Words From The CEO: How to have an excellent first call with an agency.
Help Us Help You
When we receive an inquiry from a law firm, we know that, despite the characteristics setting that firm apart from others, there is likely one thing they have in common with our other clients. Namely, they want to improve the outcome of their marketing efforts. Regardless of the firm’s position coming into the call, ours is always the same: to help them get one step closer to their marketing goals. Here are three simple things you can do to help us help you with your marketing strategy.
Tip One: Approach your search for an agency as if you were buying a house, not a car.
Many attorneys spend about as much time selecting a marketing agency as they would shopping for a new car. They look only at the sticker price. But what these attorneys are not factoring into the price is the cost of making a poor decision.
If your firm’s $50,000 marketing budget is supposed to generate $250,000 in attorney fees, the importance of your hiring decision is pretty significant — more like deciding which house to buy for your growing family than which set of wheels you want to drive for a couple of years. When you’re shopping for that property, you don’t visit one house, one time, and buy it without asking any questions.
Similarly, your chances of hiring a successful agency dramatically improve if you take the time to understand how their services work and why they may or may not be right for you.
Sometimes law firms do hire bad agencies, but mostly they just hire the wrong agency. You can avoid this by understanding how they operate and why their services might be right for you. (Example: Spending $35,000 on a video makes zero sense if you don’t have the budget to promote the video so that people even get to see it. Don’t hire an agency that doesn’t see the larger picture.)
Here are a few questions you can keep in your back pocket to ask during your first call to an agency:
- What work do you perform in-house?
- What do you think of our current law firm website?
- What is your approach to web design? Content marketing? AdWords? Social Media? Organic Search?
- How does your agency define success?
- What is your process for developing a marketing plan?
- What results should I expect and when should I see those results?
Tip Two: Have some idea about what you want the end result to look like.
Yes, we know, you want more cases. But why?
- Is your business failing and you need more cases to stay afloat?
- Do you want to be the dominant firm in your city? In your state?
- Are you trying get a different type of case you aren’t currently getting? A different practice area?
- Do you want to become more of a managing attorney? How many associates or partners do you need?
With the answers to these questions, we’ll be able to ask the follow-up questions that will help us determine how many potential clients your firm needs to meet its goals. This ultimately has to do with budget and expectations and making sure those are aligned with your goals.
When a law firm feels stuck in the mud, it is often a marketing problem — but it isn’t always an advertising problem. Sometimes advertising is all you will need to reach your goals . . . sometimes it isn’t. We can help you understand how far advertising will get you and provide some direction on how to get the rest of the way to your objective.
Tip Three: Be open to feedback that you might not want to hear.
Many agencies will take your money regardless of whether they can actually help you. The legal industry can be expensive to market for, whether that is done with Google Search Rankings, on social media, or with paid advertising through Google Ads.
A successful digital marketing agency is picky about the clients they represent. They don’t want to provide marketing services to firms that they can’t be successful with. The right agency is the one that is curious about how your firm provides legal services, so they can match what they offer with what you need.
Sometimes Gladiator winds up starting work for a law firm as much as a year after the first contact, because they took our advice to make some internal improvements and then came back when we were a better fit. Our agency is always willing to help, whenever and however we can — even if that means we don’t work together immediately.
These are some of the questions we might ask you to help both you and us focus on the next best step:
- What is your intake process like? (I want to know you will convert the leads we create for you.)
- Are there any cases you don’t want? (I want to know that you won’t turn down cases resulting from our lead generation.)
- What is your budget? (If other firms in your area are spending $20,000 per month on internet marketing, a $2,000 budget likely won’t produce much.)
- How involved are you willing to be? (For example, I can help you get reviews. I can’t get reviews for you. If you won’t do your part, our part won’t work.)
- What marketing efforts are you currently pursuing, and why do you think they aren’t working? (I don’t want to recommend something that has already been tried. Additionally, if you mention something that I believe should be working for you but isn’t, it clues me in that I might need to ask some other probing questions.)
Successful law marketing requires a partnership between the law firm and the agency. If you are trying to make great things happen for your firm, give some thought to the questions posed above, and then give Gladiator Law Marketing a call. We will be happy to help you in any way we can, even if our services aren’t right for you at this moment in time.
Adam Draper
CEO / Gladiator Law Marketing
