As a 25 year practicing lawyer who has profited immeasurably from advertising strategies that dominate my legal competitors, I have found it most rewarding to provide my direct marketing services to lawyers nationwide.

For those determined to uncover why direct marketing works spectacularly for the few privileged lawyers who know how to harness its power effectively, I assist lawyers in demonstrating the costs of ignoring a direct mail campaign.

Please know that I only offer my direct marketing services for lawyers in the independent practice of law. Unfortunately, my own direct marketing materials will not be made available to advertising agencies or marketing firms.

Step One: Understanding The Need For Direct Marketing

As I have stated elsewhere, the question for the lawyer looking to accumulate a client base is not whether to market their abilities, but how to market themselves in the most cost effective manner possible. Now just because marketing in my opinion may very well be the single most important factor in regard to the viability of a legal practice does not mean that such efforts should be conducted in a haphazard manner.

Throwing money at marketing efforts and putting your head in the sand does not build an effective legal practice. Too many lawyers have adopted the stock market philosophy of investing in the assurances of a so called advertising expert and leaving the results to chance.

Such lawyers willingly suspend disbelief as to why their client acquisition efforts are not working. They choose to believe that they’re marketing efforts, sometimes provided by nationally known legal publishing companies, mean that they are in good hands as they seek to perform the task of their day-to-day legal activities.

Some of these former legal names (who I will not name) who have now joined the ranks of marketing experts have formerly published the law books lawyers use, or are associated with the legal research tools they rely upon. However, in truth these established legal industry names have been losing money to the internet and have ineffectively jumped into the lawyer marketing arena as a means to use their former respected names to remain relevant.

Many lawyers I have consulted with devoted far less time to a well thought out marketing plan than the attention given to their respective legal cases. While such devotion to the best interests of client legal matters is noble and worthy of praise, depriving the public at large the ability to become meaningfully aware of your services is worthy of scorn.

Time after time I find myself repeating this notion that without the ability to effectively accumulate good clients, your legal abilities will be underutilized and your practice will ultimately dissolve like far too many other aspiring lawyers nationwide.

Young or idealistic lawyers begin their practices with the best of intentions. Many believe that somehow through osmosis word of their good legal work will somehow catch fire among the masses and elevate their efforts far above all other competing lawyers in their respective jurisdictions. Such notions in today’s world are as immature as their are foolhardy. In fact, I would suggest that an attorney who still believes in such principals as a means for real world legal success is simply not fit to endeavor to run their own legal practice.

There is an outlet for lawyers who believe in nothing more than an academic preoccupation with scholarly pursuits, that outlet is employment within a law firm or government agency where such an individual’s efforts can be dictated by others. However, as you have found this information presumably as a result of an active search for legal independence, I will assume that a law career dictated by others is perhaps not what you have in mind.

Once we have crossed the threshold to allocate needed financial expenditures toward the meaningful acquisition of clients, the inevitable decisions as to where and how to most effectively market your legal practice must be determined. It is at this stage in a lawyer’s career that the decisions made will either power his or her legal efforts for years to come or have those marketing expenditures serve to bring down a legal practice.

While my foremost priority is to convey to lawyers the severe financial repercussions that come to those unwilling to invest in direct mail campaign strategies, some generalizations may be put forth in regard to some existing minefields lawyers may need to be extricated from prior to pivoting to more cost effective and impactful advertising efforts. In short, financially crippling and outdated forms of marketing that is compelling the dissolution of law practices throughout America.

To be sure I profit from top internet rankings as well as direct mail. However, unlike most lawyers I have number one organic (free) rankings for my desired search terms. Basically this insulates me from my competitors frenzy to pay increasing amounts of advertising revenue each month in the “pay to play” world of today’s internet advertising; advertising that is little more than an ineffective artificial attempt to boost rankings with the big boys like me.

Direct Marketing Services For Lawyers Victimized By Ineffective Internet Marketing

Unlike internet marketing, direct mailings without doubt have far more bang for the legal marketing buck than any other advertising mechanism that I know of including the internet. In addition, direct mailings allow your legal practice to both control and target your desired client in a way no other marketing venture can accomplish. In so doing, such a marketing concentration serves to prevent wasted expenditures draining your ability to earn a needed profit in the continuation of your practice.

The general public usually knows enough about the internet today to know that pay per click rankings are for the pretenders in any business industry. Thus, even where such websites may invariably be clicked, no meaningful intent to correspond with such a business is likely to occur.

Joining the masses of your legal competitors each bidding up the prices for pay per click internet advertising does nothing but benefit the seo companies. The internet “clicker” will do no more than go from one website to the next leaving in his or her path wasted dollars accumulated daily on your credit card without any realized return.

Further, such activities make one susceptible to growing click fraud problems afflicting many lawyers doing their best to keep their legal practices in the black. Although widely publicized, the seo companies have done little to convincingly communicate how or if they even have any genuine interest in stopping such activities that have continued to benefit their bottom lines. Nonetheless participation in pay per click advertising keeps increasing at the expense of the desperate business internet advertiser; an advertiser still willing to risk the prospect of fraudulent click activity fearing no other way to market themselves or their business.

That fear also allows deceptive “first page ranking” guarantees from internet marketers to be jumped at by too many lawyers. More often than not these first page guarantees are merely pay per click results where you will now have the good fortune to be paying both the seo companies as well as your new marketing company. This “marketing expert” you have placed your faith in is most likely charging you for the wasted pay per click advertising that you could have just as easily failed participating in by yourself.

For the sake of argument, even if internet first page rankings could theoretically be achieved by your marketing rep, in my opinion unless a business is within the top 2 maybe 3 of the search engine organic (free) rankings, the monies paid merely to be on the first page of an internet search will not be cost justified.

If not a top organic listing on an internet search page for a given query, you are unfortunately considered nowhere. Internet marketing companies already know this adage. Too many lawyers being taken advantage of do not.

With effective direct mail marketing your message will be front and center with your targeted potential client. Whether you can capitalize on this opportunity to capture the potential client’s attention is up to you, or with your good fortune, me.