Communication Archives - The Attorney Marketing Center

What’s your story?

March 11, 2025 by David M. Ward

To build your practice, you can tell prospective clients all about your capabilities and experience, and you should, but if you want to stand out from other lawyers and firms, if you want to get hired, you should also tell them your story.

I don’t mean your client success stories, although you should tell these, too. I’m talking about your story.

Who are you? Why did you go to law school? What do you love about what you do?

Tell them what drives you to get up early or stay late. Tell them what makes you happy, and what doesn’t. Tell them what you’ve done in the past and what you want to do in the future.

And why. Especially why.

You know, your story. That’s what clients buy.

Facts tell but stories sell.

Stories invoke emotions and emotions drive decisions.

The facts show people the benefits available to them when they hire you and speak to your ability to deliver those benefits. These are clearly important components of marketing. But you can’t depend on facts alone to get someone to hire you.

You have to make them feel something.

You may think you don’t have a compelling story to tell. But you have one. It’s in you and you need to find it.

It will take some work. But you can do it.

And it will be worth the effort.

Filed Under: Communication, Copywriting, Marketing legal services

3 questions that can increase your income

February 25, 2025 by David M. Ward

Why do clients choose you instead of any other attorney? You need to know.

What’s important to them? Why did they search and find your listing or profile? Why did they hire you?

In short, what is their motivation?

The more you know about their motivation, the better able you’ll be to improve your marketing message and appeal to your ideal client.

Fortunately, you can figure out most of this out by asking just three questions:

What outcomes are prospective clients looking for?
What is their top priority in choosing an attorney or firm? (Experience, size, resources, accomplishments, location, recommendation or referral, fees, etc.)
Have they hired attorneys before and what was their experience with them?

Talk to or survey current and former clients and ask them. When a prospect contacts you, see if you can deduce the answers to these questions through their questions and comments, or just ask them.

Demographics (age range, location, income level, etc.) can help you target the right prospects (and avoid the wrong ones). But to get those prospects to call, make and keep an appointment, and hire you, you need to know their motivation.

The Attorney Marketing Formula

Filed Under: Communication, Copywriting, Marketing legal services

You and only you

February 13, 2025 by David M. Ward

You’re not merely good at your job, you’re the best in your marketplace. That should be your mindset and marketing message.

You’re the best lawyer for the job. The only lawyer your clients should choose.

Yes, it borders on arrogant and is open to dispute. But it is the very message your clients want to hear, the very message that will attract them to hire and refer you.

Clients want to know they’re getting the best advice possible. Not just good advice, the best.

They want to know that you will take care of them, work hard for them, and competently and completely solve their problems. And do it better than anyone else.

You want them to know you are the best lawyer for the job, and hiring anyone other than you would be a colossal mistake.

To accomplish this, you have to believe it’s true. If you don’t, if you think you’re good but not necessarily better than anyone else, it will show.

If you don’t believe you are the best of the best in your market, you need to work on that. You need to improve the quality of your services, add more value, work harder, or target a different market, one that is aligned with who you are and what you offer.

Or all of the above.

So that when you say you’re the best, you believe it, because it’s true.

When you believe it, your clients will believe it and you won’t have to use clever marketing (or lie) to be seen as the best choice.

You, and only you.

Filed Under: Communication, Image, Law office management, Marketing legal services

Help me help you

February 11, 2025 by David M. Ward

A client tells you what they want, but what they want isn’t necessarily what they need.

They tell you they want surgery to repair their medical problem and need money to pay for it. What they need is a second opinion, more options other than surgery, and if there are no other options, only then money to pay for the surgery.

The client tells you they want a divorce. What they need is information and advice about separation, support, custody, counseling, and a path to reconciliation.

What the client (says) they want isn’t necessarily what they need. They may not know their options, fully understand them, or appreciate their significance.

The best lawyers educate their clients and help them understand their options, and why the course of action their lawyer is recommending is their best choice.

When you educate your clients,

The client can get what they want AND what they need
The lawyer ends up with a satisfied client, or at least a client who makes an informed decision and doesn’t blame the lawyer for a negative outcome
The lawyer’s reputation for knowledge, understanding and patience grows, attracting more clients

Educating your clients is a big part of the job. You can (and should) start doing that job before anyone hires you.

Teach the marketplace about the basics in newsletters, blog posts, seminars, or videos. They will still need to hire you to get your advice about their specific situation.

If you do a good job of educating them, they will.

Filed Under: Communication, Content creation

The simplest way to improve your marketing

January 16, 2025 by David M. Ward

There’s a simple way to get more people to read what you write, listen to and engage with your message, and contact you to learn more.

But most lawyers don’t do it. Or do it enough.

Most lawyers do a good job of presenting facts and logic, and that’s certainly important, but you can’t rely on the left side of a reader’s brain when you want to persuade them to do something. For that, you want to stimulate the right side of their brain, i.e., their emotions.

The best way to do this is to tell stories.

Tell them about someone they can relate to and what happened to them. A client, a friend, someone you heard about, or even yourself. Tell them in your articles, blog posts, emails, and presentations. Tell them when you’re talking to them on the phone or in your office.

If you want bring in more clients and keep your clients coming back, if you want your clients talking about what you do to their friends or business contacts, include stories in everything you write or say.

Stories dramatize the facts and make readers feel the fear or other emotions of your “characters”.

Facts tell but stories sell.

Besides making the logical case for hiring you or following your advice, tell your reader or listener about people who did or didn’t follow that advice.

The best stories involve people who are “like” your audience, with a similar background or circumstances. You want clients and prospect to see that the people in your stories are “just like them”.

Stories don’t need to be lengthy. A brief anecdote or mention is often enough. Neither do stories need to be overly dramatic. You can use irony or satire or a bit of fun to make your case.

Clients and prospects often want to do what you’re telling them and are just looking for an excuse to do it. A simple story with a happy ending is often enough to give them that excuse.

Filed Under: Communication, Marketing legal services, Salesmanship, Writing

The most important part of your marketing message

November 4, 2024 by David M. Ward

Marketing experts advise you to tell your prospective client, reader or listener, what to do.

Tell them to call and ask for an appointment. Tell them to click, download, read, or watch, tell them to sign up, and you should. Telling people what to do makes it more likely they will do it, and more likely, therefore, that you will get a new case or client, subscriber or follower.

Don’t leave it for them to figure out what to do; tell them. And tell them why.

What are the benefits of doing what you’re asking? How will they be better off? What will they learn or get or be able to do?

Telling them what to do is important. Telling them why is the most important part of your message.

People do things for a reason. A benefit they want or need. Just as you shouldn’t leave it up to them to figure out what to do, you shouldn’t leave it to them to figure out why.

Even if it’s obvious, tell them anyway. Tell them that getting your information or advice might help them avoid an expensive lawsuit, for example. Or that hiring you might be the quickest and best way to make their painful problem go away.

Talk about their legal problem and their pain. Because people will do more (and pay more) to solve a painful problem or difficult situation than they will do or pay to prevent one.

Tell people what to do and why. Especially if “why” means the end of their painful problem.

Filed Under: Advertising, Communication, Copywriting

Transparency is overrated

August 2, 2024 by David M. Ward

Prospective clients, people who read your articles or listen to your presentations, want to know what you do and how you can help them.

Tell them what, not how.

It’s okay to speak about your process in general terms. A few words about how you’re different and better. But keep the details to yourself.

It’s your intellectual property and you don’t need to share it.

What about paying clients? Aren’t they entitled to know?

Not really. They’re paying for your efforts and results, not your methods. So don’t tell them “how” unless you want to.

In your next article, blog post, or presentation, give folks the big picture, get them excited about the results you can get for them, but just as the magician doesn’t share their secrets, you shouldn’t share yours.

As author William Zinsser put it, “Readers should always feel that you know more about your subject than you’ve put in writing.”

Filed Under: Communication, Content creation, Presentations, Writing

Invert your pyramids

July 19, 2024 by David M. Ward

Some prospective clients want to immediately know everything about what you can do to help them. All the details, the entire process, and as much proof as you can provide.

Others don’t.

When they first encounter you, most people simply want to know if you have something to say they want to hear. If looks like too much work to find out, they often don’t stick around.

One solution is to write shorter pieces so visitors can see at a glance what you have for them.

For longer pieces, the simplest thing to do is to fashion your marketing documents and website content with an inverted pyramid. Newspapers used a journalistic style to do this, with the most important information at the top, followed by increasingly less important details.

Use a headline to capture attention and give readers the big picture and follow that with the “Five Ws” (who, what, when, where, why) in descending order of importance. This way, the passing reader can quickly get the gist of your message and move on if they aren’t interested, while others, with more interest in your subject, and more time, can continue reading and learn more.

In the digital age, you have other options than they did in the 1800s when the inverted pyramid structure was first used. You can link to additional pages, use call-outs, charts, photos, and other visuals such as larger or colored fonts, and other graphic flourishes, to call attention to elements you want to emphasize, “hide” others from immediate view (and link to them), or “stage” how and when certain information is delivered to the reader.

Pay attention to how bloggers and online publishers make it easier for their readers to consume their content and emulate them.

No matter what you do, if you want more people to read your words and decide they want to talk to you about representing them, follow this rule of thumb: don’t tell them everything at once.

Filed Under: Blogging, Communication, Content creation, Online Marketing

It’s easy to mess this up (and easy to fix)

July 18, 2024 by David M. Ward

Look at the multitude of emails in your inbox. Without opening each email, can you tell who sent it?

If you recognize the name of the sender, or other identifying information appears in the “subject,” you probably do. If you don’t, what do you do?

Do you open the email and read it to find out who sent it? Do you delete it? Or mark it as SPAM and then delete it?

Ah, but if you delete it, you might miss something important. If you mark it as spam, this will hurt the sender’s “reputation” in the eyes of email service providers, and affect their email deliverability rate.

Why should you care? Because the same thing can happen to you if you do the same things they do.

Recently, I signed up for a newsletter from a reputable company I wanted to hear from. I got their welcome email, followed by several follow-ups.

So far, so good.

Then I got an email from the same company, but the “sender” was a different person. I didn’t recognize their name and deleted it.

A few days later, I got another email from someone else at the company whose name I also didn’t recognize.

And this continues.

It’s annoying and I’m “this close” to unsubscribing, in which case, everyone loses.

Don’t let this happen to you.

Send your email to clients, prospects, subscribers, and colleagues with your name as the sender. Not your firm’s name, not the name of someone else in the firm.

You.

Recipients see your name, recognize it, and let you into their inner sanctum (if they deem you worthy).

Problem solved.

Email is a personal medium. A sender and a recipient. And through that process, a relationship begins. As you nurture that relationship, it gets stronger, providing your recipient with additional value and information, eventually leading to new business for you.

If you send your email from different names, people get confused about who’s contacting them and that relationship often never develops.

Make it easier on yourself and your recipients by sticking with one sender’s name. Ideally, yours.

Email marketing for attorneys

Filed Under: Communication, Email, Newsletters

Long time no see. Let’s fix that.

July 15, 2024 by David M. Ward

Your best clients, closest friends, strongest business contacts, people who know, like, and trust you and with whom you communicate most—your “strong ties”—are often your primary source of referrals and opportunities to grow your business.

What about everyone else?

What about former clients and business contacts you haven’t spoken to in a long time? People who know your name but aren’t now actively involved in your life? Experts say these are your “weak ties” and if you’ve been around for more than a few years, there are far more of them than your weak ties.

And they represent a potential bonanza of business and prosperity for you.

They can provide you with valuable information about your (their) market, introduce you to people you’d like to know, send traffic to your website, promote your content and events, provide you with a testimonial or endorsement, and otherwise help your practice grow.

But their value isn’t so much what they can do for you, it is how easy it is for you to get them to do it.

You don’t have to spend time or money to identify them, and meet and get to know them. You just have to reconnect with them. You don’t have to win their trust, you just have to kindle it.

And it can be as simple as digging out their contact information, reaching out and saying hello.

Is that it? Just call or write and say hello?

Yes.

Acknowledge the passage of time, ask how they’re doing, and wish them well

You can do more. You can also send them something, perhaps an article you found (or wrote) and thought might interest them. You can offer to meet and buy coffee or lunch, or invite them to your upcoming event. Or find out what they need or want and help them get it.

What’s next? Perhaps you’ll get together with them and continue the conversation. Or invite them to sign up for your newsletter so you can keep in touch. Or simply calendaring a few months and contact them again.

You might not need to do anything else.

How about contacting them and finding out?

Filed Under: Communication, Increase your income, Relationship marketing