Want clients? Be helpful and do good

Reflecting on Avvo’s Internet mar­ket­ing con­fer­ence for lawyers, Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog writes:

I started on the Internet at AOL. I answered people’s injury, med­ical mal­prac­tice, and worker’s comp ques­tions. The more ques­tions I answered, the more work our firm got and the more suc­cess­ful we became. The more I lis­tened to oth­ers and the more engaged I became, the more I enjoyed myself and the more peo­ple who con­tacted me to help them.

I dis­cov­ered that Internet mar­ket­ing was not all about me. It was about what I, as a lawyer, could do to help other peo­ple. Rather than buy­ing cheesy yel­low page ads and run­ning expen­sive TV ads, I could get good legal work by help­ing people.

via For lawyers is the world really all about Google rank­ings? : Real Lawyers Have Blogs.

The les­son that good con­nec­tions with peo­ple — aris­ing from pro­vid­ing good qual­ity con­tent on a blog, help­ful com­men­tary in forums, use­ful infor­ma­tion and replies on Twitter, to name just three exam­ples — is the core of effec­tive mar­ket­ing is often lost.

You might call this “un-​​marketing” or “non-​​marketing” to dis­tin­guish it from fran­tic SEO, blar­ing bill­boards, or extrav­a­gant ban­ner ad pur­chases. It’s decep­tively sim­ple: go out and help peo­ple, and clients will find you.

Taking this kind of approach does not mean fore­go­ing an online pres­ence. How can you put your­self out there and be help­ful if you don’t join Twitter, don’t blog, and don’t con­tribute to forums? And once you start seek­ing out peo­ple to help, how can they and oth­ers find you later if you aren’t on LinkedIn or don’t have your own Web site?

Whatever you call it, the core mes­sage is to be help­ful and do good, and the clients and cus­tomers will seek you out in return.

As a do-​​gooder, SEO, ad buys, and sim­i­lar strate­gies should be done to be help­ful. That is, such strate­gies should make it eas­ier for peo­ple to find you, and for you to be help­ful in return. They are sec­ondary strate­gies, not pri­mary ones.

For a do-​​gooder, pri­mary strate­gies involve get­ting out there and pro­vid­ing util­ity to oth­ers: answer­ing ques­tions, being a resource, advo­cat­ing posi­tions you believe in, shar­ing your expe­ri­ences and knowledge.

Doing good and being help­ful isn’t a new mar­ket­ing strat­egy. It’s just an old way of show­ing the world your worth, updated for new medi­ums. It takes Google’s “don’t be evil” and goes one bet­ter: go do good, and the clients will come (just don’t for­get to make it easy for them!). It takes “add value” and takes it fur­ther: go be helpful!

Has this kind approach worked for you? Have bet­ter ideas? Think it’s crazy? Let me know in the com­ments.