If your goal is to get more high-net-worth divorce cases, this is the marketing seminar for you.
We have worked with family lawyers for over 20 years, and designed this marketing seminar to share our marketing wisdom on how you can attract high-net-worth divorce cases. Some of the changes we have seen impact law practices include:
- Some lawyers are losing big cases to other law firms and don’t understand why
- Many family lawyers rely on referrals for new cases, yet not all of them have a strategy to keep the referrals coming in a consistently
- Some experienced lawyers are finding that the quality of their clients has declined year after year
- And newer lawyers are upping their game.
While this seminar is catered to family lawyers, it will benefit all divorce professionals who are interested in attracting high-net-worth divorce cases.
Watch this marketing seminar and you will:
- Gain a clear understanding of what is needed to design and craft an online and offline reputation in order to attract high-net-worth divorce cases
- Leave with 3 new strategies to help develop and nurture quality referral sources who will refer high-end divorce cases
- Learn 3 new ways to use new technology and improve your website to attract high-end divorce cases.
Transcript of the above webinar:
Welcome to our marketing seminar. Today’s topic is “7 Strategies to Attract High-end Divorce Cases.” My name is Martha Chan, and I will be leading today’s seminar.
I am the VP of Marketing and the co-owner of Divorce Marketing Group, a marketing agency that is 100% dedicated to helping family lawyers and divorce professionals grow their practice and increase their billable hours. We are celebrating our 20th year in business. We host these half-hour marketing seminars regularly online. I should mention that our next seminar will be held on Thursday, September 29 at the same time, which is 2:00 p.m. EST. The topic for that seminar is “6 Common Website Mistakes Family Law Firms Make.” As always, the tips and strategies we offer in these marketing seminars largely apply to all divorce professionals, and we record all these marketing seminars and post them on our website so that you could visit them and review them or share them with other people. Our website is www.divorcemarketinggroup.com.
Today the topic that we will cover is really for the purpose of helping divorce professionals who are interested in getting more high-net-worth divorce cases. We are going to give you seven strategies that would help you.
The first strategy is to conduct a SWOT analysis. I’m going to go into the first one and then let you know when we reach the second one. When we do a SWOT analysis – I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a SWOT analysis – what we’re doing really is taking a look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that you or your company is faced with. You can begin this analysis by getting clear what your business and personal goals are. The idea is that you need to do a very honest review of yourself and your practice to determine what your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are against the goals that you have.
While we are assuming that you want more high-net-worth clients since you’re a part of this seminar, do you also want to increase the number of law attorneys in your firm? Do you want to make significant contributions to the field of family law? Do you plan to sell your practice when you retire? Without these goals, there’s no context for you to do the SWOT analysis or evaluate your action items and their results. Your SWOT analysis should be done also in the context of your competition. How do you compare from these perspectives your legal competence, service level and options, fees, technology, reputation, and your marketing efforts? Who are you up against? Why do they get cases that you desire and that you don’t? Or what do you have that they don’t have?
You also need to look at the opportunities and threats that are present in your field which may impact family law as you know it — for example, the growth of the Internet, the ever-evolving technology, the ability to outsource and unbundle services, and the new ADR options. Are you offering any of that? You need to determine what might be missing in you, your team, and your practice and what it is that you need more of. Ultimately, once you’ve done this analysis, you’d be able to leverage your strengths and opportunities and address your weaknesses. If your firm has more than one lawyer, you would want to do this with each individual and also do it collectively as a team.
The second strategy is about getting to know your prospective clients, but we mean really getting to know them. Even though we’ve narrowed down your desirable clients to be high-net-worth individuals, there may be more work to be done. For example, you may want to work with successful people who are business owners, highly compensated executives, professionals, athletes, celebrities, politicians – or maybe including people who didn’t generate their own wealth but they inherited it. If you take a good look, you may find that you have certain preferences for some of these categories of people. And then in the case of divorce, would you prefer to represent the moneyed spouse or the other spouse? Or do you want to deal with children, domestic violence issues? How about just working for men versus women to fight for their rights and represent their unique situations?
Each of these individuals that we just mentioned has certain legal, personal, and emotional needs that you want to use to market to them, and you need to be able to attend to them should they become your client. High-net-worth divorce cases and clients are very demanding; they will not suffer incompetence. Any weak link in your firm will show up and be the cause of problems. Are you and your firm ready to meet their demands? Are they risk takers? Are some of them needing 24/7 service and do they value discretion? Do they want you to move as quickly as possible and respond to every little demand that they have? You need to take all of these into consideration. Sometimes some spouse has a long-term financial security need or they have a greater need for compassion and emotional support. How and what are they thinking? Getting to really know your clients would help.
The third strategy is to make sure that you create your marketing positioning statement and branding. What do I mean by that? After you’ve done your SWOT analysis, you know what your target audience’s needs are and you could clearly identify what it is that you have to offer them. What is unique about you or the edge that you have and why would they want to engage your law firm? Have you ever heard of the term “elevator speech”? It refers to a short reply you may give to someone you meet in an elevator who may ask you what is it that you do for a living. Your elevator speech has to be short, to the point, and powerful. The reply has to be short because most elevator rides are short – hence the name elevator speech.
If we were to look at creating an elevator speech, what would it look like? I’ve got two samples here to share with you. It’s a mark that I created, and they are for two law firms that are interested in high-net-worth cases. But the true scenario will very clearly be different to you once you hear it. Example one: the answer to the question, what is it that you do for a living? Example one: I am a hardcore family law litigator who works exclusively for high-net-worth men and gets the results they desire in a divorce or other highly litigious family law issue. The second example I have is, our law firm has five divorce attorney mediators who are focused on settling high-conflict and high-asset divorces out of court where other law firms have failed. We are sensitive to our clients’ needs, creative with our solutions, and have a track record of 100% settlement.
You can hear the difference between those two marketing positioning statements even though they are both looking to work with high-net-worth cases. If you could get your marketing positioning statement that clear, then you’ve got the foundation for all your marketing efforts. If you’re interested in getting the two examples I’ve just quoted or knowing more about the marketing positioning statement, you can send me an email. My email is marthac@divorcemarketinggroup.com. I’ll repeat this at the end of the seminar.
Some of you may have thought about branding your law firm. Branding is really achieved by doing everything that is consistent with your marketing positioning, over time, regularly, online and offline. It should even guide you on how and where your personal or group picture should be taken, your office design, and the type of staff and attorneys you hire. It’s all overreaching.
The fourth strategy is to invest in marketing and make your case to your prospective clients. You would never go to a courtroom with just enough evidence to win a case. Ideally, you want to go into the courtroom with an overwhelming amount of proof. You need to take the same approach when it comes to marketing and try to get the cases you desire. Your marketing has to be a clear and convincing argument that you are the one for your prospective clients to hire. Unlike presenting your case in the courtroom, you won’t be given a chance to interact or question what your potential clients are thinking when they see your advertisement or visit your website by themselves late at night. There needs to be a preponderance of evidence. You need to present that evidence in a way that speaks to your best potential clients and referral sources in a consistent manner and regularly.
The biggest task of marketing is that it speaks for you and represents you when you are not there to represent yourself. That’s why it’s important to get your marketing position statement right. You can start your marketing with your logo, your stationery, your website, your attorney, bio, company, brochure, any online listings, collateral materials, advertisements, videos or company e-newsletters, press releases, etc. It’s a long list of marketing options.
The number five strategy is to have a great website and online reputation. It goes without saying that your reputation is important. It’s easy for good family lawyers to enjoy a good reputation among their peers and their clients. But does that reputation extend to the Internet, which is likely the common way your prospective clients use to check you out even if you were recommended to them by their friends, families, or colleagues? Your biggest tool to marketing yourself online is your website, so make sure it is an asset and not a liability. If your website has not been totally revamped in the last three years, it is likely to be out of date.
Most importantly, it needs to be mobile-friendly, because more and more people are viewing websites on-the-go and Google favors websites that are mobile-friendly. Of course, if your website doesn’t follow a solid marketing positioning statement we talked about earlier, it will not be speaking for you or represent you powerfully. You will never know what cases you may have lost due to a substandard website because those people will simply not contact you.
There are many, many things that we can recommend for you to do with your website, but here’s one big item: videos. Your visitors have an experience of who you are, what you may be like to work with, and your level of expertise and passion. Don’t just have a video that says how great you are. Have videos with useful information on topics and that are near and dear to lure prospective clients.
Now, how is your online reputation? Do you have any social media pages? If I were to Google your name, what will I see? Will I see bad reviews about you? Perhaps by disgruntled spouses of X clients whom you have done a great job for; pages about you that have no information; or worst of all, you don’t show up when I Google your name. What do you think each of these scenarios says about you? If you have not attended to your online reputation, I recommend that you start by doing a reputation audit, because after all, you are your Google results.
Strategy number six: You need to stand out from your peers. You may say, how do I do that? How do I stand out from my peers? One way you can differentiate yourself from your peers is by demonstrating your expertise. You could certainly do that by presenting at state bar, AAML, and industry-related conferences. If you don’t have the opportunity to speak at those events, you can still create other ways of demonstrating your expertise.
People believe you more if you are seen in the media. Most people believe that if you are quoted in a media, you must be an expert. So, get yourself visible by writing articles, by submitting articles to publishers who produce divorce-related publications online and in print format, or some of the websites and magazines that our company owns, which are Family Lawyer Magazine, Divorce Magazine, and DivorcedMoms.com, for example.
If you’re thinking, I don’t have a lot of time to write articles, where should I put them? I would recommend that instead of putting your articles on your own website, you will be better off submitting them to websites that are visited by millions of people because more people would read those articles there than finding their way to your website. Publishers welcome good contents as long as you minimize your self-promotion. You can also become an occasional writer or a regular blogger, but what you write has to be of interest to your target audience.
Strategy number 7: you need to nurture your referral source resources. Without a doubt, I think everyone on this call would agree that referrals are still a very, very important component to getting cases, but you need to constantly work at being top of mind with your referral sources. Most family lawyers know to do networking by being active with their local bar association, attending conferences, or having lunch with people. But often you neglect this when you’re busy, right?
Today, with the technology that we have, the task of networking can be done on a much more timely basis, more regularly, and also reach a wider audience. For example, if a referral source of yours is often in the news, you can set up a Google Alert to receive an email from Google whenever that person is in the news. Then you could choose to send an email of congratulations or comments based on the news that you see immediately to that person.
You certainly can send out a monthly newsletter to your clients, your schoolmates, or colleagues to keep yourself top of mind. Once set up, the newsletters are inexpensive to produce and distribute. Make sure the newsletter is consistent with your branding. There is, of course, also social media. With LinkedIn, you can join or start a group that is a potential source of referrals for you. You could certainly post articles, and that would also bring you in front of these people. But most importantly, when you have the opportunity, don’t be shy to ask for the referral.
I’ve just covered the seven strategies for you to get high-net-worth cases. We have come to the end of this seminar. Thank you for attending, and I hope that you’ve got some useful tips out of this. If you are interested in finding out more about branding or the marketing positioning statement examples that I talked about earlier, please send me an email. My email address is marthac@divorcemarketinggroup.com. Our next seminar will be held on September 29, which is a Thursday at 2:00 to 2:30 EST, and the topic will be “6 Most Common Mistakes Family Lawyers Make in Marketing Their Practice.” I hope you will join us then. Thank you for being here today. Have a good day.