Lawyers dominating their legal markets using direct mail are not eager to share this information with others.

I feel quite confident, that if you take the time to analyze the most financially successful lawyers in your community, you will uncover that it has often been direct mail advertising that has been rendering the advertising expenditures you have been throwing at the internet useless.

This is so because the potent direct mail piece has now often become the first marketing tool to capture the potential client’s attention, not the internet. If marketed correctly, the right direct mail appeal stops your potential client’s online search in its tracks, and in turn channels these unrealized direct mail revenue streams away from even the most experienced top dog internet marketers.

Don’t let appearances fool you. The high brow law firm or attorney you would never expect to engage in targeted direct mail to get clients? They are doing it and in increasing numbers across the nation right under your collective upraised noses.

To maintain appearances and maintain luxurious office accommodations, a law firm must make money. Like it or not direct mail marketing has become the essential marketing tool for savvy law firms across the U.S. who have prioritized the generation of revenue over the dissolution of their respective law firms.

In the final analysis high brow law firms become this way through revenue generation. Or in more blunt terms; making money. Nice clothes, cars and offices are no longer simply handed down from generation to generation. Such amenities must now be earned in a competitive legal environment the likes of which has never before existed. It is simply a wasted exercise to scoff at those lawyers profiting from direct mail.

Adapt. Compete Win. Without utilizing direct mail advertising I submit that your law practice will never be on an even playing field with the “reputable” law firms within your community so many financially strapped lawyers can only envy.

Online marketing corporations have too much invested in lawyer advertising revenue to allow the notion that there is a far more effective means of landing legal clients.

Financially successful lawyers discreetly accumulate clients away from their legal competition through the use of powerful direct mail appeals. It is not in their interest to empower their unsuccessful lawyer competition.

Conversely, there is no limit to the unrestrained sales appeals of online corporations touting the need to pour money into internet advertising as the only available forum with which to market a law practice.

Online internet sales companies are loathe to acknowledge the existence of direct mail marketing as the most cost effective means for client retention. Not unlike those lawyers profiting from direct mail, corporations who have profited handsomely from foolish online lawyer advertising spending will go to great lengths to subvert the true statistics as to what marketing strategies truly create revenue for the lawyer, as opposed to the internet salesperson.

As I have written in great length elsewhere, it is my belief that pay per click advertising expenditures are fools gold when planning long term strategic marketing goals. (I will not even discuss the lack of any marketing value of corporate online websites who get lawyers to actually pay to be herded into the same online portals as their competitors and somehow believe that this will earn needed revenue)

The reasons that pay per click advertising fails law firms are varied, including, but not limited to, spiraling expense costs at the mercy of Google and other search engines playing you off of your legal competitors. More specifically, an unjustified return on whatever cost allocation the lawyer is able to designate to his or her desired pay per click keyword terms.

With this being said, there are still countless numbers of lawyers who have grown dependent upon pay per click advertising as the only perceived outlet with which to market their respective law related services.

For nearly all lawyers, especially those recent graduates just starting their own independent careers, the marketing competition to sustain a robust legal practice can be daunting. For young lawyers who know of no other world than the virtual marketplace of online or social media, anything less than a top of first page internet ranking spells the real prospect of financial failure; even more so within our nation’s urban markets.

The reality that I have first position/first page rankings on all of my targeted online keyword terms is no doubt an achievement that I covet and work hard to maintain. Nonetheless, as I have strenuously tried to communicate in other forums, such top rankings have not been able to usurp the absolute requirement for the top law firms such as my own to invest in the most effective direct mail marketing strategies to stay on top of the client retention curve.

Unlike years past when online non paid internet marketing (seo rankings) were the be all and end all of lawyer marketing competition for client retention, a present day allowance for lawyer direct mail advertising has altered the playing field altogether.

As time passes, and internet legal marketing failures persist, lawyers who have seen the light in regard to the incredible return on investment (ROI) of direct mail marketing are emerging in all corners of the U.S. Lawyers like us welcome the disparagement of direct mail within our legal jurisdictions. In this way our legal “competition” becomes no competition at all. With unsuccessful lawyers complaining about “ethics” over dollars, I am pleased to continue to accumulate dollars.

Please be wise to the emerging marketing minefields that continue to spur the dissolution of more and more legal practices with each passing year. By understanding the economic motivations behind online marketing appeals that fail to disclose the most cost effective means of lawyer marketing, you have the ability to profit handsomely from the knowledge that it is direct mail marketing that may best enable your practice to vault itself above all of your legal competitors.