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Exclusive legal leads can help you grow your practice by putting you in contact with your ideal clients. The process doesn’t result in an automatic conversion every time, but it is one of the most reliable marketing tools you have at your disposal.
There’s a lot that goes into maximizing the value of the strategy. Some of the work involves choosing the right lead seller. You might also need to form some strategies of your own to handle these incoming opportunities.
In this article, we are going to look at buying leads and how buying quality leads can help you grow — even in some of the most competitive practice areas. Here are the topics we will cover:
If you have any questions, please call Forward Lawyer Marketing at 888-590-9687. You can also reach out through our website contact form here.
It will probably come as no surprise to you, but the primary benefit of buying legal leads is that it generates more clients for your firm. In fact, buying leads is one of the most effective ways to get new clients.
There is one caveat here, and it is that you should not expect every lead you buy to convert to a client. Here are some of the ways that you can increase your chances:
Most of the best lead generation services offer flexibility, quality, and customizability. However, none can guarantee that every lead you get will convert. Part of that conversion rate will be your responsibility.
If you are in a competitive focus or geographic area, then you should seriously consider buying leads. One of the hallmarks of these services is that you get unique information.
Most other forms of advertising and marketing have you competing for attention with many other firms. Simply drive down a major highway, and you’ll see this illustrated in the number of different auto accident injury firms that have billboards.
Nobody has a monopoly on the attention people pay to billboards along a highway. The same is true of search engine optimization — and even pay-per-click advertising. You will be competing with other attorneys who are targeting the same keywords and displaying in the same search engine results pages.
However, you do have exclusivity when you buy high-quality legal leads. You are the only firm receiving that information, which means you will also probably be the first contact for that potential client.
A tight budget and strident competition is rarely a winning combination. With legal lead services, even smaller firms can capture the number of leads they need to grow in the most competitive practice areas.
Any attorney who has spent any time on a pay-per-click advertising platform knows that legal keywords are incredibly expensive. In fact, lawyers were some of the first people who ever advertised on the internet — and they haven’t slowed down since.
There are certainly ways that you can make online advertising for lawyers more efficient. However, it is never going to be cheap. High-quality legal leads are not cheap either, but they do give you access to generalized, high-value campaigns that would be otherwise out of reach.
The mechanism is simple: the economy of scale. Companies that sell leads generate those leads through a variety of costly advertising methods. They might maintain online legal information resources, run national-scale advertising campaigns on search engines, or have viral social media presences. More often than not, it’s a combination of several of these techniques.
When you buy leads, you are taking a slice of these enterprise-scale publishing and marketing businesses. In other words, unless you can afford to stand toe-to-toe with these advertisers, it makes sense to buy leads as needed.
Buying leads can help you grow your business by making it easier to process new clients. That might not sound like much, but it makes sense when you consider how complex and difficult new client intake typically is.
Intake is a cost center. Whether you employ staff or use your own non-billable time, the work you do is only indirectly contributing to the revenue of your firm.
Every hour you spend processing new clients is an hour you do not spend doing research, drafting documents, preparing for cases, negotiating, or litigating. Every hour your staff spends on data entry is an hour they’re not spending on more revenue-focused activities, such as contacting new leads.
To grow, you need to optimize profit. Buying leads helps you do that for your intake process in several ways:
What do you do best? For some attorneys, the answer to that question is truly that they are experts in generating new business for their firms. However, most are better at negotiation, litigation, research, or some other skill that is directly related to the practice of law.
If you fall into the latter category, you propel your firm towards success via your own skill and knowledge. You should remove all of the barriers that are stopping you from exercising those talents.
The need to generate new leads is one of those barriers. If you are always chasing new clients, you don’t have as much time to focus on your cases and, therefore, on growing your firm. Buying leads is one of the most direct ways for you to free yourself up. It lets you do what you do best, practice law.
Unstable cash flow is one of the largest threats to any type of business. You need money coming in to pay bills, meet payroll, and satisfy your financial obligations. Unfortunately, many types of legal practices are prime examples of feast-or-famine revenue patterns.
Good planning or sufficient capital can go a long way towards stabilizing cash flow, but the gold standard is predictable revenue. In fact, it’s nearly a prerequisite if you want to grow your firm over the long term.
Buying leads helps many firms stabilize their cash flow through a more predictable revenue stream. For example, buying leads during slow months could help you make up for seasonal lulls in advertising traffic. It also helps young practices grow by developing an initial set of clientele.
In addition to stabilizing cash flow, buying leads can help you stabilize your caseload. When you approach it strategically, you can always have the amount of business you need to grow your firm predictably.
You probably won’t start out at this stage of stability. One of the first things you have to learn is how often you can convert the leads you buy into new clients. Once you have specific data about that, and once you’ve optimized your intake processes to make the most of each lead, you should be able to plan effectively.
Some lead generation agencies might be able to give you a head start on this. They might have statistical data about lead conversion rates in your practice area. Even if these statistics are not available, you should be able to get a ballpark idea of how many leads you need to start out.
Legal lead services typically prequalify contact information before they send it to you. This prequalification process identifies people with the intent of retaining legal services. Moreover, it sorts potential clients by the types of cases they might have.
The lead service will pass their ability to sort on to you. You should be able to filter potential clients by multiple factors, such as your practice area and your geographical location. Even though the service is running a large-scale, general campaign, you get to choose exactly which leads you want.
One of the core purposes of marketing is to put businesses in contact with their best clients. Buying legal leads is one of the best examples of this idea in action. It allows you to focus on the types of cases that make money for your firm.
Wherever you are in the country, we invite you to call us at 888-590-9687 to talk about how buying leads might fit in your business development plan. We also offer website design, SEO, PPC campaigns, site content, and a full range of marketing services tailored specifically to law firms.
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