Jun 1, 2018
On episode 12 of Clienting, Gyi Tsakalakis and Kelly Street were joined by Alex Barthet, a Miami Construction Lawyer with a growing practice that focuses on marketing via content and referrals to get clients. Alex shares his 9 tips for legal marketing based on 10 years of marketing mistakes his firm made before they got things right.
Here are Alex's 9 tips:
1. Claim your online profiles
Claim and complete profiles on Google, Yelp, and Avvo. (All of these platforms have the potential to be highly visible when people search your firm.) Don’t forget the pictures.
2. Get online reviews
Work hard to get online reviews on all of these platforms from friends, clients, and colleagues. Having reviews will immediately separate you from 98% of your competition who probably have no reviews. Think about it, when you Google a service you need, which of the businesses that pop up are you going to use: the one with no reviews, or the one with good reviews? Google "Miami construction lawyer" and see how we stack up.
3. Do not move on before completing steps one and two
Only when you finish the above, work on the rest.
4. Start blogging and create resource sites
Either on your site or on a separate site, start blogging to your potential clients. Make sure your site is mobile-first. You don’t need anything complicated—simple is better. You need to blog at least once a week to even be in the game. If you are not going to be consistent, don’t waste your time. We blog weekly at www.TheLienZone.com and www.ContractorConflicts.com.
Not interested in blogging, then maybe a resource site is your thing. We created two resource sites, www.MiamiConstructionForum.com, and www.ConstructionLawyersAlliance.org. These are hubs for other marketing and networking we do. They are not as good as the blogs, but they help support our overall marketing strategy.
5. Use video and keep it short
You can get fancy by shooting videos that you then transcribe for blog posts (we use www.rev.com). You can also use the audio for podcasts (https://www.thelienzone.com/podcast/). That’s three uses for the same content—not bad.
We shoot videos with a camera, mic, lighting, and background setup that cost, in total, about $800 from Amazon. Your face and the content sells, not the fancy graphics in post-production that cost a fortune. And keep it short. Our videos range from 3 to 7 minutes. And they are very actionable – they ask and answer a very specific question. Can you say long-tail keywords?
6. Focus on solving the client’s problems
No one cares about you, so don’t talk about you. All they care about is how to solve their problem, so talk about that. We keep track of the questions clients ask and answer them weekly on our videos. How easy – we don’t even come up with the questions we answer!
7. Use pay-per-click (PPC) carefully
PPC is okay and we have used it. If you do use it, keep it hyper-focused on your area of law in your county. Use lots of negative keywords to exclude results you don’t want and avoid wasted clicks. For example, we don’t do anything with "accidents" or "injuries", so we blocked those words.
8. Claim your social profiles
Claim all the available social profiles for you and your business even if you won’t use them right away. We use LinkedIn primarily (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexbarthet/), then Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/thelienzone/) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/thelienzone).
We don’t do much on Facebook or other platforms. Only use networks you are going to check daily. Linking these networks to my phone has made them easier to keep track of.
Actively post on each network (we post two to three times a day) and engage folks online by calling them out by their profile names. We use a service called Buffer (https://bufferapp.com/) to make posting to multiple networks easier: We queue up about two or three weeks of posts and it drips them out on each network three times a day.
9. Be very careful with paid profiles
In my opinion, paid profiles are a waste. Claim what they have that is free, but divert what you’d spend on paid profiles to PPC on Google.