Marketing via Product Markets
Various products can be your greatest marketing billboard on the road to success. “Productizing” your practice—creating tangible items or products based on the service that you already provide and then using them to help your whole practice grow—is an excellent way to leverage what you’re already doing to grow your practice and increase your revenue.
Products are great marketing tools. In today’s competitive legal environment, lawyers need all the marketing help they can get. Creating and selling products provides that by making your service more tangible and promoting you and your practice. You are limited only by your imagination when it comes to what can be created, although the bulk of items produced by lawyers tends to fall into only a few categories. Specific products being successfully produced by lawyers around the country now include articles in publications, newsletters (both hard copy and electronic), books, seminars, surveys, audiotapes and videotapes.
Products increase your credibility and solidify your position as an expert. In addition, by creating products, you expand your clients’ knowledge. When clients read your books or articles, listen to your tapes, or attend your seminars, they are exposed to more ideas and, as a result, have more questions to ask. And the more questions they have, the more they will come to you for the answers. Furthermore, selling products can increase your revenue can also increase your revenue. Finally, with products, you create a tangible legacy for your family and children. Products can be seen and touched; there’s something more there than just the intangible result of doing good work for a client.
Of course, creating products can take time away from a lawyer’s primary activity. But so does every other form of marketing and business development. The question is whether the activity will produce positive results. There are many examples of lawyers who have successfully increased their legal practice and ancillary project revenues. Who knows? If you’re really successful, practicing law might become your second business.
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