You might want to consider breaking these marketing rules in your law firm

As a law firm owner, you know you need marketing, but it’s not true that you need to follow every marketing rule for your law firm.

As a law firm owner, you know you need marketing, but it’s not true that you need to follow every marketing rule for your law firm.

Most attorneys think that the only thing that matters in your law firm is marketing because that’s what you think gets new clients.

And the truth is: Marketing is not the stuff that you see. It’s typically the stuff that you don’t see that’s happening behind the scenes. It’s so easy with today’s digital, Social media age to think I need an Instagram, I need a TikTok, I need this, I need that. I am going to cut the bullshit.

I’m gonna give it to you straight. I’m gonna tell you what you need. I’m tell you what you don’t need, but listen, I cannot stop your FOMO, right? That is a mental thing.

Have you stopped to ask: who really benefits from you having social media, or SEO in your law firm?

And the reality is that, there’s a lot of people who benefit from you investing in social media. There’s a lot of people who benefit from you investing in SEO. And I can’t tell you without knowing who you are, what your practice area is, what your budget is, is are those marketing channels even going to be worthwhile for your practice.

But here’s what I am going to tell you in this episode, specifically.

I’m gonna tell you the three marketing rules that I give my middle finger to.

I am so tired of so called marketing gurus who are trying to sell you, a very successful, hardworking individual on some silver bullet that’s going to help their law firm make more money. I’ve never, ever, ever, ever met or come across any form of, of marketing strategy, that is the one trick solution, the one pony for every kind of law.

There is no one marketing strategy or tactic or gimmick that every law firm needs to have.

That does not exist. And I’m telling you right now that if you are being sold to. There is nothing out there from a marketing perspective that every single law firm needs to have. The 100% rule does not apply here. The 99% rule does not apply.

The 97% rule does not apply.

Every single law firm must have a unique marketing strategy that is specific for that law firm.

Every single law firm, every single law firm owner is going to be different when it comes to its marketing strategy. So I’m gonna tell you the three rules that I hear all the time in the podcast space, in the YouTube space, in the coaching consulting space, right. That I literally have decided this is not right for me and fuck that rule because it’s not right for me.

The marketing rule I break in my business: I don’t do marketing that is a trend.

Rule number one that I give my middle finger to all day every day. Anything that is a fucking trend. It is not an actual strategy that you can build long term growth around. It is a trend. So let me be specific reels. Reels are a huge trend right now. Being on TikTok is a huge trend right now. I will tell you, I don’t do either of those things. At this moment, I have not published a reel or gone on TikTok. I don’t even have a TikTok account. Maybe my team created it and I don’t know about it, but I don’t know of it.

Be careful with marketing your law practice: don’t let them play on your FOMO.

I don’t have it on my phone. I don’t know how to search for things in TikTok. TikTok is not where I hang out. And the really important thing to understand with trends is that they’re playing on your FOMO more than anything else. You’re starting to see people doing it. You assume that because they have views that views is dollars in their bank.

Or phone calls or leads, what the people who are posting this stuff don’t show you is their ROI. They’re not showing you how many people call them because they saw some TikTok about them because they saw some something, or the other.

All you have is the number of likes the number of views. And you are as the viewer then thinking, oh, this is something I need to do because clearly it worked for this person, but they’re not actually sharing with you all of the details.

I will tell you that I have YouTube. I have a podcast and I came to these two things fairly late. A lot of people in this space are acting on your FOMO and they’re acting on the fact that you wanna get in early, you wanna get in on the ground floor.

And that is essentially how the trends work. And that is not what I’m about. I will tell you that if there is a way that I can get my videos that I’m creating here, if I can find a way to get my podcast audio, to look like a real or to be on TikTok, I’ll use that. But it’s essentially repurposed content.

But that’s only because I started with these fundamental things that have been around for much longer. I think podcasts are essentially the new radio and radio’s been around for decades. The form of auditory engagement, is gonna continue to be around for decades because it was around how many years before us. And before the podcast came on, it’s really just a radio. And the channel that you choose to listen to YouTube has been around for decades at this point. The way that I see YouTube playing into my marketing strategy is that it lives on forever.

Once I post that video, it’s there forever. People can go to YouTube. They can search on Google: law firm, growth law firm profitability, and they might see a video from me. And that for me is worthwhile. That’s why I invested in that channel. What I’m trying to get you to understand here is that trends are something that I give my metal finger to, that I stay away from because I look for stuff that’s more fundamental, that’s been around for much longer.

I wanna quickly remind you all, you know, I took a month off from Instagram because I didn’t know if I even wanted to show up on Instagram. And I really had to think about how I wanted to use that channel. And I decided that, you know what, I’m gonna be here. I’m gonna show up for the people who are on Instagram and whatever content I create on, on the YouTube.

And the podcast is essentially repurposed for Instagram purposes. . And there’s not much extra work on my part, but it does feel in line with part of my mission, my purpose, to provide free support and just actual, like fundamental legal law firm growth advice, and not like anything that’s a hack, or like a quick fix or anything like that.

The second marketing rule I break is I don’t have testimonials or social proof on my website.

If you look everywhere, any website, you go to Sephora, Walmart target, apple, any restaurant that you’re searching for there’s tons of social proof. There’s a lot of reviews. If you look on my website, I have three testimonials, I don’t name the person. It’s a fake name. I change the practice area. But I generally try to share this: what they said and try to keep that in quotes. But that’s the only place that I’ve shared that I shared testimonials.

If you look on my social channels, I don’t share a ton about my personal life. Even in this podcast, I don’t share a ton about who I am and what I do or anything that’s super personal to me.

And so, because I am a private person, I’m not gonna share my client’s private information for other people to see. I am not going to tell you that I worked with attorney Smith who made a million dollars in the first year of working with me like that. So gimmicky and fake, and like, I’m just psychologically messing with you as someone who might potentially be interested in working with me, it doesn’t feel right for me to share what I think is private information.

I don’t share testimonials because I want to protect my clients privacy.

And I will tell you that it is something that is very important to me and that’s protecting my client’s privacy. I will never say I worked with attorney blah. Will never name names. I will, I will never say this is what I, these are the results I got for this person. I will never ask someone to throw up a video and share about how amazing I am.

I don’t need to do that to get clients. I don’t need to do that to get leads and I don’t need to do that to make money in my practice and in my business. That is something that I decided very early on. I have a lot of experts telling me “you gotta show testimonials. You gotta show reviews, you gotta show screenshots.”

And I just say, you know what, I’m not doing any of that. I am not going to share my client’s information. That’s just not how I’m gonna do things. There are in between solutions to this block out their name, block out their face, change their change, their name, I’m not about that.

If you want to work with me, it’s more than likely because someone else has referred you to me, that is the ultimate social proof. That is the ultimate testimonial. I do not need to have three pages of, of testimonials from the clients that I’ve worked with. The that’s just not necessary.

And I would never ask my clients to leave a review. I would never ask them to do a video, to talk about how great my program was or how much it helped them. Um, that’s just not my style and. Again, it’s all in line with wanting to protect my client’s privacy because I’m a private person.

Now, please know that just because I do this doesn’t mean that you should do this or that you shouldn’t do this. I’m just giving you my strategy behind this and I feel like any attorneys who are listening to this who wanna work with me, who have ever been nervous about working with me, find so much reassurance, knowing that they’re not gonna be a bubble on my website.I mean, nobody wants to disclose that they needed help.

I’m certainly not going to blast your information or even ask you for that.

So the third rule that I give my middle finger to when it comes to marketing is the rule around wanting to advertise everything you do.

Look, there are those attorney websites that I go to and I giggle to myself because I’m like, okay, so you’re a solo law firm owner or a small firm, but you do everything. You do personal injury, you do criminal, you do estate planning and immigration like, whoa, what?

If you’re a law firm owner, your website doesn’t have to disclose the kitchen sink on everything you do.

You do you do everything, you, you are an expert in all of those areas of law and you do all of ’em at like master level efficiency.

Nah, that doesn’t seem right.

I don’t personally advertise everything that I do. I don’t even personally advertise all of the ways that I work with my clients. I will tell you that there’s what you see on the public front.

The reason that I don’t share all of it is because it’s overwhelming, it’s too much information and it doesn’t allow people to focus on the things that I truly want them to focus on. If you don’t have time to work with me for 12 months and you’re nervous to spend 90 days with me, then we start small.

We start it with an hour, and that hour is going to very quickly tell you if we are going to be able to work together in a long term environment or not, I’ve structured it this way intentionally.

So those are the things that I publicly disclose, but I also do like 15 other things that I don’t even publicly disclose because all of that business just comes to me and I don’t have to advertise every little thing that I do. Look, you’re all law firm owners. And on this podcast, I talk about the work that I do with law firm owners.

But what you don’t know that I do is that I actually have a couple masterminds for women of color attorneys who are in big law. And who are in corporate positions in house counsel. But you had no idea that I do that. You don’t really see it openly displayed on my website. You really have to kind of dig through my website to find that, secondly, I work with doctors and dentists regularly.

They have been on my portfolio of clients for years, and I don’t openly advertise that. My LinkedIn is dedicated solely to law firm owners. That’s where I spend most of my energy. The doctor work, and the dentist work, I don’t even openly advertise that because it comes to me. I have enough connections with financial planners and bankers that when they have a doctor who needs help, they just reach out to me and put me in touch with the doctor. And that’s like a 90% close rate. I don’t need to seek that work out. I don’t need to create an entire Instagram page for them.

If most marketing companies came and looked at me, they’d be like, oh, you should have a whole marketing strategy for the doctors and a whole separate strategy for the lawyers.

It’s not where I see my business going and where I see my time being spent. My time is spent best in this space, the way that this is all formatted.

The one thing to remember about marketing is that it’s not final: when you make a decision about marketing in your law firm, you can change your mind.

Does that mean I may not evaluate it again in the future? No, it means that right now, this is what it is. What I do is a lot, and I work with a lot of different kinds of businesses in different capacities, but I don’t share that because I don’t need to.

It’s really beautiful when you’ve gotten to a place in your business where you don’t need to market. Marketing people will tell you it’s more of a spaghetti, throw it against the wall, see what sticks they wanna try everything to see what’s going to stick.

It’s not my approach, not with my business and I don’t care who the marketing person is. I don’t care what they do. I am not on board with what most marketing companies say when it comes to how I do things strategically.

Connect with Nermin on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nerminjasani/