The one thing you must do if you want more clients for your legal practice

If you want more clients for your legal practice, there’s one thing you absolutely must do.

You must educate your prospective clients about why they need your services and why you should be the one to provide them.

If you can’t or won’t tell them why, then you shouldn’t expect them to instruct you. And chances are they won’t anyway – unless they came as a warm recommendation or referral – which means you’ll be missing out on tens or even hundreds of instructions from potential clients who just needed to know why…

How can you educate them about ‘why’?

One way to make sure your potential clients know ‘why’ is to tell them one-on-one, when you talk to them. Most lawyers are reasonably good at this. But it’s slow and time consuming because you have to tell them one at a time and you only get to tell the ones that you have an opportunity to meet or speak to.

The other way to tell them is one-to-many. That means through your marketing. That can be on your website, in your emails or letters, in your adverts, or through social media.

But most law firm marketing doesn’t explain the ‘why’. It just says something that goes like this:

‘This is who we are, this is what we offer, this is how to contact us…’

This kind of ‘here I am’ message doesn’t tell us anything about why we need your services or why you should be the one to provide them.

To make things worse, if you use this kind of marketing, it will have limited effect because it only ‘speaks’ to people who already know why they need your services and are trying to decide which firm to approach. Everyone else will ignore it because they aren’t looking for help from someone like you.

In most cases only around 3 per cent of your potential clients already know they need help and are actively looking for it. That means most marketing (which is based on ‘here I am’) ignores up to 97 per cent of potential clients for that service.

Imagine if, instead of ignoring 97 per cent of your prospective clients, your marketing could help more of them understand why they need your help and why they should choose you.

You can achieve this by making one simple change to your marketing.

Change the content of your marketing from ‘here I am’ to ‘here’s some problems or pitfalls you might be facing, here’s why you need help to fix them, and here’s why you should choose me to help you’.

This is also known as ‘education-based marketing’ and can take many forms, including articles, guides, talks, videos, or seminars. With it you can ‘speak’ to, and attract, a large proportion of the other 97 per cent of your prospective clients who aren’t actively looking for your services today.

Using ‘here I am’ marketing (and therefore only targeting potential clients who are actively looking to buy your services now) is just one of the three big mistakes that can slow you down from getting as many clients as you want.

To find out what the other two mistakes are, and how to use education-based marketing to fix them, download this free guide: ‘The 3 Biggest Mistakes That Keep Most Solicitors From Attracting Enough Clients and How To Fix Them in 90 Days’.

Michelle Peters (The Business Instructor) is a former Magic Circle solicitor who helps lawyers to get more clients and increase their profits without working more hours. Find out more about Michelle, and download resources to help you grow your practice, at www.thebusinessinstructor.com