May 15th, 2013
Regular contact with your clients is all important – it reminds them that you exist and showcases your expertise. More importantly, it helps retain their business and generate new opportunities. One of the best ways to do keep up communication is with an email newsletter.
Anyone that subscribes to newsletters can instantly spot the good, the bad and the plain ugly. A poorly executed newsletter will reflect badly on your firm. Given their importance, we’ve put together a simple three step guide on how to write a newsletter:
Step One – Planning
Having an action plan before you start makes the whole process of writing a newsletter easier. Consider the following:
When to post? The simple answer is regularly. How often do you think you can produce a quality newsletter? Based on your answer, we would suggest choosing between weekly, bi-monthly or monthly.
How long should it be? Getting the balance between information and brevity is all important. You don’t want the newsletter to be too long to make it intimidating but conversely, if it doesn’t contain enough information then is it really worthwhile? Strike a balance that feels right.
Who is it for? Knowing your audience and tailoring the newsletter to them is crucial to your success. Make sure you know who your clients are and what they are interested in. Then stick to topics that will be beneficial to them.
Step Two – What To Include?
You need to remember that your newsletter needs to be valuable – it should be something that is relevant, useful and beneficial to your client. It should also be an enjoyable experience for them.
Choosing the Right Information – When you right your newsletter, ask yourself the following questions:
What do your clients want to know? What are the questions they regularly ask you? What queries do you receive all the time? What topics interest them? Use your newsletter as an opportunity to cover these areas.
Sharing your news and promoting your services is a must but try not to make it to sales-based though. Also, don’t feel like you have to produce all the content yourself. If you have seen a good news story or stumbled across something great on Twitter it is worth sharing. Chances are your clients will find it interesting too. Keep your content fresh and topical. Try not to repeat the same material in each newsletter. If something in the news relates to your area of law then this is ideal.
Choosing your content – As well as text, try and include some of the following:
Step Three – Writing & Structure
Golden Rules when it comes to writing:
- Simplicity – Use everyday language and keep your content jargon free.
- Spelling/grammar/inaccuracies – Mistakes are a no no. Be sure to complete research and proofread. And once you’ve proofread the newsletter, get a colleague to proofread it too. Once the newsletter is sent there is no going back
- Structure – Like when writing a news story, structure your newsletter by placing the most important and interesting information at the beginning. This is a good way to structure each individual section too.
- Headlines/Topic Headings – Use headlines/sub-headings to divide up your newsletter. This makes it easier to read and avoids blocks of text.
If you want help producing a newsletter or any other aspect of legal marketing, contact us at Samson Consulting for expert legal marketing advice.
Author: Guest Blogger
May 8th, 2013
I am writing to let you know that I have just written a new report entitled 3 Steps To More Clients Now!
It is definitely a Ronseal type report – designed to do exactly what its title suggests for you.
So if you would like some more clients, and would like to know the three things that I can almost guarantee that you are not yet doing but should be, hop over to the page below and request your free copy.
The good news is that the three steps are very easy to take and will cost you little, if anything, to implement.
Ready?
All you need to do is click here and I will send your copy to you.
Author: Nick Jervis
May 2nd, 2013
The recent case of Devil Is In The Detail v Perfection Kills Momentum brought to light some interesting issues. The impact of the case for the legal profession was considered so important that it was transferred to the High Court for the final hearing.
Devil Is In The Detail argued that when it came to the attraction of clients to a solicitors practice it was absolutely vital that no promotion of the firms services should take place unless or until the supporting evidence was completely perfect. He argued that to promote any law firms activities with any materials which were not of the usual high and exacting standards expected of any legal document would lead to ridicule and mocking amongst colleagues and peers, and may indeed deter certain clients from ever using the said firm in the future.
Perfection Kills Momentum responded vehemently to the claims made against her. She argued that for too many years solicitors had faced challenges and assaults to their livelihood from a number of different sources, citing Government change of policy and new entrants to the legal services market place as just two major reasons why many law firms were now having to work longer and harder to even stand still.
With these challenges Perfection Killed Momentum pleaded that it was vital solicitors understood that the promotion of their services to attract new clients is not of itself ‘the provision of a legal service’. She went on the state that whilst in the provision of said legal services ‘the devil is of course in the detail’, the promotion of them is a creative process which is designed to deliver new clients to the firm in question on a regular basis rather than create a document, website or other marketing collateral which never leaves the firms premises.
The Devil Is In The Detail presented several exhibits showing minor errors in the promotion of different firms’ activities, including an advertisement promoting Probate Services which did not include any footnotes whatsoever detailing the full probate process, along with a website from one firm, which remained nameless for the shame that Devil Is In The Detail thought would be caused to it, which failed to list their legal services in alphabetical order. Devil Is In The Detail argued that the website should never have been published until this heinous error was corrected, and whilst that may have taken many months for the partners to agree such a change, it would have been in the firms best interests.
Perfection Kills Momentum responded to these exhibits with what she believed to be her trump card. She presented evidence detailing the demise of no less than 10 firms of solicitors, all of which closed due to a decrease in business. However, in each case the firms were ‘in the process of’ putting in place new, automatic promotional activities which would generate new business for the practice with very little input required from the partners, save for signing off the process in the first place.
The most harrowing case was that of a firm which had all but completed a website and instructed a company to handle all of the promotion of it which would almost certainly generate enough new instructions to keep the business profitable for a number of years, but they had failed to ‘go live’. The two partners had spent the last 12 months before the practice closed arguing whether blue or green should be the dominant colour in the firm’s new logo on the website. This one argument had prevented the website being completed and in the meantime the partner’s had run out of money.
Lord Justice Hackson presiding ruled as follows:
“For too long now solicitors have been all but paralysed by The Devil Is In The Detail when it comes to the promotion of their services. This has led to the closure of countless practices across the country, as demonstrated by Perfection Kills Momentum. This simply has to stop and so I have no hesitation in playing my part and stopping this now.
When it comes to the promotion of legal services, solicitors must remember that they are not dealing with a legal document, such as a contract of employment, or pleadings in a High Court matter, but just that, the promotion of their services. For this promotion to have any chance of working for the firm, it must be set free from the law firm and allowed to go out and find new prospects and clients for its master. A brochure cannot extoll the value of its masters services if it is left sitting in a box under reception, no less than a website can do so if it is never published because the firm and the designer have ‘creative differences’, whatever that may mean.
The evidence from Perfection Kills Momentum is quite clear and for that reason I have no hesitation in finding in the Respondent’s favour. Quite clearly Perfection Does Kill Momentum, and without momentum a firm’s marketing will never do what it is intended to, that is to regularly deliver new clients to the door of the firm in question.
The Devil Is In The Detail has caused too much hardship to too many law firms, and accordingly this action is dismissed and Devil Is In The Details must pay punitive costs.
Any firm reading this judgment should take heed: The Devil Is In The Detail can no longer stop them from attracting new clients. They are now free to promote their services even when the perfection required for the provision of their services is not present in their marketing collateral. They must remember that good is good enough, and that any marketing collateral can be amended as many times as they like once it is set free, and unlike pleadings they do not need to apply to the court for these amendments and nor are they required to show these amendments underlined in different colours, the order of which no one can ever remember in any event!”
N.B. Anyone obsessing with any punctuation or typographical errors in the judgment should be reminded that they have missed the point. These may or may not have been intended by the court report, Mr Nicholas Jervis.
Author: Nick Jervis
April 30th, 2013
Content Marketing is very much a buzz phrase at the moment and is in fact an essential aspect of legal marketing. It’s all about creating and sharing interesting content. Your goal is not to sell your product directly but to provide valuable information to your target audience.
By delivering reliable, relevant and interesting content, you will find that you attract more online traffic and that your business will grow over time. Content marketing is not an instant fix, but part of a long-term legal marketing strategy that will lead to more cases coming your way. It is therefore well worth investing in.
As with all things online, it is an art as well as a science so here are a few basic tips to get you started with content marketing:
What content?
Blogs
Blogging gets a bad press. On hearing the word, you may well be imagining legions of nerds revealing their innermost thoughts in the dank corners of the world wide web but this is not the case. Blogs are so much more and are the beating heart of content marketing. Blogs are the best way of updating your site with quality content. By posting regularly you will drive traffic to your site which in turn leads to more enquiries and more business. Blogs can be targeted to your desired audience and make full use of your legal expertise. And blogs don’t just have to be articles. In fact, the best blogs will feature the following:
Know Your Audience
Before creating any content, you must ‘become’ your audience or at the very least put yourself firmly in their shoes – what do they like? what do they find interesting? how do they like to interact with information?
Once you know your audience, you can start creating the kind of content that they will love.
Making It Relevant
By now you know the types of content that you can produce and who you are targeting, it’s time to get creating. Spend some time producing your content. If you don’t have the time, then get someone else to make the effort because the rewards are great.
If you can bash out ‘content’ in an hour then there is every chance that it is not going to be the kind of material that people will spend time reading and then sharing. It becomes pointless. The end goal of legal marketing and in turn content marketing on your site is to build more traffic and to convert that traffic into business. This will only happen with quality content and the old adage remains true, if something is worth doing, it is worth doing well. Here are a few pointers:
Social Media
So you’ve followed the tips and produced some fantastic content. Now time to share it and watch it get shared. The better the content the more it will be shared naturally. It will make its way across the web with people sharing because you have provided useful, attractively presented, well-written content. This helps build your brand as a respected voice.
There seems to be a new addition to the social media world every day but that doesn’t mean that social networking and bookmarking is any less important. Ultimately you want your content to be seen by as many people as possible. Make full use of the following to help spread the word:
It’s easy to add a whole host of easy-to-use sharing buttons to your blog posts to make it easy for people to share what they have enjoyed.
These steps may be simple but they do take time. They also represent the tip of the iceberg when it comes to legal marketing. With your time both precious and expensive, why not get in contact with us at Samson to find out exactly how we can help with legal marketing.
Author: Guest Blogger
April 29th, 2013
I remember the Tax man’s advertisements with the theme of “Tax doesn’t have to be taxing”.
The same should apply to law firm marketing. I know that a lot of solicitors are not massive marketing fans, but they are all people, and they all have personalities, and this above everything else should help to make your marketing fun.
An often repeated but so true statement is that ‘people by people’. Now whether I have an injury and need a personal injury solicitor, I have a business and need a commercial solicitor or I am simply moving house and looking for a conveyancing solicitor, I am much more likely to choose a solicitor who I actually like as a person.
Yet so few solicitors allow their personality to come out in their marketing, instead hiding behind a fascade of ‘bland and boring’ just like every other solicitor (except the beautiful people who make up my Marketing4Solicitors group and consultancy clients of course – they completely understand the personality in law firm marketing requirements).
So if you really want to start having some success with the marketing of your law firm, allow your personality to come out and people just might like you and choose you to be their solicitor more so than they currently are doing. It has to be worth a try doesn’t it?
Author: Nick Jervis
April 26th, 2013
I have just had a free call with one of my Marketing4Solicitors members (well two of them from the same firm actually) and it was fantastic.
Every M4S member is allowed a free one on one call with me, usually one every three months but I don’t rigidly enforce that if a member has a more pressing need. So these lovely people had a call a few month’s ago, and asked for improvements to their website. So I spent some time on the telephone with them and advised them what they should do, and here is the best bit, they went away and did what I said.
Fast forward a few months to today and they request another call with me (using Gotomeeting so I can do a live review of their website as they watch at the same time) and guess what? They are getting more visitors to their website and are generating more enquiries because they took action.
I was able to suggest several more changes that they can now make which I can almost guarantee will lead to more of their larger number of website visitors turning into leads and clients.
Well done to them for all of the action they have taken, and a big thank you to them for sharing their success with me! It really makes my day!
Author: Nick Jervis
April 22nd, 2013
Marketing is just a fad. You pay a bit of money, do a bit of advertising, nothing really happens, nothing really changes, but you feel that you have done your bit. After all, in ever more competitive times you know that you need to do some marketing, so doing some random or ad hoc advertising ticks this box doesn’t it?
So when you receive that phone call on a Friday afternoon, offering you an amazing ‘advertising opportunity’ which has a 5pm deadline, and which if you do not seize will be grabbed by your neighbouring law firm, you have to take it don’t you? And when you discover that it costs less than £1,000, the seemingly magical cut off point when serious decision making is required, you would be mad to say no wouldn’t you?
This falls into the “We have to do something” territory that so many law firms find themselves being trapped by at the moment. They all know that they have to do something, that it really is now or never, but they often sadly do completely the wrong thing.
If you go back to my headline, that marketing is a ‘gimmick’ which I know so many solicitors believe to be the case, you can easily buy into these last minute advertising packages. I mean, you can’t treat marketing seriously like you do the law, can you?
Well of course you really must if you want to be running a successful practice for now and many years to come. And I would start doing this right now. You owe it to any staff you employ, your suppliers, your family and above all else to yourself.
You see marketing is much more similar to the law than you might at first glance imagine. It has rules and systems, for example just like a litigation case does. If you took on a dispute for a client with no prior knowledge and immediately tried to apply for a judgment, you would fail. If you just accept any offer to advertise without giving the matter some serious consideration, you are again much more likely to fail.
When you are approached my these advertising charlatans with their last minute offers, take just a few moments to run through the short check list below and you can save yourself many wasted thousands of pounds.
Ask yourself these questions:
Unless and until you can answer all of these questions, you should say no to any more of those random calls selling gimmicky marketing or advertising. They resort to underhand selling tactics for a very good reason, largely because what they are selling doesn’t work (worse still is that I am sure that in some cases the publication is never actually printed).
I hate the people selling these systems, because I know that most solicitors are easy prey for the reasons that I have mentioned above. You know that you should be doing something, so they take advantage of this knowledge and sell you what anyone in the know would call ‘utter rubbish’.
This is why I have set up a section within Marketing4Solicitors called Saints And Sinners. This is where my members approach me before they spend money to see if I or others within our group have tried the company that has approached them, so that they can save themselves the time and money of investing in an advertising scheme that simply will not work.
Just think about that, you could buy one of these last minute schemes for £1,000 that produces absolutely nothing, or for just over half of that cost you can have access to Marketing4Solicitors for a year and save yourself the stress and pain of investing in these sham schemes (there is no minimum contract – just making the point that it is very reasonably priced).
Not only that, but you will be provided with a wealth of resources explaining exactly how you should be spending your hard earned marketing money to generate a steady flow of new client instructions, and then the system you can use to automate the marketing processes so that they work with or without you, month after month.
Whatever you do, please don’t waste your money on the advertising methods outlined above. Use the simple test of ‘Will I be able to track to the penny how much money I make in costs by advertising in this publication’ and if met with a negative answer, get back to doing what you do best, looking after your clients. Let the snake oil salesman snare a different solicitor that day.
To join Marketing4Solicitors for 30 days risk free, and receive over £400 worth of benefits instantly, sign up for the free guide on the form below and I will send you some more details.
Author: Nick Jervis
April 16th, 2013
How to Gain New Clients Monthly on Autopilot – An infographic by the team at Legal Marketing – Samson Consulting
April 12th, 2013
We frequently hear of businesses closing down and all sorts of people are asked to comment on the reasons for this. I never like to hear of a business failing, but sometimes the coverage by the media and those who are supposedly in the know is just plain wrong.
Take my local restaurant, Europa in Nailsea which very disappointingly has just closed. It was an Italian Pizza/Pasta restaurant which took over the site from a well established chain called Bottelinos.
No one quite understood why Bottelinos left. A town like Nailsea needs a reasonably priced family restaurant for birthdays etc, and aside from a Wetherspoon’s pub, there really is nothing else around, so Bottelinos was always packed. It was strange that they decided to sell their lease to another similar type of establishment.
So Europa came to Nailsea, spent £50,000 renovating the site and opened to much local fanfare. But that is where it stopped. Once they opened, there were no leaflet drops, no advertising that I saw, no special promotions or offers, and no more press coverage. In this day and age no one can expect to run any business just by ‘being there’. You have to do more to convince people to spend their money with you, this applies whether you are a restaurant, an estate agent or a firm of solicitors.
Sitting there and waiting for the work to come through the door is simply not enough.
There was one other lesson to be learned from the closure of Europa Nailsea. Sadly, the food wasn’t as good as it used to be with Bottelinos. I ate their twice in three months and was disappointed both times. My family ate their once and did not want to go back when it was the next family birthday. If the quality of your service or product is not there, then it doesn’t matter if you have the best marketing in the world, you will struggle to stay in business.
I was really disappointed to see Europa close. I wanted it to succeed, because as I say Nailsea needs a good family restaurant. I feel for the owners, because of course the last thing that they wanted was for the restaurant not to be a success. Perhaps another reason that it failed was that it was following in the path of what seemed to be a really successful restaurant and perhaps it was just not given enough time.
Interestingly, I went out for a meal last night with one of my good friends Rob Ward who runs a business advising Garden Centres and farm shops how to grow their businesses – a very bright chap (Food Marketing Network). Obviously we could not go to Europa, so we went to a gastro pub in the neighbouring village of Backwell called The George (just over a mile from Europa). It was full to the brim (and on a Thursday night).
Back to the two big lessons for you. Do more to make sure people know exactly what it is that you do, and when all of the many different methods you use to promote your message start to work, make sure that you provide a great service for your clients.
If you do both of these things, you will stay in business for as long as you choose to, and you won’t have the blame the media, the recession or anyone else. You will have taken responsibility for your business and reaped the rewards.
Author: Nick Jervis