There are scads and piles of articles that will tell you how to market your services and your firm. Many have switched to a complete online marketing program. Others keep it "Old School" and only advertise in print. However, when I think of marketing I think of getting your name out to the largest number of your selected targets as possible. Today, that obviously means to many young lawyers that we have to turn to and rely on social media as a way to network and name drop. Yet, it seems to me that these are limited to a certain extent because these types of media generally only reach those that already know you exist. And while it is a great tool to keep friends, family and past clients up to date on your firm (and keep your firm planted in their head), it may not produce the results that everyone says its going to.
Another form, the firm website. There are many places that will go out of their way to try and build a site for you, but it will come at a premium and it will be very simplistic. I say this because now-a-days most people are capable of entering text into a box, which is what most web-based creation platforms are (a.k.a. WYSIWYG [what you see is what you get]). So I say skip the service and do a little research. In example, www.yooandosborne.com was a domain that my partner and I purchased and then had hosted for free by www.wordpress.com. It cost us $17. Next year it will cost us another $17. Now with that being said our site is simple and clean. There are some restrictions, but mostly prospects want to see clear information and don't want to have to dig to find it and that is what a simple wordpress.com site can offer. Additionally, once you purchase the domain name you can create FREE Google Business accounts so that you are not using some @gmail or @hotmail tags on your business cards. Its the little things, trust me.
I am not going to go into the pros and cons of print advertising because it is such a gambit or failure and success that it is hard to gauge sometimes. We can receive many phone calls, but land one prospect. So its up to you what the definition of success is.
The last (and most interesting) type of advertising we now see is the deal promotion (sites such as Groupon, Google Coupon, Living Social, etc.). Recently, there has been an uproar in the legal community about the use of the above services too attract clients. Only a few states have weighed in on the issue. North Carolina , for example, has outlawed the practice of using a Groupon by stating its a violation of their professional responsibility rules. Specifically, they believe that paying Groupon is essentially share legal fees with a non-practitioner (which is strictly forbidden). Missouri on the other hand has decided the practice is allowable and equates it to paying an advertiser for exposure. Although the lines are not clear on this right now, I thinkk we will begin to see a push for answers. Many vendors say that Groupon is a bad deal because you pay half of what you make back to Groupon; however, they fail to understand that in a populated region a firm's deal may be published directly to 100,000 e-mail addresses simply because people have signed up for notifications. Even if prospects don't purchase the deal, the prospect still sees the firm's name and may call for a legal issue outside the scope of the deal/bargain.
I would like your take/comments on this issue. Do you think it is ethical for attorney's to offer a deal/bargain on one of their services? LET ME KNOW!
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