Marketing of Law Firms
Posted May 19th, 2011 by adminLaw firm marketing is primarily based on selling the lawyer as the product, so a biography is an essential element of selling your services. This article offers 5 quick ideas to make sure you get your biography absolutely right.
Developing a bio, for marketing lawyers on websites or in printed material is often given very little thought and can appear to have been completed in little time. Worse still are those that the lawyer has not been involved in creating and an admin worker has scraped together from a CV.
If this is true of your firm or your bio then you have a serious flaw in your marketing strategy. You must be aware that marketing for lawyers, particularly those in repeat business areas of law, is based around the principle that the lawyer is the product. That is why the employees page of a law firm web-site is almost always the most popular page after the home or landing page. If you charge an hourly rate for your time, you are the ‘product’, and any potential clients want to have a good concept of what they are buying!
It’s true that some companies base their marketing on a general sales pitch, or branding in a specific area of law, but generally, the success of your marketing strategy will be due to whether the client believes they are getting good value when they buy the time of the individual that is doing the work. So, hopefully having impressed on you the importance of a well-crafted biography, here are 5 tips for putting one together:
Essential Tips for creating a compelling Lawyer Bio
Provide all the obvious information
It’s perplexing how many law firm web-sites have bios of their staff that neglect to include relevant information. And this doesn’t mean which law school you attended. Make sure you begin the bio with a full name, your position within the firm, the type of work you excel in, and any other firm responsibilities. It’s important to remember that you’re not writing this for other lawyers to read.
As a lawyer I was very happy the day I was admitted to the Supreme Court in my state. But frankly, most clients won’t have any interest what this means. So remember to include info that may be of interest to your client, not just what will impress other lawyers. By all means mention qualifications, positions on legal committees and the like, but unless it’s something your clients will understand and consider important, leave it to the end of the bio. It may help to involve a third party. Have someone outside the legal industry read your bio and provide you with some feedback.
Your client is looking for a solution
As hard as it may be for your ego to accept, clients are not absorbed in you as individual. They are looking for someone they believe can best solve their problem or most successfully undertake their project. So you need to give information that will convince them you’re the right professional for the job. In printed documents you should aim to include examples of how you’ve helped people, but online bios are often concise. So try to cover this one with phrases like, “More than 10 years experience in”, “Recognised within the X business community for assisting with”, “A certified specialist in the area of”, or “Successfully negotiated more than 200 rural property contracts”.
Connect with the real world, not just the legal world
If your firm or practice provides services that are based in a particular city or region you can improve your marketing efforts by demonstrating a connection to that community. Being recognised as a “local” by potential clients by demonstrating a connection with the region’s major industry eg. ” from a family with a long involvement in the coal mining industry”, encourages an immediate connection with the reader.
Add a little personality
Don’t be afraid to add some personal to your biography. And this doesn’t just have to be the usual “Married with 2.5 children”. By all means include personal information if it helps with point number 4 above, but more importantly, you ought to consider how you practice and the type of “client experience” you provide. Are you a ” fiercely determined approach”, a “collaborative practitioner focussed on keeping costs down” or a “down to earth, with a knack for easing clients concerns”. Finding a genuine point of difference in how you work shows that you are a real person with a real personality” and not the same as the numerous other lawyers out there busily marketing themselves.
John Gray is a practising lawyer and the Senior Marketer at John Gray Marketing, an Australian specialist law firm and legal marketing consultancy. If you are interested in law firm marketing, legal marketing and marketing for lawyers, contact John Gray today.