To grow and thrive, consumer law firms need to sign a steady stream of new clients. This lead generation can be driven by a variety of different marketing tactics—word of mouth, content marketing, or advertisements.
Whatever your preferred marketing techniques, there’s one question you should ask yourself before you start.
Are you ready for success?
Your campaign worked. Now what?
Of course, every marketer wants their campaigns to work. A great campaign attracts interest, raises your profile and, in doing so, generates valuable leads for your practice.
But marketing success doesn’t end with a table full of new leads. Once you have the leads coming in, you have to be ready to deal with them.
Lead capture
The more successful your law firm’s marketing campaign, the more leads you will generate. But that doesn’t automatically translate into clients. The next step is to capture those leads.
Firstly, you need to make yourself approachable. You want to encourage leads to contact you – and consumers are famously easy to distract.
Keep it simple. Your phone number should be visible on every page of your website. The more questions you include on your web form, the less leads will fill it out, so keep it short. And consider adding a live chatbox to your site, you’ll stand out in the 1% of firms that take advantage of live chat to engage with leads.
Once you have invited this first interaction, you’ll need a system that turns this into actionable information—most likely a record in your customer relationship management (CRM) application.
If you don’t capture the leads you generate, you wasted the money you spent on marketing.
Lead qualification
So now, you have captured the majority of incoming leads, but your marketing efforts aren’t over. You need to determine which of these leads is most likely to become your next client with excellent lead qualification.
Some people who respond to your marketing just don’t have a case. Others have a legitimate need, but it’s for a type of law you don’t practice. Neither one makes a good client for you.
Efficiently identifying the leads that meet your criteria is key to maximizing the return on your marketing investment.
You can build this into your lead capture process. For example, add in intake questions to your receptionist’s call flow, so you can find out why each person has reached out.
When you’ve captured and qualified your leads, you’re left with the true fruit of your campaigns. Screening your leads means attorneys only speak to qualified leads, saving them time every day.
The role of a virtual answering service
Should you handle lead capture and qualification personally? Probably not. The better your marketing is at generating leads, the more work it will be to sort them.
You’re an attorney. Your time is valuable. To be efficient, you need someone—whether an in-house assistant or external partner—to do some things for you.
A good virtual receptionist or answering service can handle lead capture and qualification for you. Then, once your list of leads is pared down to the best fits for your firm and practice area, you take over. That’s when your expertise really shines, and you’ll be able to commit time to your important cases.
Your marketing strategy doesn’t end once a person has decided to approach your firm. In fact, until each lead has signed a contract and become your client, every interaction should be analyzed for its impact on your marketing.
Don’t let your marketing efforts fail at the final hurdle. Invest in your lead capture and qualification processes, and watch your client numbers increase.
Could a dedicated legal answering service help you capture valuable leads? Contact us to find out.
