My wife and I went to a specialty market the other day to pick up something she needed for dinner. We passed a table with a bowl of tortilla chips and samples of six or seven different types of dips.

I tasted several dips and they were amazing. We bought two, along with a big bag of chips.

Which prompts me to prompt you to give your prospective clients more than one choice. Because if the only choice you give them is to hire you or not, sometimes you won’t like what they choose.

Give them different options, at different price points, and you’ll get more people saying yes. Once they are a client, you can talk to them about your other services.

Because it’s easier to get an existing client to hire you again than to get a prospect to hire you the first time.

If you don’t have this ability now, consider breaking up a bigger service into smaller services. Offer an entry-level service or package, or a menu of smaller services they can buy.

If that’s not possible, give prospective clients other ways to “sample” your deliciousness.

A free consultation. Free information. A presentation with questions and answers.

Meet them for coffee. Invite them for golf. Introduce yourself to them at a party or networking event.

Give more people a taste of what you offer and more people will walk out of your office with a big bag of chips.

A newsletter is a great way to give people a sample of what you do

You may not be the best in your field or even as good as your competition. You may not do anything different from other lawyers in your field.

One way to stand out and make a name for yourself is to find someone doing something noteworthy or interesting or controversial and help them.

Marketing your practice doesn’t necessarily mean promoting yourself. You can promote someone or something else and ride the wave of interest that ensues.

If you know someone in your target market who is doing something laudable–building a business or a cause, for example–tell the world about them.

Be their champion. Join their crusade. Look for ways to help them get the word out.

You could volunteer time or donate money to support their cause. You could refer them business or introduce them to investors. You could tell their story to everyone you know.

Find ways to help them grow and, as they do, stick by their side.

Many lawyers have found success representing a client that takes off. You don’t have to wait for one of your clients to do that, however, you can go find someone doing something you like or believe in and introduce yourself.

Marketing legal services is easier when you know the formula

Yesterday, I pontificated about the value and importance of educating your clients and prospects about problems they may not know they have and about the solutions you have available for them.

That’s your warm market. It’s different in the cold market.

In your warm market–clients, prospects, newsletter subscribers, and others who recognize your name–teaching them what they don’t know doesn’t cost much.

They’re already on your list. If you send them an email, they’ll open it and read it. If what you say makes sense and they eventually do hire an attorney to handle that problem, the odds are that attorney will be you.

In the cold market, you have to find people, get their attention, educate them, build trust, and persuade them to take the next step, and all of that takes time and capital.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it. Just be aware that it’s not as easy or profitable as educating your warm market.

If you do target the cold market, you have two ways to go.

You can target people who know they have a legal problem and are actively looking for a solution, or you can target people who don’t know they have a problem and show them what they need to know.

The first group–people who are looking for a solution to a known problem–is likely to be more profitable, but for one thing: competition.

Most lawyers target people who know they have a problem.

Does that mean you should target the broader market of people who don’t know they have a problem and/or aren’t looking for a solution?

Not necessarily.

Those folks are more difficult (expensive) to identify and communicate with.

So, what do you do?

You can make money educating people who don’t know what they don’t know but you have to get a lot of things right and be willing to invest a lot of time and capital to do it.

Therefore, despite the competition, you’re usually better off going for the known commodity–targeting people who are already looking for what you offer.

Just make sure you do a better job of marketing to them than your competition.

How to use email to build your practice

Some of the clients and prospects on your list don’t know they have a legal problem, let alone that you have the ability to help them.

You need to educate them.

Tell them what they need to know about their problem or potential problem, and what might happen if they do nothing about it.

Don’t leave it up to them to figure this out. Don’t make them wait until their problem worsens. Tell them what they need to know.

And keep telling them because they might not be ready or willing or able to do anything about it the first time you tell them.

Describe the problem and tell them how to recognize it. Describe the risks and their options. And describe the benefits they get when they do something about it, ie., hire you.

Tell them how they will be better off. Tell them about how they will save money, protect themselves (family, business, etc.) against negative consequences. Tell them how they will be safer and enjoy peace of mind.

And then give them examples of other people, like them, who were in the same situation and, with your help, obtained those benefits.

It’s a simple and effective formula for marketing your services.

What’s that? You don’t have any other services to offer to your list?

No problem. Do you know any attorneys in different practice areas who can help your clients? If a client contacted you with a problem that attorney could handle, would you recommend them?

Great. So why not recommend them (their services, their website, their seminar, etc.) now?

Your clients will appreciate that. So will the other attorney, who might do the same thing for you with his clients.

If you want to know how to build your practice with email, my email marketing course shows you everything you need to know.