Contact Tom at 813-251-9706
I am an attorney and co-founder of The Injury Board, a national membership network of plaintiff attorneys committed to a more constructive way of marketing their skills and advocating for the public. Members of our group work with a team of experienced management and marketing professionals to develop and implement customized word-of-mouth marketing plans based on the Radius of Influence (ROI) Approach to relationship marketing.
We provide personalized marketing consultation and assessments, strategic planning, benchmarking and metrics tracking, customer relationship management tools, and in-person / online educational programs and networking events. Members also have access to first-in-class web development services, high-end offline marketing collateral and many other agency services specifically designed and developed for plaintiff trial practices.
What are my thoughts on marketing for trial attorneys? Most of what we see in the marketplace is flat out detrimental to your practice. To start, mass media advertising is different from, and in my opinion vastly inferior to, relationship marketing - the art of generating referrals through your relationships. Also known as networking. And by the way, relationship marketing is a heck of a lot cheaper. No more yellow pages, TV ads, billboards, park benches. No more worrying about outspending your competition.
Today's successful relationship marketers segment their audience. For most of us, daily conversation means discussing different things with different people based on who they are, where they are and what types of interests we share. In marketing, however, we too often rely on a one-size-fits-all message, delivered over a handful of mediums to what we hope is a homogeneous audience.
This basic mistake is most apparent in web marketing where we tend to treat everyone as if they’re the same. A single website delivers one message to all the people we’re trying to reach. To “expand our impact” we simply broadcast the same material on Twittter, LinkedIn and Facebook. We would never bombard different people with the same message over and over again in our “real life” conversations, but we do it in our virtual conversations as a matter of practice.
Much of this disconnect has to do with the size of our intended audience. In “real life” we may have only a few dozen relationships. We can check-in, share a thought or message, hear a reply and move on. We can keep track of multiple ongoing conversations instinctively, all while treating people as the individuals they are.
With internet marketing, however, we are trying to reach far greater numbers and must take a learned systematic approach to keep our conversations organized while maintaining their authenticity. To successfully communicate with a more diverse and targeted audience and to effectively market to a larger base, we have to segment our conversations based on the people we’re tyring to reach, the message we’re trying to communicate and the online medium that bests connects the two.
As an attorney, I help firms define these relationships and segment their online marketing in order to develop referral opportunities with their professional colleagues, friends, family, former clients, and community leaders.
