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Yellow Page Marketing for Lawyers

Yellow Page Marketing, Part 2

(Back to Part 1)

By: Benjamin W. Glass, III, Fairfax, Virginia (www.BenGlassLaw.com)

If you were the consumer in need of a personal injury or medical malpractice attorney how could you go about differentiating one firm from the next based upon their Yellow Page advertising? Can you begin to see now that there is almost no useful information for consumers in the attorney section of the Yellow Pages.

By the way, you could do this same experiment with most TV or Radio advertising as well. Think about it. Switch the names around. Most attorneys have a terribly difficult time differentiating themselves from one another.

For the consumer who is doing "research" and is in search of an attorney, there is almost no useful information currently available in any media typically used by attorneys. Does size of an ad matter? Maybe. But attorneys can continue to beat each other’s brains in buying larger ads, more pages and more color. This is nothing but shouting louder.

Shouting louder, in marketing, means spending more money. (How about the most useless thing I’ve seen in years? Lawyers buying two yellow pages, side by side, with exactly the same text and photos on both pages! What- they couldn’t think of anything different to say?)

There are vast possibilities for you here. If no one else is giving them any useful information in the Yellow Pages, then your ad, no matter how small or how far back in the attorney section it is, can make it drop dead easy for the consumer because virtually no attorneys think “outside the box” with their Yellow Page advertising.

You can vastly increase the number of inquiries to your firm and at the same time have only highly qualified potential clients calling you for that initial free consultation, because you are doing something entirely different – providing real access to useful information that no one else is giving them.

We have been very successful in our firm (www.BenGlassLaw.com) in developing and implementing a method of advertising in the Yellow Pages that not only does not require you or another staff person to respond "live" for information but which will get free information in the form of books, reports and audio CD’s into their hands long before they have an opportunity to get in to see another attorney for an in person "free" consultation.

The Yellow Page advertising that we use says nothing about us or our law firm! Instead, we market several consumer books that we have written. Our two most popular books are “Five Deadly Sins That Can Wreck Your Virginia Accident Case” and “The Truth About Lawyer Advertising.” These books were amazingly easy to write, cheap to publish and deliver a ton of information that not only educates the consumer but “sells” our firm as the obvious choice for their case.

The object of this style of legal marketing is simply to make it as easy as possible for the consumer to initiate contact with you in a non threatening way that rewards the consumer by delivering comprehensive information materials to them to read or listen to on their own time, in their own house or in their car and the only thing that they have done is to trade their contact information to you.

We do this through toll free recorded message lines and through a variety of small, one page web sites that we have developed. (www.TheTruthAboutLawyerAdvertising.com, for example). They have not had to call to talk to someone live. They do not feel that they are going to be pressured by an aggressive and persuasive attorney. They understand that truly in most cases there is no urgent rush on the process of deciding on an attorney. In fact, if they slow down a bit to get more info, they’ll do a better job of making the right choice. And if, in your information materials, you have clearly communicated to them exactly what type of case and which type of client your expertise and level of experience is best suited for then you will have essentially provoked the very good set of higher qualified potential clients to contact you and to beg you to be the attorney to take their case.

This sets you up as the wise man on the top of the mountain for whom there is a long line of people waiting to get in to see you.

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