Opening the door was an invitation, an engagement, a path to your expertise. Your client knew your door would be open and a wealth of expert legal knowledge would be at hand.
Fast forward to 2011, that door is still open but there are a lot more ‘virtual’ avenues in which to get there.
Your client will have an e-mail address, it is getting increasingly likely that their business will be on LinkedIn, they would have attended webinars, seminars, they would possibly re-tweeted and blogged on their way to meetings too.
The physical face-to-face meetings are still paramount in the legal sector, there's no doubting that, but at some stage your client will want to use an aspect of your firm’s online facility to engage with you.
Here is an example of how you can use harness your key cost-effective online presence to try connect with a fantastic number of prospects.
You will have a database of prospects, clients -preferably in an open-source CRM system, (but that's for another blog!)
- You set up an up-to-date, complete LinkedIn profile enhancing your reputation within your sector for your client base to see.
- You e-mail every one of your clients with an invitation to connect with you on LinkedIn – the chances are nowadays they will be on there.
- You have a seminar coming up, on employment issues within the sector (or whatever applies to the audience you're looking to engage), you therefore setup an event on LinkedIn promoting the seminar itself.
- You then e-mail an invitation via LinkedIn to every single client with whom it applies - not sending the letter arrived two days later, but delivered straight to their inbox.
Within 20 minutes, you have an event page loaded with every single detail of why that client should attend your seminar.
As said previously, the most important thing is relevance and engagement with the right audience and making sure they know you will be in contact when it matters most.
From there you will have a captivated audience ready to hear your opinions and expertise in the subject that matters to them.
Check out our social media for law firms page for further details on how you can apply this key component to your online marketing strategy.