Driving business without damaging your law firms branding
Marketing is a costly and challenging business. Raising awareness of your products and services can consume huge amounts of time and cash. With so many ways to market, it can be hard to know what the best path is. And sometimes, maybe you can go too far with the approaches.
There is rarely ever a silver bullet to fix it all but can we make it better by using a simpler, collaborative approach? Would a singular intake platform help boost the trust, confidence, and experience of your customers?
Casting a wide net to capture your customers' attention
Getting a voice in the marketplace is not easy. If you are new to the market, then you have to beat a loud drum to get amongst the competition and make customers aware of your existence. If you have a presence, maintaining it and being relatable to your latest messaging can be just as much of an issue. Especially if your brand is already associated with something else.
Setting up mass media campaigns such as tv or radio ads, billboards, magazines and the like is usually a great way to reach out and get coverage. But it’s difficult to drive customer response and to associate spending directly with acquisition.
A more focussed approach using direct marketing, social media, web marketing, and so on can help bring in more quantifiable leads. Run well, it can give you some great results with a tangible view of the return on investment (ROI). But implementing various direct promotional campaigns, multiple re-branded websites, engaging third parties to run lead generation, and so forth can lead to serious spending. It’s usually the more fiscally secure firms that can spend sufficiently to make this really work. Even then, the more they do, the more diluted the ROI can become.
If you are first to market and can hoover up the majority of customers available, then this can be a superb way to grab market share. Capturing customers at all points can be cost-efficient. But are you damaging your brand in the process of running this way?
Damage to your brand and your organisation
Acquiring customers through a multi-channel setup is definitely going to add to the bottom line costs. You can be buying leads from third parties, getting customers coming to your main website, hooking them in via white-labeled and rebranded sites. But this detracts from building trust in your brand.
Customers may shop around to use a service. When they keep seeing your brand offering its wares but under different URLs, or through intermediaries, it can lead to confusion. Customers can be left scratching their heads and wondering which deal is better, even if they are the same. And if they don’t walk away, they may simply opt to sign up everywhere leaving you with false conversions and a load of deduping to do, including with your third parties.
Spreading thin can also lead to difficulties and unknowns in conversion analysis. Unless you have a fully connected solution for all the sign-up channels you use, getting a single source of truth for your data becomes a challenge. If you are able to get the data together,
- can it be analyzed side by side?
- where can performance be improved and replicated across each channel?
- can you spot opportunities to avoid third-party cannibalisation (where you are competing for the same customer)?
- how can you work with them more closely to understand where to diverge your efforts?
On this latter point, do you have the right sort of relationship with your third parties to maximise your efforts? Most of them simply want to find the highest-paying bidder for their leads/claims pack. They are rarely vested in adding value to your processes but through no fault of their own. A lot of law firms will use many, maybe too many third party setups and as a result, won’t build lasting relationships. Loyalty to your brand will be non-existent.
There are better ways to tackle these issues and understand what will have the greatest impact on your campaigns.
Sign them up in one place. Each time. Everytime.
It’s far easier to guide a customer through a process the first time than to have to actively try and re-engage them. If they find a reason to leave, it can be a lot of time and effort to get them back.
Having a consistent platform and a high-quality customer journey will lend itself to a better relationship with your customers. They are not stupid, clients value a simpler experience. They know that joining a legal claim is not easy and they will bite the bullet to engage and supply needed information. If you can give them that, a lot of customers will appreciate the effort and it will help build trust and confidence in using your services. They may not go all out and help swing for you to get a better Net Promoter Score. But they will show a sense of brand loyalty, coming back when they need legal services again.
A singular funnel also means that you can lower your end-to-end costs. No more building out and maintaining numerous onboarding channels. It can let you focus on a standardised intake process which in turn will also allow for consistency in your data capture.
Insight into the data is crucial if you want to understand how to then improve the intake. Having eyes on conversion metrics for each part of the customer journey allows you to understand what is working and what is not. If the data shows that a percentage of customers are not getting past a certain point, it allows you to investigate further and take corrective actions. Access to the data also allows you to take more proactive steps and identify areas that may be doing well and could be improved even further i.e. customers may progress past a certain point but can you do anything to make it even more streamlined? Maybe you can look at non-functional factors such as the speed of the website and see how that can be improved. Each conversion metric point will be clear and any changes will result in direct impacts. This attention to detail gives you the chance to ‘fail fast’; make improvements rapidly, see the net results at a minimal loss of customers and if it doesn’t work, throw the change out and try something else. Without analytics, it’s a very difficult challenge to improve the flow.
With a platform like Claims Gate, you can also leverage third parties much better. Rather than just buying in leads, the platform will allow you to collaborate with lead generators and originators. Giving them (limited) access to help you set up the funnel will allow them to influence the intake process based on their expertise. You can promote healthy competition to understand whose ideas work well and develop a closer working relationship with those who want more than just to sell an email address.
It’s not complicated to move to this space. With Claims Gate set up as a self platform, you can take control over how this works and move to a single platform onboarding experience in no time at all.
