Personal Injury Attorney Marketing

How do you create an effective marketing strategy for your personal injury law practice? How do you get your custom marketing strategy plan and a marketing strategy process implemented quickly and easily?

A marketing plan template is not going to cut it. You need something customized for your legal practice. Every attorney and entrepreneur is different. Introducing:

Marketing Made Easy For Personal Injury Attorneys

The 8 Steps To ROI For Legal Practices That Want To Become Profitable Businesses (FREE, No Opt-In Required!)

Inside this Comprehensive Guide, You’ll Learn…

• How to Avoid the Most Common Law Firm Marketing Mistakes
• How to Test Your Ideas Before You Waste Another Dollar
• How to Create a Quick and Easy Attorney Marketing Plan
• How to Decide What Advertising Media to Use for Your Firm
• How to Develop Advertising Assets That Give You Ultimate Leverage and Reliable Profits
• And it’s all right here on the blog. You don’t even have to give me your email address 🙂

Jesse Stoddard here with the Stoddard Agency and today I am going to be talking to you about marketing made easy, the eight steps to ROI for small to medium-sized law firms that want to become profitable businesses. I’ve been doing this line of work for quite a while. I am an “outsourced” Chief Marketing Officer and Consultant to personal injury attorneys and law firms and what I found is that a lot of people make it way too complicated, so today, I’m going to make it easy.

All right, first of all, we’re going to start with the Marketing Mentality. There’s kind of a philosophy and a mentality that you need to attain or aspire to before any technique is going to work. It’s the difference between principles and techniques. Specific procedures are going to change all the time inevitably but marketing principles are going to be something that you can stake your future on, and so first of all, don’t overcomplicate it unnecessarily.

It has been made ridiculously complicated.

• There are more ways, more media available than ever before.
• There are more people selling methods, basically, media, than ever
  before.
• Everyone in the advertising media selling business is now in the “digital marketing” business.

I don’t know about you but if you’re a legal entrepreneur or you are a partner in a law firm (or are going at it on your own), you are assaulted with phone calls, e-mails, texts, and office visits from media companies, whether it’s TV, radio, or print or online, who also have an online arm and who are trying to take all of your SEO and pay per click and whatnot. So it’s as if everybody is in the same game selling the same thing.

• And as your law firm grows, you will be inundated with complexity.
• By the way, you should EMBRACE the complexity using simple principles, so again, it’s going to seem complex but you don’t want to get overwhelmed. If you rely on principles, you can get through the weeds and find your way to a successful outcome.

So first, we want to start with a:

1. Customer Focus

That’s the number one principle. Select a single target market at a time and know everything about them. Now, notice I said at a time. It doesn’t mean you can’t have more than one target market. It just means you’re going to want to select a single one at a time and you want to understand everything about them. It’s all about focusing on the customer first as opposed to what most people do, which is create a widget, create a product, create a service and then, go out and try to find customers for it.

It’s infinitely easier to identify a market, to identify a person or a type, an avatar or a persona if you will, who want something and then design or create or offer something, a service or product that they want. That’s so much easier and everybody does that backward; even people that have been in business for a long time and who should know better.

If you’re already in business as an active law practice with real clients, which you probably are if you’re reading this, you likely can’t start over but you can begin making your business about that customer and you can tailor to them and customize it to them in order to get a better outcome.

Let’s talk about your Ideal Client.

• It sounds odd but you need to identify your market first.
• A market is actually just a group of people that shares something
  in common.
• Which means that the group is made up of individuals that you can study and get to know intimately.
• At the core of the transaction is the relationship just like a very small Mom-and-Pop business startup.
• So no matter how big you get, you’re never immune to the natural
  laws of business.

In other words, it’s the same whether you just started or whether you own a tiny law practice or you’re running a large multi-million dollar partnership, you’re the financier or you have a multi-state law firm or even a second side-business doing 14 to $15 million a year in-home services.

It doesn’t really matter. There’s still the fact that the relationship is the basis of it all. People want to do business with people, not with nameless and inhuman corporations or robots. It’s never going to change.

They’re usually several or many different target markets you can do business with

And you need to start with one and master the Marketing and Sales Process with that one and then, you can move on to others.

By the way, you can do it all, just not all at the same time at first.

Eventually, you create systems where you can, I guess, “multitask.” Really, it is just creating systems to help target multiple markets at the same time with either systems and software and automation or with people helping you.

A huge mistake is trying to use one ad to target all potential markets.

So especially when people get started or they haven’t done a lot of advertising before, they try to just copy what other people in their industry are doing, which, by the way, if everybody’s doing it it’s probably likely that you shouldn’t be doing it. By definition, it’s going to create average results because it’s what the average person does and so typically, what they do is they create an ad that is just trying to appeal to everybody.

For example, if I’m a Carpet Cleaner (I just pulled that out of thin air because I was listening to Joe Polish who’s, by the way, a fantastic Marketer and has a really good Podcast)… If you’re a Carpet Cleaner and you want to do commercial work for offices but you also like to do high-end homes, well, this person who owns a luxury home is a lot different than a business customer. They have two different needs and so trying to create one ad that serves both, it basically creates less impact, if any impact at all.

You’re muddying the waters. You end up with bland, homogenized and ineffective ads.

• So take your ideal target and create a persona or avatar that you can describe in great detail.
• Start with demographics (even if it is hard because personal injury leads are triggered by events, of course).
• That’s all the basics, that age and location, geography, income, different affiliations, basic information on them and add psychographics.
• And some might even be able to figure out “psychic-graphics”, by the way, which you’ll hear some marketers talk about. Basically, the idea is to figure out what do they like and what do they don’t like? What magazines do they read? What are their habits? You’d be surprised what you can find out with your current customer list. Maybe you need to survey.

Maybe you need to dig in but sometimes, all you got to do is call a few people up and ask them a few questions. Get to know somebody. Take them to lunch. Take them to coffee, whatever you need to do to learn a little bit more about them because it’s going to be much easier to target a persona or an avatar like your ideal target market if you know something about them.

• And of course, Pain Points. What keeps them up at night worrying and staring at the ceiling unable to overcome the nagging fear or discontent?

If you can find out what they are, really what’s pain for them, you’re going to be way ahead of your competition because people are more motivated to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. A little bit more about the ideal target market is what I call it.

• If you can identify a second market, could the two overlapped to create a hyper-targeted list?

A quick example is here with one of the clients I work with is that they target homeowners but also, they like to target Real Estate Agents, so they have advertising. We have marketing advertising that focuses on Real Estate Agents, marketing advertising that focuses on homeowners but then we realized what about Real Estate Agents that own homes? So, in other words, it’s the best of both worlds.

Either way, identify the perfect Avatar and begin your targeting around that person first.

Study them, Survey, online quizzes are a good idea, focus groups, expensive but very effective or just ask your customers what they think.

A little quote from Joe Chernov, CMO of InsightSquared, “Good marketing makes the company look smart. Great marketing makes the customer feel smart.”

2. Solution Testing

The next step is Solution Testing. Find a need and fill a need or a want. Now, this one is really interesting. People think about this when they’re first setting up a company or they’re exploring potential business opportunities. They think about this but they don’t often think about this after they’re already in business. It’s not just a solution meaning your product or service. It’s also additional products and services that you add, looking for research and development opportunities, change or improve your product.

And I put it as step number two because again, if it’s all about the customer and the target market, then finding a need and filling a need is all about finding the right solution, which means you have to test your solution to find out if it’s even going to work.

Now, there’s some really easy ways to Test Your Theories.

• Most people don’t want to do it at all though.
•  If you already have a product or service, that’s okay. Just know you’re doing it the harder way.
• Identifying the market first and figuring out what they want is exponentially easier.
• Your current product or service may need to be modified or you may have to modify your target market to create a profitable match.
• If you’re just starting out or you’re adding a new product or service to your existing offerings, you can find out a ton, a lot of stuff on Google with AdWords Keyword Planner.

Simply type in the ideas that you have, keywords, to find out what people are looking for because if there’s a lot of people looking for something, obviously, there’s some kind of a demand for it. If you have studied your target market closely, you probably already have found out what they want. That’s the other no-nonsense low tech way is just ask people what they want and find out what they think about your ideas.

If you’re about to launch a new product big companies do this all the time obviously but small businesses, which is our focus today, often don’t think about doing these things. They’re some good habits from large businesses that you can pick up.

You can go back to your surveys or simply have a conversation with a few of your best clients and the same research can also be applied to new advertising campaigns or any changes to your message to market to make sure there’s a match. This is a big point. I really want to emphasize this. We’re not just talking about products and services when we’re talking about testing your theory. It’s really about going, is my market responding to my marketing and my ad? Do I have a message to market match? Does what I say match up with who I’m trying to say it to? Alright, now you need to test that and you need to look at that to find a good match.

Some of this stuff is really common sense but you’d be surprised how many small business owners, entrepreneurs or independent professionals, sales professionals never bother to do this. Try out your ideas in small samples before you sink a lot of money into an unknown. This doesn’t just go for R and D. This is also for advertising. If you have a potential market that you’re trying to hit and you want to run an ad, you’re so much better off jumping on Facebook or jumping on some platform where you can spend a small amount of money to sample.

If you’re going to do mail, do a small sample of the list. Obviously, it has to be big enough to be statistically significant but it doesn’t take blowing the whole wad on one ad and I’ve seen it many times, worked with a company who wanted to do some direct mail and they spent 100 grand on one mail and it didn’t work. They got a return but it wasn’t even enough to really cover the cost of the ad and that’s a lot of money to waste on something you haven’t tested yet, so start with smaller samples.

3. Power Positioning.

You must arrive into the marketplace like no one else if you expect to be acknowledged like no one else. It’s really like a Chess game where you need to get leverage in order to get to checkmate, not just trying to take out a pawn or two but winning the game. So it begins with your USP and brand.

• How much you can sell your product or service for has more to do with who you are selling to, how you are selling it, where you are selling it and how you are perceived than does the actual product or
  service.
• A unique Selling Proposition/Position, USP, is useless unless you have integrated it into your core messaging and your brand and you put it in front of the ideal target market.
• By “Branding”, by the way, I don’t mean big expensive “Brand Advertising” like big dumb companies do. They have big budgets and different reasons for marketing than a small business does.

They may have to appeal to investors, shareholders. They may need to dress it up before a sale or a merger acquisition. They may have somebody on the Executive Team that they’re trying to appease. They may want to look good compared to another competitor. They may be positioning or posturing against a competitor as a threat. There’s so many reasons that a big brand, a big company advertises that a small company or a startup or a small Mom-and-Pop shop just can’t do, can’t afford to do, wouldn’t want to do.  So there are a lot of differences there.

• Now, positioning is perception and power.
•  It’s why sometimes, you have to go to another town to sell something or do something different where nobody knows you in order to get out of the law of familiarity.

It’s kind of like Cheers—a place where everybody knows your name, that’s great if you want to feel accepted but it’s not good because everybody’s already labeled you and they already think they know everything about you. Let’s say you’ve been a letter carrier, mailman all your life and then one day, you decide that you’re going to go become a Doctor, they laugh at you, you’ll never make it, you won’t succeed and they want to pull, those crabs that want to pull you back in the bucket if you know that analogy. Well, that positioning, that’s a problem. It’s where the Law of Familiarity breaks down. It’s a double-edged sword.

It’s people want to do business with people that they know, like and trust but if they know, like and trust you but they think of you as a certain way, sometimes, changing the perception is really, really, really difficult. It can be done. You just have to be conscious of this.

The quickest way to create power positioning is by controlling the media and PR you get.

…And the easiest way to control the media and PR is to create your own media.

By the way, the fastest, simplest, easiest tip to get started is to write a book. It still has the highest perceived value.

Now, your product or service must differentiate to avoid death in the marketplace

…And your Marketing must differentiate or die.

To market DIFFERENTLY, you need to know what your competitors are doing and what other industries are doing and draw from ideas that your competitors aren’t. By the way, this is all related to having your own media like I said in that last slide, that having your own media is about having your own information, your own podcast, your own blog, your own book, your own articles, your own everything, your own newsletter and when you have all of those things and you’re presenting information that people want, then you have the ability to kind of create your own media, so and that’s a platform and a following and you see it all the time online. It is the quickest way.

Then, also eventually, you make relationships with PR, media people and you may be able to get free coverage sometimes but it all starts with marketing differently. If you know what your competitors are doing, you know how to stand out from the crowd. The fastest way to know what not to do is to watch what everyone else is doing. By definition, what everyone else in your industry is doing is wrong because it leads to only average results.

Next is Multi-Media, Multi-Channel, Multi-Step, Multi-Modality Integrated Marketing. That’s a lot. Multi-Media. Okay, Multi-Media includes online AND offline. Media is the way that you transport your message into the marketplace. It’s the vehicle. It could be SEO. It could be pay per click on Google, it could be Facebook, it could be LinkedIn, it could even be Twitter, it could be print media. It could be a Magazine, It could be a local Newspaper and by the way, yes, they’re not dead. It’s going to take a long time for print media to die and in the meantime, people are getting rich and Google spends more money on mail than just about every other company in the United States, so even the great Google, even the great Microsoft, they’re spending money on Direct Mail. So it’s important not to develop a bias towards a certain media or against media simply because of a belief system that you have attested and so I’m talking online and off are the best strategies.

Multichannel means varied and nuanced. Different social media outlets require different approaches.

Facebook is different from Instagram. A magazine advertorial is different from a postcard. And so having these different channels give you diversity and protect you from being over-reliant on one.

Multi-Step means extensive follow-up and behavioral direct response, which is basically “If this, then that” automated marketing.

So if the person responds, let’s say you’re going from offline to online to offline, so you start with a postcard, drives them to a website. They go to a website. They opt in to get a free report. They get their free report and you actually send the free report to them in the mail. That’s something that very few people do.

Then, after that, you’re sending them e-mails and you’re following up but if they click a link, then you want to send them you know, you’re going to send them down a certain path. If they don’t, then you don’t want to hound at them and send them 9,000 e-mails that make them hate you and want to remove them self your list. Instead, you’re going to want to maybe offer them something different, go at it from a different angle and that’s basically Behavioral Direct Response. Their direct response, your follow-up is based and changed and dynamically changing based on their behavior.

All right, Multi-Modality means appealing to different senses and learning or consuming styles. So some people learn better by reading. Some people are watchers of videos. Some people are listeners to Podcasts while they drive or exercise and it’s best to offer all of them. Some people do multiple different ones. I personally love to read but I can’t always do it if I’m exercising or driving. I’m not going to be reading but I do love to hear Podcasts. And some people love to go through video or very visual and so you need to be offering all of them. Integrated, means bringing it all together and automating, as well as high touch human interaction.

So these are the keys. Now, some offline examples, well, basically, there’s the

• Offline-Online-Offline strategies; I mentioned one before.
• Print is far from dead, by the way.

I already mentioned that. The direct mail industry is showing statistics that are through the roof. There are actual increases in consumer buying behavior with direct mail, by the way so it’s far from dead.

Also, “Shock and Awe Boxes” is a concept of when somebody opts in for your free report or in other words, they raise their hand and they show, they prove that they are interested in what you have to offer and they’re a target market for you, you know that they’re a good valuable prospect that’s likely to turn into a customer.

That’s the person you send your “Shock and Awe Box” to, which is kind of an old Marketing term now. I got it from Dan Kennedy; mean, old Dan Kennedy great, a genius. Basically, what you send out is you over deliver on your promise.
So if they want a free report, you send them that and you send them this box full of other goodies, your book, interesting things that they might find more valuable. You keep adding value to it. It could also be fun stuff, some trinkets are okay sometimes if they’re clever or interesting box of chocolates or whatever but the whole point is you’re arriving into the marketplace like nobody else, you’re surprising them. It’s like Christmas Day and they’re opening a present and they’re unwrapping a wrapping paper and they’re surprised and excited to get this package. If you get a FedEx or even a UPS or you get a big parcel in the mail, chances are you’re going to be interested and curious
and going to open it unlike your typical junk mail that goes straight into the circular file. That’s a Shock and Awe box. It’s getting you noticed.

  PRINT Newsletters …Another amazing forgotten art. Everybody moved from print over to e-mail and now everyone gets 1,000 e-mails and no one reads any of them especially newsletters and so we found that print newsletters are not only having a resurgence but the open rate, if you can call it that, the reading, the rate at which people respond is higher. They tend to stick around longer. They have a way higher perceived value.

Letter Campaigns are another example, not just sending out e-mail when someone opts in to your list, but getting their physical address.

They raise their hand and say, “Hey, I’m interested about learning more about what you do,” but actually following up with physical mail. We’re finding a huge, huge response rate from that because nobody does it anymore again.

So all right, Online Examples… We know a lot of them, the Google and the Facebooks of the world but also, there are some cool new things that you might not have looked
into yet.

• Instant Messenger Bots.

People are communicating on Facebook and Instant Messenger and by the way, I don’t love Facebook. I don’t like being on it personally. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on there, so if you don’t, that’s okay. You don’t need to love Facebook or want to spend time on it to make money from it. It’s called Paid Advertising. A lot of people are there, so let’s just accept that fact. They tend to respond to instant messages and the open rate is very, very high because they’re actually having some interaction with you and they’re already in the Facebook platform and there are programs now that you can help create this behavioral dynamic response style communication. If they say, “Yes, I’m interested,” then you can send them in. If not, you can offer something else.
We’re getting a lot of luck with that.

• YouTube targeted Ads

A lot of people don’t realize this. For a long time, you’ve been able to target on Facebook and you’ve been able to do Google pay per click but now, you can actually use YouTube to create a new list and target.  And there’s some really cool hacks that are out there now for utilizing YouTube in a new way.

So you got pulling audiences from one platform and integrating into another. For example, if you clicked at the LinkedIn list of your ideal target referral partner, you can pull them out. You can upload them to Facebook and show them ads on Facebook and create lookalike or custom audiences. You can actually find other people that are similar to them.

• A Single purpose landing squeeze pages with strong offers.

Another suggestion is to, instead of just relying on your one size fits all website, is to have specific landing pages or even full-on websites that only have one purpose that are related to the ad or to the target market that you’re looking for and have an offer there to compelling offer.

So, okay first of all, STOP.

All right, I know that was a lot of information.

• This is when business owners get overwhelmed unnecessarily.
• It looks complicated. By the way, the techniques always are and they always change
• But remember, the principles never change.

So we want to stay focused on that. If you’re getting overwhelmed, hang in here with me because we’re going to simplify it again. Trust me on this one. If you keep the principles in mind and you understand the philosophy, it’ll help you navigate the complexity of all the techniques that are constantly changing and the tech geeks out there that are talking to you about this and that and it seems every month, there’s something else that they’re selling but if you understand the principles, you can make good decisions.

  What’s the secret here? If I had to boil it
down to simple principles, number one is:

• Omnipresence

Being everywhere to your target market, looking like you’re just everywhere, being on Facebook, being in the mail, being there in front of them where they’re at, not everybody but to your specific target market. Also, delivering massive value and being extremely helpful and generous to build and nurture goodwill in your marketplace. This is the other thing and I got this from my main man, Frank Kern who’s a big proponent of this, an excellent Marketer. He’s big on providing goodwill into the marketplace and by showing that you can help people by actually helping them.

What a noble concept, right? So instead of trying to pitch and pitch and sell and having this guru centric model where it’s all about me and look how great I am, look at how are my words and you need to hire me today, it’s about actually going out and providing something useful to them, to begin with. There is that Law of Reciprocity – People tend to want to give back to people that have given them something. But more importantly, you’re giving them time to build a relationship with you and to know, like and trust you and to see that what you have has value and then, they’re more likely to want to do business with you. Eventually, you’ll get your big break and maybe you’ll get free PR and you’ll end up on the TV or whatever but why not make money as you
go and as you learn?

So that’s what we’re talking about here. Those are the basic secrecy, omnipresence and delivering the value and just continue to do that.

4. Market Diversification

So just like investing, asset allocation and diversified buckets, so if you go to a Financial Planner, they’re always talking about that, right that you want to mitigate risk. Most law firms don’t understand the power of marketing diversification as it pertains to Personal Injury Attorney Marketing.

So what does every investment Guru tell you to do?

• Diversity to mitigate risk.
• Some stocks are going up, some are going to go
  down and everything changes.
• Also, being over-reliant on one media is EXTREMELY
  risky

Okay? So for example, if you put all your eggs
in one basket like Google, what about when:

• Google slaps you? What then? What are you going
  to do?

Facebook, as great as it is, it’s got like an iron fist. They control, when I was in the fitness industry and consulting gyms, they started cracking down on the ads and no one could use any before and after pictures and no one could say anything and nothing. No one could say anything about weight loss. I mean, they really restricted it. It’s very difficult.  Or what about the Yelp Mafia, which is my least favorite but when they changed the rules or raise the rates on you, who can you complain to?

• So get educated, learn the market, use a pro and pick a strategy that doesn’t leave you with all your eggs in one basket.
• If you do put all your eggs in one basket, if you’re advertising through one channel, all you do is one thing, well, you better watch that basket but I don’t recommend it.

I recommend diversified marketing just like diversified advertising just like you would with the stocks and bonds
and your investment portfolio. Okay, a couple other numbers. You’re going to have to learn your

• Customer Acquisition Cost, called CAC, and your CLV, which is Customer Lifetime Value.

You got Customer Acquisition Cost. That’s how much it costs for you to acquire a customer. Typically, that’s your advertising cost but there are also sales costs involved in that and if you have a sales team or salesforce, you have to consider that as part of your acquisition cost, and
then the lifetime value.

This is the trickiest one because a lot of people know that they have a value to a customer but they usually are thinking, most personal injury attorneys are thinking you know “I get a customer and they’re worth $4,000 to $8,000 to me,” but that’s maybe upfront. Do you have a recurring? Do you have a backend of your business? Do they use you every now and then? Do they use you once every four years or eight years? If so, the lifetime value is whatever they’re bringing in, so maybe the customer’s worth actually $8,000 over their whole lifetime. Then, you’ve got also the referral side of it as well. We’re not going to get into all those numbers today but the very least, you need to
start calculating

• Customer Lifetime Value and that’s how you
  determine whether you’ve got a good investment.
• If you can put a dollar in and get a dollar out,
  you are a winner.

So that’s why we need to know these two numbers because if you find out that the customer’s worth 300 bucks, you can also find out how much you can pay to get that customer and if you don’t know those numbers, you’re going to be in a world of hurt, my friend, especially if you try to scale and grow. All we do is leverage assets to create profits. In our case in marketing advertising, it’s our business and advertising assets are the assets we’re working with instead of stocks and bonds. Don’t create your own secular religion around beliefs that are true. There’s no magic bullet media that lasts forever. Now, here’s the Hidden Benefit of Diversity Advertising
that you might not have thought of.

• Your omnipresence, by the way, you know, being everywhere, showing up everywhere to your target market not only brings in more leads. It also completely demoralizes your competition.
• It creates a huge deterrent and increases the perceived barrier to entry for new competitors who are considering entering your market.

They’re going to be thinking to themselves,

• “I don’t want to bother getting into John’s business because he’s already everywhere and everybody knows him and he must be dominating. It looks risky and expensive to compete with him. Why bother?
• That, by the way, is EXACTLY what you want, right?

Bucketing Your Advertising Let’s talk about
Bucketing your advertising.

• Well, you’ve got your online marketing and advertising, so your pay per click, Google, SEO, social paid ads are what I’m talking about, not just getting likes, purchase leads, targeted campaigns with very specific landing pages and top of the funnel lead generation along with bottom of the funnel as well.
• Then, you’ve got your Offline.
• The Old Media

It’s on sale right now, by the way, because everybody
flocked to digital.

• Most business owners never think of out of category advertising, by the way and old media is more than happy to make a deal.

An example of this, you understand what is out of category, your phonebook, for example, which everyone thinks is extinct and yet, if you’re targeting an older demographic that is not as digitally savvy, a retired market they’re still people using it.
By the way, it’s a lot cheaper than it used to be, so that might even be an option. But an example of it just off the top of my head is if you are able, let’s say instead of being where all of the other chiropractors are in the phonebook and you deal with bad backs, maybe you put your ad in where people are looking for a place to buy mattresses. Why would you do that? Well, if I’m buying a mattress because my back is hurting, I might see an ad to fix my back and go, “Huh. Maybe I should call.” And now, you’re not competing with the Chiropractors because you’re not with them. The worst place to compete is where all of the other competitors are. We talked about Place Strategy. We briefly talked about the pricing. Pricing has to do with who you’re marketing to and where and how. Well, here’s the where. If I am the only person selling water and I’m in the middle of a desert, I can charge whatever I want. If I’m selling water in the grocery store next to 27 other bottled water companies and then there’s a free drinking fountain next to me, it’s going to definitely affect my price. Well, it’s the same concept. Out of category advertising is something that most people don’t think of.

• Advertorials Offline-Online-Offline and much,
  much more.

There’s so many different options for you with offline and Bucketing, so you want to do a little bit of all these.  And then, of
course, there’s

• Referral Marketing and Internal Marketing, which we didn’t even talk about.
• And also Recruiting; so finding employees. As you grow your business, you have to market for those employees to get the better quality and to retain them. So those are kind of the big buckets and you want to always be thinking of how can I intelligently have something going on in all of these categories and allocating funds for my budget into all of them, all Online-Offline, Referral and Internal and Recruiting.

“Marketing is a contest for people’s attention,”

-Seth Godin

In order to master Personal Injury Attorney Marketing, we are going to have get people’s attention. That’s what we’re doing. So let’s talk about how to leverage your results:

5. Advertising Assets.

An Asset is something that pays you over and over again and provides you with business leverage and so similar to any other kind of asset, advertising can be turned into an asset. Most people aren’t used to thinking about it that way, of course, but let’s: Think like an Investor for a minute.

• Just like investors in the stock market, we are simply leveraging Assets to create Profits. The difference is our returns are amazing. If every dollar you put into the stock market got you 10 out, you would be considered the greatest Investor in the world and we do that all the time with Advertising.
• Turning advertising into profit is the best and most reliable way to create consistent and lasting Return on Investment.
• Most average law practice owners are doing random acts of advertising and Shotgun-style Marketing. This is not for you.
• The only way to reliably and predictably grow revenue without sacrificing net profit
• Is by building marketing assets, not random acts of advertising.
• Any media can work as long as it has been proven to work to create a return.
• If it works, NEVER stop doing it until it doesn’t work anymore.

This is a major mistake. I see it all the time even with people that ought to know better. Even then, you can often tweak something to make it work before you abandon it. Okay? As you find message to market to media matches that WORK, you continue to add them to your portfolio.

• Eventually, you’ll have an entire PORTFOLIO OF WINNERS.
• This is how you completely DOMINATE a market.

Let’s talk about

6. Follow Up

Behavioral Direct Response
Automated Follow-up and the fortune is in the follow-up, by the way.

First of all, Holes in your Bucket, it happens.

• One client had a problem in that they were not getting as many leads as they wanted. This is somebody I worked with. ( They were up 8% over the previous year but they wanted 25%.)
• Upon closer investigation, they had plenty of prospects. I’m defining prospects as people raising their hands and identifying themselves as interested.)

In other words, “Hey, I’ve got a free report or we’ve got some information here you know who is interested?” “Oh, yeah. I’d like that. I’ll opt in.” “Hey, we’re offering a free quote, okay?” And then, they go, “Oh, yeah. I’d like a free quote.” Well, that’s basically a setup, right, but they weren’t converting to leads, which is appointment set. So somebody saying I want a free quote, come give me a free quote but then the leads, we weren’t getting the lead count that was following with the prospect count. The prospect count was going up. The lead count was staying stagnant. There’s a problem there. In this case, cramming more and more prospects into the phone won’t fix the problem. It might even make it worse because it might break your system or overwhelm the
human resources.

• What they need is an improvement to the Internal
  Sales Funnel

Help! We Are Losing Leads! Every new report seems to say it takes more and more touches to close a sale. The last one I saw was like six to seven follow-ups. I’ve seen them before where they say you need 15 follow-ups on average to make a sale or some of these sophisticated follow-up systems that are automated have as many 37 steps. I’m going to ask you this. How many steps does your follow-up process contain? By the way, human touch is always best. But the most difficult to systemize and correct it and manage it and prove it or optimize Necessitates hiring and firing leadership training a lot
more

It might be worth it for you. (It usually is), by the way. However, Automation can help a lot in that it takes out the human element by making sure that things are done on time and every time. So first of all, you got to:

Invest in Automation.

I like Infusionsoft (That’s one of my favorites). That’s what I use, that’s what I was trained on. I love the lower price point compared to a lot of others. I love how it’s sophisticated and it works for brick and mortar business and online businesses. Some of my favorite top online marketing Gurus, so to speak, are using Infusionsoft, so that’s what I use. HubSpot is another great choice. Everybody I know that’s kind of more ‘Techie, they tend to love HubSpot and it’s growing in popularity, great choice. Or you could even go really simple like a MailChimp or an AWeber with Pro Tools. AWeber with Pro Tools work, even MailChimp where you got a basic e-mail Follow-Up System with a little bit of automation is better than nothing and you’re probably going to need to tie in with Of course, you will also need to dial in your Industry Specific Software. It may or may not have CRM, Customer Relationship Management capabilities. It may have some e-mail. It may or may not, so you need to invest in something. Whatever you use, get it and get help with it NOW. Okay, you’re probably going to have to get some help, hire somebody who knows some of this stuff unless you’re going to spend your time really investing and learning it. You still want to understand the process, by the way, even if you’re going to delegate it or outsource it and you want to be a part of the design because you want to understand the concepts behind it and how it works and the points of follow-up, even if you’re not the one actually executing on it.

And that leads me to

7. Personal Touch.

Don’t forget that customers are people and people want to do
business with people, not robots or corporations, okay?

DON’T GET LAZY HERE. All humans want things personalized, individualized, and customized to them. That’s both online and offline and they’re always listening
to the radio station, what’s in it for me? WIIFM.

Don’t forget that. You are responsible for remaining a human (even under the corporate veil) Even if you’re a brand, you’re not a personality-based business, you’re kind of a brand-based business, and they still want to deal with the owner or the representative or the person that’s going to take care of them. People expect you to have a good product or service, so they don’t see that you deserve a positive review referral just because you did your job. This is another major mistake I see all the time like, “We did a great job but they don’t leave referrals.” Well, they expect you to do a great job. You didn’t go you know, and The difference is in the EXTRA MILE. You need to walk it and it’s a lonely road, which is what will make you stand out, that little bit extra.

Simple Things You Can Do to Add Personal Touch

• Thank you cards… HAND WRITTEN!

Never go out of style. There are systems that let you automate this. I’m not personally a fan of them because it kind of defeated the point of; its direct mail, which is good, better than nothing but it kind of defeated the point of the personal touch although

• Physical mail, in general, is still great and not very many companies, especially in the digital space do it anymore.
• PICK UP THE PHONE

Or have someone who does pick up the phone. This is huge; the biggest thing.

• Gathering and recording data

…Not just pushing out surveys and quizzes although those can be good about your best customers. You want to gather that data about them and then USING that data deliver a better experience. So when you meet a great customer, ask them lots of questions and take note of it and then use that to help build a case. Keep those records about that person and when you market, use that information. Don’t treat everybody like the same.

• Orchestrating Referrals, which is different from reacting.
  Most companies react where if a referral comes in, great but orchestrating is actually having a campaign around it, adding parties, contests, awards and rewards and building a community.

Huge things you can do and they’re not that complicated. Doing one or two things a year is better than zero. Getting OUT THERE and include people on events. People like to gather especially aroundgood causes. So you can tie in a charity; this is a really good tip. These are all things that can also potentially get you PR, so there are a lot of reasons to do them. “As marketers, we should be changing the mantra from “Always be closing to always be helping,” so that’s my philosophy too, its about building goodwill, Jonathan Lister, VP Sales at LinkedIn.

8. Closed Loop

The final step is Closed Loop: Closed-Loop measurement accountability. So what this is about, we call it an ROI Calculator and it includes analytics, so first of all, you got to :

Know your numbers CAC, Customer Acquisition Cost, CLV and everything relevant to you Hold everything marketing piece and every advertising channel accountable.

Online, of course, is easier to measure

But Offline CAN be measured (and should be) But here’s the key that nobody I know is really doing and that’s why we do it now We bring it all together in one place, So you need to have a lot of website development and SEO and pay per click companies and digital marketing agencies will give you analytics but it’s the analytics on showing you that they are doing their job hopefully and their online sources but I’m talking about everything. Even that postcard, even that networking meeting, even that radio ad and how do you track them all and bring them all together and show what the ROI is on all of them.

So Always Consider The Big Picture Here’s an example of
what I was talking about earlier. Prospects are rising, leads staying the same. You need to know your numbers so you’re able to be ahead of the curve. Then, finally, here are…

Quick tips to get it all done.

Getting it Done:

• Write a plan (even if it’s a one-page) or back of a napkin, better than nothing. You might have written a business plan when you started your business. I guarantee that was a long time ago that you were even thinking about it and you may have had one paragraph about marketing. We’re talking a Marketing Plan. If you need help with that, let us know. We can help you.
• Write a Budget (just use a Google sheet) even.

Have a calendar of the year and then the months along the top and then the channels on the left and then what you plan on spending each month. Even if it changes, have something there. That’s the only way you can plan.

• Create a Marketing Calendar

Now, this is a little different from the Budget Calendar although they’re tied together. The Marketing Calendar could be more like a creative calendar. It’s just a simple monthly campaign calendar. Each month, if you’re seasonal business, you want to predict that and have specials and holiday specials and campaigns around those times of year and have it all marked out on the calendar in internal, external, internet and all the different buckets we talked about of online and offline.

• Hire a Marketing Manager to execute your strategy.
• If you can’t afford that yet, get an Assistant, an Intern, or outsource it and that’s what we do. We offer outsourcing options.
• ALL of this is BEFORE you hear another pitch from the media salesperson, by the way.

So you want to get this planning done before you have that radio ad salesperson who comes in, says I want to introduce you to our new digital marketing side of our company because they all have one and then before you know it, your bill went from three grand to 15 grand that month. So before you talk to anybody else who pitches you on a technique or a feature or a tool, get your strategy together so you can see how your tool fits into place. And so finally,

Take Action on what you learned today. You can contact us for a consultation. It’s been a pleasure and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

I offer a free marketing consultation for qualifying personal injury attorneys and law firms.Let’s Chat