Ten New Rules of Legal Marketing

Legal Marketing has changed.  It used to be enough to keep an ad in the yellow pages and belong to the Rotary Club.  Not anymore.  Times are tough, so I present to you Ten "New" Rules of Legal Marketing.  Let me know what you think.

1.  "My lawyer can beat up your lawyer" isn't a marketing strategy.  "My lawyer will call me back before yours will" is.

2.  Google tells me there are 337,000 "Full Service Law Firms” out there.  Which one was yours again?

3.  Unless the person who founded your firm 100 years ago is still alive and practicing law, he's completely irrelevant to every client who's thinking of hiring you.

4.  Market to a "want" not to a "need."  By the time your clients realize they "need" you, it's often too late -- for them and for you.

5.  Your “keep great clients happy” budget should exceed your “try to get new clients” budget by at least 3:1.

6.  Thanksgiving cards say you're thankful for your clients' business.  Christmas cards say you're just like everybody else.

7.  Having the scales of justice on your business card says you're a lawyer -- an old, stodgy, unimaginative, do-what-everyone-else-has-done-for-fifty-years lawyer.  Same is true for your yellow pages ad.

8.  Speaking of yellow pages, don’t abdicate your marketing strategy to their salespeople.  They don’t know marketing.  They only know how to sell you a bigger ad each year.

9.  Your future clients have been living their entire lives online and will expect the same from you.  If you’re invisible on the web, you won’t exist to them.

10.  The single best marketing strategy in the world is to find your best clients and ask them, "How do I get more clients like you?"

Look for ten more rules next month.  For hundreds of legal marketing ideas, check out my Marketing Category on this blog.  And if you want to get these in real time, follow me on Twitter.