By Officense, An MSBA Affinity Partner

For years solo firms have been unable to compete with big budget marketing campaigns from larger competitors. Fortunately, today, small firms can easily use many abundant free data collection tools to take advantage of local and niche targets through better audience segmenting. Use this helpful guide for ideas on how to leverage freely accessible client data to create a more numbers driven marketing plan for your practice.

Common Mistakes

You may think of marketing and advertising in dated, Mad Men–esque terms. In the current online landscape filled with oversaturation of advertising, no matter how creative a catch phrase or slogan, it will be worthless without the necessary insights to reach your specific audience. With audiences growing ever more segmented by the year, choosing where to focus attention becomes extremely important. While messaging is still impactful, it is no longer the driver it once was and must always be backed up by clear demographic targeting and solid audience data.

As a solo practice, you may think there is no way to keep track of all this customer information or form a detail profile necessary to shape your marketing campaign. You may also feel the time you will need to invest to track every call and lead is simply not worth the hassle. Many solo practice owners are simply overwhelmed with the number of available advertising tools and CRM options, and are unable to determine where and how to spend their valuable marketing dollars.

The good news is you do not need to undertake the task alone.

The Solo Practice Solution

While you probably can’t afford to go out and hire a professional marketing company, you can use MSBA resources to partners to help inform your advertising decisions. Officense is a trusted MSBA Affinity Partner and exclusive member benefit who offers lead tracking and call answering services designed for attorneys. There are many ways to track data and become more informed through the administrative services offered by Officense, and all are affordable to any solo attorney.

Take a look at some of the ways we can better inform your marketing decisions through our phone and lead tracking processes:

• Have our staff compile a marketing log with all sources of new business inquiries broken out by lead channel.
• Have inbound calls integrated with your CRM system and customer data input for each caller.
• Have Officense staff survey customers on each call with direct questions about their experience, background, or specific product interest.
• Collect inbound call lead’s email addresses to re-target through an email marketing campaign.
• Have our staff track customer zip codes and area codes so you can target new business using geographic data.

How to Begin

The easiest way to begin focusing your marketing efforts and targeting a specific audience is by simply collecting contact information. Maybe you are currently answering your own phones and forget to collect all information for every call. Instead, have our executive assistants answer your calls to ensure every bit of information is collected. This phone, email, and address information can easily be converted into a direct mail or email campaign down the road or used to create a customer profile to target unique geographic areas.

With the proper support and help from the MSBA and Officense, you will be collecting the right information and can use this data to inform your marketing decisions. No longer will you be unable to compete with larger companies and have to depend on your gut when deciding how to advertise. Instead, you’ll know exactly who your customers are, where they live, what they do for a living, and what first attracted them to your business.

Stop wasting time and money on ads that reach the wrong audience. Take advantage of all the services available through your MSBA membership, including a 10 percent discount on all Officense services.