So I’ve been doing some thinking…
What happens between a client knowing you exist and hiring you?
I’ve been thinking a lot about client journeys, basically, what happens between a client knowing you exist and hiring you.
In the book Permission Marketing, Seth Godin writes about a summer camp.
- Any ads or a conference booth are designed to get you to request a brochure.
- Now they have your email address or your physical address to send you the brochure and can follow up a few times cheaply.
- The brochure gets you to do a virtual tour on the website.
- Now you can see testimonials and reviews and such.
- You get through that stage, and now they want you to come out and check it out.
- And then, once you’ve done all those things, only at that point do they genuinely want to sell you on going to the camp.
What they realized is that by getting you to take those small, incremental steps, you would not only attend camp, but you were more likely to stay for years and then have siblings come as well.
There’s a great lesson to be learned for almost any law firm, because here’s the reality of it: depending upon your practice area and how your market changes, how you expect your client journey to go will differ.
For example, if you’re only referral-based, your client journey will involve someone asking somebody else for a lawyer, and hopefully that person sending them over to you.
Whereas if you’re all PPC (pay per click), your client journey is going to involve them searching for something on Google, finding your ad, and then finding you.
Obviously, the more opportunities people have to get in touch with you, the more varied that client journey can be.
Here’s the thing: if you’re a personal injury attorney, a criminal defense attorney, or an immigration attorney specializing in asylum, then your client journey isn’t as important. Your clients need to hire you ASAP, so the most significant thing is them finding you.
Whereas if you’re a business lawyer, adoption lawyer, or estate planning attorney, your client journey involves them finding you and vetting you in some manner (and maybe you giving them the kick in the ass to actually hire).
Mandatory shout-out here to knowing your ideal client. Obviously, you want to think about the journey of your ideal client, but really, what does it look like for them to go ahead and hire you?
Are they signing up for a newsletter?
Are they going to a webinar?
Are they joining a Facebook group?
Are they just doing a consultation?
Think about the next step they take once they know about you to decide if you’re a good fit for them and for you to determine if they’re a good fit for you.
I want to go deeper into this based upon my own personal experience mainly with this newsletter.
For the most part, this is your initial connection with me. We have our Facebook group, but that’s more of a community than me just trying to sell you something. Then, obviously, you could book a consultation or something along those lines, but this newsletter is an opportunity for us to have a conversation every week.
So I really sat down and thought about what that looks like, or at least how to provide more value for you all.
We talk about marketing.
We talk about branding.
We talk about running a firm.
We talk about my journey and hopefully the lessons you can learn from my mistakes.
Still, I wanted to do a little more with this newsletter, or at least do something a little bit different.
We’re in the process of migrating this newsletter from coming from LegalEase Marketing to coming from jordanostroff.com.
In essence, it’s still going to be me. I write this newsletter 100% myself. But by making it more jordanostroff.com than LegalEase Marketing, I want to give you a more personalized experience less of a marketing company perspective and more of “I’m a person who’s built, and is still building, a life supported by different business ventures,” and really helping you into that role if that’s what you choose to do.
If you’re just here for marketing help, that’s totally fine. Don’t feel obligated to stay on this newsletter, we’re going to move that to a monthly update that’s more marketing-heavy and focused on helpful tips along those lines.
Still, if you’re on a similar journey to maximize your impact while minimizing your time constraints, I hope you’ll join me for the more personalized newsletter.
Like I said, I want this to be a two-way street. Please, please, please reply to this or respond to any future newsletter. They’ll all come directly to me. I do my best to answer all of them.
I always appreciate the feedback, whether it’s constructive, supportive, or something I didn’t think about.
Along those lines, I’ve got to be honest that I really struggled with this one between doing another opt-in or just having you opt out. But I really thought about the audience of this newsletter and how specific it is, for the most part, to me. So I hope you’ll be okay with me opting you into the other one unless you opt out of the new one.
For the most part, I just feel like the personal newsletter is closer to what you’ve gotten out of this one (and you’re still here). But seriously, if you think I screwed this up, let me know.
The coolest part is that the longer I do this, committing to the legal space between LegalEase Marketing and Jordan Law, the more I realize there are so many other attorneys running multiple ventures. For the most part, everyone has done an excellent job of building things that make sense together.
You’ve got people like Joey Vitale doing thought leadership for attorneys alongside VA work with a trademark firm.
You’ve got Russ Nesevich and Victor Medina combining financial planning with estate planning.
There’s a slew of you intelligent enough to do real estate law and title work, like Marc Brown.
And literally dozens of other people I’m not going to name here, but I’ve got to tell you it’s been really cool to see.
A couple of weeks ago, I had Sonia Lakhany on the Exhibit (A)ttorney Show. We dove into the difference between the trademark work she does versus the coursework she does for other lawyers on how to trademark things.
One thing we really delved into and which gave me time to think was the different client journey between a business owner hiring Sonia for trademark work versus a lawyer hiring her to learn trademarking themselves.
That’s really the impetus for this change.
Hopefully you’re interested in both legal marketing and running a great firm in minimal time, and this slight change will help me give you more free information across both of those topics.
What do you think? Let me know.