Marketing is a tool that allows you to keep the conversation going. It informs, engages and sells to your audience, resulting in constant growth of your practice.
Here we discuss marketing tips that can be used by any firm regardless of size, budget, or marketing aptitude.
1. Marketing materials
Before you can start marketing your business you need to invest some time and money in the essentials, including business cards, brochures, and your website. While that may sound expensive, it doesn’t have to be.
Most printing and stationary shops will provide templated business cards and brochures at a low cost, without the hassle of having to go through a designer.
You also have a suite of free and user-friendly design programs that come with their own templates such as Canva, Publisher or even Microsoft Word.
Business Cards and brochures allow you to give your clients something tangible to relate your business to.
Not only will this help them remember your firm and your brand, but once they reach the purchase stage of their buyers cycle, they have your contact information ready to go.
Your website needs to be updated as regular as possible to attract clients. As your digital shopfront, your website is the representation of your business online.
If a client walked into your office and it was dark, messy and had a funny smell then you have already made a bad first impression. The same can be said for your website.
There are a few routes you can take to update your website.
Firstly, you can do it yourself. There are an enormous number of free articles and videos that detail how to get started with a website and how to optimise it for your customers.
While this will take time on your behalf, it’s the most cost-effective solution.
Second, you can hire a freelancer from sites such as Airtasker, where they will build you a functioning website and hand it over. This requires a much shorter investment of time from you but will incur monetary costs.
Lastly, you can hire an agency. This will give you the best results with a functioning, optimised and stand-out website, built for customer conversion.
This usually requires a large investment on your part, but its money well-spent if you have the budget.
2. Social media marketing
It doesn’t matter about the size of your business, when you started or how many clients you have, social media is an important tool to utilise. It helps you connect to clients, increase awareness, and improve your business growth.
With over two billion active users on Facebook globally, chances are your customer-base have a Facebook account. The same can be said for LinkedIn with over 500 million users.
If your potential-clients are on these platforms, you should be too. This is a great place for you to connect with people, share your expertise as a lawyer/conveyancer, promote your services and keep up to date with industry changes.
If you have a properly designed website, built for converting customers, then social media is a great place to drive traffic to that website where they can fill out enquiry forms.
Global Web index reported that 54 per cent of social browsers use social media to research businesses and products.
With over 3.5 billion social media users, you would be missing out on a large cross section if you weren’t to market through social media.
3. Network marketing
Just like many other industries, marketing has transitioned to the digital world in recent years with companies like Google and Facebook leading the charge.
Advertising your business through these channels is not only easy, but the pay-per-click pricing model means your only paying when someone is interested in your ad.
While this does present some efficiencies for businesses, old-school network marketing should not be overlooked. Especially not in an industry as old as the legal industry.
At the end of the day, business success comes from making in-person connections and creating relationships. Clients will not work with you if they do not trust you and they will not trust you from an internet ad.
Networking enables you to get face-to-face with your potential clients so they can see who they’re dealing with, building that trust from the outset.
Networking can be as simple as attending your friends barbecue and being able to confidently explain what you do, all the way to attending trade shows, conferences, and other events. T
o make sure that you’re networking effectively, and making the most out of every opportunity, you need to first plan your elevator pitch. An elevator pitch is an overview of your business, including the what’s, why’s, how’s and a call to action.
This marketing tool may seem unnecessary, however these one to two sentence pitches can make a powerful impact on the person you are connecting with, along with setting you apart you’re your competitors.
4. Content marketing
Content is key. Once your website and social media platforms are up-to-date, you can use content to drive traffic.
By providing useful content to your audience, it increases your reputability, positions you as a thought leader in your field and helps entice clients to engage with your service.
Content can come in many different forms like videos, books, events, and articles. Writing blog articles is one way you can set yourself apart from your competitors.
You don’t need to be a professional writer to have a blog. By posting blogs, weekly or monthly, it will show your audience that you are an expert in the industry and care about providing useful content.
Content should be thought of as the first step in an overall marketing strategy.
An article you write or a video you post of you talking about the industry that you push out through your channels can be the first time someone interacts with your company.
You want this first interaction to be a positive one. It doesn’t always mean that every person who sees the video will come flooding into your inbox, but it’s a great steppingstone to building a reputable brand.
Over time, the more content they see, the more people will get to know your brand and will trust your services.
If you have found these tips useful, we have an upcoming webinar on Attracting clients to your Conveyancing Firm, on June 23rd that will going into further detail on marketing for your firm. The 30-minute webinar is free to attend and is worth 0.5CPD points. To find out more and to register, click here.
