Effective, Ethical and Outside the Box Marketing for Personal Injury Attorneys...

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How to Shout Louder With Your Marketing

Make a New Kind of Noise With Your Marketing
(And Restore Dignity to Lawyer Marketing.)


By Ben Glass

Earl Nightingale, one of the world’s foremost experts on what makes people successful, had some good advice for lawyers who want to market their practices. He said, (and yes, I am paraphrasing) that if you wanted to learn a new skill in business, and you had no mentor or guide you could trust, that the best thing you could do was figure out what everyone else was doing and then do the opposite. The majority is, at best, average.

So it is with lawyer marketing.

Most lawyers struggle with the whole concept of marketing their practices. Stop reading this article right now and go and pick up the Yellow Page directory for your area. Look at the attorney ads. What do you see?

Are there any really compelling messages that would convince you to call any particular firm first? If you knew no attorneys could you pick the most qualified attorney based simply on the Yellow Page ads?
I suggest that most attorney advertising does little more than to try to “shout” louder than the rest. Pages and pages of essentially the same message shouted in bigger print, over multiple pages, and in color. For personal injury firms the messages are all basically the same:
• If you’ve been hurt, call us
• No fee if no recovery
• We care for you
• We are aggressive

Not real helpful are they?

Think you can fix it with graphics? Who cares what your picture looks like? Or that of your building. Or your “mascot.” Anyone still going to use a pit bull in their ad?

Response to advertising can be improved by doing the opposite of what most lawyers do with their marketing.

You can’t improve, though, without putting some new thought into it. Stop copying what other lawyers do because it’s not working for them, either!

I have developed a system that we are using in my small personal injury and medical malpractice practice with great success. It is effective, ethical and “outside the (lawyer) box.” It takes me out of the “I can try to outspend you” battle and drives highly qualified personal injury claimants to my office who, before I have even spoken to them, have already decided to hire me.

Forget the Old Way of Marketing

The best client is a referred client. This article isn’t about referred clients. It’s also not specifically about TV, radio or Internet advertising. I am going to talk about Yellow Page advertising because most lawyers use the Yellow Pages. I promise, though, that all of the concepts are easily transferable to TV, radio and Internet marketing.

What does your marketing need to do in order to give you a chance to be in a position to select that cases that best fit your case selection criteria?

Your marketing must achieve six very specific goals in order for you to produce a steady stream of new clients with the type of cases that you want. Effective legal marketing must:

1. Attract their attention. Depending on where you practice, the Yellow Page directory could be anywhere from 20 to over 70 pages deep in lawyer ads. In order to attract their attention you must have a different message.

2. Provoke them to initiate contact with you. You can’t market to them if you don’t know who they are so you must give them a reason to give you their identifying information. What’s your “reason to call?” (Hint: How can the answer be a “free consultation” is that’s what everyone else is doing?)

3. Stop their search until you have a chance to communicate with them. Give them a good reason to stop searching now that they have been provoked to initiate contact with you.

4. Prove that you are the obvious choice. Once they initiate contact your response has to be to give them overwhelming proof in a highly dignified and ethical way that allows them to decide for themselves that you are the obvious choice for their case.

5. Create urgency. You must create urgency by convincing them that the demand for you and your time exceeds the supply of you and your time.

6. Filter out (with little or no staff time) those cases that do not meet your criteria. Your materials must create a filter that helps weed out those cases that you do not want to handle in a way that will minimize time spent on cases that don’t produce income.

Attract Attention

Let’s talk about pizza.

When Tom Monaghan started his little pizza shop he realized that he was not the only one around selling pizza. He quickly figured out that there were a limited number of things you could talk about in marketing pizza. It either tastes better, is larger, is fresher or is cheaper. That’s how everyone else marketed pizza.

Monaghan looked around and figured that if you wanted to compete for attention on any of the above issues he could only do it by shouting louder. Certainly he could spend more money to run more TV ads or to have more full-color glossy inserts in the newspaper, or to mail an ad or coupon to every single household in the area, but all he would be doing is shouting louder.

The problem with the “shouting louder” approach to marketing is that there is always someone who can come along and shout louder then you can. There will always be someone who can sell more cheaply or advertise more often. (Here’s a frightening thought for those spending hundreds of thousands on “double truck” Yellow Page advertising to get near the front of the lawyer directory: How many of you thumb through a book or a directory by holding the book in your left hand and actually looking at the ads “backwards”?)

Competing on those grounds is for the foolhardy.
Monaghan attracted attention by changing the game. He identified a void. Where was the void in pizza?

Delivery.

No one could get the fresh, hot pizza delivered to the buyer’s house in time to be still fresh and hot and without the box being crushed into the cheese. Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza didn’t market the pizza. He marketed the delivery of the pizza. Remember “Fresh Hot Pizza Delivered in 30 Minutes or Less, Guranteed?”

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About Benjamin Glass
Ben Glass (www.BenGlassLaw.com) is a practicing plaintiff’s personal injury and medical malpractice attorney in Fairfax, Virginia. He is the author of The Ultimate Personal Injury and Practice Building Toolkit
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