Alt Legal Connect Session Summary:Growing Your Practice with Digital Marketing
Alt Legal Team | October 29, 2020
Thank you to Margo Cruz for participating as a Law Student Reporter at Alt Legal Connect! Margo is a 3L at Cardozo School of Law. Law Student Reporters had the opportunity to attend Alt Legal Connect in exchange for contributing to the social media presence of the conference. Reporters assisted by preparing blog posts and live-posting about sessions and in turn were permitted to attend all Connect sessions including valuable networking and social events to make meaningful connections with trademark professionals.
On Tuesday, October 27, Karima Gulick, a patent attorney, aerospace engineer, and host of the GenWhy Lawyer podcast moderated a panel discussion with attorneys Andrea Sager, Abraham Lichy, and Kristen Roberts, “Growing Your Practice with Digital Marketing.” The panel of successful solos disucussed how they’ve taken their practices from $0 to six figures with the help of different kinds of digital marketing from Facebook Ads to groups, niche outreach, and content creation.
One of the most common points of the session was to “go where your clients are.” Don’t just pick a social media platform based on what you like or try to juggle them all when your resources are limited – pay attention to what types of clients you have and what social media platform they use the most. For example, if you are mostly interested in startups and small businesses, you may want to spend more time on Instagram. Abe Lichy’s clients have said they like his Instagram because they can that see he’s a real person. On the other hand, if you want to get in contact with the decision makers at Fortune 500 companies, you may want to focus on LinkedIn. But if you want to work with brand new or young entrepreneurs, maybe TikTok is worth looking at – that’s one place where Andrea Sager has found a large following.
Another major lesson is that practitioners should not see a social media following as a direct conversion to clients. 30k followers and the Instagram ‘swipe up’ feature don’t always mean six figures in the bank! Increasing your following is more about expanding your reach and your familiarity to people who may want to hire you in the future or may end up referring you to someone, but not necessarily tomorrow. Focus on building your brand and creating a page that people can visit to see what you really do and who you are – often it can help build the trust and familiarity that are key for client conversion later. Also, depending on your audience, don’t be afraid to share some of your real life — it can also help build that trust. At the same time, it is important to keep things on brand and make sure that when people see your page they know what you are ready to work on, so try to find the balance that works for you and the kind of clients you are adding.
Finally, don’t be afraid to give a freebie, and don’t be afraid of old-school marketing or email. Andrea Sager can confirm they really work! One good freebie can build trust and confidence in your work, and let a client know just how good you really are. Email marketing, like social media, can help you stay top-of-mind for potential future clients. Building your email list can be extremely valuable – sometimes you can use social media to build the list, so you are doing both at once!
At the end of the session, each panelist reminded us that failing is learning, and for all of the success they’ve had in building their practices online, there have been many swings and misses they didn’t see. Just keep trying new things, and if something is failing, let it fail quickly. Before you know it, you might end up famous online, too.
Access the Recording and Materials: Click here
Resources Mentioned:
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If you use Clio, they just announced a new integration that makes it easy to create a Google Business Profile: https://www.clio.com/features/integrations/google/ (Thanks, James Creedon!)
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We started asking clients for Google reviews, and quickly got about 25 “5 star” reviews. We immediately noticed an uptick on organic calls from folks who had just searched for a local attorney. (Thanks, James Creedon!)
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Law Pay – https://lawpay.com/
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Docusign – https://www.docusign.com/
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Highly recommend to also ask them to mention certain words when writing reviews for SEO – e.g., “If you could please mention how we helped you by including words like “trademarks” or “patent” or “copyright” in your review, that would help our firm to show up in search results that are relevant to the needs of our potential clients.” (Thanks, Maddy Martin!)
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We’ve recently learned the lesson of not committing too early to your handle. We were CreedonPLLC, but we’re now changing our corporate form. Luckily, we were able to secure CreedonLegal across the major platforms. If you can, avoid using LLP/PC/LLC/etc. in your handle/domain. (Thanks, James Creedon!)
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Hootsuite (Thanks, Maddy Martin!)
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Captioning videos – I’ve used Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects – fair warning, there’s a bit of a learning curve, but some really cool things you can do if you put a little time in to learn it (or have a team member learn it) (Thanks, Kevin McLaughlin!)
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Davinci Resolve
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You can use services like Streamyard and Ecamm to go live with a banner or record a video with a caption (Thanks, Glinnesa Gailliard!)
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iMovie (Thanks, James Creedon and Kevin McLaughlin!)
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More tips for building your law technology stack, including information about virtual assistants: https://www.altlegal.com/blog/alt-legal-ip-docketing-blog/tips-for-building-your-law-firm-technology-stack
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www.zirtual.com and https://lawfecta.com/ (Thanks, Josh Noffke!)