Improving Your Law Firm Lead Quality

Marketing success isn’t measured in the number of leads you receive each month or in response to a particular campaign. A ringing telephone or long list of contacts doesn’t improve your law firm’s bottom line. Your goal is to convert those leads into clients who are profitable for your law firm. What many attorneys don’t realize is that the conversion process begins long before you reach out to the lead: successful conversion begins with attracting high-quality leads.

What is a High-Quality Law Firm Lead?

In simplest terms, a high-quality lead is one that is likely to:

• Convert to a paying client
• Be a client you want to work with
• Bring the type of business you’re interested in
• Be profitable to work with and pay promptly
• Be a source of repeat business or referrals

The first step toward attracting the best leads is to determine what those leads look like. Fortunately, you have an excellent source of data about the clients who will be easy to work with, bring matters you like working on and pay their bills on time: your past and present clients.

Attracting the Best Leads for Your Law Firm

Step 1: Identify Your Best Clients

Start by looking at the clients who are most profitable and easiest to work with. Are there demographic characteristics such as age and education that are common to your best clients? Are there common threads geographically? What type of cases do you prefer to work on, and which are most lucrative? This information will not only help you identify the most effective marketing outlets, but inform your targeting selections when you advertise through a network such as Facebook and Google AdWords.

Step 2: Determine Which Marketing Channels are Working
You should be assessing your marketing channels for return on investment on a regular basis, so this information may already be at your fingertips. If you haven’t made this type of analysis before, it will be well worth your time investment.

If you’re already asking your clients how they found you, review that information and determine which marketing channels are delivering the best clients. If you aren’t currently collecting that information, it’s time to start. It will help you focus your marketing dollars on the most effective channels, improving your marketing ROI.

Step 3: Find Other Ways to Reach the “Best Client” Pool

Once you have a clear picture of what your best clients look like and where you’ve encountered them so far, it’s time to think about other ways to reach that same demographic. You’ll accomplish this by asking the same question you’ve always asked (or should have) when selecting marketing channels: where will I find this type of prospect? Every publication, radio station and social network has a slightly—or dramatically—different demographic. Your ideal client’s age, educational level, socio-economic status, sex, marital status, profession, and other characteristics will help you determine whether you’re likely to reach that market through.

Step 4: Offer Solutions in Your Clients’ Language

Of course, finding the right channels to connect with your target market doesn’t guarantee that the right prospects will respond to you. That requires offering the information and solutions they’re looking for in your advertising, blog posting, social media posts and other content. Fortunately, your past and current client bases once again provide the data you need.

You know the problems clients bring to you, the questions they ask and the language they use to ask those questions. Whether you’re preparing an e-book as a premium content offering, placing an advertisement or composing a sponsored LinkedIn post, use that knowledge to show your target market that you have the answers they’re seeking.

Lead Quality Counts

Collecting a lot of leads may create a sense that your efforts are successful, but it’s important that you never lose sight of the bottom line. Your lead generation efforts are successful not when you generate a large number of leads, but when you generate a significant number of leads that are ripe for conversion to paying clients. When you know who your best prospects are and meet them where they’re comfortable and provide the information they’re looking for, you’ll be positioned to generate clients and revenues rather than just leads. Don’t hesitate to contact us for further information.