Assuming you acknowledge that you must engage or enhance your marketing efforts, what do you do? Marketing is communication. It is educating your potential clients (and referral sources) about who you are and what you do – specifically that you can best provide the services that they need and want.
So, the first element to communicate is who you are.
Because there are so many lawyers out there, merely stating that you are a lawyer is insufficient in most markets. There are lots of lawyers. People need to be able to identify with you. We are all unique. What makes you unique? This goes beyond what you do. Giving people more information about who you are enables them to find ways to connect with you and increases the chances that they will. After all, most of what we do and deal with requires a certain amount of trust. A healthy and productive relationship is easily fostered when a client finds a connection with his or her lawyer. And one of the best sources of new work is a satisfied client. If you explore why your clients feel satisfied, you will find that it is based on more than results. They connected with you.
For those who already know us, we need to communicate what we do and what we want to do. We are terrible at this. We don’t talk about what we do.
Honestly, we’re a fairly modest group (for the most part). Perhaps we’re tight lipped because of our culture, our professional heritage, or maybe it’s the mandated hallmark of our profession --- confidentiality. Think about all the lawyers that you know professionally but with whom you’ve not worked. Do you know what they actually do? What kind of work? Their legal experience? Chances are for most that you don’t. And if we in the profession don’t know, do you think our (and their) potential clients do? How are we going to refer work to these other lawyers when we don’t know what they do?
We need to do a better job of communicating to those who know us what it is that we do and what we would like to do.
Because most people who want to hire a lawyer first ask friends, family and coworkers for a recommendation, we need to make sure that those friends, family and coworkers know what it is that we do. They are our influencers. You might “get” a potential client through your website, but many got there because you were recommended to them by someone else.
So, we must first identify what it is that we want to do – what kind of work for what type of client – and that will illustrate what we need to communicate and to whom.
There are LOTS of lawyers who are engaged in facets of the practice that they do not enjoy and thus probably do not do very well. They keep taking those types of cases because they don’t want to say no or are afraid to. Perhaps they pay the bills. But how will you ever expand your practice with what you enjoy doing (and thus probably do well) if your time is eaten up by work that you don’t want?
It is important to identify what you really WANT to do, not just what you CAN do.
Lots of lawyers and firms do a good job of identifying who they are at some basic level, but few provide as much information as they could and should. Fewer do a good job of communicating what it is that they want to do or how they do it.