Lately we have received several questions revolving around the difficulty of maintaining a consistent marketing presence without having to spend all day doing marketing instead of client work.
Most attorneys have heard the advice that they need a consistently updated marketing presence, but you’re already busy with your client cases and maintaining the business. Taking time away from the work that pays the bills to “work on marketing” is a tough ask without even considering that most of the time, it’s not always clear what needs to be updated or how often.
Here at AmazeLaw, we’re trying to take the generic guru-ish marketing advice that experts spout like gospel, and deconstruct it to teach attorneys what it really means and how they can use that advice to grow their firm.
The point of this post is to show you what consistency really means and how mastering it can benefit your business. Not only will we tell you what consistency online can do for you but we will also help you to keep up online while you keep up with your busy schedule.
What does it mean to be consistent?
What it means to be consistent varies depending on the activity, but the general goal, is that any time a prospective client stumbles upon your firm, either through your website, a facebook page, a tweet, etc, it needs to look like you’re on top of your marketing.
There are some technical reasons why this is beneficial, but let’s focus on the feels.
As a prospective client of your firm, I want to know that I’m going to be working with someone that I can relate to. Someone that’s on top of the latest trends in the area of my problem. And having marketing that’s up to date checks both of those boxes for me. And as a tip, another signal it sends, is that you’re not an overwhelmed solo. It shows a position of friendly strength. That you can afford to spend time teaching people about your craft because you’re good at what you do and you’re confident in it.
Consistency online helps to build professionalism, clarity, and trust from your viewers while also boosting your google standings. When your viewers are on your pages and you have only updated some of the content or haven’t updated in a really long time it looks as if you don’t care about the details. As a solo the details can make or break a referral so keeping up online sends a message to your current and potential clients. Your viewers will respond well to your commitment to be consistent online and take it as a sign that you are willing to commit to their issues and build a bond of trust.
So now you know you have to be consistent but you need to know how consistent do you need to be with each avenue that you have online. Does that mean every day? Every week? Every month? Well, it depends on the activity, so let’s break it down.
Social Media
Putting content on your social media posts can be simple and easy. An original thought everyday. Do you have more than one? Post it! Do you want to promote something more than once? Schedule it! Social media is a way to draw the attention of everyday viewers into things that you are mutually interested in. The idea behind social media is to constantly be grabbing the attention of people online. Social should be part of your everyday morning routine. Get up, stop at Dunkin Donuts, get to the office, POST.
But it’s easy to say “Do social media every day!” That’s where most gurus stop. We put together a detailed 20-minute daily marketing plan, so check it out and commit to it for just one week.
Blogging
Ah blogging, ranking second just behind social media for the buzzwordiest marketing advice that never gets into the details.
We’ll cover a simple plan to get you started in a few seconds, but let’s talk about what consistency means when it comes to blogging.
First off, the idea isn’t necessarily to drive a ton of traffic to your site today (though it’s possible and can be a nice side benefit), the idea is to build up your blog like a long-term savings account. And the easiest way to do that, is to make small weekly deposits. Over time your bank account (your website) will grow enough to the point that it has a large number of pages. And just like compounding interest, as a site grows and ages, it’s ability to attract more traffic increases as well.
We recommend weekly blog posts, mostly because it makes it easier to keep up with. Two weeks in between posts and you’ll get out of the groove, and blogging will remain that “activity I’ll get to later when I have lots of free time.” Twice a week can work even better, but we’re also trying to be realistic. It’s hard to set aside that much time every week.
Pick your slow day of the week if you have one. Friday is my favorite. Make a recurring weekly appointment on Friday morning (avoid the afternoon because we all know what happens to tasks relegated for Friday afternoon) to draft a blog post.
I would allocate an hour. And all you do is spend one hour answering one common question you get from clients in the simplest terms possible. It might feel like you’re giving away your secret sauce. You’re not. The clients that take your info and try to run with it on their own, were never going to be clients anyways. The clients that look at it and say, “Whoah, she knows what she’s talking about and I really don’t have the time or the expertise to handle this on my own” are the clients you’ll love.
Alright, back to it, spend one hour answering one of your common client questions. The headline can be verbatim what clients usually ask, i.e. “How often should I update my will and what should I be looking out for?”
If you’re happy with the post after that hour, go ahead and post it you’re done. If you think it’s a bit rough, put it away and schedule 20 minutes of time on Monday to edit it. You’ll find that having a weekend for the thoughts to settle in your head can really add to the clarity of your answers.
There’s no rocket science to blogging, and we could go into all sorts of advanced advice, but that plan will make it easy to get started, and could provide you many months of great blog posts.
Email Marketing
There aren’t many firms out there that are using email marketing to their advantage. And in an industry where you’re typically not needed until you’re really really needed, having a medium that puts you in front of prospective clients on an ongoing basis can be key to making sure that you’re top of mind when they do have the need.
We’ll be posting an epic email marketing tutorial soon that will go over all of the how’s and why’s of email marketing, but for the sake of completeness, we recommend that you’re emailing your list anywhere from once to twice a month. More than that, and it’ll be tough to keep your newsletters stocked with great content, and any less and your list will go stale. Meaning your readers will start ignoring your emails, or perhaps even forget why they’re getting the email in the first place.
Don’t have an email list yet? Don’t worry, we’ll get to that soon. Better yet, sign up for our marketing bootcamp and you’ll get a weekly email that explains the whole process.
Consistency Is The Golden Ticket
It really is. Over time a consistent marketing approach will be out the best marketing campaigns or PPC ads, or TV commercials. So look at your schedule and see where you can add those small marketing nuggets to your daily, weekly, and monthly routine so that you never have to think about what to do next.
And if you need help, sign up for our Marketing Bootcamp, and we’ll walk you through the basics and turn marketing your firm into a habit.