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Episode Description
Stop wasting money on ineffective marketing! In this episode, learn 3 budget-friendly tactics to create high-converting materials.
Forget fancy production companies and expensive ads. By focusing on your ideal client, clearly defining their problems, and explaining your solutions, you can achieve better results without spending a dime.
Lauren shares how to leverage videos, blogging, and email lists to get your message in front of qualified leads. You’ll also discover the common mistakes that make legal marketing fall flat.
Whether you’re just starting or want to amplify existing efforts, this episode will help you maximize ROI. Save your money and sanity. With a few tweaks, your marketing can attract and convert even more of your perfect clients.
Press play now to get tangible tips to improve your website content, social media, and more. Take control of your messaging and stop leaving sales on the table. It’s time to get the right leads knocking down your door!
Listen now!
Episode Resources
Building a Storybrand by Donald Miller
Ep 9: Why Sleeping on TikTok is Costing You Money
How to Create Your First 50 TikTok Videos – for FREE!
Episode Transcript
LAUREN: [00:00:00] You can pay a million dollars for a marketing campaign. But if it doesn’t focus on the consumer, if it doesn’t define the problem clearly, if it doesn’t explain what your firm is going to do to solve that problem, that million dollars was frankly wasted. Welcome to A Different Practice. I’m your host, Lauren Lester, and I’m obsessed with all things business, well being, and optimizing the practice of law for solo and small firm lawyers.
I started my solo practice right out of law school, built it from the ground up. And now work four days a week while earning well over six figures. I’m here to share tangible concrete tips and resources for ditching the legal professions, antiquated approach, and building a law practice that optimizes growth and enjoyment.
Think of this as grabbing coffee with your work bestie mixed with all the stuff they didn’t teach you in law school about how to run a business. Pull up a seat, grab a cup, and get ready to be encouraged and challenged. This is a different [00:01:00] practice.
Welcome back to another episode of A Different Practice. If you listened to the last episode, I talked about how to improve your intake process so that the first impression that your potential client gets is a positive one. Today we’re going to take a step back from that and actually talk about how do we get clients to know that we exist.
So that they can jump into our intake process, which has now been improved and is amazing. So today we’re going to talk about marketing. Marketing is something that can be really costly. There’s a lot of marketing companies out there. You can pay an arm and a leg for marketing, but even expensive marketing can be ineffective.
There’s no guarantee that the more that you pay for marketing means the better that the marketing is going to be. And that’s often because ineffective marketing has at least one. Of three issues. First, the focus is on the company and not the consumer. And this feels [00:02:00] really natural, right? Because it’s our company that we’re trying to promote.
So of course we’re gonna talk about our company so that our potential clients know that we exist. But while there’s a need to make sure that the company is clear. Many businesses put 90 percent I would say of the focus in their marketing on them and their story talking about their business and that the consumer or their potential client is only a supporting character when they should be the hero.
And I see this a lot when it comes to legal advertising as well. If you’re familiar with it. Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller explains this concept really well, that the consumer should be the hero of your business and that you are there to be the guide. And the reason for that is, is because legal consumers, just like every other consumer, don’t buy companies, they buy solutions to their problems.
So when the marketing talks only about the company and how long you’ve been in practice and what awards [00:03:00] you’ve won and what bar associations you are a part of. That’s all lovely, but that doesn’t help the consumer know that you are actually going to solve their legal problem. Another problem that ineffective marketing has is that it doesn’t explain what the problem is that the company is going to try and solve.
An example for me that always highlights this issue so well are perfume commercials. I don’t know if y’all have seen perfume commercials. No matter what, every time one comes on, I am so confused as to what this commercial is talking about. And it’s always inevitable that at the end, some perfume bottle or cologne bottle comes up and I go, Oh.
Of course, it’s a perfume commercial. No wonder I was just confused for the last 30 seconds as to like, what is happening? Cause I ha I can’t answer the questions of what is this supposed to do? What problem is this solving of these two people floating on a cloud and then there’s a moon and then there’s a cut to walking through water [00:04:00] at night.
Like in my brain as just an average consumer, I’m saying what? What, what problem are we solving here? There’s nothing about the scent or that it evokes a certain memory or it creates a connection with people, or you can have a belonging. If you buy a certain perfume, you are a part of this elite group or it’s just going to make you feel good.
Or it’s a perfume made of a certain quality or certain ingredients. None of that is talked about often in perfume commercials. It’s just. Some of like very random images, and it’s not helpful because it doesn’t explain what the problem is that this particular perfume is solving. On the flip side, if you’re familiar with like the Axe commercials, they actually do a pretty decent job of this.
They are much more direct and effective in their marketing. It’s often geared obviously towards men and it can be about, uh, you know, getting the girl or being like the cool guy, but that’s what problem that they’re solving is. So if a consumer looks at [00:05:00] that commercial and goes, yeah, I’m trying to be the cool, cool guy in my social circle.
That’s important to me. Often this is not a conscious thought, uh, but it does happen. Then they are going to be much more likely to buy Axe because Axe directly says, This is the problem you have. This is how we solve it. When marketing doesn’t do that, the consumer is not going to part with their money because they don’t believe that this particular product or service in our case as lawyers is going to help them solve a problem.
So effective marketing, no matter the industry is going to clearly answer what problem does this product or service solve? The third issue that ineffective marketing can have is what the company does to solve the problem. If you can identify the problem, that’s a great start. However, it’s only part of the equation.
Ineffective marketing is going to explain the problem, but then fail to explain how this particular company doing this marketing will actually solve the problem. [00:06:00] Sometimes it happens because the problem isn’t really a problem at all. Uh, you may have seen commercials where you’re like, who, who would buy that?
Sometimes some of those like one off, um, infomercials. Although they are brilliant at marketing, but sometimes when they’re not done as well, you’re like, who needs that whatchamadoodle to stick in their door to make sure that the door stays open when that’s not actually a door that doesn’t stay open, right?
You’re just like, no, this isn’t a problem that anybody needs to solve. That type of marketing is ineffective because consumers want to know exactly what they’re getting. For us as lawyers, our target market has a legal problem. They want to understand how we as the lawyer are going to solve their legal problem.
And ideally they would like it in pretty easy steps, although we obviously know as practitioners there’s a hundred steps to get from the start to finish line, but to the consumer that’s overwhelming to them. The legal consumer just wants to know that your law firm understands the problem and that you have [00:07:00] a very direct, easy solution for them to understand to solve it.
If it’s unclear what the legal consumer is getting or the steps that they need to take to get there are too complicated or just are opaque, any marketing that you do is not going to have the type of results that you’re looking for because unfortunately it’s just ineffective. But here’s the good news.
You can create effective marketing without spending any. Money. You don’t have to engage in a big, fancy marketing firm. You don’t have to spend a lot to get in front of target markets. What’s really important is that you avoid those three common mistakes. Effective marketing will be effective even if you don’t put any money behind it.
So that’s what we’re going to talk about today is how do you create effective marketing on a budget? Whether we like it or not, we have to create marketing collateral. And that’s going to be anything that falls under that marketing budget, whether it’s an print ad, a website, a [00:08:00] video, a radio spot, whatever it is, right?
There’s some sort of marketing collateral that we’re going to have to create to promote our business. And if we’re not paying someone else, to do it, which some of us don’t have the budget for, still going to need to be done. Sometimes the money that you would pay to have someone else do it for you can be worth the time saved for you not to have to do it yourself.
However, it’s very easy to spend a lot on marketing and not get the return on your investment because some of those issues or all of those issues are present. So instead, we’re going to go through today, ways that you can market without paying a dime. that are going to be effective. And you might be saying, okay, that’s really fun and nice, Lauren, and having a fun social media presence would be great, but I have to pay to get in front of the right leads, right?
Like it’s wonderful if my neighbor down the street sees my lovely ad, but she’s not in the market for legal services. So what’s the point. And you’re absolutely right. In a few instances, it very well may be true [00:09:00] that you need to pay to get in front of potential leads for your particular practice area.
For example, if you have a very niche practice area, maybe you need to pay to go to a conference where your potential clients are. But even once you get there, when you are talking to them or when you are handing them marketing collateral or sending them to your website, that bit you do not necessarily need to pay for to have it be effective.
When it comes to something like pay per click or PPC to show up at the top of search results for a particular keyword or keywords. It isn’t always the case that you have to pay to get in front of the right leads. Because depending on your practice area, PPC can be crazy expensive. For example, the, just the general term family law is highly competitive, probably in most markets.
And if you live in one of those competitive markets. You’re going to pay several hundreds [00:10:00] of dollars just for someone when they click on that link. Doesn’t mean that that person’s a qualified lead. Doesn’t mean they have one iota of a chance of actually converting to be a client of your firm. But you are still going to lose that several hundred dollars just because they clicked on the link.
That’s the problem with PPC. There is no I’m going to go ahead and type in family law, and you may handle private family law like divorce and custody, but this particular person is looking for help with a juvenile delinquency case because to them, that is family law. And so now you have lost. three, four or 500 because they clicked on your firm’s PPC link.
They went to your firm and went, Oh, this person doesn’t do that at all. They only do divorce [00:11:00] law and then they went away. And so PPC does not guarantee conversion or the qualified lead. So of course you can certainly spend money on marketing. It is your business, spend your money, how you would like, if you have it in your overhead and you want to allocate those funds to outsourcing for marketing rather than something else.
That is wonderful and great. Go for it. You run your business. However, you want to run your business. You do you, but if you were like me, especially in the beginning and even now, and you don’t have the funds, or if it just doesn’t make sense for your business to spend money on marketing, when you can allocate it to something else, that’s going to get more return on that investment.
We’re going to go through three ways today that you can effectively market without spending a dime. Okay. So our first way to have effective on a budget is to make sure that all of your marketing materials focus on the consumer first. Ofcourse, you have to talk a little about your firm. You can’t make a whole ad and not mention your firm’s name.
That’s not going to be super valuable But that [00:12:00] really should be the last Thing that you do, the essence of those materials should be about your target client, who they are, what their life looks like, and what might be going on that they need legal help. So let’s think about this in terms of your website.
What does the content of your website focus on? Is it about your education? The awards you’ve won, the involvement you have in the profession. If so, totally normal. Most lawyers do that because again, we were never taught this in law school. So, so it’s okay, but that’s not helpful to the consumer because the consumer is thinking, Oh, that’s so great that you graduated from Georgia state law school.
Shout out, but it doesn’t help me know if you’re going to help with my pending eviction, because every attorney out there who is selling their services has graduated from. Some law school. So how does the consumer know that whether you’ve graduated from this law school or that law school, or the one over there that you’re gonna help me with my pending [00:13:00] eviction?
Now, of course, if you have a target market where the particular law school that you graduated from is a selling point to them. Please make sure that you put that on there. That does give your consumer value, but that’s the difference there. You want to make sure it’s something that gives your potential client value versus it’s just you talking about your accolades and what you have done versus focusing on.
the consumer first. I always like to say your about page should be a little bit more of an afterthought on your website. It shouldn’t be in the top three navigation items. Those should be focused on what the consumer needs and wants. Remember they are the hero of the story of your law firm. I don’t even have an about page on my website.
There is nothing about where I went to law school, what awards I’ve won or what. I’m involved with in the profession. Honestly, all I have is my photo and my name. That’s it. And in the eight years and [00:14:00] thousands of consultations that I have had at this point, I think two people have asked what law school that I went to, and more of that was out of curiosity.
And that’s because a huge majority of my target market and most of our target markets do not care what law school I went to, what committees I’m on, what bars I’m in, how long I have been in those bar associations I think it’s Because what I focus on is instead the client and where they’re at and what they need.
A simple way to think about this and to evaluate even your own website to do a little audit is to count the number of I statements versus the number of you statements on your website or any of your marketing materials for that matter. Go through and count those. The number of you statements or the times that the word you talking to the client is used should be at least twice as many as the [00:15:00] number of I statements or me or what I have done as the attorney.
So instead of writing something like I practice immigration law, I’ve been in practice for 10 years. I help with work visas, removal, defense, and asylum, which is pretty common on most Immigration attorney websites again, nothing wrong with it. It’s just not super effective for the consumer. You could rewrite that to say something like you’ve come to the United States looking for a better life for you and your family.
Now you can’t find work because you don’t have the right paperwork. Let me help you get the. Documentation you need to support your family. A much different experience for the consumer. Instead of the sort of I, me attorney focus, it’s focused on the consumer as the hero. They are in this predicament and they need legal help to solve a problem that they have.
So you might already see the next way to increase the efficacy of your marketing in that last example. Not only [00:16:00] did I focus on the consumer, I stated the problem that they were facing. And that’s the second way to improve your marketing on a budget. Clearly define the problem that you are solving for the consumer.
We understand the practice areas that we work in and what it means that we do, but the average legal consumer does not. And to be honest, sometimes I don’t know, even when talking to a fellow attorney, what the heck it is that they actually do. So saying that you practice something like probate doesn’t help the consumer as much as saying, when a loved one dies, I’m here to help ensure that their assets are properly transferred to their new rightful owner.
In episode 29, Jess talked about how research continues to show that many legal consumers don’t even know they have a legal issue. So not only are you trying to explain what you do to solve the person’s legal problem, in some cases you actually have to inform them about The legal problem to begin with, I’ll share a little bit more in a bit about how to get in front of people who may not realize they actually [00:17:00] have a legal problem.
But for now, just know that it is important to ask yourself the following question for every bit of marketing material and content that you have or will create. Can the consumer clearly understand the problem I am trying to solve through my law firm? It is a simple question, but it can be difficult to implement.
The more you practice, however, the better your marketing will be, and you don’t have to spend a single dime to get there. This will make a fundamental shift in the efficacy of your marketing, and all you have to do is make sure that the problem you are solving is clearly defined in a way that the legal consumer can understand it.
So once you’ve focused on the consumer, You’ve made them the hero of the story, and you’ve clearly defined the problem that you will solve for them. The third way to improve your marketing materials is to explain what exactly you do to solve that problem. What I’m talking about here is the basic steps [00:18:00] from start to finish.
So now you may be saying, Lauren, the basic steps from start to finish are numerous. Basic doesn’t even begin to describe it, right? It depends on the particular case. There could be a hundred different steps that I have to take. This is a super complicated case that this person is coming to me with. Yes, you are absolutely right.
But those aren’t the steps that I’m asking you to define. Those steps that you’re thinking about, the hundred different steps that you need to take, is from the perspective of us as a lawyer. To be honest, the client doesn’t really care about those hundred steps. That’s our job, to know that and to figure it out and to get the consumer there.
What the client cares about is what they have to do to get things started and what the high level, 10, 000 foot view is for their particular case from start to finish. For example, on my website, there are three steps a potential client has to take to get help within a state probate or family matter.
They are, one, choose a service. [00:19:00] This means, essentially, they go through the pricing page, they get a sense of what service they might want, and they schedule a consultation with me. Number two, get support. This is where I do the work to help them solve their legal problem. This is where I do the hundred steps that they need to get from start to finish.
But to the client, their step is, just get the support they need. Number three, reach your goals. Their problem has been solved. We got to the finish line. That’s the third step that the client can check off. I don’t make any guarantees of an outcome or a timeline. I don’t think any of us can probably do this.
You can also include language to that effect in those three steps that you can’t guarantee an outcome, but you are going to do your darndest to help support the client. What you want to focus on here is how the consumer gets signed up with you, how all their work is done in the middle, and what the finish line looks For the consumer, what are the goals that they’re trying to reach?
What is [00:20:00] the value that you are going to provide to them? When those steps are unclear or they’re overwhelming, or you list all hundred things that the consumer is going to have to do with all of these legal terms, they are going to be overwhelmed and hesitant to sign up. They’re not going to know where to start.
So we want to make it really clear in our marketing materials and easy for them. These are the three steps that you have to take. So think about your firm. How can you boil it down? What are the three steps a potential consumer would take to get their problem solved with you? If you want to include a more detailed description of steps or a general timeline, absolutely you can do that.
However, that should be a second option, not the primary communication. It will certainly help set expectations that in many cases, legal problems can’t be solved immediately. We all know that. We want to make sure our clients know that. And you can include language like that within the description of those three steps.
You can also include a read more link or see [00:21:00] more about the process and let the consumer decide how deep they want to get into the details at this point. However, to start, we want to keep it simple to avoid overwhelming them. Alright, so how do we put these three ways to make our marketing more effective and on a budget into practice?
Remember, we’re going to focus on the consumer, we’re going to clearly define the problem we’re solving, and we’re going to explain exactly what we do to solve the problem so that the client understands how they can get started. So here are some budget friendly ways. First, video. There has been a huge trend over the last years towards video content.
You have probably seen this as you have engaged with media in general. TikTok, in particular, has really accelerated this trend and pushed the entire social media market down. In that direction, YouTube now has shorts, Facebook and Instagram now have reels. And a lot of that is because they have been influenced by the [00:22:00] strategy of TikTok, because we’ve seen so much on how that can work.
And it’s easy to understand why this has been a trend. You can get so much more information through a video than just text or even an image. Not only are you getting the information being said or spoken by the person on the video, you’re also seeing how it’s delivered by that person, what their mannerisms are, What their personality is and for us as attorneys, when we create videos, the viewers or the potential clients get a much better sense of who we are, which is not only going to build knowledge about our firm, but also ends up giving you the like and trust factor without you having to talk to the particular person because they have seen your video.
And that’s huge. I cannot tell you how many people have booked a consultation with me after seeing one of my videos and then telling me that they felt like they could trust me. All my video contained was information, but they got a sense of my personality and how I approach practicing. And because people [00:23:00] want to know who they are working with, especially in such a personal setting as the attorney client relationship, videos can really help give a potential client a sense of that to the point that having not ever even engaged with me in real time, folks will tell me that they feel like they can trust me.
So knowing that huge impact that they can have, here’s the great news about videos. They’re super simple to produce. You do not need fancy equipment or a crazy production company to help you. Your phone and some decent lighting is all that you need. If you want to learn more about creating videos, particularly for TikTok, be sure to go back and listen to episode nine.
I go through all of it in detail and how sleeping on TikTok is probably costing your business money. And if you’re ready to dive in, but don’t know what videos to create. Go to a different practice. com slash Tik TOK, where you will get a free guide on exactly how to create your first 50 videos. I give you the [00:24:00] exact prompts to use so you don’t have to think about it.
All you have to do is hit record and you’re on your way. Again, that is at a differentpractice. com slash TikTok. All that being said, while I love TikTok, and I think it is a huge value to businesses, you don’t have to be on TikTok if you do not want to. You can achieve the same thing on YouTube if that’s where you feel a bit more comfortable.
The point is you can create really fantastic marketing content by creating videos. and publishing them. YouTube, in addition, is going to index your videos and start showing them as search results when someone types in certain keywords. Again, and this is the direction that YouTube, who’s owned by Google, is going in.
They understand that consumers want more video content. So for Google to be an effective search engine, it has to show the searcher What they want to see. And if the searcher is looking for videos, Google is going to start showing videos and because they own YouTube, they can index [00:25:00] all of that information.
So now when someone types in, how do I get a green card? Your video comes up and because the consumer wants to watch a video rather than read a page of content about it. They’re going to click on your video. And now they’re not only getting all the information that they need, but they can see how you deliver it.
And they say, man, look at this attorney. She knows what she’s talking about. I’m going to call her. I like her. I want to work with her. I cannot say enough about video content. Like I said, in the episode about TikTok and in videos in general, I think if you’re sleeping on it, you are costing your business.
money. I believe that even more today than I did last year when I made the episode about TikTok, video is where the market is going. Jump on board. It is not as scary as it seems. It is such an inexpensive way to create amazing marketing content for your business. As long as you follow. Those three rules that we talked about earlier.[00:26:00]
All right. So if you’re not as jazzed about videos, and I get it, hopefully I’ll get you there one day. I’ll keep talking about it. I get that it can be intimidating to create a video. It can be very self conscious when you watch yourself back, especially the first couple of times. I totally get it. I was there too.
You’ve got to push through it. But if you are not quite ready to do that, I understand I am still here for you. And we’re still going to talk about a way that you can do some. So very cost effective marketing that doesn’t involve videos. And that is going to be blogging. There are many benefits to having a blog on your website.
First, it creates fresh content on your website, which Google in particular. Most of us, we put the information on our websites. Hopefully you’ve gone through and done an audit and you’ve switched all the I statements to you statements and you are consumer focused and you stating the problem and how you’re going to change it.
Fantastic. And then you do that and that doesn’t really need to be updated all that often. But Google [00:27:00] wants to make sure that when someone is searching for something, they get fresh new content because in a lot of ways, information can change pretty rapidly. So if you have a. Website that hasn’t had its content updated.
Sometimes that can hurt your rankings. And so Google likes blogs because it is new content on your website. It’s also great for the consumer. It creates value for them because you’re just providing basic information that they may have a hard time finding. Otherwise, it shows you as an authority and your particular practice area.
As a bonus, it makes it super easy to repurpose your blog content either as a video down the road, because you’ve already got your script ready, or in my next tip, which we’ll get to here in a second. So blogs in general should be less than a thousand words, pretty short. To get started, make a list of the top ten questions you get about a practice area that you are in.
Those are your first 10 blog posts, bam, done. And if you find that there’s a common question [00:28:00] that you get that can’t be answered in less than a hundred words, break it up into smaller questions. And now you have even more blog posts. All you’re going to do in answering these questions is provide information.
Give all disclaimers you will see on my website every single blog post at the bottom says this is not legal advice I’m not your attorney Information changes all of that can be in there. Don’t worry. I’m not sending you out on the ledge without a parachute, right? You’re gonna do this Smartly, but the point is, is that you’re going to provide information without all of the legal ease so that the consumer can see, you know, what you’re talking about.
You’re able to explain it in a way that they can understand. And that starts to show them that you can help them solve their problem. So when it comes to blogging, you want to commit to a consistent schedule of posting. It can be very helpful to batch or to write a bunch of these posts at once. So you’re just kind of in the groove and then you knock it all out and then you schedule them to publish.
So you [00:29:00] don’t put them all on your website. It. at once, but you schedule them maybe every week or every two weeks to come out and be new fresh content on your website. Because again, search engines like Google are constantly indexing and so they come along your website and go, Oh wow, look, there’s three pages of new content here.
Since we’ve last indexed this website, we’re going to continue to bump this up in the search engine rankings because obviously this website is providing content that is fresh and new and current. Once you’ve got your blog set up on your website, you’ve got these posts scheduled, they’re starting to come out.
You want to make sure that the blog itself is easily accessible from the website so that a potential consumer who comes to the website maybe directly can find it and then find this plethora of information that you are providing. Additionally, each of those individual blog posts can get picked up by search engines so that if somebody is searching for, how do you calculate child support in your state, and you have a blog post that says, how do you calculate child support in North Dakota, and [00:30:00] then the blog post content includes information about how that’s generally done, that’s going to come up as a search engine top result for that consumer because you are answering the exact question that they are looking for, and Google wants to pair the two of you together.
All right, so I alluded to this a short while ago that you can repurpose blog posts for not only video because you’ve got your script already ready to go, but the other option that you can use them for and repurpose so that you’re not having to do three times the work, you can do it once and use it three different times, is in an email list.
Video for sure. Blogs absolutely are important. I think that you should create them. I think you should put that content out there. A lot of ways that you’re going to share that content can be social media, whatever platform you have chosen for yourself and your law firm. I think all of that is great. The caveat is you are at the mercy of the algorithms for those social media platforms in particular.
If they decide one day that they are not going to [00:31:00] show as much of your content or they have changed up how they calculate their algorithm and you haven’t been doing that and so now you’ve all of a sudden dropped, there’s not a lot that you can do. The best way that you can create your own audience where you do have control over the content that they see is to create an email list.
So again, I think this is a two pronged approach. I say that not to say that social media and video and blogging should not be a part of your marketing plan. I do think it should be heavily incorporated, but you want to not entirely rely on those companies to make sure you are getting out in front of potential leads.
So in addition, you want to create your own email list. This is something you control. Obviously you need to get permission for folks to be on the email list, but you are going to then have an audience who has opted in and therefore is much more likely to be engaged with the content that you’re going to send.
Have a sign up on your website so that somebody maybe who’s coming to your website Who might not be ready to sign up. Maybe doesn’t quite [00:32:00] need a lawyer right now, but is just kind of getting some information. They can sign up and get some resources in their email. You can also include it in the signature of your email.
You can say, Hey, sign up for my free newsletter and you might get some new signups that way. It’s important to remember that the purpose of this email list of these folks that you’re collecting is to provide them value. This is so important to remember. If you have a bunch of names, let’s say you have a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, whomever, these folks who have opted into your email list, And all you do every time you send an email is sell them something, you are quickly going to get a lot of unsubscribes, and you’re really going to turn some folks off even if they stay subscribed.
So that’s not what we want to do. Instead, 90%, I would say, of the emails that you send out should provide information and value directly. to the recipients. It should be answering those questions that you put in your blog post. It should be news, maybe in your particular practice area that’s come out, maybe some of your [00:33:00] commentary about it.
90 percent should be about that, informing the recipient, giving them value, showing them how you are an expert in the field. 10 percent of the time you can ask for a sale directly. Because, truth be told, in the 90 percent of you just providing information and value, you are building the know, like, and trust factor with those email recipients.
And so, when you ask for a sale, every once in a while, 10 percent of the time, it’s a super easy sale to make because they’re already bought in. They’re already sold. They just need to pull the trigger whenever it’s right for them. There’s an estate and small business attorney here in Denver who does a monthly newsletter that is just fantastic.
Uh, I signed up for it and I get it every month. He answers probably four to six questions on a particular topic. So he does, um, business formation, he’s done will drafting. A couple of different emails about titling property and sort of some of the common questions around that. I have learned something every single time I read [00:34:00] his email.
Every single time it comes out. He never directly sells anything. He never says, here’s what I do. Call me. I can be your lawyer. Nothing like that. It’s just information. Here’s what an LLC does. LLC means. Here’s how you set up one. Here are some of the documents that most LLCs might want to have. Uh, here are some of the pitfalls that wills fall into where they aren’t going to actually be enforceable.
I mean, it’s just general information, doesn’t sell anything, but I can tell you because I love these. So, I’m going to go ahead and click on this. And I can go ahead and click a menu. Uh, and then I can choose to be able to send me a text message, send an email addressed to me, and I can choose to be able to get a friend sent a text message and send the And then I can send a request to email you.
So if you’re reading this, um, text your friend. If you’re reading this, I can send you a request. the sales process so much smoother. Um, and you have so many fans right there at your fingertip. So you want to figure out when you want to send these emails out. Like I [00:35:00] said, my colleague sends them out monthly.
You can choose whatever frequency you would like. Bi weekly, so every other week, weekly. Even twice a week, depending on your target market, um, might be what those potential clients need to keep you top of mind. Don’t be worried if someone unsubscribes. You may use an email sending software that tells you, you know, you got two unsubscribes this time that you send it out.
That’s okay. What that means is you have two less people who are not interested. And you don’t want to be talking to them anyway, right? They’re just wasting your time. You’re not creating the content for them. They weren’t in your target market. So you want those folks to weed themselves out. You really want your email list to be folks who are engaged and who are potential qualified leads.
It is better to have a hundred people on that list who are actively engaged than a hundred thousand who could not care less. less. It is not about the number, it is about the engagement and the qualification of those folks as potential leads or even [00:36:00] referrals to folks who would be qualified leads. So whether you’re creating videos, writing blog posts, or creating an email list and sending out valuable emails, effective marketing doesn’t require.
Transcripts provided by Transcription Outsourcing, LLC. That 1, 000, 000 was frankly wasted. Instead, by focusing on the consumer, clearly defining the problem and explaining what you will do to solve it, you can spend zero and have it be worth a million dollars in returns. Thanks so much for listening to this episode on budget friendly ways that you can create effective marketing.
I will be back in the next episode, as always, with even more practical tips to help you optimize your law firm for growth and enjoyment until then keep building. And have an [00:37:00] awesome week.
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