The One Thing Every Attorney MUST Do Before Spending Another Dime on Advertising

Before you spend a dime on marketing, stop and read this. We all see those fancy billboards while driving down the highway, perhaps you’ve envisioned your future billboard or many you have some already, but there is one thing every attorney must focus on before spending any money on advertising.

Look there are many ways to advertise your practice these days. You can advertise on billboards, radio, television, Google and you can even advertise on Facebook. I’ve even seen attorneys advertising on shopping carts. No matter what form of advertising you invest in, there’s almost always a fast talking salesman on the other side pretending to want to help you grow your firm. Truth is, most are just trying to get another sale or hit a quota in their office. 

There are two golden rules that must be paid attention to when doing any type of advertising. First your ads must be trackable and measurable. This means you must have a system in place to gauge the performance of your advertising. Ideally you want to track how many calls or clicks were generated and how many of those converted to sales. It’s not the number of eyeballs passing that flashy billboard down the highway that matters. What matters is the amount of business that is generated from those dollars and where else would those dollars be better spent.

The second rule which is more applicable today than ever before is to make sure to maintain your online reputation stands out from the crowd. I’ve seen it happen too many times. The salesman told them about a special deal that was only available this week and has another client ready to pull the trigger on the last spot, so you better hurry. But what happens nowadays when someone wants to do business with someone they don’t know? 

People almost always go to Google and look the company up. What happens next determines whether or not you get the phone call or not. You see if a company has bad reviews or even no reviews (and no reviews could be less than ten or twenty, depending on how many your competitors have) they may not get the calls. So whether regardless of the type of ads you are running, if your online reputation doesn’t speak volumes for you, you may be throwing your money out the window.

Below is a search query for a personal injury attorney. If you were looking for an personal injury attorney or any service for that matter and saw these results (see below) who would you call first? Would you call the first, second or third attorney? My guess is that you would call the third law firm because they have far more positive reviews than their competitors. You see it doesn't always matter how good you are, what matters is what other people say about you.

You should be asking for reviews every time a case is won or a victory has been made on a client’s case. This is when they are most likely to leave you a review. Many people don’t like to ask for reviews because they don’t want to sound desperate. The truth is, we live in a digital environment and the data is right at consumers' fingertips and if you did a good job for someone, you deserve a good review.

Asking for reviews is not hard, but getting people to follow through is the tricky part. One way to circumvent that is by sending your clients an email or text message asking for their feedback. While emails are usually more convenient, the open rates on emails is not always very high due to the enormous amounts of emails people receive. The open rates with text messaging are significantly higher than with emails. Many statistics show email open rates are less than 15% whereas more than 90% of all text messages are read within the first ten minutes. 

Asking your clients for reviews doesn’t cost you a penny and the returns can be infinite. Failing to build your online reputation before investing your hard earned money on advertising can result in poor returns on capital. That’s why it’s best to maintain a regular system of asking for reviews. You can even ask your past clients for reviews. Over a period of time, the reviews begin to accumulate. As you get more reviews, they also have been known to help you rank higher in the search results, so you are hitting two birds with one stone.

So before you spend another dime on your advertising, take a second to Google your firm and look at the number of reviews you have compared to your competitors. If you have a glowing five star reputation, it may be the green light to go ahead with an effective and proven advertising campaign. If you don’t have enough reviews, it’s time to get them. 

We live in a competitive world these days and if you don’t ask for reviews, your competition will eat you for lunch, so you may want to start texting your clients and asking them for reviews.

If you would like a short link you can text out to your clients that will work on all of their mobile devices so you can start building your reviews, go ahead and leave a comment below or send me a private message and I will be glad to send one over to you.