Most lawyers don’t know about the power of Permission Marketing. They barely know what it is, let alone how it can transform their legal marketing efforts and their law practice. Don’t make that mistake.
How does Permission Marketing compare to how most lawyers market their law practice?
Permission marketing is a term that I first heard of through Seth Godin. (If you haven’t started reading a couple of his books, I highly recommend you start. Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, The Dip, and Tribes are all good places to start.) The idea of permission marketing is that you gather the customers permission before you move to the next step of the marketing process. Essentially, you are looking for prospective clients to “raise their hand” and tell you that they are interested in your services before you send them any further marketing materials.
Most lawyers engage in a more traditional form of marketing called “interruption marketing”. With interruption marketing, marketers are constantly badgering everyone and anyone they can find, hoping that one of those people will need their product or service right then, and right now. This is the “old school” way of legal marketing that most older law firms and traditional lawyers employ. Whenever you see a billboard with a lawyers name on it, a big yellow pages ad, or a radio or television advertisement for legal services – think interruption marketing.
Why you should use Permission Marketing in your law practice?
Permission marketing is a form of relationship marketing, meaning that once a prospective client gives you permission to send them more information, you can begin to develop a relationship with them. You can send them information that is most helpful to them and educates them about the legal problem they are having and how your firm can help them solve it. Most individuals prefer to be marketed to in this way.
What are the pitfalls of Permission Marketing?
With Permission Marketing, you have to be careful. You have to provide an offer to a prospect to get them to give you permission to send them more information. Typically this is in the form of an e-book, or an email course, or a free webinar. You must be careful not to overstep your permission. If you tell them you are giving them an e-book, but then you start bombarding them with spammy emails everyday, you have broken their trust and lost the prospect.
Here’s what Seth Godin has to say about permission marketing:
In order to get permission, you make a promise. You say, “I will do x, y and z, I hope you will give me permission by listening.” And then, this is the hard part, that’s all you do. You don’t assume you can do more. You don’t sell the list or rent the list or demand more attention. You can promise a newsletter and talk to me for years, you can promise a daily RSS feed and talk to me every three minutes, you can promise a sales pitch every day (the way Woot does). But the promise is the promise until both sides agree to change it. You don’t assume that just because you’re running for President or coming to the end of the quarter or launching a new product that you have the right to break the deal. You don’t.
So how can you work permission marketing into your law practice? I have written an e-book (and am currently working on a more formal, self-published book) that I advertise on every page of my website. What do you do? How can you work permission marketing into your legal marketing efforts?
Feel free to post below about how you have used permission marketing in your law practice or questions you have about permission marketing.
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