Excellent Advice For Crafting A Great E-Mail or E-Newsletter...
Now combine that with the advice in 10 Things To Remember When Selling To Lawyers, and you'll have an unstoppable e-mail for your prospects.
Essential Links
- Seth Godin's Permission Marketing
- MetaCool
- Advertising In The Parker Directory of California Attorneys
- Essential Resources for Legal Professionals
- Intro To Weblogs For The Legal Market
- Jeff Gitomer Online
- LawBiz Blog
- Legal Marketing by Andy Havens
- Legal Marketing Association
- Proven Ways To Get New Customers
- Search Engine Marketing For Lawyers
- Selling To Lawyers RSS Feed
- The Parker Directory of California Attorneys
March 03, 2005
Two No-Cost Ways To Sell To Lawyers
1. When you're creating marketing materials, make sure it includes information about your customers or your clients, and not just information about YOU. If your brochure or flier or whatever is full of "rah-rah" stuff only about YOU, it probably won't get read. Send your prospects information about thow they profit, produce or succeed, and they will eat it up with a spoon.
2. Writesmall articles in journals, newspapers, e-zines, and newsletters that your prospects read. Two good places are association newletters and your city's local legal or business journals.When your name appears where your prospects are reading, it's a great value statemtn for them-- they get information they can use-- and for YOU-- you are now seem as an authority.
February 25, 2005
Web Designer's Eye For The Sales Guy
Clever domain name? Check.
Web Site Strategy? Check.
Web Site? Check.
Web Page Title? Check. And then check it again to make sure you don't make the biggest and most common sales website mistake...
... stupid title tags! [*]
Your web page's title is your greeting to your prospect. You wouldn't insult your prospective audience with the first sentence out of your mouth, would you?
If your title beigins "Welcome to YourCompany", "Welcome To YourCompany.com", or, worst of all, "Welcome To The YourCompany Website", you are insulting them. You're telling your prospective audience that you think they aren't smart enough to figure out that your site is a web site about you while they're looking at it.
In my experience as a web designer, I always reccommend client looking for me to "tune up" their existing sites to get rid of the "Welcome to..." part altogether. Not only is it condescending, but it wastes space, and makes any browser that bookmarks your site alphabetize under "W".
Instead, try making your web page title, the name of your company, followed by a powerful value phrase that describes your business. Let THAT be your welcome.
[*]A title tag is HTML that creates the words that appear in the top bar of your Web browserl like so:
The HTML code for a title tag like in the example would look like this:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Shawn's Li'l Corner of Cyberspace</TITLE>
</HEAD>
February 23, 2005
Another great resource for selling...
...is Jeff Gitomer's website, Gitomer Online . In addition to his books and seminars, he publishes a free weekly email newsletter that is chock-full of practical sales advice.
He also has a weekly free "GITBIT", a nugget of sales advice, or worksheets or activities that you can access and download and use to build off of what he touches on in each newsletter.
I'd also reccommend his "Little Red Book of Selling". I recently got it, and it's really opening my eyes to a lot of things.
Another Great Legal Marketing Blog
Of course, while I aim to make this blog an essential resource for anyone looking to do legal marketing or selling to lawyers and legal professionals, I've recently discovered another excellent blog that you should check out, too.
The title is simple-- Legal Marketing, but the author, Andy Havens, is brilliant. While my focus is selling legal services to lawyers and law firms and other legal services, his focus is a dfferent niche. He has everything from industry analysis to links to thought-provoking articles to marketing advice.
Besides, how could you not love a guy who adds to an article discussion on legal firm mergers with a headshot of Locutus of Borg?
Consistency Means More Than Making Sure The Colors Match
Common look and feel is what most people think of when they
talk about consistency in marketing. While that's important, it's not enough.
Consistency is being in the same place each time so that your clients
and prospects come to trust that you will be there again.
Unfortunately, the legal market has been burned innumerable times by vendors
and service providers who have disappeared after their huge initial
announcements. Attorneys really need to see that you're consistent to believe
you're real.
Consistency means using the same language to describe your company or your
product every time you talk about it.
It means advertising in the same publications in the same way over and over.
It means going to the same shows year after year. Lawyers believe that if
you've been advertising and you stop, you must be going out of business or
having difficulties that make you dangerous to work with.
What are you doing to ensure your marketing message is consistent? How are you
making sure your potential clients view you as trustworthy?
Ten Things To Remember When Selling To Lawyers...
I had the chance last year in Texas to speak with Tracie Burns-- a brilliant legal marketing expert who was a practicing attorney for 15 years. She was kind enough to share with me "10 Things To Remember When Selling To Lawyers and Law Firms". Here it is:
The
rules for selling to the general public are often simple: Hire Michael
Jordan or Tiger Woods, add an "i" or an "e" to your company name, or
make your product out of transparent plastic. If you are trying to
appeal to America's million-plus lawyers, however, these rules will not
apply.
Lawyers are an entirely different breed of consumer.
They have their own method of processing print and online information.
They have distinctive buying habits and unique concerns. If your
message doesn't immediately hit them where they live, they won't give
you a second glance.
But
there are some things that you can do to ensure that your message not
only gets to your legal target market, but that it is also heard and
heeded by the lawyers you want as your clients.
1. Pick your target. Contrary
to popular belief, all attorneys are not alike. Large law firm partners
are going to make different buying choices through different marketing
avenues than Intellectual Property attorneys in boutique firms.
In-house counsel will have different interests than solo practitioners.
Choose which category of attorney would be the most likely
purchaser/user of your product or service and aim your pitch to that
category. Just as in any other marketing campaign, you have to be able
to envision your buyer or you'll never make a sale.
2. Attorneys buy TIME. There are really only four major ways to catch an attorney's attention with your marketing campaign. You've got to be selling Time, Information, Money, or Education in order to appear on their radar screen.
- Time
– attorneys bill by the hour, and anything you can do to save them time
will make them more productive and, thus, more successful.
- Information
– more than almost any other profession, attorneys HATE looking stupid.
If you can provide them with accurate information that they want or
need to use, then they have a reason for working with you.
- Money – saving money and making money are the goals for almost every law firm.
- Education – lawyers need Continuing Legal Education to maintain their licenses.
Nothing else you can promise them, except maybe
luxury or the notice of their peers, is going to keep an attorney's
attention. You can talk "cost-effectiveness," "customer satisfaction,"
the "meaning" or "history" of the profession, "user-friendliness" or
anything else until you're blue in the face. For this market, your
headline has to promise to save them time, make or save them money, or
save them from looking bad or they'll never read on. As for CLE, even
if you don't provide education to attorneys, you can still take
advantage of their need for it. See number 9 for some additional ideas.
3. When it comes to purchasing decisions, lawyers are followers. In addition to being more skeptical than "normal" consumers, lawyers have been trained in the concept of precedent.
If something has been done before, then it's the right thing to do. The
psychology of the attorney buying decision is simple: If someone who
looks like me or who has a firm that is structured like mine has been
successful with something, then it's something I should look at, too.
Because of this mindset, testimonials and case studies are some of the
most valuable sales tools in this vertical market. But it's also why
you need to avoid anything being "new" or "cutting edge," and you never
try to get a law firm to be "the first on their block" to do anything.
4. Repeat, repeat, repeat. In
the legal marketplace, sameness sells. Because of the attorney comfort
level (some might say "obsession") with precedent, this market wants
every promotion and marketing piece you do to look alike, and they want
to see the same ad in the same color with the same message over and
over. Sameness means stability, longevity, and proven effectiveness.
Integrated marketing helps them remember that they have heard of you or
seen your message before.
In the legal marketplace, it takes at least nine impressions to make an impression,
so attorneys have to see your message at least nine times just to
remember that they have seen your name. In reality, it probably takes
another nine times to actually remember your message! Changing
marketing concepts on a regular basis means you're "inconsistent," or
that your product doesn't really work yet, or that you're "new." It's
not like you're selling beer on TV. Running the same ad to the legal
marketplace for a year is not unreasonable. You're going to get tired
of looking at it long before your target buyers even register that
they've seen this ad before.
Make each impression count by keeping your message consistent and integrated.
If you use a mix of media – and you should! – and make sure every
business card has the same look and feel as every ad as every Web page
as every direct mail piece as every trade show booth. Pick a color
scheme and use those colors only. Use a single set of typefaces. Make
sure your tagline is everywhere. You'll create the comfort level you're
looking for a whole lot faster if you give these people what they want.
5. Make ‘em laugh. Contrary
to public opinion, lawyers do have a sense of humor. Don't be afraid to
appeal to it. If you can get them to laugh, you've stopped them long
enough to make them listen to your message – and potentially reduced
the number of times it will take for them to remember who you are.
...want the other five? The whole article is free. Just send me an email at shawnstruck@gmail.com with the subject "10 Things".
What have you learned, as a marketer, or business owner, is the best way to target this market? Leave a message in the comments thread here.
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