Make Money Mondays: Seasonal Marketing – Summer Specials
I’ve written previously about the concept of seasonal marketing for law firms – that is, offering limited-time services that have some connection with a holiday or season. So for example, around Memorial Day or Veteran’s Day, a law firm might offer discounted services to veterans. Of course, seasonal marketing can go awry also – as with this attorney who offered free divorces on Valentine’s Day .
With summer officially here, there’s another opportunity for seasonal marketing – especially for lawyers who practice near popular summer tourist destinations. Summer activities involving boating, hiking, amusement parks, outdoor concerts, swimming and outdoor festivals are always a blast – but they’re also rife with the potential for accidents, drunk driving and other incidents that might trigger a lawsuit. Moreover, because tourists hail from outside the state and may have an immediate need for legal advice, you’ll have access to potential clients who don’t know anyone locally who can recommend an attorney.
How can you capitalize on summer seasonal marketing opportunities? Here are some thoughts – some that you may be able to implement for this season; others that may have to wait for next year:
- Be the summer expert. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know that ethics rules bar lawyers from labelling themselves as experts on the law, but those restrictions can’t stop you from holding yourself out on local summer events or popular tourist destinations in your area. So take a break from writing blog posts or articles about the law and instead, pen some personal pieces about your favorite area activities to circulate to travel blogs and other sites where they’ll be viewed by a wider audience. Naturally, link back to your website, and include a clever tag line in your bio about your availability to help visitors out of vacation scrapes.
- Help folks stay out of trouble. Every summer, we learn of tragic events like drownings, boating accidents, fireworks burns and drunk driving deaths. You could put together a list of safety tips for tourists that perhaps your Chamber of Commerce would circulate. Or offer area vendors a flat fee package to review their releases and warnings to customers.
- Beef Up Your Online Reviews. Today’s clients overwhelmingly want reviews – and nowhere are they more important than in attracting an out of town crowd. Several years ago, I was waiting in our local urgent care clinic, when a woman sat down next to me and asked whether the doctor was any good. I responded that he was excellent, and she explained that she was in town at a conference when she injured herself, she found the office online and after seeing more than a dozen top reviews, she decided to take a chance.
Do you have favorable testimonials online from clients at sites like Avvo, Google or Yelp? With a potential summer influx of out-of-town clients who might need a lawyer, you now have an added reason to gather reviews from past clients (assuming your state ethics rules allow that…)
What does your firm have scheduled for summer? Let us know in the comment section below.