It’s corny but true. You can (and should) lie, cheat, and steal your way to success.
Lie in bed at night thinking about what you can do the next day to get more clients and increase your income.
Cheat some time during the day from your other activities and dedicate it to marketing.
Steal the best ideas from other lawyers, and especially from businesses since most lawyers are terrible marketers.
Solid advice because it gets you to focus on marketing and primes you to continually look for ideas you can steal, well, borrow from others.
Let’s talk about that.
We’re talking about finding what others are doing that’s working and emulating it. Using the essence but not the actual words. Modifying what others are doing to suit your practice, market, and style.
Start here: :
- Set up a swipe file to collect emails, articles, ads, blog posts, and such, that other people are using to promote their practice or business.
- Subscribe to other lawyers’ email lists and blogs. Do the same for other types of professionals and service businesses. Â Copy things you like and also things you don’t like (so you’ll know what to avoid).
- Study the emails, etc., you like and ask yourself why you liked them. Make notes. Try your hand at writing it differently.
- With each new email, ad, video, or piece of content, ask yourself why you opened it or why you watched it. What words or images caught your attention?
- Once you began, what compelled you to continue? What did they promise or imply? What benefits did they offer? How did they get you to read all the way to the end?
- Pay extra attention to headlines, sub-heads, email subjects and bullet points. Also note calls-to-action. You may not know why they are effective but if they resonate with you, put them in your swipe file and review them again later.
- Did you buy what they offered? If so, why? If not, why not? What closed the deal for you? What objections did they overcome? Where did they miss the boat?
Go back through your swipe file periodically and ask yourself what you could use or adapt. What ideas, what offers, what words could you use in your marketing?
Keep reading and watching and studying. Train your marketing eye. Study the content and conversations around you, not with the eye of a consumer or colleague but with the eye of a marketer.
You would be amazed at what you can learn, and what you can steal.
Marketing is easy when you know The Formula
