Berbay's Blog: Marketing for law firms, engineers, CPAs, architects and other professional services

About a million years ago, I was awarded my MBA from USC’s Marshall School of Business (I won’t say how many years ago it actually was—let’s just call it a million). The other day, I received a brochure from USC Marshall Executive Education, the business school’s extension program. I was paging through it when I came across what I thought was a fabulous idea. It’s called MBA Recharge, and it’s a recurring event for Marshall MBA alums and guest.  The two-hour event focuses on “hot topics” relating to current events and offers knowledge that can be immediately be applied to your career.

File this under “Wish I’d Thought of That!” For alums, MBA Recharge offers what looks like a nice ongoing opportunity to at least somewhat keep their MBA degree up to date.  There’s so much to keep up on, and while many of the fundamentals remain the same, you know that 10 minutes after you’ve obtained your diploma, much of it is out-of-date. Meanwhile, for Marshall, MBA Recharge is a smart marketing idea: Putting on a relevant, snappy event like this helps keep alumni bonded to the school (and alumni gifts coming in). Whether or not I actually make it to the event, it’s a terrific idea.  Maybe the next step is a webcast.

Really good ideas are almost as rare as natural redheads.  So when I spotted one at the salon recently—a good idea, not a natural redhead—it jumped out at me.

The salon was offering to take 10 percent off whatever hair product they were promoting that day if you brought in an old hair product of your own. Ladies—you get why this is a clever ploy to increase hair-product sales. My medicine cabinet, for one, is absolutely littered with products I’ve bought—when my hair was somehow different, or somebody recommended a brand, or whatever—but used only once or twice, or never. There aren’t many people who this promotion wouldn’t cause to think of their medicine-cabinet graveyard and resolve to return, exhumed hair product in hand.

The problem is, I wasn’t interested in the products the salon was promoting—but I would have been interested in a discount on a salon service or another promotion.

Those who market professional services have a lesson to learn from this. The salon had a good idea, but it wasn’t executing the idea to its full extent. When you’ve got a good idea, really question yourself about whether you’re taking full advantage of it. Could it be implemented in a different area of your business? Could it be used to reach another market? Ask yourself: Am I giving my good marketing ideas the full treatment?

Berbay Corp. Senior Account Manager, Beth Miller, recently spoke on a panel to a group of attorneys and legal services providers discussing, “A New Outlook for Legal Marketing 2012,” which covered innovative methods of marketing, including videos, blogs and teleseminars. Beth recaps the discussion:

As attendees began asking questions about implementing these tactics, the panelists reminded the audience that it’s easy to get caught up in the “newest” way to market, but that it’s critical to look at your marketing tactics in the context of the bigger picture – how each one fits into an overall marketing plan, otherwise, you may get the phone to ring, but not with the kinds of clients you want.

Implementing any marketing tactics presumes that you’ve already created foundational items such as a database of current clients, prospective clients and referral sources. Without identifying your target market, who will you be reminding to read the blog you’ve created, or watch the videos posted on your website?

As 2012 gets underway, it’s a great time to reflect on what worked and what didn’t in the past year. But before you jump on the latest marketing bandwagon, avoid shooting from the hip and consider how to integrate these new methods into a strategic plan that will generate more business.

We’ve all seen them: Those square barcodes that have been popping up everywhere from cereal boxes to business cards. Many of us, however, don’t know what the strange-looking images are—much less how we might want to use them in our marketing.

The barcodes, called QR (Quick Response) codes, work something like the barcodes found in supermarkets or other stores: When scanned, they provide information. A QR code can support up to nine different types of data including, contact info, URL link, calendar event, geographic location, etc.

In order to read the code, you will need to “scan” it by taking a photo with a smartphone camera (Keep in mind, you have to download an application to read the codes). Once read by a smartphone, QR codes direct potential clients to a “landing page” on the internet, where they will be able to access what they were sent for, whether it is information about trends in your practice area, event details, contact information, etc.

If you’re thinking about incorporating QR codes into your marketing efforts, there are a few points to consider:

• First, what will you provide using the code? A video about a recent court decision that impacts your clients? Contact information?  A discount?  How will your offer improve your potential clients’ lives? You need to provide something of value to keep them engaged.
• You should deploy a “call to action” with your QR code—just a few words near the code to entice people to scan it. For example, “Scan this code for a free gift,” yields a higher scan rate than, “Scan this code.”
• Think about design and usability. Color, for instance, makes a code look more approachable than the traditional black and white. A common mistake when it comes to QR codes is to direct people to your regular website. Aside from the fact that many websites don’t load very well on cell phones, your standard website doesn’t provide any added value to a potential client. He or she could have easily accessed your website without the code.
• Once you have your QR code marketing campaign in place, it is important to track the results. The most meaningful way to do this is to track not only the number of scans, but how much time visitors spent on the landing page. If the landing page is your Facebook page or Twitter account, you should record how many new fans/followers you received during your QR code campaign.

QR codes are here to stay, and will only be popping up in more places as time goes on. You can quickly and easily generate a code using sites such as Kaywa, Qurify and Delivr. QR code marketing can be quite successful—if, before embarking, you give thought to the factors involved in developing a high-quality campaign.

One of the most important aspects of any professional’s website is the biography page, which is the section that is often looked at the most. What we’re seeing is the morphing of each firm professional from having a “cookie-cutter” biography page to a biography microsite—a miniature website, which much like their larger counterparts, can have multiple pages. For instance, within a biography, along with facts like education and experience, there might be navigation tabs for published articles, awards, or case studies, which then make the biography more of a standalone website within the firm’s umbrella site.

People forget that often site visitors no longer enter a website via the home page. For example, when they run a search, they enter the site from wherever that search leads, meaning they might be coming to the website via a practice area or a biography page. The latter is particularly significant because research shows that clients hire the professional as opposed to the firm, and each lawyer is selling him/herself. Therefore, you want to think in terms of creating your own website within the larger firm’s context; it’s no longer about just having a one-page biography. Instead, it’s about creating a microsite that provides page visitors with a deeper amount of information and expanded content. This transformation of the one-size-fits-all biography page into more of a personalized landing page is one reason microsites are becoming more common.

Another reason for this transformation is that no two lawyers want to be limited to marketing the same way. Whether there are 20 or 2,000 lawyers in a firm, each has a different background and is selling something different. There are also those lawyers who have a much better understanding of marketing and how to sell themselves, and you want to be able to work with those variables. Microsites provide individual attorneys the ability to use their landing page as a personal business development tool and control the amount of marketing they do while still incorporating the firm’s overall culture.

Ultimately, microsites are designed with the intent to convert a site visitor into a lead. If developed and maintained well, microsites can greatly benefit professionals and their firms.