By Legal Futures Associate: DPS Software [1]
The answer to this question is both simple, yet complicated.
The simple answer is marketing and to adapt your marketing strategy. But that’s where it gets complicated.
When looking at your marketing strategy, it is always best to start from a position of what us marketers call customer centricity. Basically, think Atticus Finch – “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
You need to understand things from your prospective client’s point of view. If they require legal services, where do they look? They might know a friend who has used a solicitor they can recommend, or they might know of a firm local to them, but the vast majority will turn to the internet.
Gone are the days where prospective clients would search through the Yellow Pages for a solicitor, or seek one out on the local high street. Now, especially with the lockdown, people are more likely to do a Google search on their phone during the ad break of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here.
And that’s where you need to be.
You need to work on your website so that you appear as high as possible on the search rankings for relevant keywords. There are two ways of doing this.
Search Engine Optimisation, SEO for short, requires you to create valuable content that your prospective clients will find useful around your chosen keywords. But that is just a small part of it. There are also lots of technical things that should be addressed on your website to help you rank higher.
The second way of appearing at the top of the rankings is Google Ads or Bing Ads. This is essentially an auction for clicks, where the highest bidder appears top of the rankings.
You can find many good marketing agencies (and a few bad ones…) who can deal with both of these aspects for you to get you to the top of the search rankings, but that is not what I want to focus on.
What I want to focus on here is what happens when that prospective client does get through to your website.
The ideal situation for you is that prospect leaves their details so that you can contact them, so then the question becomes, how do you get their details?
You could create some interesting content that would be really useful for them that you could ‘gate’, so the prospect has to fill out a form to download it, or more simply, you can provide them with a quote for your services.
Giving your prospects the ability to quickly and easily get a quote from your website greatly increases the chances of you winning that client. One of the first questions a client will ask is how much are they going to be paying, so if they can find that straight away on your website, they’re less likely to go looking around.
With DPS, as part of the Access Group, you can do just that. Have a simple form on your website that captures all relevant details and produces a quote instantly. All details saved to the Spitfire Practice Management System ready for you to follow up on and convert into a client.
And when you do convert them into a client, the onboarding process becomes really simple as most of the tasks you’d usually carry out are done automatically.
We’re holding a webinar on Thursday 26 November showing just how this all works. Register here [2] and if you can’t make it on the day, we’ll send you the recording.