(We thought we'd start the Monday after this holiday weekend with several good laughs with the above video of 4 brief but hilarious commericals to kick off our two-part marketing series.)
Part I of II/ Marketing Don'ts
Anyone who has been in business for a while has probably learned a few marketing don'ts but it doesn't hurt to repeat them as we all tend to stray from our original advertising goals. This week we'll go over these basic marketing don'ts with a follow up next week of proven advertising do's.
10 Marketing Assumptions That Are Wrong For Your Practice
1. Current and prospective clients know what services I provide; (Generally, clients are aware only of the services that they are seeking. Teach them.)
2. Referral services will send me all of the clients that I need or can service; (No comment necessary to point out the fallacy of this presumption.)
3. My marketing materials don't need my photograph; (Especially in this technological age, people want to place a face to the professional they will contact.)
4. Clients will remember what I tell them, so I don't need to send any follow up correspondence; (Wrong. Regardless of the sophistication level, people hear what they want to hear.)
5. Clients will understand legal jargon; (Wrong again. Read above.)
6. Certain marketing methods are obsolete. (All advertising avenues work; it's your budget and message strength that will determine ROI.)
7. Complicated messages will make clients feel that they need my services more; (KISS - no offense intended.)
8. Graphics are unimportant in visual media placements; generic photos can be used. (Keep it real. Real pics of yourself, your staff, discreet photos of your office...)
9. People expect lawyers to not return phone calls promptly; they know attorneys are busy. (No, they don't and they don't care about any other matter other than their own.)
10. Keeping in touch with clients on a reasonable basis is a waste of time. (It'll also be a waste of money when you have to re-locate your own clients or take an extraordinary block of time to bring them up to speed after months or years of non-contact.)
Basically, it's your firm, your business and as such, you never stop selling yourself.
The College Board is suing a company called Karen Dillard's College Prep that has its own review courses for the SAT and PSAT, claiming that some of the questions in the review course are active questions on the SAT and PSAT. Those claims would mean that KDCP is infringing the College Board's copyright on those questions.
This reminded me of PMBR (now partnered with Kaplan), one of the companies that has a review course for the bar exam. PMBR's specialty is aiding in getting a better score on the Multistate Bar Exam, the multiple choice test that is a part of most states' bar exams. PMBR finally lost a case in 2006 in which copyright infringement was alleged by the National Conference of Bar Examiners, who writes the Multistate Bar Exam. PMBR was fined almost $12 million. Wow.
The standardized-review-test industry is in a difficult position. If a company exists, it has to have a mix of its own questions (which may or may not be good enough) and questions that have been used on exams (they're good enough because they were on exams). If I remember correctly - and I can find no outside source to confirm this - one of the founders of PMBR claimed to have a photographic memory (do any lawyers who took this course remember those claims) and that PMBR had been sued before for copyright infringement (but no success were in those suits). It's a tough balance, having to rely upon a template in an industry that comes from another.
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An attorney is trying to register a trademark. That's not unusual. His mark? "Cyberlaw." Seriously.
I find this to be rather egregious. After all, I took a class in law school called Cyberlaw that was a mix of law and technology. It's easy to find a Wikipedia page on the topic. Even though the word was registered as a trademark in 1995, it expired in 2000 and today it must be considered a generic term that's not right for a trademark registration in legal services.
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I look forward to reading more about the case a man filed in Maryland, claiming that the Baltimore Ravens used the logo he created. The Ravens have claimed that they never saw the logo and then changed their logo when they were made aware of the possibly infringing logo.
Witness statements; seem simple enough. The attorney needs the incident/accident details; recorded in an accurate and concise manner. Often, however, it is the experience of both the seasoned accident investigator and the harried trial lawyer to have obtained a witness statement (usually out in the field) only to realize later that it is not as comprehensive as he or she would have liked. Especially in multi-vehicle accidents with serious/fatal injuries (as in the above vid), the investigator needs to be extremely thorough.
BNI's founders sought to alleviate this concern for attorneys and conducted an in-depth review of witness statements obtained over the course of its decade in the private investigation field. After a careful study, we've created incident-appropriate Witness Statement Checklists for the investigative and trial law professional. This week, we've attached a Witness Statement Checklist relating to motor vehicle accidents.
WITNESS STATEMENT CHECKLIST (MVA) This checklist contains items that must be addressed for a witness statement to be considered complete. One checklist per involved vehicle.
1. WITNESS PEDIGREE (to include name, address, phone # (home, cell, work,) DOB, SSN,employment/scholastic and licensed driver info, and email addresses.
2. WEATHER CONDITIONS (including possible glare)
3. LIGHTING CONDITIONS
4. SURFACE CONDITIONS (roadways, shoulders...)
5. DEBRIS/CONSTRUCTION PRESENT
6. DESCRIPTION OF ROADWAY (# of lanes, travel direction, divider present...)
7. SIGN DEVICES/PRESENCE OF TRAFFIC AGENT
8. DIRECTION OF TRAVEL OF PARTICIPANTS (drivers/pedestrians...)
9. DESCRIPTION OF ACCIDENT (detailed)
10. ALCOHOL/DRUG INVOLVEMENT
11. WHERE WAS THE DRIVER GOING?
12. RATE OF SPEED
13. FORCE OF IMPACT
14. DAMAGE TO VEHICLE (detailed)
15. POSITION OF OCCUPANTS
16. OBSERVABLE INJURIES SUSTAINED (detailed)
17. MEDICAL ATTENTION RECEIVED AT SCENE
18. EMERGENCY/OFFICIAL VEHICLE AND PERSONNEL RESPONSE
19. POSITION OF VEHICLE AFTER IMPACT
20. SUMMONSES ISSUED
21. STATEMENT(S) MADE AT SCENE
22. ADDITIONAL WITNESSES
23. WAS THE VEHICLE TOWED?
BNI Operatives: Street smart: Net savvy.
To all who have, and those that continue to, serve, our thoughts are with you this Veteran's Day,
Kelly Chang, an LA-based family and divorce lawyer, our featured Clip of the Week focus, has figured out how to leverage YouTube to promote her practice. You Tube is free, easy and ultimately, the success of your marketing effort in this venue depends entirely on you - how you portray yourself and your skills and experience. You do not have this level of control utilizing traditional advertising avenues. Aside from the obvious costs involved, print, tv and radio advertising all require an ad designer; almost always not the client. YouTube allows for consumer-control and provides effective distribution with deep market penetration potential.
Quick ground rules for making a YouTube video:
1. Do NOT hire a film crew. Unnecessary. A good handheld digicam will do- especially one that is HD-enhanced. Canon and Sony are good choices.
2. Flesh out a brief script for yourself. Try not to be rigid; but stick to your main selling points - for your practice and even more importantly, your character.
3. Allow for viewer comments. (It's risky but not as much as looking overly controlling.)
The one thing we would have done differently would have been to insert a scrolling I.D. banner along the bottom of the video. There are tons of video editing apps (such as Video Edit Magic) that you can use: some free; most easy to use. Try cnet.com for well tested suggestions.
Turned into an office and/or family project, advertising your practice on YouTube or similar internet venue, can also be an empowering and loyalty-inspiring group project.
MacGyver-ing Your Camera Phone Into A Scanner, Copier and Fax
In June 2006, the verb "Google" was officially entered into the OED. Prior to that, and without the academic and historical fanfare, many of us learned what it meant to "MacGyver" a situation. Facing a near-impossible situation, with only the materials at hand (read: absolutely no tech gear or 24-like outside CSU-support) the eponymous TV character would jerry-rig everything from stray twigs to shards of shiny glass to pre-owned dental floss to work his way out of the situation, save the day and issue a pithy lesson-learned wrap-up, all in 60 minutes (minus commercials, in-law phone calls and finishing ).
Fast forward to tomorrow, a week from now, next year... You find yourself in a situation where you need to make a copy of a document and have only your cell phone, or just a digital camera. How would you MacGyver this situation?
scanR is a system of applications and services that enable you to copy and fax documents using just a camera phone or a digital camera. With scanR, you'll be capturing and sending the information you need. The above left picture is the original scanned photo; the right jpeg is the scanR processed document. That about says it all.
scanR is a Web-based service. You create a user account. When you want to scan a document, you simply take a picture of the document. You can take pictures of documents, white boards, and even business cards. You can easily scan and store business cards or save what you've written on whiteboards before they get erased.
You then send your image to scanR from a camera phone using the MMS protocol or send JPEG photo images. You'll then receive in your email digital copies of your image in PDF format for you to use and print. You can send up to 15 pictures in one batch.scanR supports sending faxes to most phone numbers in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. scanR is currently a free service. Learn more about scanR.
Pop open your Internet Explorer, Firefox or the Google browser. Type in "ny personal injury attorney". Why do certain law firms seem to always come up on Page 1 of Google?
The answer is SEO - Search Engine Optimization.
In a nutshell, SEO is tweaking your website so that Google (and subsequently all other search engines) will recognize and note your site more immediately than those of your competitors. Today's Bulletin, the first in a two-part series, addresses maximizing your firm's online visibility - through the use of keywords, copy, and keyword placement.
Know Your Market
Be keenly aware of your strongest area(s) of practice: personal injury, medical malpractice, wrongful death... By concentrating on your expertise, you will draw the clients best suited to your practice.
What search words are potential clients using to find a law firm to represent them?
This is the most important question you need to ask yourself, preferably, before your site is built. The quickest way to get the answer to this question - and in a manner designed to NOT re-invent the wheel, is very simple:
1. In Google, type in the keywords you think your potential clients might use to search for a law firm. (This will bring up the first page of Google results.)
2. Click through to any of the top named law firms.
3. At the top of your browser click the drop-down box, "View". Next click "Source" (in other browsers like Firefox it might say "Page Source").
4. What initially appears as gibberish to most people with hectic schedules is actually called "basic tags". You'll note the more web savvy sites intentionally including misspellings (atorney, attorny, laywer...) to ensure they capture as wide a portion of the searching public as possible.
Now that you know what the competition is doing - you also want to know the actual search terms that potential clients input. There are two simple ways to do this:
1. Wordtracker. There's a free tool at wordtracker.com (register for free to access) that allows you to punch in specific words and get a run down of how many searches (in general terms) for these keywords have been performed in the prior 90 days. (IMPORTANT: Overture is a similar keyword tool owned by Yahoo. Overture has been disconnected and is no longer providing relevant info - but the site is still up and running. Overture may be on hiatus, nonetheless, its current functionality and information is out-dated.) This site also contains fee-based services/functions your firm may want to pursue.
2. Your Browser (equipped with Google Toolbar). Make sure your Google toolbar is installed on your Internet Explorer or Firefox Browser. When you type in different search terms it will offer suggestions (known as "Google Suggest) of what people are currently searching for. But even better, Firefox provides the number of searches performed in the last 90 days.
Adding Keywords to your Site
Now that you know the specific search criteria input by potential clients, DO NOT PUT THESE SAME WORDS ONTO THE CODE OF EVERY PAGE OF YOUR SITE. Make sure your web development department is aware of this. Google's response to repetitive keyword code on every page of your site is to place your website at the bottom of the pile.
Instead, have your IT person:
- Group your Keywords in 3s. 3 words, or phrases ("personal injury lawyer, accident lawyer, personal injury firm New York") ...then rearrange these words/phrases on each page of your site so that the phrases/key words do not appear in the same order.
- Ensure that your keywords are in similarly coded pages that have visible text containing that keyword(s). (I.e. If you enter "personal injury" as a keyword for a page on your site that only refers to medical malpractice and does not, in any instance, mention personal injury, your website will result in the bottom pages of a Google search, not the top, as is your goal.)
- Name each page after the relevant page keywords. (E.g. TrueLaw.com/personalinjury.html.) This allows one to instantly monitor the site for consistency.
These above directions relate to hidden code. Next, we approach maximizing your keyword results.
Best and Strongest Foot Forward
Your main keywords and phrases should be in the first paragraph of your text, preferably in the first sentence. The most effective boost to your firm's site regarding search rankings is to have your most important keyword in your main page's heading and two other keywords in the immediately following paragraph.
This concludes Part I of our two part series in "Being Number One". In the next Bulletin, we'll explore PageRank, Backlinks, "White-hat/Black-hat" and a number of other tips that will put you on top of the search engine game.
