South Carolina Trial Law Blog

Andy Havens is a marketing consultant and is the author of  the entertaining and informative Andy Haven’s legal marketing blog. Andy is a regular contributor to LLRX. Andy’s company is SaneStorm, which provides a free consultation to determine how they can help you.

1. No marketing without goals: If you're doing stuff just to do stuff, cut it out. If you're doing something because your competition is doing it, I
   can pretty much guarantee that they don't know why they're doing it, so cut it out. You're better off spending the money on employee bonuses. Seriously, if you don't have a very good reason for a marketing program, you may in fact be doing more harm than good.
2. No marketing goals without specific measurements: Hey! This links right up with that last one! That's right, campers. Goals require measurement.Marketing without measurement is like basketball without baskets; lots of dribbling, but no point whatsoever. If you can't measure the success (or failure) of your marketing programs, you won't know if you're making progress. You won't know which activities are paying off for you, and which should be abandoned. Every marketing process should be a cycle; you do something, measure its effect, change the activity based on the measurement, and do it again. That way, every time you do something, it becomes more efficient and/or effective. Over time, you end up with world-class marketing. If you don't measure your programs, over time you end up with... who knows what. It could even be worse than when you started. You'll never know. Was that a basket? Or did it bounce off the rim? We can't tell.
3. Brand is about more than a logo, tagline and color palette: Those are like the black tie at a "black tie affair." Yes, you need them. But if you show up wearing just that, you'll be asked to leave. Pants are a requirement, too, after all. Brand is hard to get right. It takes hard work,
   lots of time and, more than anything else, attention. You have to work to align everything in your practice with your brand. Example: billing. If your brand is something like, "We fight harder for your rights," then your bill collection policies have to be tough but fair. If your accounts receivable people are all soft and fuzzy when they contact clients, that's off-brand. Contrariwise, if your brand is, "We're the friendly lawyers," you can't have knee-breakers making collections calls. Think of brand as the "corporate personality." You can't be even a little schizophrenic. All your transactions have to fit within the brand. That goes for how you treat employees, vendors and other law firms, too. You can't be "the friendly firm" to clients and total bastards to your staff. It won't ring true, and you'll be asked to leave the party, go home, and put on pants.
4. Get your silly mug out of your ads: We know you're beautiful. Yes, your mama gave birth to a beautiful, beautiful baby. You are, without a doubt, the best looking lawyer since Hammuarabi slapped down the code. I don't care. Get out of the ad. Don't argue with me. I don't want to heart it. Get. Out. Of. The. Ad. I don't know who is worse on this one, lawyers or real estate agents. Your face has nothing to do with the value proposition you're selling. If you are working in family law, show pictures of families. If you are working in med mal, show pictures of doctors and patients. Pictures of people are powerful drivers of behavior in advertising. IF they are linked logically to the decision you want your customer to make. Unless you are actually selling yourself, get out of the ad. I've told this to dozens of lawyers, and some of them get all up in my grill with, "But I am selling myself. That's what a lawyer does." No. It's not. That's how it feels to you, since you're the provider. But the client doesn't care if you're Mr. Pinkleburger with sideburns and a bad sprayed-on tan or Ms. Claymore wearing a 1980's, teal power-suit. They want a result, not a particular face. Show them images related to either the situation you can help them avoid/escape, or the situation you can help them find/discover.
5. Blog: A year ago, I thought a blog was something you went to your  internist to have removed in an outpatient procedure. Now I preach the gospel of blogging. In less than five months, and with fewer than 40 posts, I created a blog that more often than not ranks on the first page of Google, Yahoo and AltaVista for the search term "legal marketing." I generally get 100-200 visitors a day to my blog, about half of whom come from search engines, half from other blogs and media sources. A law firm without a blog in 2005 is going to look, in retrospect, like a law firm without a web site did in 1996. Pretty damn dumb. But there are right ways and wrong ways to go about it. See #1 and #2, above. Don't just do it because everyone else is. Do it for a reason. So what's the reason? Blogs aggregate content that readers are interested in. They do so in a way that's very attractive to search engines, and they are subscribable in a format call RSS (Real Simple Syndication) which lets people keep track of your blog by its headlines through a portal like MyYahoo. If you need help getting started with a professional blog, there are several consultants who do a great job for lawyers. One of them being Kevin O'Keefe over at LexBlog.  If you want to work blogs into your overall marketing mix, give me a yell.