The Yodle Challenge started on June 18th, almost a month and a half ago. To date, Brea Buettner has gotten about 25 leads—people actually looking to talk to a Minnesota bankruptcy lawyer. But only one came into the office. In this ten-minute video, we catch you up on the Yodle Challenge so far.
Legal Marketing
Below are our best tips and ideas for creating a sustainable legal marketing pipeline to grow your practice.
Before you can serve clients, you have to get them, and that starts with a clear sense of your law firm branding.
Once you know your marketing message, share it with the world through networking events, and other online marketing methods such as social media.
We have great ideas on building your law firm website, starting a law blog, and search engine optimization (SEO).
Need more ideas? Join other innovative lawyers in the Lawyerist LAB.
Almost everyone has tried googling themselves, and almost everyone has had the same experience finding out that it’s incredibly difficult to distinguish one’s self on the web. According to Google, I was the US Ambassador to South Vietnam in 1973, have a foundation dedicated to the preservation and restoration of natural ecosystems, live in Queensland, Australia, and am a professor of avian sensory science at the University of Birmingham in the UK, among other things.
When researching a marketing plan for your law firm, Google will provide you with hundreds of options with 15 or 20 involved steps to follow. While that is great in theory, it makes the process of developing a marketing plan overwhelming.
Lets cut it down to three realistic items that are essential to consider and critical to your sustainable success. Bringing it down to the basics, here are the top 3 things you really need to consider and plan:
Guest post by Alexander Ripps
Selecting the right domain name for your law firm or private practice is an important decision. As broadband continues to expand, both domestically and abroad, securing your online identity is more important than ever before. When selecting your domain name, there are certain characteristics you should always look for. Specifically, you want a name that is short and easy to remember.
When networking for business development or finding a job, you must know your value proposition. In other words, if you want to be hired as someone’s lawyer or employee, be prepared to convincingly state why you are different and better from the others being considered. For some, this is easier said than done. Eventually though, most are able refine their “story” in a compelling manner.
Now here is one area where it takes very little effort to be “different and better” than the others. How is that? By simply being polite and remembering two words: “thank you.”
In the 12 days since Brea’s brand-new, Yodle-built website launched, she has gotten a few nibbles. Unfortunately, the only bite was someone interested in free advice. Yodle says results will improve with time, but I also wonder if bankruptcy, like landlord-tenant, is an area of law prone to bum leads.
Watch the video, then leave us your thoughts.
In this tough economy, perhaps the most frequently asked question I get from my business development coaching clients, as well as attendees at my marketing CLE’s is “Should I be doing anything differently now?”
The answer is basically no. Now is the time you simply cannot afford not to market. You need to reconnect with former clients and jump start your networking efforts with acquaintances, both professional and personal, who could become potential clients or referral sources.
With that said, there are two things that make this environment unique and are worth mentioning.
A week and a half in, our Yodle Challenge guinea pig, Brea Buettner, just posted an update to the Yodle Challenge.
Here is what Brea has to say so far:
Yesterday, I sat down with Mike DeLuca, Yodle’s Senior VP of Sales & Marketing. I tried recording the video chat, but Pamela let me down. I feel badly about that, because Mike is a nice guy and I think he was pretty excited to have the chance to get me back for being so mean about his sales team, but I totally cannot do his wit justice by reporting his zingers myself.
Instead, here is a summary of our conversation. We touched on four main topics: Yodle’s strategy for advertising itself, the breakdown of fees for Yodle’s services, how Yodle is different than other services, and what kind of results Brea can expect to see.
We have been writing about using Twitter for legal marketing for over a year now.
If you still have not checked Twitter out, or if you feel like you need to learn more about how to use it for your practice, you might want to check out some books on Twitter best practices. There are lots of books on how to optimize Twitter for marketing and social networking.
