Marketing against ROI
* This tip was first published by the Massachusetts Bar Association: Tip of the week on 12/17/2009
ROI is “Return on Investment”. It is a measure of how successful your investment is in any given venture. In the context of attorney marketing, you want to be able to measure how well a particular investment (marketing strategy) is. Is that yellow page ad generating business? Is that new Web site bringing new clients? That’s easy to measure by simply asking your clients where they first found your information.
Every summer, my firm invests in marketing through participation in area elder fairs and also cultural fairs. I routinely go out to engage the public, to meet with them at these events and speak with passersby and answer their legal questions, for free. I have not yet gotten a single client that has told me they’ve hired me from seeing me at those events. But yet I keep doing it year after year. Am I a fool? Perhaps. Am I wasting my money? No.
Malcolm Gladwell has a classic discussion of why Coca Cola dominates market shares over Pepsi. It is not because Coca Cola tastes better because when given the “Pepsi Challenge,” most people actually prefer the taste of Pepsi over Coca Cola. The reason why Coke dominates is because of its brand. Its brand is so pervasive that you would be hard pressed to find anyone on earth that won’t recognize the name.
All things being equal, when a new client sees your ad and they see your competitor’s ad, you want them to pick you. People choose products that they know, whether it’s a conscious or subconscious choice. The more they’ve seen something, the more likely they’ll pick it. So, why do I continue to do those fairs during the summer? Because though they don’t know it, people recognize me and when they see an ad of mine down the road, they pick me not because my ad is so much better or because I am more qualified, but because they recognize me as a brand.
Go out and engage your client base. Make your name and your presence pervasive.
This tip is courtesy of Gabriel Cheong, attorney at law, owner of Infinity Law Group.
Marketing Using Twitter
* This article appeared in the MBA Lawyers’ e-Journal: Tip of the Week on 11/5/2009.
Twitter was the “it” kid on the block when it got started and up until this year. Then statistics came out that pointed to the fact that most Twitter accounts registered were NOT being used on a regular basis and a majority of the “tweets” come from a minority of tweeters (Twitter lingo). Add to that, many legal business and marketing gurus didn’t know exactly how Twitter could help market a law firm and if they did make a claim that it was beneficial, they didn’t have hard numbers to prove it.
Then last month, Google and Bing revitalized Twitter as a marketing tool. In their usual epic battle of Microsoft vs. Google, Microsoft’s new Bing search engine struck a deal with Twitter to start indexing their site. In the same day, Google made the same announcement that it will now start to index Twitter.
What does that all mean for legal marketing?
It means that individual tweets can now show up as searches in Google or Bing. So if you tweet something about your particular substantive area of law, there is a possibility that it will get picked up by Google and Bing and if relevant enough to a user’s search terms, it will show in the search results.
If you haven’t started using twitter yet, now is as good a time as any to start and I predict that many more firms will start to see direct results from their twittering over time. Tweet about your practice or the law. Tweet your blog posts. Retweet other interesting posts. Just start tweeting.
This tip is courtesy of Gabriel Cheong, attorney at law, owner of Infinity Law Group. Follow Gabriel on Twitter @GabrielCheong.