HOW TO... Marketing4Solicitors. How to use social media to build. expertise and generate new leads!

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1 Marketing4Solicitors Toolkit / Issue M4S 10 HOW TO... How to use social media to build Social Media expertise and generate new leads! Join the M4S Insider s Club for one-on-one marketing advice!

2 Welcome To The Social Media Edition This month s issue deals with social media and how you can use it to increase your profile and your perceived expertise in your sector for the benefits of your practice. Please note that in the opening section I did not say how you can use Twitter or LinkedIn or any other social networking site to instantly win tens or thousands of new client instructions. What you must realise with social media is that it is a tool to be used alongside everything else that you are already doing as opposed to a tool that can be used independently to create substantial amounts of new business for your practice. That being said, if used well, you are almost guaranteed to win new clients. I simply do not want you to think it is the fail proof and easy method of marketing but to understand that it takes time and effort but it should be implemented alongside your current marketing initiatives. I use Twitter and LinkedIn and these are the main social networking tools I will focus on because I believe that they are the most helpful platforms for professionals (yes, I include marketing consultants alongside solicitors in that category). 2 One of the main benefits for solicitors in using Twitter or LinkedIn is that it can make you seem far more approachable. With both the public and business clients perception of solicitors still being that they are hard to approach this is always a positive thing which is why I recommend you use social networking tools when marketing your business. Nick Jervis Solicitor (non-practising)

3 Title. body Your contents. Details Page Part 1 - Why use Social Media? 4 Part 2 - How to use Social Media? 4 Part 3 - Nick s Golden Rules Of Social Media 5 Twitter Guide 6 LinkedIn Guide 9 Bonus 10 Appendix Twitter User Guide LMP 35 Nick s Twitter Profile LMP 36 LinkedIn Profile LMP 37 3

4 This Month s Big Lesson. How to use social media to build expertise and generate new leads. Part 1 Why Use Social Media? By , social networks will eclipse corporate Web sites and CRM systems Clearly Forrester, who are largely renowned and respected in terms of research and reports into online platforms, anticipate that social media will continue to grow and assume even more significance. Perhaps it is not surprising when you consider that whereas websites or your own marketing policies allow you to only communicate largely on a one way basis (i.e. you to client/prospect) social media allows far more interaction with your target audience. You are able to provide information but they are also able to respond and comment on that and provide their opinion on your services to their network of friends and influencers. Whereas a client who previously received a bad service might have told one or two people and within a few weeks the comments are all but forgotten, that same client now could post a Tweet on Twitter about the bad experience, enter a comment on his blog, and respond to any questions from potential clients about your firm to deter them from using you. Your service suddenly becomes far more visible to the public at large, which makes ensuring that your service is always of the highest quality an essential part of your role. In looking at social media tools I will talk generally about how you should communicate and when you should communicate before moving onto the two most important tools that I think you should be using, Twitter and LinkedIn. 4 If you are providing good service and good information you will have nothing to fear from the new world incorporating more social media. However, those solicitors who in the past have perhaps not focused sufficiently on the quality of service provided will find that it is harder to win business without receiving universal recommendation and support from clients that have already used the firm.

5 Title. 5 body Part 2 - How To Use Social Media? 2.1 Nick s Golden Rules of Social Media There are certain basic rules which must be followed across all social media platforms. Whilst at the moment Twitter and LinkedIn have been powerful for some time, there will be other platforms that will come and go. However, the general rules apply to each of them and should be followed carefully. My key rules for all social media are as follows: Be helpful Your primary aim with social media is to provide assistance using your skills, expertise and knowledge. It should not be simply to win new business quickly and easily. If it is, stick to pay per click or website marketing, traditional advertising or your own database. If, however, you are genuinely passionate and interested in your subject matter then social media can be your best friend. It will allow you to confirm your expertise without doing any selling whatsoever. In my experience, solicitors are not fond of selling so social media should be seen as a fantastic support tool for your practice. Therefore, the number one rule for social media is to be helpful. Find people that have unanswered questions in your field of expertise and provide them with assistance or point them in the right direction to find more help Engage, don t preach Following on from rule number one, the purpose of social media should be to instigate conversations as opposed to allowing one way selling. This is the reason Forrester anticipates social media will increase in popularity because it does allow this two way dialogue. Therefore, provide answers to questions, expand the question originally asked and you will create dialogue with a potential future client. Even if the person you are helping at that time does not have an immediate need for your services, a history will be created that shows that you are helpful and clearly understand your area of expertise. With Google rumoured to be placing more emphasis on your social media profile and the amount of contributions you make this will serve you well in the long term Make friends It follows on from points 1 and 2 that if you are being helpful and engaging with prospects that as long as you are doing this well you will build online relationships with people. Social media should be used with this in mind. You are making friends not trying to win immediate business. This may be a hard concept to understand but one thing that is true in all business is that people like to do business with people like them. If you allow your personality to shine not only will you seem more approachable than most traditional solicitors, but prospects and clients will see that you are someone with a personality (more like one of their friends) and feel more confident in contacting you and using your services Never sell Provide useful information, engage with people and answer their questions but never try and sell your services from the social media platform. Your sales process should take place either face to face or on the telephone or through to , but not across a social media platform where people quickly see that whilst you might provide some useful information your primary purpose is simply to sell your services. Of course, that may be your primary purpose, but with social media I would urge to make it a secondary

6 purpose. Concentrate on the points above and the clients will follow Consistency This is perhaps the most important part (and of course applies to every type of marketing you undertake): You will rarely succeed initially in any way, shape or form with any marketing activity if you try it just once and then give up! You will know by now that I always encourage you to take regular marketing action and this is no different with social media. However, it should not consume too much of your valuable marketing time. You can quite easily manage your social media commitments in ten to twenty minutes per day. If you decide to give social media a go, I would advise you to commit to at least ten minutes per working day for a three month period to then assess whether it is providing you with any benefit Summary If you follow the above golden rules for social medial I am confident that you will achieve success. Measure the success and you will soon find out whether it is worth continuing to use social media for your business. 3 Twitter User Guide For how to create your Twitter profile see LMP 35 which provides you with step by step instructions. See also LMP 36 so you can see my Twitter profile, or visit to see it live. Once you have registered your profile on Twitter, you now need to decide who you are going to follow and who you would like to follow you. If you are a niche practice, there are several ways for considering who you would like to follow. 3.1 The followers of people like you One Word Of Caution (but don t let this stop you) One word of warning about Social Media is to think very carefully about your post before you send it. Once you make a comment on a social media platform it is there for good. It cannot usually be erased or removed so you need to make sure your comment will stand the test of time and hold you/ present you in the right light Link To Your Accounts Once you have mastered each social media tool refer to your account in signatures and on your website. One way of considering the profile of a person you would like to follow is by looking at your competitors Twitter accounts. Twitter allows you to see who is following them. Think about this: if you have one competitor that you would like to be more like or that you believe is the most successful in your area of expertise, how nice of Twitter to allow you to see exactly who follows them. These followers could be your potential clients. This is one excellent way of finding people to follow. If you want to find out who your competitors are on Google or find other solicitors like you, use which is the official Twitter tool. Type in the type of solicitor you are and

7 Title. 7 you body will find other solicitors that you can follow. For instance, if you are a commercial solicitor you might type in commercial dispute solicitor or commercial conveyancing solicitor/commercial property solicitior. You will then find other solicitors postings (and no doubt lots of recruitments agency postings also). Once on the profile page of someone that is in the same sort of business as you, you can click on the followers list and it will show you who is following them. See if they are people that could potentially follow you, and if they are, follow them to see if they come back and follow you. I would stress at this point the basic rules only follow those who you think are interesting and that you can add value for. I would not advise a blanket following of your competitors followers. 3.2 Use Twellow.com To Find Categories Of People Twellow is the yellow pages for Twitter. It allows you to search for people by category. For instance, there is a lawyers section and once you have created your Twitter account you can log into Twellow.com with your usual Twitter login details, and place your profile in the Twitter lawyers section. You can then look for people that you could follow. For instance, if you are a planning lawyer, you might look for people in the planning industry. If you are a media lawyer, you might look for people in the media section. A personal injury lawyer might look for injury support groups such as charities or physiotherapists. A conveyancing lawyer might follow estate agents, surveyors or architects. There will be types of people that you can follow that are related to your industry who, whilst not perhaps being potential clients, may have people following them that could be. Find these groups, click on the follow button on the left of the person and you are then following them. If you have completed your profile correctly and are providing some free and useful information from your twitter feed they may well decide to follow you and click through and suddenly they have become someone that follows or downloads your free guides or follows your list. If you are brand new to Twitter both of these methods are great ways of slowly adding people to your Twitter account. 3.3 How many people to follow Twitter can ban your site if you add more than 100 people that you are following each day. In addition to this, it is far better to have organic growth that is believable to your potential clients rather than forced growth. There are many Twitter tools that allow you to automatically follow people with a specified criteria but I would strongly advise you not to use these tools. You are better off following ten targeted people per day than one hundred automatically. 3.4 What to Tweet It is best, if you are completely new to Twitter, to follow some of your competitors and see what they have to say. You should also follow people from non-competing sections but that are professionals but not lawyers (e.g. follow architects or accountants); see what they say both about their industry but also commenting on topics of the fringes of it. This will give you ideas of how you can do the same thing for the law. You will quickly see what you like and what you dislike and this will help you to choose the right postings for your own Tweets.

8 Once you are happy with how to Tweet, you can consider the following points : Send links to videos that you have prepared that provide free and useful information Send links to free downloadable guides that clients/prospects can use to advise them on your specialist legal topic Post links to interesting articles that you read that are relevant to your sector. For instance, if you a conveyancing solicitor and find an interesting article on the state of the property market then post a link to that article and make a short comment about it. This shows that you are not constantly promoting only your own business but are genuinely interested in your specialist subject area Re-Tweet other people s interesting Tweets. If you are looking at a Tweet that you think is interesting you will see a Retweet next to it which allows you to post that person s Tweet to your followers (see below). This builds your credibility as someone that is genuinely trying to help those in the Twitter community and wins you some brownie points from the person that posted the original Tweet. It is well worth doing and again shows that you are not simply in this to win quick business. 3.5 Do s and Dont s of Twitter Special offers. Do make time limited offers once you have been on Twitter for a good period of time (but this must not be your core period of activity) Enough about me, what do you think of me? Remember, that Twitter is all about them. Do not fall into one of the most dangerous rules (see my article Why Lawyers Marketing Fails So Often for more on this here: co.uk/legal-marketing-articles/lawyersmarketing.html) Spam, spam, spam and spam You will receive spam to your Twitter mail account. Do not let this put you off using Twitter. It will happen as it would happen with any form of media but you should not let this finish your use of Twitter. Simply, ignore the spam and move onto the useful parts of Twitter. 3.6 Twitter tools Automatically post new articles which you send to your mailing list. If you are using Aweber (see marketing4solicitors/resources.html) then every time you broadcast a message Aweber can automatically Tweet this for you. I am heavily into marketing leverage, i.e. doing something once and using it several times, so Aweber allowing you to automatically Tweet your message is a big advantage. I use this for my own broadcast messages when they are relevant and helpful Tweet deck Tweetdeck allows you to create different columns so that you can organise the tweets you receive. You can set up one column to monitor anything said about your firm name and anytime your firm name is mentioned across the whole of Twitter Tweetdeck will put the Tweet into your firm name s column. Wouldn t it be nice to be one of the first when a client says something good or bad about you? You can also set up another column relating to your specialist legal subject matter. For instance, if you

9 Title. 9 Bonus 1 are body a personal injury solicitor set up a column for personal injury solicitor and you will automatically receive Once you details have of produced any Tweets your where Press someone Releases is and looking submitted for a personal them to your injury local solicitor press, or or has to a question your chosen that niche needs publications, answering. You you will should then also be able distribute to answer them the online. question and increase your profile on Twitter. This will help you to generate traffic but also to obtain Tweetbeeps.com more links to your website. Here are some websites for you to use. You can also use Tweetbeeps to notify you when anyone is commenting about you. You can set up Free Online Press Release Distribution weekly or daily alerts and you will receive an with links to all Tweets where you or your practice have been mentioned Twellow Paid For Online PR Distribution: As mentioned above, Twellow should be used to allow you to find followers and to list your own Twitter account details. 4 LinkedIn User Guide Bonus 2 LinkedIn Fine Tuning is perhaps Your quieter Pay on Per a day Click to day Campaign basis than Twitter but can be far more powerful and targeted If you have in terms been testing of building Pay Per connections Click since and the last generating issue, now is leads. the time to go back and do a thorough review. Below is what you should do: LinkedIn is purely a business networking tool (which 1. Review Twitter the two seems advertisements to be moving you towards have also) written but for each through ad group use of and it s groups delete the you advertisement can quickly find potential with the worst clients CTR that, (Click once Through again, you Rate). can Write get to know another and advertisement prove your expertise similar to by the answering best their questions. performing I one thoroughly but altered recommend slightly. Even the use a question of LinkedIn. mark or exclamation mark can make a big difference to the CTR. 4.1 Your profile 2. Find more keywords and set up more Ad Groups focused on very tight group of keywords If you have created a good profile listing your (remember many smaller ad groups will perform key skills and responsibilities (see LMP 37 for an example) better than people larger that ones are with looking all of for the someone keywords like thrown you in will together). be able to This find is you because (e.g. conveyancing you will be solicitor). able include the keywords in the advertisements improving your Click Through Rates (which in turn keeps List your your Cost current Per Click and lower). past positions/education Use the keyword which tool provided will increase M4S people s 6 (page chances 8). of finding you For Photograph more keyword always ideas, review add a photograph. your website People statistics. buy You people should and be we able all to react find to the photographs search so phrases please that do include people have one. used when they visit your website Can you Include add any as much of these information (and variations in your of profile them) as to possible your campaign to help to people increase find your keywords? and your services. You should use this space to explain what you do but 4. Review think of the it from keywords the users that prospective. are the most Talk expensive. about the If these benefits are using your service up most offers your and daily even budget promote very a quickly free guide consider you can dropping offer on them your or specialist putting them subject area. into a You group must on use their this own. space They to will increase stop your the chance other of advertisements people connecting from appearing. with you. For example, if you are targeting a keyword and the average Cost Per Click (CPC) is 3 on a daily budget of 10, it will soon 4.2 Expanding your online network stop your campaign from working. However, if these keywords are producing new instructions (ask your As with any networking or relationship building, new clients from the internet which search term you have to walk up to someone and make your they used some will remember and this is vital introduction. Start by inviting your known business information for you) keep them and increase your contacts to connect with you. You can find people budget (see 5 below). through the search bar, but you will also find that once you start to connect with people. LinkedIn 5. Increase your daily budget? If you are seeing new will start to recommended other people that you client instructions from your Pay Per Click campaign should also connect with. Quite often these will and you would like even more new clients then be potential clients or useful contacts or referrers. keep increasing your budget. As long as the leads This makes it very easy for you to build a targeted are converting into new clients keep increasing your network LinkedIn. budget! Who to connect with You should decide who you wish to connect with carefully on LinkedIn. Whereas a lot of people use LinkedIn to connect with everyone and anyone they know, again, like Twitter, I believe it is far better to have a small yet tightly connected group. I have often been approached by people who also supply

10 services to solicitors asking me to connect with them. However, often I decline their invitation as if the service is not one that I would endorse to my clients face to face, I do not want to be seen to be silently endorsing them by connecting with them on LinkedIn. Therefore, you need to think carefully about all connection requests that you receive. If you want to start connecting now, please feel free to invite me to connect with you (I will not refuse ;). 4.3 Groups You should join groups for subject matters that you are interested in. These will usually be linked to your main area of expertise. For instance, I have joined the Law Society Gazette group which allows me to provide answers to marketing related questions (of which there are many). Once again, I would never sell on this platform but I can link to articles if it is relevant to the question that has been posted and provides more useful information for the readers. Many groups will only accept you once they have reviewed your profile so it is important that your profile is an accurate reflection of your business. 4.4 Recomendations Once your profile has been live for sometime seek recommendations from people that you have worked for and with. In the same way that Twitter is about giving rather than receiving, also ensure that you provide recommendations for those whose services you know, trust and can recommend. 5 Bonus There is a bonus video about packaging your services which you will see on the download page for M4S 10. Packaging is a hugely underused and underated tool for selling legal services. I urge you to watch the video and think how you can package your legal services ESSENTIAL TIP REMINDER Please make sure you spend PRODUCTIVE time every working day promoting your practice. Only when you do this, and master marketing, will you have all the clients that you need. 10 You might find that there are groups which are relevant and interesting which you should join. You can search under the heading of groups on LinkedIn. Think of any subject matter that is interesting and relevant to your practice, search for groups related to that and apply to join them. Once you have joined, you should review the group regularly (perhaps at least once each week) to see if there are any questions to which you can provide a useful response to. Coming Up In the Next Issue... Don t miss the next one as it is going to provide you with a large number of different ways that you can promote your services all in one issue!

11 M4S Insider s Club For One-On-One Advice If you need more help, please join my M4S Insider s Club. M4S Insiders Club - Click Here To Find Out More Previous Issues Available To Download Lesson 1 Defining your offering Lesson 2 Advertising For Results Lesson 3 Website Design For Lead Capture Lesson 4 Website Marketing Lesson 5 Cross Selling Your Services Lesson 6 Pay Per Click Advertising Lesson 7 - Generating Leads Using Free Media Coverage Lesson 8 - Use Video to Market your Business Lesson 9 - Setting Up a Referral System 11