Category: Legal Marketing

Tips for Improving Your Client Retention Rates [INFOGRAPHIC]

The Rainmaker Institute

Client retention consultancy Sparked counts some of the world’s most successful brands as its clients, including Microsoft, Google, Kraft, SAP, Barclays and more.  So it’s worth lending an ear when they release research that shows a mere 5% increase in a company’s client retention rate can increase profits by as much as 95%.

Many firms don’t place much emphasis on client retention, believing such fallacies as one or two poor experiences can jettison a relationship (actually, clients leave because of poor performance overall, not just a few isolated incidents).

Sparked has created this infographic to show where firms go wrong when it comes to client retention and provides the remedies for correcting it:

ARTICLE BY

Stephen Fairley
OF
The Rainmaker Institute

Six Ways to Build Momentum in your Practice

We have all ‘been there’ finding ourselves too busy with client work to breathe and then the rollercoaster heads downward and we’re searching for new projects. It can be challenging to devote any time to developing new work when your plate is already full. But, what happens when we’ve eaten what we’ve killed, proverbially speaking?

I work with law firm clients consistently who voice the same complaint: “I’m so busy, until I’m not.” This common thread began my wheels turning on how to stabilize the perennial ebbs and flows of business development and how, if at all, can lawyers take proactive steps to get and keep momentum in their practices.

At the outset, I will directly state that those who engage in random acts of marketing such as sporadically reaching out to their network; infrequently scheduling coffee/meal dates with top clients; and other high impact business development initiatives need to just stop it – – – now. It’s a waste of all your resources and, in the end, doesn’t reflect well on you as a business owner. Instead, I offer a better approach: development and maintain a balance approach by creating momentum to your business development efforts.  Read on to learn what you need to know.

Word of the day: momentum. Webster defines it as the tendency of an object to continue movement in a single direction. And, the speed of the movement increases in exact proportion with the degree of momentum. If the speed is very slow, there will not be much momentum, period.

When lawyers genuinely invest in building a prosperous practice, one of the quickest ways to get there is by focusing your time and energy on the concrete steps that matter most: delivering extraordinary service to existing clients (to sow the seeds for recurring assignments) and targeted relationship-building to develop new clients and referral sources.

By taking concrete action in a meaningful and purposeful way, you will generate a certain momentum which must be sustained to build traction with your business development efforts. The more you can ‘just do it’, the more and more momentum you will build, the more comfortable you will be with doing that activity or task, and the more productive and effective you will be – closer to reaching your end goals.

What we often see with clients if they may begin on a high note, commit themselves to one or two business development initiatives, then they really struggle with sustaining the momentum and follow through which is critical to building a prosperous practice.

In short, the momentum is stunted and whatever traction the client created is lost. Among the value that we bring to clients, guiding them along in the business development strategy and execution process and holding them accountability is highly rated, according to our client feedback.

Below are steps lawyers can take to create momentum in building a prosperous practice and sustain it over the long term:

1. Plan for Success – Once and for all, stop the random acts of marketing that wastevaluable resources and, most likely, ends up making you feel like you are failing. Develop a 6-month plan by writing down concrete action steps you will take on a weekly, if not daily, basis to meet your goals (sometimes, getting crystal clear on your goals is the first place to start).

Then, schedule these concrete action steps (such as reaching out to 2-3 referral sources every week for either a coffee date or lunch/dinner; draft a blog post twice month, etc.) in a calendar, whether that is paper or digital, do what works best for you. These should become “non-negotiable” commitments that you will honor and discipline yourself to take. Don’t be shy to reward yourself after each action that you take.

By taking consistent, persistent action on a regular basis, you will create momentum; it’s not good just making an activity a ‘one-off’. One must take purposeful action regularly to build and sustain momentum to carry through to your goals. To make something happen routinely we need to be persistent. Persistence is what separates the men from the boys. Education is great, high intelligence is better, but, it takes a persistent approach to build momentum and build a business.

2. Get Moving – Start reaching out according to your action steps. Begin researching blog topics. Research your LinkedIn connections for prospective introductions. Choose one action item that will contribute to one of your goals and take immediate action. Get moving, today.This means no postponing, no delaying, no procrastinating, no excuses.

3. Stay Focused– Remind yourself of your goals every day and stay focused on them. Post visual reminders on your mirrors at home, on your computer screen at work.  When you find yourself distracted by something that is not directly in line with your goals, ask yourself, “Why?” Identify how you will manage future distractions and look for ways to eliminate them.

4. Stay Active– Do something every day that will bring you closer to your goals. It need not be big – it must be consistent and persistent. If too many days pass between actions, momentum will dwindle and eventually die.

5. Avoid Paralysis by Analysis– Nothing slows momentum more than indecision. Decide as quickly as possible and then take some immediate action to support the decision – no matter how trivial it seems.

6. Seek support- Many successful rainmakers say that you must have an insightful coach and trusted advisor to guide you along the way. Build a strong team of supporters to help you to get and stay focused and to support your desire to bring cohesion and build a strong momentum to your business-building vision. All things are possible, if you keep your eye on the goal.

Remember, my mantra – marketing success comes only through the consistent, persistent massive amounts of action over a prolonged period of time.  There are no magic bullets or shortcuts to success!

© 2013 KLA Marketing Associates.
ARTICLE BY

Kimberly Alford Rice
OF
KLA Marketing Associates

How to Build Trust Online by Being Human

The Rainmaker Institute

All you have to do is troll your own Facebook or LinkedIn account to know that there is LOTS of content online.

In fact, a recent post at Buffer.com noted that more content is published every day on Facebook than is found in every book published in human history!

Building Blocks with Trust

So how do you stand out from that enormous crowd and earn the trust you need to succeed with your social media marketing program?  Buffer provides these tips:

Use personal pronouns.  Using personal pronouns in your posts — I, we, you, me, etc. — and being more conversational elicits empathy from an audience, getting  you a better response.

Use simple words.  By using simple words, you can convey your idea in a way that people don’t have to think about before understanding it.  Big words and legalese will tend to alienate people, not draw them in.

Use stories.  Since the beginning of time, humans have communicated by telling stories and the propensity to listen to a story is ingrained in our DNA.  A Buffer study showed that adding a story to your blog post can increase readership by 300%.

Use contemporary culture references.  Weaving a pop culture reference or two into your post, especially if you’re able to add a celebrity name or two like Beyoncéor George Clooney (see how I did that?), helps boost readership and interest.

Use the Shaq Rule.  Shaquille O’Neal is a social media powerhouse, with a Twitter following of 8.5 million and 4.7 million Facebook fans.  His rule for posting is that 80% of his posts must be entertaining, 15% must be informative and only 5% should sell something.  People can sniff out a sales pitch online immediately, and just as quickly they are on to the next thing.

ARTICLE BY

Morgan Kennedy
OF
Covington & Burling LLP

Grow Your Email List for Free in 5 Simple Steps

The Rainmaker Institute

Lots of law firms struggle with compiling and maintaining a robust email marketing list, and they really struggle with how to keep adding qualified names to help them build a better list.  If you are recognizing yourself as you read this, then the good news is that you can actually build a great list for your firm and it doesn’t need to cost you a dime.

Here are five simple steps you can take to keep growing that important list of people you want to market to:

Grow Your Email List for Free in 5 Simple Steps, Money Tree

1.  Provide something of value.   Take the top 5 or 10 questions that clients ask you most often, write down the answers and turn that content into an e-book or report.  Post this on your website and blog and offer it as a free download to people who provide you with their name and email address.  The people who take you up on your offer are good prospects since they are clearly interested in the kind of problems you solve.  Add their names to your email marketing list to continue the conversation.

2.  Tell them what to do.  Your e-newsletter, your website and your blog should always contain easy-to-find calls-to-action that invite readers to subscribe, download a free report, make an appointment for a free consultation — anything you’d like them to do that could lead to business for you.  All your calls-to-action need to be simple and have the ability to collect email addresses for you.

3.  Keep reviewing your offers.  If your readers are not responding well to your calls-to-action or offers, then what you are offering is clearly not appealing to them.  First be sure that they are easy to understand.  If you’re still not getting a good response, change up your offers.  You should do this anyway every few months to keep things fresh.

4.  Use social media.  Using social media to spread the word about your valuable content and offers is a great way to attract more prospects that you might have otherwise missed.   LinkedIn groups are a great way to spread the word, but be sure you’re not being too promotional too often.

5.  Pay attention to the analytics.  You can gain valuable insight into what people are responding to on your website and in your e-newsletter by scouring the statistics.  Google Analytics is a free add-on for your website and blog and provides great information on what pages people are spending time on, and what isn’t working so well.  If you use Constant Contact or a similar service for your e-newsletters, these services provide information on how many people opened and read your newsletter and what they clicked on. 

By using these five simple steps, you are not just adding names to your list, you are getting truly qualified leads for your marketing efforts.

ARTICLE BY

Stephen Fairley
 
OF
The Rainmaker Institute

What’s the Deal? Why Do Accounting Firms Use Initials Instead of Names? – Part 2

Fishman Marketing logo

We know that for many professional-services firms (e.g. law, accounting, consulting, etc.), using initials is simply a necessary compromise — a less-controversial way to abbreviate the firm’s name.  You get to shorten a cumbersome name without seeming to favor the first one or two people over the others whose names come later on the door. It seems like a reasonable solution, but it’s actually a big step backwards, as we discussed in our previous “Don’t Use Initials” blog post.

Some of our valued blog readers wanted more supporting evidence, another way to explain it to their firm’s own professionals.  This post shows how I explain this issue to the marketing committees, to help them make a good decision:

1. Look at this random collection of accounting firm logos I found on Google. (Disclosure: We don’t work with any of these firms.)

Look carefully:

Initials Accounting firm Bad Logos Page One copy

2. OK?  Got it?  Now I’ll shuffle them around and changed just one of the logos.

See the group below? Can you tell which of the following logos is different?

Initials Accounting firm Bad Logos Page TWO copy

You couldn’t tell, could you?  Of course not.

3.  OK, now I’m going to shuffle them around again and insert a new logo we designed recently.

Can you tell which of these logos, below, was added to the mix?

Initials Accounting firm Bad Logos Page THREE copy

It’s pretty obvious, right? 

Here’s the true test of marketing:

If you needed to find one of those companies on Google tomorrow, which one of them would you remember?

So, before changing a perfectly good name to a random collection of forgettable initials, think whether you’re advancing the firm’s strategic goals, or actually making your existing marketing challenges even harder to achieve.  Most of the time, a name, even a challenging one, is a better option than the firm’s initials.

ARTICLE BY
Ross Fishman

OF
Fishman Marketing, Inc.

Best Times to Post on Social Media [SLIDESHOW]

Bad timing can kill a business, a relationship and, sometimes, a social media post.

Digital marketing intelligence firm TrackMaven has broken down the research on the best times to post on the major social networks as well as the best times to post to your blog and send that marketing email and distributed it via SlideShare.

You can download this slide show and keep it on your desktop or laptop to refer to when you’re scheduling your posts.  Picking the right times is no guarantee that your posts will go viral, but posting at the right times to get maximum potential viewership for what you have to say is just smart marketing.

ARTICLE BY

Stephen Fairley
OF
The Rainmaker Institute

HTTPS – Should I Implement It on My Site?

Consultsweb Logo

Google announced last Wednesday, August 6, that the search engine will use https as a ranking signal. HTTPS stands forHypertext Transport Protocol Secure, which protects the data integrity and confidentiality of users visiting a site. For example, when a user enters data into a form on a site in order to subscribe to updates or purchase a product, a secure site protects that user’s personal information and ensures that the user communicates with the authorized owner of the site. For the HTTPS connection to work properly, websites require an SSL certificate, which is what enables the site to make a secure connection.

HTTPS Hypertext Transport Protocol Secure

Even though Google is making this change, it is not something that webmasters should jump into lightly. Webmasters should implement https only when they really need it and have sections in their site where they need to protect their visitors’ information.

Before making any drastic changes to the site, it is important to take into consideration that Google stated that this change will affect less than one percent of queries, carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content.

Cons of using https

  • Up until this recent announcement, it was recommended only using https on the sections of the site that needed to protect the confidentiality of user data, such as payment forms that collected credit card information, the site’s login section or any page that would sends/receive other private information (such as street address, phone number or health records), because using https in the whole site can overload webservers and make sites slower, which affects negatively on a site’s ranking.
  • Changing to https also means that all of the URLs in your site will change and it will be necessary to redirect all of the URLs on the site, so that they can be indexed by Google and avoid having duplicate content between https and http URLs. Redirects usually increase the load time of the site, which can be negative ranking factor and reduce the link juice coming from external sites pointing to http URLs.
  • SSL certificates cost money, and certificates signed by well-known authorities can be expensive.

I advise against making an immediate decision to change to https because it is a recent change and apparently the effort to switch exceeds the benefit obtained in rankings. Right now it is better to stand back and observe how the change affects those sites that alter their URLs to https.

 

ARTICLE BY

Robert Padgett
OF
Consultwebs.com, Inc.

How to Get Amazing Attention for Your Firm on Social Media

The Rainmaker Institute

Human beings are wired for loving the spotlight.  When you post something on social media and no one comments or likes, it feels almost like a personal rejection.  And when you’re posting to get attention for your business and no one cares what you’re writing, you are wasting your time.

social mediaOne of the most important ways to get noticed on social media — especially on Twitter — is to make sure your post has a great headline.  There are actually very good psychological reasons for using certain words that makes it almost irresistible for people to click.  Here are 8 proven formulas to craft your headlines around:

  1. Surprise — using words that surprise or startle captures attention because we love novelty.  Words that break the pattern stand out.
  2. Questions — using questions works because a question mark stimulates the human brain to seek an answer.
  3. Curiosity — using incomplete information in your headline to pique curiosity.  A famous example of this is the 1926 ad with the headline, “They laughed when I sat down at the piano…but when I started to play…!”
  4. Negatives — using negative superlatives like “worst” or “stop” intrigues us because we want to know if there is something we shouldn’t be doing.
  5. How to — we all want to get better, so using “how to” in your headline makes a promise of improving the reader’s knowledge.
  6. Numbers — because humans dislike uncertainty, we respond well to numbers in headlines.
  7. Reader referencing — using phrases like, “For those who don’t know what to do after a car accident” or just the word “you” are powerful drivers.
  8. Specifics — quantifiable facts and figures that elicit an image in our head are incredibly intriguing.

Here are more than 180 power words to use in your headlines, courtesy of CoSchedule.com:

power words

ARTICLE BY:

Stephen Fairley
OF:
The Rainmaker Institute

Tips on Creating Press Releases Reporters Will Use

The Rainmaker Institute

Business communications firm Greentarget has just released the results of interviews with 100 news reporters and editors in their 2014 Disrupting the Press Release report, and it’s clear what journalists want from firms seeking the news spotlight:  just the facts.

The core findings from this report underscore the need for communicators to understand that journalists want only the vital information, and they want it immediately apparent.  Don’t make them wade through a bunch of legal jargon, boilerplate text or self-serving quotes that sound like no human would ever speak those words.

BIG NEWS. Press Releases

In fact, Greentarget points to a perfect example of the kind of press releases journalists favor:  the ones that come from police departments, who tend to follow TV detective Joe Friday’s maxim of “Just the facts, ma’am.”

And here’s why:  journalists spend less than 60 seconds scanning a press release.  If the value is not immediately apparent, they are on to the next one.  Half the reporters and editors surveyed said that they receive, on average, 50 press releases a week.  The other half said they receive more — up to 100 or more a week.

Beyond writing concise, fact-driven releases, here are some tips on how to grab a reporter’s attention:

  • Email your press releases.  80% said they prefer email.  Not one said they prefer a phone call.
  • Craft a compelling subject line.  79% said a good subject line gets your release opened.
  • Send your release early.  44% said they prefer to get press releases in the morning.
  • Leave out the least important information: boilerplate language, stilted quotations, fluff.
  • Be sure the journalists you are sending your press release to cover that beat and are relevant to their audiences.

The good news is that 88% of journalists said they still find value in press releases, especially those that contain thought leadership (research, surveys, etc.).  Least valuable?  Personnel announcements.

My experience has shown me that many attorneys are notoriously poor press release writers, both in terms of obtuse language and too much filler.  When it comes to press releases journalists will pay attention to, always remember that less is more.  Better yet, have a professional who knows what they are doing write your press releases.

Article By:

Stephen Fairley
Of:
The Rainmaker Institute

Fix These 4 Problems on Your Blog to Maximize Search Engine Optimization

Consultsweb Logo

1.   Make It Useful

Write about something that will provide value to the person reading it. Write with your audience in mind. Keep the writing simple but professional. Remember: Your clients do not have a law degree and if your writing confuses them, they will look for answers elsewhere.

Legal MarketingThink about your client base. Are they middle aged woman, seniors, mostly male, individuals with physical handicaps? Target your posts to their interests, needs and questions. Avoid general articles that could be for anyone. Have the reader in mind when you are writing content and show your expertise. Answer the reader’s unasked questions.

Targeting a specific demographic will help with the social signals as it will probably be shared more and will earn links. Fluff content may get you some rankings for staying relevant and regularly updating your website, but if an actual human goes on your site and does not find value in what you have posted, chances of a return visit are slim—and your ultimate goal should be people returning to your site based on the quality of its content.

2.   Make It Local

Think about your local area and any news or hot topics that you can cover in blog updates. Can you add unique value to these stories? The more your topics and writing speak to your local audience, the more engaged they will be with your site. Write about charities or events you are involved in.

3.   Engage the Audience

How does the page look? Content is not just words. Content can be text, images, videos, charts, graphics and data. Use video and image assets to help tell your story. Visual content engages the user and instills respect for the quality of the information presented on the page.

Also, long blog posts allow you to fit a lot of good information and keywords onto the page, but you will need to divide it in to short sections or into an FAQ format to enable visitors to scan the page for the information they seek.

Use your employees for feedback. Ask them to share your content. If three months have passed and no one has shared anything, it is time to start asking why.

4.   Get the Technical Details Right

Effective title structure is key to generating good organic traffic and a high-quality user experience. Utilizing headings (H1, H2, H3), alt text and description tagging is important for user experience (UX) and for search engines to understand and optimally display your content.

Article By:

Tanner Jones
Of:
Consultwebs.com, Inc.