Carolyn Mumby

Lawyers getting business from Linked in

I was speaking with a solicitor this week about niche marketing for lawyers. He has recently set up his niche employment law practice and we got talking about the pros and cons of using Linked in as a tool for marketing for lawyers.  We didn’t actually get round to discussing any cons but if we had I guess it would have been the potential for spending too much time on it. Admittedly, you do have to set boundaries otherwise it consume you.

We both agreed that it was a fantastically useful tool for niche marketing for lawyers because it helps you re-connect with clients and contacts that you may not have seen or spoken to for months or even years.  As this solicitor said ‘I don’t have to go through those awkward cold calls that start with  “Hi, John we haven’t spoken for ages but …” Instead, I just send them a Linked in invitation.

The other benefits were the abundance of groups that you can get involved with but I have to be honest that I was a little reticent to start with because in the end I’m not on Linked in to vent my spleen or make new friends, (although that can be rewarding!) ultimately I’m on Linked in for business reasons. I’m on Linkedin to find people who are interested in knowing more about niche marketing for lawyers.  So I took the advice of a colleague who was already using it successfully and she said, if in doubt, just treat it like a networking event.

I took her advice and used that approach and it helped guide me when contributing to group discussions or answering questions on the Q&A feature.  You can also learn a lot from observing how other successful networkers use Linked in’s features.  There is a balance between becoming a busy fool and sounding like a pushy sales woman. When I get the balance right potential clients come to me and that is what it’s all about.

However, it is easier to encourage prospects to get in touch with you if you have something relevant to the group discussion to give away. So for example, I sometimes offer a copy of a report or a statistical anaylysis on a subject that I specialise in. My main goal is to let employment lawyers know about our corporate HR Web Service so I often follow up with a link to the brochure but only if it is relevant to the conversation. When it is done like this it seems to flow naturally and is a form of educational marketing.

The bottom line is that, during my discussion with the lawyer I mentioned at the start of this blog post, we both agreed that getting involved in Linked in had resulted in business for us. We also agreed that it’s a highly efficient way to find your prospects and to lead them to your products and services so that they can decide for themselves whether they need them and if so, whether you are the sort of person they want to do business with.

Here is a link that Larry Bodine, an expert on the topic of marketing for lawyers, passed on to me via Linked in earlier this week and it provides some interesting information about who is using Linkedin and how they use it. I would like to see more data on how niche marketing for lawyers is benefiting from Linkedin. If you know of any please share the details.

Tags: Networking, Niche Marketing, Free Courses and Guides, Educational Marketing, Linkedin

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