Every firm of solicitors advertise somewhere, yet with little or no success. Some simple changes to your current advertisements can increase the responses and income earned from your advertising.
Follow this five step plan and see an immediate improvement.
1. What is your intention with your advertising?
This should be a simple response: – to win new clients. Most firms do not have the substantial budgets required to produce “brand advertising” like Coca Cola or Nike. The one response you want is to recruit new clients. If your advertising is not achieving this, change the advertisement, and if that does not work, stop doing it.
It really is that simple.
2. Who is your target audience?
Remember who you are writing your advertisement for at all times. I know that approximately 90% of all solicitors’ advertisements start with the name of the practice. This is not good advertising. If you are doing this you must change your advertisement immediately. We need people seeing a great headline and being compelled to read your advertisement and then at the end of the advertisement to take action. Write some headlines and then put yourself in your clients’ shoes. If you look at the headline and can say “so what”, you need to think again.
In the body of the advertisement, consider what is important to your clients. For example, if you are advertising conveyancing services, your prospective clients might want to know that you will be there to talk to them when the exchange breaks down. If you are offering wills, they want to know if you will visit them at home and why they should pay a premium for you over a will writing agency.
If you are advertising personal injury services you need to educate the public to use you instead of claims companies. Think carefully about what matters to your audience. If you currently have your practice name at the top of your advertisement, I beg of you, change it now, please!
3. Features not benefits
Talk in terms of benefits to the client of using your practice rather than the features of your firm. You can change a feature into a benefit by using the terms “which means that” in the middle of the sentence.
E.g. We were established in 1910, which means that our experience can ensure you have a trouble and stress free house purchase.
4. Monitoring Response Rates
Many solicitors I visit have no idea how much business each advertisement generates. If you are spending a significant amount of money advertising you must know if it is money well spent. I know that fee earners are not always quick to ask where the new business has come from, but you can make it easier for them. One method is to place a false name in the advertisement so that when the caller speaks to reception and asks for that name you immediately know it is in response to the advertisement. Obviously you need to forewarn the receptionist or she will send your new enquirers packing, but it is a very simple and effective way of measuring the success of your marketing (and remember there is ‘no treasure without measure’).
5. Tell Them What To Do!
At the end of every advertisement make it abundantly clear what you want the reader to do. If you are offering a free legal guide, tell them where to get it, if you want the instruction tell them how to arrange their free consultation. You must tell your reader what you want them to do and how to do it (phone, online or email).
Summary.
Following this simple 5 step plan will ensure that your advertisements provide you with some success.
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I am a member of a business mastermind group. Once every couple of months I get together with this group of smart minds and we spend a day together with specific time allotted to each other’s business to take apart a current challenge, disect it and then put it back together. The power of five brains instead of one makes this a very useful and powerful process and it has had a massive impact on my business.
