q&a 4 marketing solicitors

Send your questions to:[email protected] now.

Nick, when I talk with a new prospect, I take the timeto listen to their challenge and then explain how I

can help them. I then present my fee. Some say yes,others go away and never become clients. Should I dropmy price to these people? Anon (commercial lawyer)

No! That was nice and easy wasn’t it? However, Imean it. Price is rarely ever actually the problem. Itcan be used as the problem, but there is usually a

fundamental issue at heart which you have not covered.The other problem is that if you show you are so keen todrop your price it is a terrible message to send out toprospects and immediately undervalues the service thatyou provide. If they do use you after you have droppedyour price what will happen the next time they want touse your services? They will expect you to drop your priceagain.

How many follow up communications are you having witheach prospect? If it is not at least five but preferably 10you will miss new business. Very few solicitors follow upenough with new prospects in my experience. You need totalk with the client, follow up with an email, follow up inwriting on the same day, call the client three days later tocheck they have received your letter and to see if theyhave any unanswered questions and if they say no, askthem for the instruction (see What I Wish I Had KnownWhen I Started In Business). If they say no, ask them why.You need to know so that you can find out for the future.If they say they need more time to think about it, ask themwhen they would like you to call them back next, thendiary note to call them again. If they say that they willcome back to you when good and ready, if their need isnot time related, make a note to write to them again orcall them again. If you have the feeling that they are notgoing to instruct you regardless, ask for their real reasons.

“Mr Jones, if you are not going to instruct me on thisoccasion I would really like to know your reasons so Ican try and serve my clients better in the future”.

Learning from the clients that do not instruct you is moreimportant than learning from those that do!

Marketing4Solicitors

Marketing4Soliciotors | Issue 15 | December 201012 | Marketing4Soliciotors | Issue 15 | December 2010

Increasing Solicitors Profits - Samson Consultingwww.samsonconsulting.co.uk

T: 01275 855525 F: 01275 858884First Floor Offices, 119 Station Road, Nailsea, Bristol, BS48 1TA

I am so excited to introduce you tothe new look Marketing4Solicitorsnow delivered straight to your door!The main reason for the change isthat this format will be easier for you(printed and delivered) and also willcontain more up to date and currentcontent. Now that all of theimportant aspects of marketing havebeen covered in detail in the previousissues of M4S, it allows me to changethe format so that each month I bringyou up to speed on a variety of newand improved marketing methods ortechniques that you should be usingto market your law firm right now.

I am also going to invite guest authorsfrom time to time to provide you withreally targeted and useful informationabout specialist subject areas. I hopeyou will find these incredibly valuable.I am starting the Guest Author section

with one of the most important areasthat I know can help to bring in a lotmore traffic to your website andtherefore increase the amount of newfiles you are opening every month;article marketing. If this does not meana great deal to you at the moment,once you have read the informationfrom Steve Shaw contained in this issueof M4S and future ones I hope it will allfall into place.

In addition to featuring informationabout article marketing, over the nextfew months I will provide you withmore information from the results oftesting of my own marketing. Thismonth I am looking at how you canimprove your Pay Per Click advertisingwith only a few minutes of your timebut in ways that can produce incredibleresults.

Your Questions

Answered!As we are moving into a new format for M4S thismeans I can fulfil one of the aspects that I reallyenjoy and that I believe will give you maximumbenefit of your membership; providing you withanswers to your own marketing related questions inthe monthly M4S publication.

Whether you want feedback on one of youradvertisements, or have a general marketing question,please send me your questions and I will answer asmany of them as possible in each month’s Questionand Answer section. Simply email your questions [email protected].

New Style For Your M4S

In This IssueThe Extreme Close Up – Pay Per Click Advertising

Golden Rules of Marketing4Solicitors

Guest Author – What is article marketing and howdoes it bring more people to your website?

A Quick FixWhat I wish i had known when i started inbusiness!

Wow or Ow?

What’s in your Vault?

The Hot Spot

Your Marketing4Solicitors questions answered

M4S resources to help you

Q&AQ

A

View your online resources atwww.samsonconsulting.co.uk/m4s

Levels Of Marketing4SolicitorsMembershipM4S Mastermind GroupMembership of the M4S Masterming Groupincludes all of the benefits below plus:

• Quarterly meetings chaired by Nick with otherlegal and business owners to grow your businessfaster

• Monthly coaching calls with Nick

• Emergency call access to Nick

M4S Insiders ClubMembership of the Insiders Club includes all of thebenefits below plus:

• A 45 Minute Monthly Telephone Call To SetTargets And Answer Any Questions.

• "One on One" feedback from Nick on yourmarketing projects

M4S MembershipYour M4S Membership includes:

• The monthly M4S ToolKit packed with ideas togenerate new clients for your practice

• The Video of the Month

• Access online to the M4S Marketing Blueprint foryour practice (14 issues of M4S, each onetacking in depth a new marketing topicproviding you with a blueprint to success

• New marketing precedents added onlineregularly for you to immediately use in yourown practice

To upgrade your level of membership or to find outmore email [email protected].

The only way to secure your monthly copy ofM4S and access to all of the above benefits isto sign up online atwww.samsonconsulting.co.uk/m4s.

Your M4S Questions Answered!

1. You get more visitors to your website and therefore winmore new clients; and

2. Your average cost per click comes down becauseGoogle rewards campaigns that work harder for the peopleusing their search engine (so you get a better return oninvestment of your Google spend).

Improving Your PPC Advertisements

The Google PPC advertisements are the few words that youuse to persuade someone to visit your website when theytype in a search term that you are targeting. For example,if I type in “whiplash claim” to Google, these are the resultsthat I see on the page:

The first 3 results on the left and all of the results on theright hand side of the page are Pay Per Click results. Theothers on the left hand side are the organic search engineresults (which is why you must also be reading the articlefrom our guest author Steve Shaw today to see how youcan get these results for your website too).

You will see the Loyalty Law PPC advertisement on the righthand side (second advertisement) and the 1stClaimsorganic results in the third position on the left hand side. Iuse both PPC and organic search engine marketing andstrongly advise you to do the same.

We are concentrating on PPC in this article, particularlycreating and testing different advertisements for each ofyour ad groups to see which works the hardest atgenerating traffic for your website for you. It is vital thatyou are always testing and improving your advertising copy.Google makes this easy to do as it allows you to test asmany different advertisements against each other as youlike. My preference is to run two advertisements side byside, wait until each has had at least 100 impressions butideally 1000 if you can wait that long (i.e. been displayedwhen someone has typed into Google the keywords thatyou are targeting) and then delete the worst performingadvertisement and try and beat your winner. This is reallyeasy to do and I will show you how.

Google Pay Per Click Basics Recap

Adwords group – a targeted group of keywords (thesmaller the better). For example, in personal injury youwould at least have adgroups for car accidents, workaccidents, tripping accidents etc and within each grouphave keywords targeting that “theme”.

CTR – Your Click Through Rate. E.g. if your advertisement isdisplayed 100 times and 3 people click on it, your CTR willbe 3%. It is vital to keep working on improving this CTR.Average performance is 1-2%, exceptional performancewhich I have achieved on a few very highly targetedkeywords for niche areas of law will be 50%. If you canreach 6% or above you are doing very well.

Keywords – These are phrases that people might type intoGoogle to find your website. Continuing the personal injuryexample, in your car accidents group you might betargeting the term “whiplash claim”, so this is one of yourkeywords.

Starting Point

Step 1 – Google Account Settings

The first thing you must do is to ensure that your settingsare adjusted to rotate your advertisements evenly, ie it willshow one of your advertisements 50% of the time, theother one the other 50% of the time. Go into yourCampaign, click ‘Settings/Advanced Settings/AdDelivery/Ad Rotation and select ‘Rotate: Show ads moreevenly’. This ensures your ads can be properly tested byyou (Google defaults the advertisements to show the bestperforming advertisements but this does not allow you toimprove your CTR by your own testing which is far moreeffective in the long term).

Step 2 – Setting Up A New Advertisement

The next stage is to create a new advertisement. Go into acampaign, select an Adgroup, select “ADS” from the greytabs in the centre of the screen, then click New ad/Text Ad.This will bring up a new ad for you to test the ideas below.

Now that have covered the basics, what should you test inyour advertisements?

Step 3 – What Should You Be Testing?

1. Using The Keyword In Your PPC Advertisement

The first point to notice is that any of the PPCAdvertisements which feature either of the words‘whiplash’ or ‘claim’ in the example above have these‘keywords’ emphasised (highlighted in bold). Thisimproves Click Through Rate.

If a user sees the search term highlighted in the resultsthey are much more likely to click through to the website inquestion. So this is one way of improving the effectivenessof your advertisement. This can improve your ClickThrough Rate by a good few percentage points which canmake a huge difference to the number of visitors to yourwebsite, but also in bringing down the cost of each click.

Pay Per Click – Why You MUST Keep Testing NewAdvertising Copy

Pay Per Click (PPC) tips will always feature strongly inMarketing4Solicitors as long as I see it producingamazing results for my own businesses and for thesolicitors I am working with. I have some solicitors thatproduce 80 to 90% of their new business enquiries fromGoogle advertising. You will know from my Golden Rulesof Marketing4Solicitors Rule Number 7 that ‘one’ is themost dangerous number for your legal practice, so thisis definitely a case of over reliance on one source of newbusiness, but it does go to show how effective it is forthe firm’s relying on it.

For Loyalty Law, Pay Per Click advertising is a very importantpart of reaching new clients for our panel members. I knowfrom experience that there is no more expensive market inthe legal sector than personal injury claims, but I also knowthat we have to make Pay Per Click work for Loyalty Law orwe will struggle to make the scheme work as a whole. It isthat important for lead generation. It is probably worthreminding you why it is so important, so here is a snap shotof the reasons you must be using and testing PPC.

Reasons You Must Use Pay Per Click To GenerateLeads

1. It is an instant source of lead generation. If you do nothave enough new instructions you can turn on Pay Per Clickadvertising and see an immediate increase in the numberof incoming leads to your practice.

2. It is, in my opinion, the most impactful, powerful andeffective form of advertising bar none!

Advertising used to work by putting advertisements innewspapers or magazines and hoping that a person inneed of your service saw your advertisement and actedupon it. For every one person that was interested in yourproduct or service who saw your advertisement another 99people who had no interest also saw it. Google PPCchanges this because your advertisement is only seen bythose looking for your service at that moment in time.

If a prospective client types into Google “SolicitorMiddlesbrough” and sees your firm’s advertisement andwebsite and you are a solicitor in Middlesbrough, you havean excellent chance of them at least picking up thetelephone and calling you. No other form of advertisingcomes close to this in terms of finding targeted clients orprospects when they are READY to buy your services.

3. You can turn it on and off depending on your need fornew instructions.

4. You can set a cap on the amount that you are preparedto spend, thereby reducing any risk of overspending.

5. The in-built tools allow you to constantly test, measureand improve your campaign’s performance (this is oneaspect I am focusing on in this issue of M4S.

If you are not yet using PPC advertising, revisit ‘M4S 6’ nowwhich shows you how to set one up and get started now.

I hope you are already up and running with PPC, in whichcase I am now going to share some practical tips to helpyou improve your campaign performance immediately. Ifyou improve your performance two wonderful thingshappen;

Marketing4Soliciotors | Issue 15 | December 2010 | 32 | Marketing4Soliciotors | Issue 15 | December 2010View your online resources at

www.samsonconsulting.co.uk/m4sView your online resources at

www.samsonconsulting.co.uk/m4s

ExtremeClose Up

on Pay Per Click

The Extreme Close Up allows me to go into more detail on one marketing area for your practicewhich I know can produce results for you. If you have any areas of marketing that you needmore information on, email me on [email protected]

Pay Per Click is the most impactful, powerfuland effective form of advertising bar none!“

”

It means that you should be creating lots of very small adgroups targeting a tiny range of keywords as this will have adramatic impact on the performance of your PPCCampaign. If you are new to PPC, don’t worry about this atthe start. Start with bigger ad groups and then as you findkeywords which work for you and deliver good traffic, takethem out of the bigger group and put them into a smallergroup on their own. Then you can start to ensure that bothof your ads in that smaller keyword group use the keywordsin the title and the body copy.

Using the keywords in the title and the body of theadvertisement can increase your CTR by several percentagepoints! You will see in the advertisement below it is used inthe title (line 1), the body of the ad (lines 2/3) and in the‘Display URL’ (line 4). The final point is an important one.When you are writing your advertisements, if you haveroom always repeat the keyword in your ‘Display URL’ asthis again can make another small improvement to yourCTR.

2. Subject Of Your Advertisement (your angle)

In the example above you will notice that nearly everysingle advertisement features “100% Compensation” as amain reason for choosing the advertiser. This is why LoyaltyLaw is testing a completely different ‘angle’. If you sayexactly the same as every other advertiser why would aclient choose you over and above them? You have to thinkwhat else you can say that will make your advertisementstand out. You can then test your new different angleadvertisement against one using similar wording to yourcompetitors.

You should look at your competitors, learn from them, stealtheir ideas if they are new and it is ethical to do so, but ifthey are all saying exactly the same you absolutely musttest different advertising copy to bring traffic to yourwebsite. Look at different sectors and other professionalsadvertising online. See what they say and notice whichadvertisements stand out for you. Don’t be afraid to testsomething that you feel is a bit too ‘brazen’, because it isjust that, a test. Let your clients tell you whether they likethe ads or not by seeing if they keep clicking on it and ifyour new instructions go up!

3. Other Tests That Can Make A Massive Difference

Leading Capitals - You will notice in the Loyalty Lawadvertisement above that each word starts with a capital.Remember this is not an English lesson (or clearly I wouldfail with my lack of attention to detail) so you have to usewhat works. Let me tell you that EVERY time I use leadingcaps I get a better CTR than my other test ad. That is 100%

of the time. I have tested a good performing ad againstanother ad with exactly the same wording and just addedleading caps and the new ad will outperform the first one.You MUST try this for your own Google Ads.

Punctuation - Question marks or exclamation marks canmake a massive difference to CTR, but this is not in such acertain way as leading caps above. For example,sometimes when I add a question mark or exclamationmark to the end of my Ad Title, it reduces CTR, other timesit increases it. This is the only change I make (as I test onething at a time –see below), so you can only find out bytesting.

Vitally Important!I hope that I have given you some food for thought andsome excitement for ways that you can make your PPCcampaign work harder for you. However, the mostimportant thing is to only ever test one change at atime. Do not try to do it all at once as it will mean thatyou can not measure the improvements (or work outwhich of the improvements is working the hardest foryou) but also it might dishearten you at the size of thechanges you need to make. Test one aspect of thepoints above, then when you have seen how thatworked, test another, then another etc. until you haveimproved your CTR by several percentage points (whichyou will).

Summary

If you are using PPC, please test a new idea as soon aspossible. If you have never used PPC, go to your vault for‘M4S 6’ now and see how to set up a campaign. If youhave tried PPC before but it did not work, go back and tryagain. I have yet to fail to make it work for a solicitor in oneway, shape or form.

Marketing4Soliciotors | Issue 15 | December 2010 | 54 | Marketing4Soliciotors | Issue 15 | December 2010

Golden Rules Of

Marketing4SolicitorsRecap CornerGolden Rule Number 1 – Become A Master OfMarketing

You can be the best solicitor in the world, but if you donot have any clients to look after you will go out ofbusiness. Unless you accept that your role is to masterthe bringing of new clients to your door (and alsodragging old clients back through your doors which isactually more important) then you will never have a trulysuccessful practice.

Become a master of marketing, devour M4S from coverto cover every month, then take action and your practicewill flourish!



Whiplash (whip lash)?Read This Free Whiplash Claim GuideNow Before You Do Anything Else!www.LoyaltyLaw.com/Whiplash-Guide

Whatever you want or needright now, someone has theanswer for you.You might have to pay for it, you might have tomake 100 calls, but if I had realised the power ofthis initially it would have saved me a lot of time,effort and energy. If there is an area of marketingthat you are unsure how or whether to use,someone, even another solicitor, has alreadybeen there and tried it so you can find theanswer.

“What, pick up the telephone and talk toanother solicitor about marketing Nick? Youmust be mad!”

Don’t go to your nearest competitor, maybesomeone you went through law school with?Obviously you can ask me now through “YourQuestions Answered”. Ask and you will receive,but don’t sit there fretting about it. The answerto all of your problems is often only a few emails,phone calls, or time spent camping like a stalkerin someone’s office away, although if you takethe last option I will deny having ever said that,but I hope you get the point.

What I Wish I HadKnown When IStarted In Business!

The Quick FixThe quick fix is designed to give you a quick shot inthe arm: something you can take and use (orimprove how you currently do this) in your practiceto immediately improve your results.

This month I want to talk to you about a part of yourwebsite, or more the information contained on a partof your website; prices! If you currently show yourprices in total or in part (for example for conveyancingservices, wills etc), stop it. Displaying your pricessimply allows your prospects to use your prices as abenchmark before they call another firm to find outtheir prices.

I worked with a major supplier of conveyancingservices who found that when they put an instantprice calculator on their website the enquiries literallydried up overnight. The instant quote tool was gonewithin a week. It might be a nice gadget, but the onlypurpose of your website is to find you leads and getthose leads to the point that they are ready to engagewith you. If your prices are displayed and easy to findon your website, unless you are the cheapest firm inthe UK (and that is not a strategy I advise you tofollow when new national competitors are just aroundthe corner) you will lose potential clients.

There needs to be plenty of information on yourwebsite about each area of law that you are looking toattract work for, enough so that you prove yourexpertise and convince a visitor that you are the bestfirm to handle their transaction, but you do not wantto give them everything. The last part of thetransaction, when you are asking for the work havingpresented the price, must come from a one on oneinteraction with your client, either face to face or overthe telephone.




We just talked about how your website can receivetargeted traffic when readers click the link in your resourcebox, but there is another way that your website can receivetargeted traffic - through Google.

Imagine a potential customer going to Google andsearching for information on your area of expertise.

They type their query into Google, and a list of results popsup, listing websites that Google deems will have thegreatest chance of satisfying the searcher.

What if someone did a search for your area of business andyour website popped up as the top result in the list?

You would have a much greater chance of that searcherclicking through to your website and becoming a newcustomer!

When your articles are reprinted all over the internet withthe precious link in your resource box going back to yourwebsite, it sends Google a message that your website isimportant, and you have a greater chance of rankinghigher in the search results.

Additionally, when you do article marketing your articlesthemselves may start turning up in the search results inGoogle. Once a person has clicked through to one of yourhelpful articles, they can click the link in your resourceleading them back to your website.

We've just talked about 3 ways that article marketing canhelp drive targeted traffic to your website:

1) When someone reads one of your articles and thenclicks the link to your website in your resource box.

2) When your website ranks higher in the search engines(like Google)

3) When a person does a Google search and your articlesappear in the search results

By doing article marketing, it's like you're sending out salesrepresentatives who keep popping up in the places whereyour potential customers are likely to be hanging out.

Article marketing is a trusted and effective method formarketing a website, and to top if off, it's easy! You don'thave to be an internet mastermind--just start writing andsubmitting articles, and you're well on your way!

5000 Extra Visitors Every MonthSteve Shaw created the web's first ever 100% automatedarticle distribution service, SubmitYOURArticle, whichdistributes your articles to hundreds of targeted onlinepublishers with the click of a button. I use Steve’s servicefor my own websites but also for many of my client’swebsites. You can find out more about his service on theresources page. My advice would be to sign up and test it.Once you see the increase in traffic to your website you willrealise how easy a decision this is to make for you.

I have clients using Steve’s service who have increasedtraffic from 3,000 visitors each month to over 8,000(for a small niche practice), so I know how effective this canbe as a marketing tool which is why I asked Steve to writeand article for you all.

Next month I will ask him to provide more advice andtips about Article Marketing to drive even more traffic toyour website.

M4S Resources To Help YouIf you have a website that already brings new clientenquiries, what will happen if you receive more free,targeted traffic at that website? Yes, you will receivemore enquiries. For one of my clients I have seen trafficrise from 3,000 visits per month to over 7,000 visits permonth, for a small niche practice. The main reason forthis has been adding content and then using thesoftware from this month’s Guest Author, Steve Shaw, todistribute these articles and generate links back to myclient’s website. Over the course of the year this hasmore than doubled their traffic, but more importantly

just last month they generated the most new clientenquiries ever generated from their website. It is nowtheir lead source of new enquiries (it used to be in aweak third place). So in a year we have turned theirwebsite into their number one source of new enquiriesand reduced their reliance on other sources.

This is how powerful article marketing can be. If youhave not yet started using it in your business, I urge youto do so. Visithttp://www.samsonconsulting.co.uk/marketing4solicitors/resources.html to sign up for some more free articlemarketing tips and a trial of the software.

Whether you have a brick and mortar legalbusiness with a website or a virtual law firmthat is 100% online, you know that gettingtraffic to your website is essential to yourbusiness' success.

But if you're not an SEO junkie or a technologicallyadvanced person, if you're just a "regular" small businessperson with an average amount of internet savvy, how inthe world do you bridge the gap between where you areright now and a thriving, bustling website?

The thought of learning how to "drive traffic to a website"or "ranking higher in Google" is daunting for most folks, butplease rest assured that you don't need to be an internetmastermind to have a successful website.

Business owners with a moderate understanding of howthe internet works can market their websites effectivelywith the help of the simple and entirely approachableonline marketing tool called Article Marketing.

What is Article Marketing?

Article Marketing is when you write educational articleson your area of expertise, and then submit those articlesto article directories.

When your article is published on an article directory, it canbe seen by a limitless number of people who may decideto reprint your article on their own website.

The idea with article marketing is to get your articlereprinted on as many websites as possible, because eacharticle that you send out into the big wide world of theinternet is like a virtual sales person who is mingling aboutthe net trying to draw people back to your website.

How do articles draw people back to your website?

Along with each article that you submit, you will includean author resource box, which is a short author bio thatalso includes a link back to your website. That link backto your website is paramount - after seeing and readingyour article on a website, the visitor clicks this link and issent to your website.

When someone clicks the link in your resource box andthen reaches your website, you are building "targetedtraffic".

Targeted traffic simply means that the people who arevisiting your website are actually interested in your servicesor products. These are not random visitors - they arepeople who were motivated enough to read your article,who found value in it, and who read your resource box andfelt compelled to click the link and see what other valueyou offered at your website.

When you're trying to get visitors to your website, you aregoing for targeted traffic, and article marketing is a widelyknown favourite marketing tool for effectively buildingtargeted traffic over the long term.

Guest AuthorThis section features an expert in their fieldproviding some advice on a specific technique ofmarketing that I think you will find very helpful.

What Is Article Marketing And How Does It BringMore People To Your Website?By Steve Shaw, Founder Of Submit Your Article And Online Marketing Expert

order process (amazingly complicated for one chair – isyour website this hard to navigate to get to the pointwhere your clients can interact with you?) before theorder seemed to have been placed. I asked if I couldleave now but was told that I needed to sign the ordersheet and the terms and conditions which he would nowprint out.

Another couple of minutes of my life dwindled away (as Iget older I appreciate my time is more valuable) andthen the order sheet was printed out. Battle axe (I know,I know, I have done away with the politeness now) cameback over for some more sneering.

“The chair should be here on Tuesday so you will need tocollect it then” was the stand-off comment. I respondedwith:

“Well if I am not away on business I will, but if I am nothere then clearly I will not be able to come in onTuesday”.

“Well we haven’t got room to store it here, we have nostorage space and what we do have is right next to a fireexit” was the snorty retort.

“That is hardly my problem is it? I am just the customerso your lack of storage is not really an issue for me.”

Making it my issue, the response back was “Well if youdon’t collect it within 24 hours we will start charging youstorage”.

Still remarkably calm (disbelief tends to send me numb) Ireplied “You really don’t understand customer service doyou. Everything you tell me is all about you and how Ishould be making your life easier when it should be allabout me, the customer”.

“Well you can cancel the order” she said pointing to theterms and conditions (seemingly willing me to do so as Iwas clearly an outrageous customer), but if you do notdo it within 24 hours we will charge you 30% of theorder value for our trouble!”

30% of the order value for “their trouble”. Their trouble Iassume being to actually sell some of their productsfrom their store to one of their customers. £70 foranyone failing to come to their senses in time and notbuy anything from Cargo.

Yes I still bought it, as much as anything for rewardingthem for giving me such a terrible customer experience.I collect these for fun (remind me to tell you about myfriend’s M & S experience which still makes me laugh outloud).

The lessons in this experience are fairly obvious, but acouple of points are worth highlighting.

1. It was all about them!

They could only see how my buying goods was makingtheir day more difficult. They had to process the order,they would possibly have to walk a chair down to me,they might have to give more discount than they wantedto and they would have to walk around a chair for a dayor two in their small store room. They were not thinkingabout their customer, just how the customer buying oneof their products was going to make their life harder.

Does this happen with any of your team? Is it easier foryour receptionist to say that you do not handle thattype of legal matter rather than ring around three orfour fee earners who are so busy they don’t pick up, or ifthey do pick up they snap at her, than it is to look afteryour prospective client’s needs? I know this happens anawful lot, so spend some time in earshot of reception tosee if your receptionist (and fee earners) are losing younew business. I can almost certainly guarantee that theyare!

2. Systems

The order systems and processes took an eternity tocomplete for a purchase of one chair. On your website,once I decide to instruct you, do you make it as easy aspossible for me to do so or are there too many clicks(obstacles) before I reach my intended destination?Once I do instruct you, do you make it as pleasant andeasy as possible for me to read all of the boringcompliance information you are required to send to meby presenting it nicely, or do you send me a 20 pagedocument that horrifies me and makes me think twiceabout proceeding? Or even better, do you come out tome and talk me through your documentation, doing allof the form filling for me to save me time (I absolutelydetest form filling – can you make this easier for yourclients)?

Don’t be a Cargo, go out of your way to make itgenuinely all about your clients and you will reap therewards.

I had a wonderfully bad customer serviceexperience that I want to share with you. It wasreally fantastically dreadful (which pleases meimmensely as I find you can learn a lot more frombad experiences than good ones). I think badservice probably happens to me more than myfair share because I am always looking at howbusinesses treat their customers, so it does makeme very aware of the service that I am receiving.However, this was a truly special experience and Iam delighted to share it with you so that you canlearn from it and ensure it is not happening inyour business.

I live and have my offices in Nailsea. My offices are rightin the middle of the Town Centre above a small café. TheTown has a population of about 16,000, and recentlyWaitrose has come into the heart of town which musthave added a few percentage points to my house price.This has also brought in some other reasonably highquality shops (or so I thought), one of them being Cargo.Cargo sells furniture and other items for the home.

When they opened they had the usual opening sale andalso they had a nice ‘tub’ chair, which is just what I hadbeen looking for for my office. I sat on the chair anddecided to buy it. So far so good: mainly because I hadhad no interaction with the staff. Prepare to come downthe hill of customer service with me now as we moveon……

I approached the young lad serving in the shop andasked if I bought it would he be able to walk it down tomy office (100 yards away). “We don’t do that, wecharge £50 for delivery” was the response. I pointed tomy office and his reply was still a firm and almostdelighted “no”.

I carried on with the purchase (I did want the chair) andhe mentioned that if I paid £10 for a store loyalty card Icould have 10% off. This made complete sense on a£229 chair purchase so I agreed. Young boy walks awayfrom the till at this point and goes over to middle agedlady. Some shaking of heads and then he walked backbut before he could say anything the middle aged ladywent to another till and started talking (without actuallylooking at me).

“You can’t have another 10% off. That chair is already inthe sale so they are not going to give you another 10%off are they?” she sneered (another success for them toshare later over their digestives no doubt).

I still carried on with the purchase and paid the price. Ithought that was it, but no apparently buying a chairinvolves all sorts of complicated and challenging issues. Iwas told I now had to walk with him to the other till toprocess the order. I could not leave yet. We went to theother till and had to go through about 8 screens of an

WWOOWW OORR OOWW??This section talks about an amazing or a terrible customerservice experience and asks what you can learn from it.




(what is a hot spot not?Duff marketing)

The Hot Spot is the place to showcase some good orinnovative marketing, to help you think outside of thebox for the benefit of your business. If you have had anysuccess with a marketing campaign, or you have seen agood campaign run by another business, please email itinto me on [email protected] so that I caninclude it in this section.

I wanted to provide you with something to really stretchyou this month, so I have gone across the pond to anAmerican Lawyer, Ben Glass. We all know that we pick up alot of ideas from the States (usually some years later and ina more mild format) so I spend a lot of time looking atAmerican marketing. This month I want to feature anAmerican Lawyer who practices in the quiet, non-competitive field of personal injury law. Bear in mind if youthink it is competitive over here, the States is a far morechallenging place to market PI services. So let’s have a lookat Ben’s home page of his website:

Clearly there is an awful lot going on on the home page ofhis website. But the main points I want you to look at (andto use on your website) and I put these in order of priorityare:

1.Data Capture - See how he is using “Free InformationPacks” to encourage people to start communicating withhim. Once you click on these free reports you are taken toa download page where you have to provide your nameand email address to receive the free report. Why?Because he wants to be able to follow up with you untilyou finally give in and become his client. Ben knows thatasking for the instruction straight from the home page isvery difficult, so he is bringing you in gently. He will beusing email marketing software such as Aweber (see theM4S Resources Section) to capture the email, send out thefree report (in PDF format) and then send a series of readywritten emails at programmed intervals (ie doing his sellingfor him whilst he sleeps).

2.Video – When you land on his home page a video startsplaying instantly. It has loading problems so is not perfect(but it is up there and working so it is buildingmomentum). The point is that he has embraced videotechnology which is vital. You only have to look at Googlebuying YouTube even though they had their own video toolto realise how highly they value video as a search tool. Ontop of this imagine video on your website when most ofyour competitors do not have it. Who is more likely to winthe new business, a solicitor with a friendly, welcomingvideo on the home page, or a solicitor with no video andno pictures (thereby endorsing the “unapproachable” tagthat solicitors as a whole still have).

3.Information – He is offering all sorts of informationfrom his home page, from the “4 Biggest QuestionsAccident Victims Have” to “Do I Need A Lawyer For MyCase?”. Ben understands the key to the internet – content,content and content. Provide as much user friendlycontent as possible and your clients will find you and thenrealise that you really are an expert in your field. A hiddenbenefit is that each time you add some new information tohelp real visitors, you have inadvertently written a newarticle to submit to the article directories using SteveShaw’s software mentioned earlier. That is what I callmarketing leverage: do something once and then use it asmany times and in as many different ways as possible tomarket your practice!

Take just one of these methods and apply it to yourwebsite today, or if sensible take all of them. They areproven, successful methods for winning new business.

Marketing4Soliciotors | Issue 15 | December 2010 | 1110 | Marketing4Soliciotors | Issue 15 | December 2010

However, I knew that if I did this without coveringthe basics then I would not be doing my best formy solicitor members. If you fail to understandyour core message, what you sell and how youshould sell it, before rushing headlong out thereto sell your services you will do so much moreharm than good.

You need to clearly define your message and thenlearn how you can explain your message in terms ofthe benefits that it will provide for your clients ifthey engage your services. This was the essence of‘M4S 1’, so I urge you to seek this out in The Vaultonline. It provides you with some exercises to carryout to understand not only what you should say toprospective clients but also more importantly howyou should say it!

Once you have worked your way through M4S1 indetail, every advertisement you write will be moreeffective. Every new page you add to your websitewill convert more visitors into prospects and everyletter or email you write to new prospects will workmuch harder for you to convert those newprospects into new clients. I cannot stress howimportant ‘M4S 1’ is for you and I would urge youto give it some more time.

You can find ‘M4S 1’ in the vault online now. Go towww.samsonconsulting.co.uk/m4s now!

When I started M4S I wanted to go straight in with someexcellent new-fangled marketing initiative that wouldtransform a practice.

What’sIn YourVault?

HHOT SPOTOT SPOT



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