So how's business for you? Is the credit crunch having any effect in your commercial department? Conveyancing work falling off a cliff in light of the forecast 7% drop in house prices? It makes closing business, asking for referrals and cross-selling even more important than in a growing market.
Ian Cooper made an excellent comment on this in last week's Gazette, and I for one have spent some time with a number of clients over the last month or two extolling the virtues of having an organised "cross selling" plan for your firm.
Just this week we will be emailing over 500 people in over 180 client firms asking them to refer us to prospective new clients. We will follow up the email with a phone call to each named individual. This takes time but in our experience yields better results (something like 60% referral rate on a test sample we did) than just emailing alone. We also provide this phone follow up service for law firms….just in case you are interested!
Also, if you have five minutes to spare over a cup of coffee, you might like to fill in this survey on "outsourcing". It's something PM Forum are doing to assess the current state of the outsourcing market. Please note that the link is right and the bottom the page...not the most obvious link in the world!
I hope you enjoy the selection of newsletter articles we have collected for you this month. If there's anything I should know about, please do let me know.
Regs….David.
0117 325 0200
In this issue:
- Marketing Mistakes - An Update
- Five FREE Books to Give Away
- Do-It-Yourself Conveyancing Site
- Xobni - Useful Outlook Addon
- Strategic Marketing in the Legal Profession - New Report
- Link Building - A New Service
- Using PPC to Research SEO Keywords
- Conscious on The Road
- The Funny Bit at the End - The Final Legal Frontier?
- The Other Funny Bit at the End - SEO Rapper
Marketing Mistakes - An Update
You'll hopefully remember from our last newsletter that I 'fessed up a direct marketing mistake we made, where we sent out a batch of letters without stamps. Well the two complaints we had, we "apologised" to by sending them some handmade chocolates from Sterchi's of Filey (probably the best handmade chocolates in the world [Ed]). I thought that would lay the issue to rest, but was amazed to receive this letter from one of the two complaints in response. So it all worked out beautifully in the end!
Five FREE Books to Give Away
I found it a really good read, so much so that I've bought five copies to give away for FREE. Yep, free, gratis. All you need to do is email me. I will select five lucky respondents at random. Simple as that.
I recently read a review of a book called "At the Crossroads: The Remarkable CPA Firm That Nearly Crashed, Then Soared". This is a really interesting business book that is written in the form of a novel. It's about a firm of US CPAs who are not doing very well, and about how they turn their business around using what is called a "Practice Growth Model" that was developed by one of the book's authors.
Do-It-Yourself Conveyancing Site
I came across this site for the first time recently and was wondering what everyone in the legal profession thought about the idea of house sellers or purchasers doing their own conveyancing.
The site is at http://www.diyconveyance.co.uk. Have a look at the site, then why not visit my blog and leave some comments on what you think?
Xobni - Useful Outlook Addon
Xobni is a new Outlook plug-in that saves you time finding email conversations, contacts and attachments. I've been using this tool since it was a beta version around six months ago and find is REALLY useful. After a quick install, you'll see the Xobni toolbar appear in Outlook. I immediately found that some information became easier to find. When a new email arrives, the sender's full communication history appears in the Xobni sidebar, including past conversations, attachments and contact details. There's also a full text search tool. I recommend you try it out.
Strategic Marketing in the Legal Profession - New Report
I've seen a preview of this report and thought it was pretty good. Designed to cover the specific challenges of marketing a modern law firm, "Strategic Marketing in the Legal Profession - 2nd Edition" will allow you to expand, update and test your marketing strategy to give your firm an edge in the hyper-competitive legal marketplace and make a real impact on your firm's bottom line. Driven by case studies from 14 of the most progressive firms operating today this report will bring you to the cutting edge of modern legal marketing.
You can get a copy at the reduced price of £225 + VAT (a saving of £70) by emailing Adam Scrimshire at The ARK Group and quoting reference AS-CNS1.
Link Building - A New Service
Link Popularity is considered to be the single most significant factor that is going to determine where you actually rank on the search engines. Link Popularity can be defined as "the measure of the number of quality internal and external links pointing to a particular website". Most search engines, especially Yahoo and Google, have incorporated this within their ranking criteria. Consequently, in order for a website to rank on search engines such as Google and Yahoo, there is a requirement of a link building campaign in order to attain high link popularity.
You can read more about this service on our website, which also has pricing information.
Using PPC to Research SEO Keywords
Everyone wants to be No.1 in Google. Everyone should be optimising their website for some specific phrases e.g. "solicitor <town>". However, the perennial problem for people is "what phrase do we optimise for?". There are numerous tools on the Internet that supposedly help you with this e.g. Wordtracker, but in our view on all these tools can really only tell you the relative "scale" of one term over another e.g. is "solicitor
Feel free to download our whitepaper on this subject.
Conscious on The Road
We're out and about a fair bit over the next couple of months. You'll find us at the following :-
- 5/6-Jun - Annual Conscious Client Conference
- 12-Jun - 2020 Seminar - Partner Training Day
- 17-Jun - 2020 Seminar - Technology to Boost Profits & Cut Costs
Feel free to come and see us, or if you'd like a speaker for an event at your firm or local law society, please do let me know.
The Funny Bit at the End - The Final Legal Frontier?
You may have seen this already, but if not, have a read of this story about a student at the University of Mississippi who recently leapt into "the final frontier of the legal system" when he recently received the first-ever space law certificate in the United States.
You can thank Kevin Glass, our Lead Developer for this little find!
The Other Funny Bit at the End - SEO Rapper
You have GOT to watch this YouTube video on SEO. Make sure you have your speakers on. I laughed so hard it brought tears to my eyes. If you need help with your SEO then read more about our search engine marketing services.
