Powerful Marketing Strategies for Law Firms
The most profitable leads your law firm can get are clients and referrals. Period. However, these great leads don’t happen by osmosis! They happen only if there’s an effort made to develop, nurture, and protect your existing client and prior client relationships.
Your list is solid gold, so start harvesting it.
Here’s an absolute fact: The law firms that get a high percentage of their business from repeat and referrals don’t get there by accident, luck, or chance. They have a system.
Without a system, you’re leaving thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table. With each passing month, you are giving your past clients permission to do business and refer their friends to some other lawyer.
I want you to think about this: do you remember the company that last cleaned your carpets? The glass company that replaced your broken windshield? The plumber who last fixed your leaky faucet? The company who last fixed your computers? Probably not.
Most consumers do not remember the company or service provider they hired in the past-even if they received great service!
Why? Because the company made no effort to stay in touch with them. The company gets paid, and then moves on to the next job, without making an effort to keep these prior customers engaged and without actively doing anything to create and maintain top of mind awareness.
Which leads me to my big money question.
Are you doing everything you can to keep in touch with your past clients so the next time they need your services, they remember who you are, what you do, and where to find you? I want you to ask yourself the following: “Will my past clients call me the next time they have a question or need legal representation, or will they call some other lawyer? Will they refer a friend or relative to me, even though I haven’t made the slightest effort to stay in touch with them? From my experience, the short and likely answer is a resounding NO. Oh sure, a few clients might hang around with you, but most will move on. Out of sight, out of mind. End of story.
It’s a bad strategy to hope your past clients will automatically come back to you or refer others to you. For every client who does, there are fifteen others out there who will find some other lawyer. Remember this, real profits and wealth are built through “trust-based long-term relationships.”
It has always been that way, in any business and in any industry. You can think of it this way; it’s like a good marriage. A good marriage takes some ongoing work and effort. It requires always being there, always having the other person’s back, so they trust your commitment to them, and they know you care about them. The same is true for your former and current clients. However, most lawyers don’t think about nurturing these long-term and highly valuable relationships. They’re 100 percent focused on income, not equity. They don’t think of what a relationship needs to be like for a client to stay with them for life. While it’s actually not that difficult to do, the trouble is very few lawyers are willing to take the simple steps necessary to sustain these connections.
