The old marketing adage is that you have to present a new product, service or business idea seven times before someone understands and embraces it. Does this still apply today? My experience in promoting my solicitor clients’ services and my own, both in terms of marketing for law firms and Loyalty Law is that the number is now far greater and I would like to explain why for your benefit.
If you think about how many interruptions your potential clients face in a day you can start to understand why. They might wake up in the morning to a commercial radio station or television and face many advertisements.
If they decide to read the newspaper again they are faced with many advertising messages, some obvious, others concealed as news items. All of them are vying for your client’s attention and your client is already under time pressure to leave the house to get to work.
Once they leave their house for work either on foot or by car they will again face the radio or a podcast with advertising, but also now billboards with more advertising and buses and vans plastered with advertising messages.
Arrival at work leads to the biggest time wasting exercise of your client’s busy day, checking email and Social Media websites (which now generally all have their own forms of advertising). Your client’s emails will contain spam advertising and requested advertising from trusted suppliers like Amazon, Tesco, or maybe even Co-Op offering you 200 club points if you make a will (yes I received this offer – de-regulation is already here really).
How do you cut through this clutter? How do you or I reach our clients with the message that we think is relevant and important to them? Well you certainly have to try at least seven times, yet now I think it is probably even more than that, maybe 10 or 20 times. Having a great product or service was never enough. This is even more the case now. You have to have a great product or service and shout it from the rooftops in as many ways as possible.
Take my own recent example. I know Loyalty Law is a going to be a great service for solicitors. Some solicitors immediately embraced it on the first mention of the service. Since then we have written letters, sent emails, run a webinar, joint ventures and promoted the service in probably around 10 or 20 other different ways to make sure we reach the right audience. We have then kept following up. The funny thing, and this still gets me after 20 years in the legal profession, is that it is often the 10th or 15th or 20th communication that suddenly prompts someone into action. We have people signing up now for Loyalty Law that first heard about the scheme two months ago.
Now of course if you promote your business or service effectively, as you must do now, you will from time to time upset someone. Embrace this, unless you are upsetting someone you are not promoting your message enough. For each person that I send another communication to them about Loyalty Law that complains about it, another two more will send back their application forms for Loyalty Law grateful that I have prompted them into action.
In my first legal practice I sent a letter to all Wills and Probate clients. It generated thousands of pounds worth of instructions. It also upset a family who had lost a loved one recently. That was not pleasant and could have been avoided had the database been correctly updated, but it allowed us to update our records so that it did not happen again and to send flowers and sympathy. The managing partner stopped the campaign for fear of upsetting anyone else, costing the business thousands more in lost revenue. You will upset people from time to time, hopefully not in this way. Do not let it stop you from promoting your services, but learn from it, put in place systems to ensure your database is always up to date, but keep telling people what you do or they will forget, walk away, or be consumed by another firm’s brighter and more frequent contacts.
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Author: Nick Jervis