With spring in the air and the beginning of Q2, it might be a good time to review your law practice management to refocus and implement a new management strategy that doesn’t require a huge budget or a complete overhaul of your systems. We have 5 ways that can help your firm.

Let’s begin.

1. Improve Your Lead Response Times

There are countless studies that show that the optimal time to respond to an incoming lead is pretty much immediately: if your firm responds within 30 minutes, the odds of you making that connection are astronomically higher than if you wait an hour, a day, or until after the weekend. (A recent study showed that out of firms that actually respond to leads, most respond within 30 minutes.)

We heard the excuses from law firms for years: they don’t have enough staff, they don’t want to pester clients, or their support staff has assured them that they are totally calling people back immediately. (Checks the call logs. Sees a large number of unreturned calls, and only one or two calls in response to urgent lucrative leads.)

Your lead responses do not have to be phone calls, though phone calls are typically the highest converting way to respond to a lead. You can ask your website developer to send out an email immediately upon form submission to your website – this is incredibly simple and should take them only a few days at most. With more robust marketing automation (a topic we’ll return to shortly), you can set up automatic text messages and drip campaigns (timed emails or text messages) to stay in touch with people who have reached out to your firm but with whom you have not connected with over the phone yet.

And yes, you do need to call them back. Most industries live and die by time to first dial. They track it, they obsess over it, because if they do not call that lead back first, someone else already has and may have signed up that client. And are legal needs any less important than, say, a mortgage?

2. Increase The Number of Contacts

One callback is not enough. If someone has reached out to your firm, and you do not connect on the first attempt, leaving a voicemail with no follow-up is a waste of your marketing dollars and a waste of the opportunity that that case presented.

You or your staff need to get in the habit of calling every lead back multiple times. In some industries, they will call three or four times on the first day alone, followed by a call cadence that lasts for weeks. You don’t have to get that crazy, but a couple of calls on the first day, plus an email and/or a text message, will put you ahead of almost every other law firm.

3. Embrace Marketing Automation

We alluded to it above, and we will follow up with further deep dives into marketing automation, but this is low-hanging fruit for most law firms. You obviously do not want to spend the time and money to have an assistant manually email each incoming lead, follow up with more emails and appointment reminders, and manually schedule consults and follow-ups.

If you are doing that, kudos, but manual processes rely on humans that make mistakes and they cost infinitely more than simple marketing automation. Most firms don’t do any of this, so if you can set up automation to stay top of mind with a potential client through their email inbox, a text message or two, and a friendly voicemail, then you are well ahead of the field.

Another great benefit of marketing automation is that you can include educational materials in those emails that cover a lot of frequently asked questions. This will save you from having to answer those questions when you do reach the client on the phone. It’s an opportunity to demonstrate expertise and to educate the potential client before you even meet.

4. Do a Brand Audit

Most lawyers I know cyberstalk themselves pretty well. They Google their name and their law firm name regularly and know the second someone leaves a bad review anywhere.

With that being said, there is no time like the new year to review all of your marketing assets, third-party review sites, and social media profiles to make sure everything is clean and consistent. If you have bad reviews, respond to them with kindness and an invitation to reach out to the law firm to discuss their concerns. (Then bury that review by reaching out to some of your favorite former clients and ask them to say nice things.) Check out how your social profiles and everything else matches up to your website. Even small things like logo and color scheme should be consistent across all channels to make you look your best online.

For your website, try loading it on a variety of devices — a laptop, a desktop computer, a tablet, and even your smartphone while on mobile data (turn off WiFi). If it doesn’t load perfectly and very quickly across all of those devices, this is the time to reach out to your favorite web developer and have them give the site some much-needed maintenance.

5. Boost Your Revenue

Things like a website overhaul, marketing automation software, and rethinking your lead response practices will take time and money. There are very few quick fixes when running growth marketing. For a revenue boost, and in order to afford these upgrades, take a look at purchasing legal leads from a reputable vendor like Legal Brands Marketing. Not only will it provide that revenue boost immediately by expanding your client base, but it also provides a diversified stream of inbound leads for all those times when your ordinary marketing hits a seasonality snag.