Asking For More Clients and Greater Internet Success
February 16, 2012
Practice Management
By Steven Gursten
I believe most lawyers, and especially most personal injury lawyers, really do care about people. And that caring–when it really is honest and sincere–will be the key ingredient that we can all build upon to have more clients, busier practices, and now with Google’s new Search Plus Your World, greater Internet success.
First, how did we get where we are?
Contrary to how lawyers are portrayed by the media today (and 20 years of “tort-reform” propaganda by insurance companies and certain manufacturers), most injury lawyers want to help people and do the right thing. But our profession is viewed by the public with suspicion and distrust.
These feelings of suspicion and distrust are unfortunately reinforced by the ways that many lawyers in my chosen field of personal injury advertise and interact with the general public.
Perhaps it is ironic, but most personal injury lawyers I know chose their field of practice because they like people and want to help them. Even today, many personal injury lawyers are deeply committed to making a difference. They want to help a person, not an insurance company. They want to make a difference in people’s lives.
But the message isn’t getting across. Instead, the wrong message is being conveyed and reinforced by all sides: by popular media, by insurance company propaganda, and worst of all, by so many of the television ads and billboards that personal injury lawyers use to try to get business.
I firmly believe that many lawyers do not want to plant their faces on billboards, television, and in phone books. But the realities of practicing in an ultra-competitive profession tends to get in the way. The pressures of business–to be busy and to have enough clients, perhaps even to be able to pay your bills–changes things for so many lawyers. The desire to help people and practice law becomes subservient to the pressures of running a business.
This pressure for clients and for more business and more cases forces many personal injury lawyers to start advertising. Strongly committed lawyers who once chose a career to help people stop handling cases. They stop interacting with clients and making a difference in people’s lives. Instead, they become advertisers. They become legal pitchmen selling a product. And the billboards, television, radio and ads in phone books that result play perfectly into the propaganda campaigns and our less-than-sterling image that lawyers already have with the public.
Choosing a different path to success
But there is a another way. There is a different road that lawyers can take to get more business and more clients, perhaps more than you ever imagined, without having to sacrifice your values and beliefs, and without having to slug it out with the mass-media advertising law firms that so dominate legal advertising today.
You have to ask.
Many people will not refer others to you, such as friends and family who really need your help, unless you give them permission first.
And your best and happiest clients will not leave a positive review or an Internet testimonial unless you ask them.
You have to ask. And I’m always amazed at how many lawyers don’t.
You have to care. You have to build relationships with your clients and with other lawyers.
Person by person, client by client. Roll up your sleeves and with a lot of sweat equity, you can build caring and strong relationships.
And then, watch out! If you tell your clients, both during and especially at the end of your case with them, that the greatest compliment they can ever give you is the referral of their family and friends should they ever need a lawyer, you will have people who you have established strong relationships with going out and trying to send you business.
There is no referral source so powerful in the world as a happy client who tells others about how hard you worked and how much you cared.
Yes, the big spenders of television will always take their share. But that share will be diminishing more and more. Based upon an important study of the most trusted forms of advertising through Nielsen Online Global Consumer Study, recommendations from friends were the most trusted form of advertising. Mass media advertising didn’t crack the top five.
The top five most trusted forms of advertising, according to Nielsen, were:
1. Recommendations from friends
2. Other people’s opinions online (testimonials and reviews)
3. Your company website
4. News articles and editorial news content
5. Sponsorships
So the moral of the story is that a lawyer who is recommended by friends and family is in a much stronger position to acquire new business. And yet how many of us have “given permission,” so to speak, to our own happy clients to tell others about us and what a great job we did for them?
Think about it from the client’s perspective: without being given permission, or told that referrals of friends and family who might need your services is welcome, how many people might think they would be bothering you or interrupting you? Perhaps this concern applies less to other fields of law than it does to lawyers who practice personal injury law, but even with more sophisticated clients, it certainly cannot hurt to let them know that you are never too busy.
You have to ask for referrals from your happy clients. You have to give them permission and let them know that not only is it OK, but that it is welcome. You have to say it is the greatest way they can say “thank you” back to you, that it is considered the highest compliment they can give you, and that it means a lot to you.
And then watch what a difference those few words make.
Caring will transform your website and lead to Internet success
What’s true for people is increasingly true of search engines as well.
What’s changed with the internet in 2012? Social search is an extension of social persuasion. It is recommendations from friends (think back to that Nielsen study), but now it is recommendations from friends that is slowly transforming search. The rise of social search and the role that our personal and professional relationships play are already transforming search engine results. With the personalization of search, it isn’t simply the law firm that has spent the most money on a fancy website, or paid a bunch of SEOs to buy the most links (the old way of dominating the internet) but now search will be increasingly based upon social connections, friendships and relationships.
And you can’t “game” or buy your way in as easily as you could before. Not when search becomes personalized.
Social connections won’t happen on their own. And this is where we come back to caring and building relationships, person by person and lawyer by lawyer. All those hours you’ve spent in the past with your clients, those countless hours you’ve spent building professional relationships through groups and organizations will now play a much greater role in your web success going forward.
It isn’t about the number and quality of links to your website. It is about the network of friends, fans, Google Plus users, and others that endorse your content and your website. This means that the broader the social network of people and lawyers you know, the greater the likelihood that quality content you have created will now be shared. As it is shared, this sharing sends social signals to the search engines that will attract more links and more citations and send more social signals back to the search engines.
Google said it best. When Google’s new Search Plus Your World initiative was introduced, Google’s announcement said: “Because behind most every query is a community. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met.”
It comes back to caring and creating relationships, to the recommendations of friends and the endorsements of the people you know and whose lives you have touched. If you have established this social community, you can now ask your professional and social connections to share your content. And if this content is worthy of being shared, it will spread and the number of citations and links to it will grow far more naturally than ever before. This in turn will result in far more visibility. Now we have authorship tags and social profiles which are already resulting in more clicks and more visibility for early adopters.
Perhaps the most important lesson remains the simplest. Want more clients? Want to do better on the Internet? You have to care, and then you have to ask.
- Steven M. Gursten is a personal injury lawyer from Michigan. He is head of Michigan Auto Law and president of the Motor Vehicle Trial Lawyers Association. Michigan Auto Law has offices in Farmington Hills, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor, and Sterling Heights.
