Basically, the goal is to establish Top of Mind Awareness (TOMA) with as large an audience as possible. When you’re talking to clients or potential clients, or even having conversations with anyone you meet in the standard events of your day, be sure to be kind and helpful, and then ask them to refer people to you if they need an attorney. The goal is to continually remind the people you encounter to think of you as synonymous with legal needs. It takes a bit of training, but when it works, it is the cheapest and most plentiful way of bringing in new cases.
Be sure to send email and direct mail to your
database. That should include all of the contacts
you’ve collected over the years in your firm, from
potential clients who didn’t have a case to former
clients to current clients.
Even local businesses and vendors you work with. If
you stay on their radar, some of them will send
referrals your way.
This is why it’s important that, when someone calls
your office, you get their name, email address, and
cell phone number. Even if you can’t take their case
right then, the
information you get from them allows you to continue to contact them with updates, helpful information, and other valuable things. That will grow your contact list, which is the goal. I have a database of about 150,000 people that I use for this purpose.
A few years back, we were looking for other ways to utilize our contacts and build an even stronger referral network. That’s when we came up with the idea of doing an invite-only dinner. This is something that anyone can do, you don’t have to be an advertising TV attorney to do this. Whether you invite a hundred people or a thousand, plan on about one-third of the invited people showing up. If you send out 100 invitations, expect about 30-35 of them to show. We created a nice, formal invitation, chose a local restaurant, and we invited them all for dinner. It was a great event.
The people we invited fell into one of two categories: people who had given us 5-star reviews on Google, and people who had referred us cases previously. Don’t forget, though, these are clients who ALREADY did this; you can’t pay a client for a review or a referral. But you can thank them for the one they already left.