How to Hire a Marketing Company That Can Get Results For Lawyers
The question:
When looking to hire a marketing company, how can I make sure that they know how to get results for lawyers? How can I make sure they understand my market?
My answer:
Start by asking questions
The biggest thing you want to find out is how many other lawyers have they worked with. And specifically, how many other lawyers with your type of law firm have they worked with.
Is it a good fit?
Let’s say it’s a marketing firm that does a lot of stuff with lawyers but mostly they’re focusing on mass torts like generating leads for mass torts. If you’re a divorce lawyer, it’s a different type of marketing.
They might not necessarily know how to get leads for a divorce lawyer. That’s the first thing. You need to make sure that they have worked with your type of practice area before.
I mean honestly it’s so hard to find good marketing companies out there. They’re definitely are out there. If you go to freebookforlawyers.com, you can get a copy of my free book. It has a 10 page guide on how to hire a marketing company.
The most important question
The most important question that I always tell everyone about hiring a marketing company to ask is: “Can I talk to your clients? Can I talk to some clients that have had success with your services?”
For my company, for example, for Social Firestarter, I don’t I don’t think that there’s a single client that we have that would not give us a glowing review. At least not unless you were a competitors trying to hire us. Then they might say, “Oh yes, they suck.”
You really want to talk to the clients and find out how they feel as customers of the company because it’s great when everything goes right. But the other thing to find out is how they handle things when things don’t go right. With 50 clients doing internet marketing with something that’s really not in our control, such as Google, things are not always going to go right.
What happens when things go wrong?
The bigger indicator of a company is what they do when things go wrong. We have clients that we’ve worked with where the campaigns have not gone the way that everyone wanted them to go, and where we haven’t gotten results.
It doesn’t mean we didn’t try. It just means that for whatever reason, whether it was a Google update or if it was a stubborn site. things didn’t work. Any legitimate SEO expert will tell you there are websites out there that they just cannot do anything with. It’s happened before.
The real question to ask
The question is not did they fail or succeed, but what did they do about it? Specifically, what did they do when it didn’t work out? For our clients we will actually come out of pocket and pay for things like Google Adwords or Facebook ads or do different campaigns while we’re working on the SEO strategy.
That’s because we want to make sure that the clients are actually getting results. It’s really a big indicator of the character of a company to see what happens when things go wrong. That’s what I would do. And the easiest way to find out is by talking to their clients.
