From May 13th thru May 22, 2009 321Punch made an open request for people to send in their online marketing questions. We reached into our own email database, the socials as well as Craigs List to get the word out. We received 167 questions in response. Below are some of the questions and our answers…we’ll be adding more as time permits.
Question #167
Q: Being part of a law firm specializing in loan mods and litigation, how would we beat out all the “non legal, regular loan mod” companies out there?
A: When we are looking to “beat out” those that may be crowding our space we have to ask this question from the standpoint of the end user—aka your audience—aka your customer. What does your customer need you to do in order to beat out other companies? Well, for one, what makes them choose one one firm over another? I do believe the answer is expertise. So then it follows, if you can demonstrate your expertise to your audience, then they will choose you. How do you do this? The answer is you must show them not just tell them. How do you show your audience your expertise? This is accomplished in 3 ways:
- Produce a short series of online videos that answer, specifically answer, one or more questions that you are commonly asked about your firm. You can start with one video, or two or 10, but the point is, create the videos inexpensively, professionally and directly answer the question for the viewer…”what’s in it for me?” (my shameless pitch here is that we’re really good at this).
- Unchain your video series from your website. Your website has a fraction of the traffic that Youtube, Revver and the like have…so get your videos uploaded and indexed by those sites using keywords that help you OWN your category for searchers. What happens next is Google indexes those uploaded videos and they become part of the Google inventory. What’s more is that Google sees video with greater relevance than just text. So it’s possible (and we’ve proven it) that you can leapfrog over sites that have been online longer, simply by getting your video distributed to many different websites. I’m not talking here about just shooting a video in your living room and uploading that to Youtube…we’ve tried that. It doesn’t work. It’s a little more involved than that…but it’s worth every single step.
- Create a landing page, separate from your website…and use that to build your mailing list by making compelling offers to people so they opt-in and thereby give you their email addresses. People find out about your landing page because you splash the URL for this landing page along the bottom of your video. They can’t help it. If your video is compelling enough, they will go to your landing page. Why a landing page and NOT your website? Because websites are distracting from the one thing you need prospects to become…customers. Make them an offer they have to opt-in to get… For example one of our customers does a coupon. You opt-in, a coupon gets emailed to you. Another customers gives away books, free audio downloads and the like. What works in your market? What’s compelling? Use that.