Posts Tagged ‘social marketing’
Quick Tip of the Week: Use Nearbytweets to Connect with your Community
There’s a social media resource out there that is great for connecting with your local community: Nearbytweets! It’s sort of a little cousin to Twitter, and very easy to use. Just go to www.nearbytweets.com, and on the homepage, enter your location, a key word or phrase, and a radius, and you will find people near you who are discussing topics related to your market on Twitter!
As a test, I entered the phrase “estate planning” in a 200 mile radius around Los Angeles, California, and came up with several different people who were tweeting about estate planning in that area:
What better way is there for you to attract and connect with your local audience online? Test the site out using different keywords your target market might discuss online, such as, “probate law” or “Mom’s groups,” and see what you find!
Quick Tip of the Week – Using the Facebook Tagging Feature to Spread Your Message
Facebook has expanded their ‘tagging’ feature beyond photos. Now there is a powerful new way to create live links between pages, profiles and groups. What this means is that you can update your personal profile status and point your friends to your fan page with an actual live link. This allows you to direct even more people to your fan page and from there you can continue to educate your community about estate planning.
Using the tagging feature is very similar to the Twitter @replies, so using it is pretty easy if you know or remember the person or group’s username. Simply type the @symbol and the first few letters and Facebook will generate an auto-suggest dropdown menu:
Once you see the group or person that you would like to tag, click on it and it will appear as an active link. Then click “Share.” Then your status will appear on your friends News Feed:
This is a great way for you to highlight upcoming workshops, special offers, or news about your firm. But as with everything in social media, use this feature sparingly. Don’t spam your Facebook friends with your marketing messages!
Quick Tip of the Week: Put your Wordpress Blog Posts on LinkedIn!
As many of you know, Linked In is one of the hottest social networks on the web today, and it is unique in that it has a very professional tone – a great place for attorneys to network!
There is very useful application within Linked-In: the ability to import your Wordpress blog posts into your account, which allows them to be displayed on your LinkedIn profile and your LinkedIn webpage. It is quick and easy to do this, so take these steps to take advantage of this feature:
- Sign in to your LinkedIn account
- Click on the ‘Applications’ button on your home page
- Click on the green ‘Wordpress’ application
- Click ‘add application’ and add you blog url
- You can choose to display all of your blog posts or just those tagged with certain keywords.
- Be sure that your privacy settings are set so that your blog updates appear on your LinkedIn newsfeed:
- Go to “Accounts & Settings” at the top of the page
- Click “Profile and Status Updates”
- Make sure that in the “Publish profile updates and recommendations” section you select “Yes”
And there you go! A super quick and easy was to expand your exposure.
The Era of Value-Driven Marketing
Marketing is moving into a new era – the era of Value-Driven Marketing
The reason is that unlike traditional marketing, the purpose of value-driven marketing is to create meaningful value to your clients. By providing quality value on a consistent basis utilizing social media marketing, you will become the “go-to” lawyer for your community when they are ready for estate planning. An added bonus is that you will cultivate lifetime client loyalty and your clients, in essence, become your sales team by directing prospects to you.
There are a few key points in value-driven marketing that you should embrace:
- Value-driven marketing requires a deep desire to serve. Since you have chosen to practice in estate planning I’m guessing this point describes you exactly! But, it needs to move beyond ‘desire’ to a system that demonstrates this to your prospects. It requires a daily commitment to seek ways to add value to your clients’ lives. Social media provides the means, but you must commit to the process and provide great content on a consistent basis.
- To create value, you must know your prospects and clients. It is important for you to understand exactly who you are speaking to – what motivates them, their decision criteria, etc. This is easily accomplished by thoroughly researching your prospects and then setting objectives and developing a comprehensive strategy.
- Value-driven marketing does not produce results overnight. Value-driven marketing is about building relationships – and relationships take time to develop. You can’t expect to throw a lot of money at a big marketing campaign and expect people to instantly trust you or see you as an expert. Your prospects are very savvy and somewhat distrustful of those old-fashioned, in-your-face, tactics. Instead, commit to small acts to build solid relationships with them.
While on its face, value-driven marketing may seem daunting, it is important to note that it will result in driving new clients to your law practice. The speed at which your relationships develop depend upon how much time and resources you plan to devote. If you set an aggressive schedule for blog posting and participation in social networks then you will see results rather quickly. While it is important for you to be very involved in your social media strategy, it is not necessary for you to do everything yourself. You can outsource many social media marketing strategies to free your time.
The answer is simply to commit to providing great content that has good value and you will see the results!
Why Offer-Driven Marketing Doesn’t Work for Estate Planning Services
Sounds good, right?
This should bring in LOADS of eager estate planning clients who are beating a path to your door.
After spending thousands of dollars for targeted mailing lists, design services for a wonderful postcard and postage you find that the results are less than stellar. But, why?
Because offer-driven marketing doesn’t work for estate planning services.
Well, let me clarify, offer-driven marketing doesn’t work for people with whom you have no existing relationship. I will be the first to admit that I have not done extensive research to find the root cause of the failure of offer-driven marketing. But I have spent years talking to estate planning prospects and clients and I think there are two key reasons.
1. Because people don’t necessarily love the idea of developing a plan that will prepare their family for their death. This is not fun for most people and they are not motivated to do this by money.
2. Because people know that when they do estate planning they will be sharing every detail of their lives with their lawyer. They will have to disclose all of their financial information and sometimes not-so-pretty details of their family life. Most people want to share this information only with people they know and trust.
What does this mean to you in terms of marketing your estate planning practice? It means that you need to find ways to showcase your expertise and allow potential clients to get to know you. Reach out to them and teach them that estate planning is not about death and dying. Show them the joy in creating a legacy for their family.
Social media is ideal for this. You can do this by regularly posting to your blog, updating you Facebook fan page, communicating using Twitter, and many, many other channels where you can connect with potential clients.
Once people get to know you, trust you, see you as an expert, and not fear estate planning, then you can them make them an offer they can’t refuse.
