Stop Believing: Stop Receiving

Nick Jervis' Law FIrm Marketing PlanSadly my children are getting to the age where they have twigged that the guy with the big white beard and the red coat might not actually be real. Megan at 11 has definitely realised, and I am pretty sure that Samuel at 9 is there or thereabouts, but at the same time they still have that hope, excitement and intrigue that just some part of the magical story might be true. I must confess, that being a big child at heart myself, I have always loved their excitement at Christmas time so I am keen to see it last as long as possible, hence this year’s ‘strapline’ I have created around Christmas:

Stop Believing: Stop Receiving!

I know, slightly cruel and barbed, but with just three sleeps to go it is holding out pretty well and whenever I say it they quickly get back on track. I have several friends who are also using it now. Can you use it too?

Marketing shares this with Father Christmas. If you start a marketing project and do not commit to it absolutely and completely, it is more than likely to fail. If you ask your partners to support a legal marketing campaign and they only partially commit, the minute your campaign does not fly off the blocks like a sprinter at the Olympics they will use every trick to pull you down and to stop the campaign. I have seen this several times and it can be brutal. Why it happens is somewhat bizarre, after all your fellow partners will share in any success of the campaign through increased profits, but a human weakness and desire to see you fail, or the campaign fail, shines through. It is more likely than not because they do not understand the marketing, or that they are ‘jealous’ that you have had the idea, but whatever human frailty causes this I have seen it happen so many times that I know it is not a one off. This is why whoever is in charge of marketing needs to obtain full commitment from other partners to proceed with the project, and then be left alone without interruption to make it work over an agreed period of time (months or years usually).

But this does not just apply to partnerships. If you are a sole trader you may well set out to sabotage the success of your own law firm marketing campaigns. You might not give them enough time to break through ‘The Dip (excellent little read by Seth Godin)‘, the period where nothing seems to be happening with your campaign so you give up on it; just before the period when it was going to start to produce results.

Once you have decided on a new marketing project, you must totally commit to it for a sustained period and do all you can to make it work until that period arrives. If you hold any doubts they will do their utmost to stop the campaign from working. In challenging times you do not need anything standing in the way of your successful marketing. You must make every campaign as successful as possible.

There are going to be plenty of challenges in 2011, but there are also going to be huge opportunities. How much you invest in and commit to the marketing of your law firm will play a big part in how well your firm performs next year. But just like this year, if firms make the commitments that my consultancy clients have made this year, they will buck the majority trends and increase their profits, some substantially.

So make sure you keep on believing in your marketing, commit to it unequivocally and keep working at it, improving it, testing and measuring it, and you will keep on receiving the new client instructions that you desire.

However, the minute you Stop Believing, you Stop Receiving, just as it is with Santa.

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Law Firm Marketing

Case Study

Beating the big boys whilst spending a fraction of their budget

We focus on accident claims, and it’s vital for us to have a strong web presence, which we didn’t have before Nick got involved.

As a result we had to buy in leads from other sources, reducing our profit margins and making us reliant on other companies to generate revenue.

We did have a company working on our Adwords and website, but the truth of the matter is that they weren’t getting the results we needed them to get – we only had a handful of clients coming in from those efforts, making us highly reliant on buying in the leads from elsewhere.

And then I came across one of Nick’s books, was impressed by what I read and got in touch with him.

The rest – as they say – is history.

We started working together with a clear brief: Nick’s job was to help us bring in more self-generated work, so we could stop relying on buying leads.

He started by working on our website, making it more accessible and easier to navigate.

Next he overhauled our Google Adwords, which the previous company had been running fairly unsuccessfully.

Adwords is hugely challenging in our sector, with some very big players bidding on some of the most common keywords, making it very difficult for any smaller firms to get a look in, and I’ve got to be honest and say that I didn’t know how Nick was going to make it work.

But he did, by analysing very closely what people were looking for and tailoring our Adwords efforts towards them.

It worked! We were competing with the big boys whilst spending a fraction of their budget, and the amount of work we got in was tremendous – we jumped from just a handful of leads and clients a month to 500 leads and 150 clients, every single month, all from our online efforts.

Nick didn’t just work on the lead generation side of things either – he helped us with the client conversion process too, training our team, making our sales calls better and improving our onboarding process to avoid drop-offs due to ‘cooling off’.

Now we don’t buy in any work at all, our pay-per-click efforts do a sterling job, and the large client database that Nick has helped us build has allowed us to increase the amount of work we do by a factor of ten, in just three years.

I’m one extremely satisfied client, and despite the dramatic differences Nick has been able to make in the time we’ve been working together, things are still improving thanks to his guidance and support.

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