For too many law firms, marketing is an afterthought. These law firms believe that 1) marketing is unseemly or 2) they don’t need to do marketing to succeed. After years of running and marketing a law practice, I’ve realized that there is no “magic money bullet.”

Your law firm must market itself. No matter your practice area, no matter the size of your law firm, marketing is THE business you are in. And maybe that’s something that you’re not used to hearing, but you cannot ignore the facts at hand.

Every element of your law firm involves an aspect of marketing, whether you realize it or not. The ads you create, your phone script, and even the materials in your reception area ALL fall under the category’ marketing.’

You’ve only just begun, but the sooner you accept that EVERY single piece of your law firm functions as marketing, the sooner you will be able to succeed.

For the first big chunk of my professional practice life, I worked as an associate and then a junior partner at a firm that primarily did insurance defense work. I had zero control over my life, but if you had asked me, I would have just said, “that’s how things work.”

I thought that the chaos came with the title.

But how many times can you tell your wife and kids that you won’t make it to dinner until it clicks that that should not be the norm?

Every once in a while, I came across books like Think and Grow Rich or 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and I’d read them, only to put them aside because I would convince myself that self-determination was not actually possible. Besides, none of the other lawyers I knew seemed to be living a self-determined life, either.

When I discovered legal marketing, I realized that building the life you want is possible—no sacrifices or compromises.

If I could recommend anything 100 times over, it is to write down your short, medium, and long-term goals religiously. Decide what you can do and what you can delegate to your trusted team.

After all, your time is your most valuable asset.

What’s a law firm without clients? No, I’m not about to tell you the punchline to a joke.

The actual answer is nothing because, without clients, there is no point in what we do. But do you allow yourself the grace of being selective with who you choose to represent?

For law firm owners who have ever waited by the phone in anticipation of it ringing, you don’t think you can be “picky” with the clients you get. After all, haven’t we been told to feel grateful to get anyone walking in the door?

But the truth is, you can be more selective in who you want to take on as a client. After all, you must decide for yourself what is worth your team’s time and effort.

What we have found to work well at BenGlassLaw (and our member law firms that we’ve taught this concept to) is to create a complete client profile.

Have your staff work on it with you. Write it down. Figure out who out of your clients you really like and figure out the defining criteria from those folks. Education level? Income? How they find you? Etc.

The clients you serve are an extension of your business, so it’s only natural that you should have a say in who you choose to invest time and resources into.

Having your name on the front cover of a book is one of the fastest ways to gain authority in a room full of others.

Imagine someone asks a question about getting more referrals for a law firm. Think about how much authority that you gain by being able to say, “I wrote a book about that.”

Creating a book is not as challenging to do as you may think it is.

The fastest way (outside of licensing someone else’s book to use) is to create an outline of topics. Then, team up with someone who will interview you about each of the topics.

You are an expert. You know more about your area of the law than anyone else, and it’s much easier to talk on the subject than it is to spend time writing it. There are many great but affordable editors out there that can take care of the nitty-gritty.

Remember, we’re not writing Shakespeare here. We are creating a guide that you can send to potential clients and referral sources that establishes that you are an authority on the subject.

Your new book is the core of your legal marketing. All roads lead back to this piece, and you can add/edit content as necessary. This particular piece is everything, from lead gen to gifts, but only if you use it!

Put yourself in your potential client’s shoes. They get into a car accident, go to the hospital, miss work, and then the medical bills begin piling up. At some point, they will pull out their phone and do a quick search for “personal injury lawyers near me.”

In that search, they will see many lawyers ranked by their reviews and their locations (attorneys closer to the potential client will show up first, that’s the way Google’s algorithm works).

Those potential clients may call you from Google without ever visiting your website, but a few will click through to check your case results, testimonials, and other major pages on your website.

What happens if your website is hard-to-navigate or lacks key information?

They will go back to their search and start over.

This is the 30-second process that your potential clients go through without you even being aware.

Your website should be the ultimate, all-inclusive resource for prospects to instantly know who you are and what your law firm is all about. There are a lot of ways that you can go about it, but here are some of my website’s “must-haves.”

As you start building your law firm marketing, you’ll find out what the right kind of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software is for your practice.

If you want to keep track of all client information, send out mass emails, develop campaign sequences to ‘trigger’ what is sent to clients, and so much more (all of which we think is a must), then you need to invest in good technology that can handle all of that.

Whatever you are using, make certain that the CRM you select will…

At this point, things have started to shift a bit.

You’re clearly no longer just an attorney. By now, you are an author, leader, marketer, and lawyer all in one. We know this, but now we need others to as well.

If you want to drive attention to those things you have been working on for your law firm (such as that book that we talked about), you need to get in front of a crowd. Find ways to involve your product or services in the lives of everyone that you can.

How many different ways can you say, “I can help you with your divorce?” “Arrested? We are aggressive.” It’s so much easier to put your book in front of potential clients and talk about that. For example, you can take your book and create 20 messages, each aimed at one part of the book. Each message speaks to the conversation that is going on in a client’s head.

Think of your offerings in a way that can be tailored to exactly what that potential client needs – they might not even know until they see it.

If you expect every lead to sign with your practice in the very first encounter, you’re in for a surprise.

In fact, in my practice, it is often 4 to 12 months before someone signs with us after their first contact.

Most lawyers would give up on those client leads, but we don’t. We’ve created complex follow-up systems that keep us in contact with our potential client leads for years.

To some lawyers, that may seem excessive. Those same lawyers would be surprised by how many potential clients sign with us months after they first called.

Our follow-up drives those ‘old’ leads to make an appointment with us. It’s one of our core attorney marketing processes.

At the bare minimum, you should be offering…

An initial package containing a free report or book that is focused on the consumer and the problems you know they are facing.

At least 3-5 email autoresponders, with additional reports spaced out over the next four weeks. The focus of the emails is always on them and addressing their needs.

At least three “snail mail” mailings. These mailings could include the same report that they got the first time in/or they got via email, each with a different cover letter.

One of the first marketing lessons I learned is that you have to build a following. No, I’m not talking about social media here (although you can use social media to deepen your relationships with your followers).

Instead, I want you to think of your following as your raving fans. They want to hear from you in many places, including print newsletters, emails, social media, and any other channel that may come along.

Your following, or a marketing list, sometimes begins with the people you know. These could be your staff members, family members, or extended social groups. While this feels like a small group at first, you will build this following over time to include clients, potential clients, and local community leaders.

You can add people to your attorney marketing list through a variety of means. Website contact forms are one place where new people can become your “followers,” or you can simply attend an event and collect business cards to add to your email list!

As your marketing list grows, so will your referrals. Keep up the hard work and grow your list where you can. Don’t forget to engage with your followers regularly! You want them to remember your name.

Do you have a system in place to get referrals?

Like, an actual proven system that almost guarantees that you will see new referrals each quarter?

If not, you’re missing out big time. Simply waiting around for a random person to walk in every now and then, saying that they were referred by so-and-so isn’t good enough. You’re leaving it to chance.

Building a strong system to receive and give referrals is not as difficult as you may think. What has helped our lawyer members the most efficiently is understanding these tips…

Marketing for lawyers is a specific marketing discipline. You shouldn’t follow the marketing rules for a restaurant or gym, because that style of marketing won’t attract clients (it may attract gym rats to your practice, but that’s not what you need). If you follow the steps I’ve outlined here, you will create a good base of attorney marketing that will help you sign more clients now, and also in the months to come.