Transcript (by otter.ai):
Quality Of Leads – Why It Matters For Lawyers
For attorneys, the quality of leads that they get from their marketing is the most important thing, bar none. It’s much more important than the number of hits, clicks, or impressions that they get. Here’s why:
- Attorneys need to have enough qualified potential clients to see their marketing. That’s the top of the funnel. (That’s where most marketers live, and where most marketing advice from agencies ends.)
- Attorneys also need enough of those qualified potential clients who see that marketing to contact their firm and to make an appointment.
- Of those potential clients who contact the firm and make an appointment, attorneys now need enough of those who do so to actually show up — whether it’s by phone, Zoom, or in person.
- Of those who do show up for appointments, attorneys need enough of those individuals to have sufficient matters that the firm 1) wants to take, and 2) they need to actually complete the sales cycle and have that potential client turn into an actual client when they retain the firm.
- Lastly, attorneys need to have enough of those clients to become actual clients who retain the firm be able to be monetized effectively.
So in cases of hourly billing, it’s simply a matter of being able to collect in cases of upfront flat fees. This is probably not an issue because the money is already there.
In cases of contingency fees on the plaintiff side, it’s a matter of the odds: Is it going to settle? Is there going to be a favorable verdict? IIs it going to be collectible?
So now, we’ve got that stage set.
Almost every attorney (unless you’re doing some kind of nationwide business law that has essentially an inexhaustible total addressable market) that plays locally has a well-defined total addressable market. That’s the total number of potential clients who are available to retain your practice because they have a matter (or want to preempt a problem that you can help them with), and that you can service for them profitably for your firm.
Now, as I said: most marketers focus just on getting the number of eyeballs or the number of leads into the top of funnel. But that doesn’t translate into clients. And most attorneys, on the other hand, would rather not have to sort through a bunch of noise and a bunch of unqualified potential new clients — having to field calls from them, answer emails from them, talk with them, do consultations with them, ultimately have to say ‘no’ to them gently, and then risk alienating them or getting a bad review from them.
But even more so, attorneys waste a lot of money on them in terms of:
- The money it takes for marketing to get those unqualified leads into the firm, and;
- The amount of time it takes out of the attorney’s day, and the attorney’s staff’s day — which can be very easily translated into dollars.
So it ends up being a waste of both time and money, which ultimately becomes a waste of money. Most attorneys would rather not do that.
The answer to this, of course, is to have better, more targeted marketing that better qualifies leads and aligns them with the firm.
Most lawyers operate in a well-defined total addressable market, and it’s a zero-sum game. They are usually competing against a finite number of competitors who are also competing for that same number of truly monetizable potential clients within their practice area and geographic area.
So if you, as an attorney (or as a law firm), can focus your marketing efforts and dollars on just reaching those truly qualified potential clients and leave the top of funnel scramble (where you want to get as many clicks, hits and impressions as possible), you can leave that to your competitors. Let them sort through the noise. You have more energy and time to focus on the things that really matter. And either that translates into dollars back into your pocket or the ability to double down on going after those truly qualified leads because you’re doing it with a more precision targeting.
At LawLytics, we help attorneys do just that. We specialize in providing technology that will empower you, the attorney, to communicate directly with your clients or potential clients through your website. You’ll be able to address their needs and their questions and qualify them at every stage of the representation. So of course, there’s the top of the funnel, but that’s just the beginning. There’s getting them to your website and creating that first impression; then there’s the whole qualification process where the potential client not only decides that they have a problem that you can solve (if they didn’t know that already), but decides that you’re the lawyer for them.
Then your website educates them about you and your services to the point where they feel intellectually and emotionally certain that you are the right attorney for them. And once that happens, that’s just the beginning, because that’s when they contact your firm. This makes the sales process go much more smoothly.
Once they are an actual client of your firm (and throughout the representation process), your website continues to qualify them when you follow our methodology. That’s because they keep coming back to your website to get their questions answered, to reinforce their belief in you and your firm. It creates a virtuous circle where they’re constantly being reinforced. And their expectations are constantly being met, being managed, so that you don’t have to do that on an individual one-on-one basis with your clients as much as you normally would be. So we like to think about marketing as a holistic part of the law firm — not only the law firm infrastructure but the holistic client experience.
Your marketing is inextricably intertwined with the experience that your clients have, from the moment they think about potentially looking for an attorney or researching their problem to the moment that they are no longer a client of your firm because their matter has concluded. But even after that, it extends because they come back to your website when they think that they might have another problem. They come back to your website when they hear about somebody else’s problems they think you might be able to solve.
So, doing it the right way gets you out of that cycle of playing “whack-a-mole” with unqualified leads. It gets you out of that cycle of having to try to chase top-of-funnel leads just for the sake of chasing them because you need to get more and more into your practice.
It ultimately helps you, the attorney, not only make better decisions in terms of your case selection, but also have more profitable cases, and ultimately have a better quality of life. That’s because you’re not dealing with the noise: you’re dealing only with the signal. You’re able to focus on the clients and the matters that you want to focus on. And ultimately that leads to more profits for you and more time for you to not only enjoy your practice, but to enjoy your life.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
