activities that you undertook in 2007 and 2008. This should include everything from yellow page ads and website costs to LexisNexis and advertising expenses, as well as money spent on entertainment of clients and prospects. Once your list is compiled, objectively identify how those activities performed. This may be difficult unless you are tracking intake, website statistics, and other indicators. However, if you are going to spend the money, you might as well track the investment and doing so isn’t as difficult as it sounds.

A couple words of advice:

• There always seems to be a few sacred cows in the marketing budget (like sports tickets that go unused). If you have sacred cows, that’s fine, but if they don’t contribute to new cases or clients, don’t classify them as marketing expenses.

• Secondly, established activities often still require some funding – websites need updating, ad campaigns need freshening, etc. Typically, you should keep using those activities that are providing value, and if applicable, spend more in those areas. For those activities that are providing minimal value, budget less.

If there are other activities that you want to include in your 2009 plan, identify conservative cost estimates for these new initiatives. Prioritize the activities based on cost / benefit, focusing on those that have the biggest bang for the buck. You may be amazed to learn that some of the lower cost initiatives may have a huge return, while some of your highest expenditures may bring very little value.

Now you are ready to identify how much you plan to spend on for your overall marketing plan in 2009. Again, you can start by indentifying the current and previous years’ budget and then identifying what is changing in your business plan: are you moving into new areas of law? Are you planning to expand into new geographic areas? Has competition increased? Plan your budget accordingly – remember, new initiatives and expansion typically require additional funding.

Once you understand both your budget and the prioritized list of specific activities you want to undertake, you can build your plan. Remember, the better the analysis – the better the plan. The better the plan – the better the return.

- John Sailer, BARD Marketing

 

The web is a funny thing. Ten (10) years after the formation of Google, and it still reminds me of the Wild West, with hucksters and shysters selling snake oil and magic liniment. A recent example being Findlaw, the 1000-pound gorilla among legal website developers.

Recently, blogger and SEO expert Todd Friesen reported on how Findlaw sent him a few unsolicited (i. e. spam) emails to see if he was interested in buying links on Findlaw’s site. It seems that Findlaw was offering a service to “help” vendors in the legal community generate higher search engine rankings by selling links on Findlaw’s websites. Read the original blog (Shame, Shame, Shame, Findlaw) here and scan down and check out the comments.

As you would suspect, Google and the other search engines don’t much care for this practice as it falsely influences search rankings. The goal of the search engines’ algorithms is to promote those sites that are viewed by other sites as being relevant to the specific search term. Naturally, paid-for links – especially ones from sites that generate a lot of traffic (like Findlaw) - can inappropriately influence these rankings.

Anyhow, Google found out about this, and slapped Findlaw with a penalty that temporarily reduced Findlaw’s priority rating – i. e. its search performance. Findlaw has quietly stopped selling the service, and Google has since restored Findlaw’s rating. So, what’s the moral of the story? I guess there are several you could focus on – such as the ethics of Findlaw who should know better than to sell this type of service, or the fact that if Google catches you in this type of behavior, they can and will punish you.

Unfortunately, a lot of people may not care about the ethics issue as long as their phones are ringing, right? But, if I was a law firm client of Findlaw’s, there are two things that would bother me:

1. I am paying Findlaw (or overpaying as the case may be) good money to host my website, and in many cases to “optimize” my website. If I found out that, on top of overcharging me, they were leveraging their relationship with me to make money with vendors who are trying to sell to me, I’d be more than a little upset.
2. I’d be more than a little concerned with how Findlaw’s misconduct may cost me and my website ranking – now or in the future.

Listen, we are all in business to make money – Findlaw is no different. Before using them – or any vendor, do your due diligence, and work with vendors you trust.

Caveat Emptor.

-John Sailer, BARD Marketing

Quite often, when we talk with law firms, one of the main topics of conversation is their website performance and its success as a source of new cases. Often, the conversation goes something like “I have a website that has good search-engine performance, but I am still not getting as many new cases from the site as I was expecting….can you help me understand why?”

In most cases, the answer is easy, though perhaps a little disconcerting. While the firm website should be a primary component of the marketing strategy for most law firms, it isn’t a magic bullet.

There’s no question that the firm website is replacing the yellow page ad as the focal point for prospective clients to turn to when researching the firm, and that usage of Google and “Local Search” capabilities continue to increase while yellow page usage is on the decline.

However, it’s also true that every day, more and more firm websites are launched. And law firms, as a whole, are becoming much more web savvy and more knowledgeable on search engine optimization, making it more difficult for any one firm to stand out from the crowd. To add to the challenge, more law firms are also advertising aggressively. In large markets, firms are spending millions on television advertising and direct marketing programs. In short, competition is increasing, the bar continues to be raised (no pun intended) and just having a website no longer ensures that people will visit it and call your firm.

As attorney Scott Trost mentions in his blog, The Trost Report, the face of Plaintiff Law is changing, with the television advertisers continuing to capture more and more market share, ultimately squeezing non-tv advertisers out of many markets – website or no website. While I don’t totally agree that small firms (plaintiff firms or those in other practice areas) can’t be successful in this climate, success surely requires more than just launching the new website and hoping that people will call.

Law Marketing (and marketing techniques in general) continues to evolve. It isn’t a once-and-done event, it’s a process. The tools, trends, and technologies are ever-changing, and the savvy firms are changing with them. Ensuring that your phones ring month after month and year after year takes effort and an integrated marketing program, not just a website. And, it’s only going to get more difficult from here.

-John Sailer, BARD Marketing

OK, my “summer vacation” has ended and it’s back to writings some blogs. Without further ado, I wanted to start off the school year talking about an asset that is vastly underused in most law firms – the firm Contact List.

Every law firm has a contact list, and in many cases, multiple contact lists. Unfortunately, few firms manage these lists proactively or treat them as actual firm assets. In actuality, the firm contact list should be a cornerstone of a law firm’s marketing efforts, given that referrals are the most effective source of new cases for a majority of lawyers.

A successful firm contact list must be centralized, must capture sufficient contact information, and must be proactively managed.

• Centralization – Whether a law firm has 1 attorney or 100+ attorneys, the firm contact list must be centralized. In many environments, individual lawyers manager their own “book of business” and contact lists. In these situations, a process to aggregate the lists of the individuals on a regular basis must be established.
• Capturing sufficient information – It’s surprising how many firms still don’t capture email addresses of their clients, referral attorneys or friends of the firm. If you aren’t capturing this info, it’s a good time to start. Aside from email addresses, you also should be capturing “contact type” for each contact – so you know whether they are a client, friend of firm, referral partner, etc. In the case of lawyers and medical professionals, you might also want to identify the practice area.
• Growing the list – Unfortunately, the contact list does not manage or grow itself. A law firm must proactively grow it, whether this is done by having the administrative staff enter business cards information from contacts met at meetings, bar functions, etc. or by giving firm associates specific goals to help grow the list through their networking efforts. Track progress on a quarterly basis.

Often managing the firm contact list is a task left for another time or for someone else to worry about. Left unattended, the effort will just get bigger, and you will lose a valuable opportunity. Start now, add information continuously, and soon, you will be able to use the list as an asset.

John Sailer, BARD Marketing

As previously discussed, cash flow is tight for many law firms due to our economy. While true, this doesn’t negate the fact that there is much competition between the 84,000 attorneys in Florida and the over 1 Million attorneys in the United States for new cases and clients, regardless of area of practice or geographic location. And I’ve yet to meet an attorney, who, even in these slow economic times, didn’t want to increase their “fair share” of new clients and cases.???????? ????? ???????? However, many of these same attorneys don’t want to increase their level of spending on marketing.

This said, the issue of capturing one’s fair share may not be about marketing more, but about marketing smarter. Many firms are already spending sums of money on marketing, but have much of those funds tied up yellow page advertising, and have no real handle on whether the investment is paying off or whether there is more effective ways to leverage that money.

Pick up any yellow pages directory, and you will typically see an attorney ad on the back cover, one on the spine, several double page “tab” ads, and many, many double-truck and full page ads. The cost of these ads are definitely not cheap, and while some law firms swear that they receive strong response from their yellow pages ads, few have the process in place to effectively track the intake and thus, cannot identify the true ROI of that investment.

Most law firms, however, end up renewing their ads year after year, and the cycle continues, whether the firm can quantify the value of the investment or not. These firms renew out of fear, apathy or force of habit.

Some law firms do actually get good cases from their ads, however over the last several years, consumers’ use of the yellow page directories has diminished, and there are several independent analysts, including the Kelsey Group (a Research Group focusing specifically on the Yellow Page industry and “local search” trends) who are predicting erosion of yellow page usage by 10% in 2008.

My point here is that many firms are spending money on yellow page advertising in a tight economy at the detriment to other proactive marketing programs without understanding the true ROI or opportunity cost of that investment and wonder why their phones aren’t ringing. Alternatively, these law firms could spend this same money on their websites, advertising programs, public relations or attorney referral programs. But until they understand the payback of this and other investments, and take a proactive approach to their marketing budget, they will be at the whim of the yellow page directories, and the economy.

-John Sailer, BARD Marketing

Turn on the nightly news and chances are the lead story is the economy, and the endless speculation about whether we are, or are not, in a recession. Obviously, with oil prices continuing to climb, the dollar continuing to weaken, and the housing market not yet hitting bottom, the question of whether we are “technically” in a recession is really academic.

The real question (for this audience) is what does the current economic state actually mean for the boutique and mid-sized law firms who desperately need to invest in the growth of their practices?

A lot of wisdom can be found by listening to Warren Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha”, and the world’s second richest man. In a recent interview, Mr. Buffett said the possibility that the U.S. economy will go into recession will make no difference in how he runs his Berkshire Hathaway empire. “We don’t spend any time talking about where the economy is going. We have a basic belief that the country will do very well over time.”

I point this out, because the propensity of many law firms (and other privately-owned businesses) is to make investment decisions based on the economy at that specific point in time, and make these decisions using emotions.

“The market is doing poorly and my phones aren’t ringing. I can’t possibly spend money on marketing. I’ll focus on marketing when the economy picks back up.”

 

Unfortunately, this thinking can actually exacerbate an even more dramatic downward spiral. In most markets across the Country, competition among law firms continues to grow and the successful firms over the long term are the ones who have aggressively built their brands and captured the larger market share.

These firms, like Warren Buffett, don’t stop marketing because of a slow economy. They understand that recessions bring opportunity. While other law firms may be in retreat mode, successful firms use the opportunity to redouble their efforts, build their brand, and ultimately pick up new clients and new market share – market share that was vacated by those firms in retreat.I’m not saying it’s easy, but Mr. Buffett didn’t build his empire by only investing when the economy was growing. You need to stick with your plan. Perhaps, you focus a little more on lower cost marketing initiatives, such as PR, blogs, e-Newsletters, etc., but you can’t stop your marketing efforts. As an added bonus, since everyone is feeling the same pinch that you are, you may even be able to find some deals and pay lower costs for some of your marketing efforts, because right now, everyone is willing to negotiate.

 

When the market does turn around, you’ll be far ahead of those firms who elected to sit this recession out.

-John Sailer, BARD Marketing