A Marketing Novice

I’ll confess I’ve floundered around a bit on the best ways to market myself.  This was certainly the arena I knew the least about when I embarked upon my self-employment path, and the task I find the most intimidating.  After all, employees don’t need to market (unless that’s their job, of course) – they just need to show up and do their jobs well.  So I’ve had to take a “crash course” in educating myself about how to market my freelance paralegal business.  I’m quite sure I still don’t have this figured out, but I’ve tried to keep moving forward in marketing efforts.  I wrestle with the temptation to do nothing until I’m sure I know what to do; I'm afraid of doing it wrong.  However, I realize that is deadly.  I believe that instead when it comes to marketing, I need to do something, almost anything, to keep my momentum going.  Any of my local efforts will probably bear at least some fruit (they already have!), and I can learn from my mistakes and fine-tune my approach as I go along.

In addition to face to face networking (more on this in future posts), my current efforts are focused on a very targeted direct mail campaign.  I spent a couple of weeks writing brochure copy.  A number of friends were very helpful to me in this regard, brutally editing down my text (“honey, no one is going to read all that!”), and giving me helpful ideas about what to focus on.   I’m happy with the end result, and friends in the marketing industry have given my brochure a positive review.

I’m in the process of carefully selecting firms and attorneys who work in litigation, and who would benefit from my services.  And I’m mailing my brochures out to this list, city by city, accompanied by hand-written notes.  I’ll be at this for a while, until I’ve blanketed my target area at least once (major cities in my own and two neighboring counties).  And I've gotten some business from this effort already!  Meanwhile, I’m trying to strategize about follow-up efforts, be it a second direct mail piece, an email campaign, phone calls (a daunting thought – that would be a heck of a lot of calls!), or something else.  I realize that with my particular business model, law offices aren’t necessarily in need of my services the moment my name/brochure/business card/etc. comes to their attention.  So how do I stay on their radar, so that they remember to call me once that need arises?

Any advice?

Thanks for reading.