5 Law Firm Marketing Strategies to Retain Clients

Okay, youve landed a couple of good clients through your law firm marketing program. But landing them is only the first part of your task. Now the real work begins as you find a ways to keep those clients you have worked so hard to get. Business has been picking up since you revised your marketing strategy and things are looking up for steady growth in your practice.

Along with new clients comes the inherent need for more time to spend on their cases. Now the problem is not enough new clients but work flow and time management to handle them all. With such a limited schedule, how do you keep them happy so they dont run off and hire your competition

It is a situation that many attorneys find themselves in and the stress and frustration is overwhelming at times. The best thing to do is stop, take a deep breath and know that there is a simple solution to manage this situation.

The following five strategies are designed to help you maintain a good working relationship with your new client. You managed to land them, now get to work keeping them

1. Begin work on the case immediately. As soon as the client signs on, spend time that day or the next working on the case. This is not only to protect your clients best legal interests, but also to show them their need for immediate legal help. It also shows them that you genuinely care about them.

2. Send the client some form of written communication within 48 hours of taking the case. It isnt enough to start working immediately on their case. You must show that you are working and making progress by e-mailing them a copy of everything you do. Consider time stamping your e-mails so that your client sees you have begun working on their case almost as soon as you landed it.

It is also wise to send a tangible copy of all of your communications with your client. Often, it is easier for people to pay for services they can actually visualize. When they can see some physical evidence of your work, it seems worth more to them.

Follow-up letters after phone calls or in-person meetings are another great way to clarify and avoid misunderstandings. They also serve to protect you from malpractice accusations because you have everything documented and dated.

3. Send out a brief survey directed at new clients. Within one week of landing the new client, send out a one-page survey. This can be a great way to collect data on vital questions for use in future law firm marketing strategies; this is also a good time to ask them for their birthdays and anniversaries so you can send a card, which is a great
marketing strategy.

Why did they select your firm
Who else were they interviewing
What do they like best/worst about working with you
How can you improve
How fast was your response time to their initial request
How did they find you
Do they know of anyone else who could use your services
Additional contact information, etc

4. Send out a client satisfaction survey after you have completed the case. This is another great way to maintain good communication with clients. It also shows them that you really care about their opinions and feelings. They will see that their cases and how it all turns out are important to you.

5. Send the client a hand written thank you card. Nothing says you care like a greeting card. Send out the card the same day they select you as their attorney. It doesnt have to be anything fancy, but you should do it because no one else does.

While this seems like just a catchy line from a greeting card commercial, it really is useful. If you have taken the time to not only find a card, but to personally sign it, you will once again be showing your client that you really do care about them on a personal level.

Clients must feel like you are there to serve in their best interests because you want to be there. Lawyers have the negative reputation of only being in it for the prestige and the money. While these are two important factors from your business view, they are of little concern to your client. You must show you care through your law firm marketing efforts and your communication with your clients. If you dont care about them, they wont care about you.


About the Author

Stephen Fairley is CEO of The Rainmaker Institute is the nations largest law firm marketing company that specializes in helping small law firms generate more and better referrals and create a 7 figure law practice. Over 6,000 attorneys have benefited from our proven Rainmaker Marketing System. Attorneys: claim your FREE legal marketing CD 7 Keys to a 7 Figure Law Practice at

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How to Succeed in Internet Marketing With Organic SEO

In the old days of the Internet, there were no SEO Consultants, automated systems, or all that high technology stuff. A few years ago, in fact, the term 'Search Engine Optimization' did not even exist! Website owners struggled with ways and means to get the much-needed hits to their website (never mind if it was not targeted) to hopefully generate the needed revenues. Those were the days of IBM (or 'It's Best done Manually) and Organic SEO.

Organic SEO still refers to the processes and strategies that are undertaken to optimize a website so that it gets good relevance ratings based on the keywords that the site is responsive to. The only difference between Organic SEO and the SEO we now know is that Organic SEO is a manual process vs. the current automated processes of page submission and alteration that characterizes 'modern' SEO. Organic SEO, if you really think about is a 'purist' approach to website optimization because nothing is a 'black box'. As a practitioner of Organic SEO, you know optimization; you don't just blindly trust it.

Organic SEO is based on a clear understanding of fundamental concepts, including:

- Search engines and how they work
Obviously, you cannot practice Organic SEO if you don't even know how the first two letters of SEO (i.e., Search Engine) works. A search engine is a web site that provides the visitor a list of recommended websites to go to, based on a specific keyword or keywords. The rank of a website is statistically determined by what is termed as 'key word density' or the ratio of keywords to the total number of words of content in a website. The gatherer of this statistical data is what is called a 'spider' or 'spider bot', which is a program whose function is to count the number of times a keyword appears in a website through a process called 'crawling'.

- Search Engine Optimization
You can't have Organic SEO without the SEO part, which stands what Search Engine Optimization. SEO's main goal is simple: bring as many visitors to your website as possible by exerting influence on the search engine to position your website as close to the top of the list as possible. As a result of having more visitors, it is hoped that your website will generate business for you. This result is every Organic SEO practitioner's clear measure of success.

- Viral Marketing
This is an important concept to understand if you are serious about becoming a good Organic SEO practitioner. Viral Marketing is a strategy to exponentially increase the number of visitors to your website from a small base that you have developed from your initial Organic SEO strategy. An example of Viral Marketing is to offer visitors to your website an opportunity to generate income from their own website by simply putting in your website's link on theirs so that when people visit their website, then there is a good chance that they will visit yours. This strategy is certainly a handy component of the arsenal of a practitioner of Organic SEO.

- Optimized Domain Names
One of the simplest concepts to understand, yet also one that is not as easy to implement. Getting a keyword-rich domain name is every Organic SEO practitioner's dream because it carries so much weight in the relevance scale. If you domain name is exactly what you are selling, you will be able to smoothly sail on without much of a problem in the rankings. The problem, of course, is that there is a very high likelihood that the 'good' domain names already belong to someone, and this makes an Organic SEO practitioner's life more difficult.

- Keyword Research
This is the first step on the list of to-dos for an Organic SEO practitioner because it plays a major role in determining your optimization strategy. Since it takes months for any optimization strategy to take effect, an Organic SEO practitioner's efforts will be wasted if he makes the mistake of optimizing a website based on keywords that are not as popular as he assumed.

Becoming an Organic SEO practitioner is not an easy task at all because it requires a deep understanding of the fundamentals that those utilizing automated systems take for granted. There is a major advantage, however, of Organic SEO vs. the 'lazy man's SEO: A clear understanding of the concepts allows you to analyze SEO situations more accurately and come up with strategies that are more appropriate and responsive to your website's needs.


About the Author

Seomul Evans is a SEO Services consultant specializing with leading dallas SEO Consulting.

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