2 minsI want to share an insight with you about your contact list that you may not be aware of.
And that is, most of them will never know the real you. They'll never know the real you in the way your friends, family, and possibly even your closest VIP referral partners know you.
This is important to understand.
Let’s say you’ve done some kind of marketing already - maybe SEO, pay-per-click, newsletters, networking meetings, etc. Think about the image someone may have of you that’s never actually met you in person. They don’t know the real you. They can’t. There isn’t enough time in the day to successfully get to know all of those people you market to on a personal level.
So what this boils down to in terms of marketing is who you are to them.
We have to do some basic analysis and carefully think through what we are communicating to our contacts to start building a relationship with them. Because who they think you are can only be based on what they've seen - and if they haven't seen enough, they don't really view you as a real person.
A lot of marketing is unidirectional - because you’re giving them information about yourself, not the other way around. The information you communicate is what they’ll use to build an image of you in their heads.
For every communication in your marketing, you want to ask three questions.
- What must they know?
- What must they believe?
- What must they feel?
There’s probably a fair number of you reading this and calling BS. "Feel"? Why does that matter?
You might believe that lawyers get hired based on skills, technical know-how, and intelligence. You might believe the image you market has no bearing on whether or not you get hired.
It’s a very typical lawyer belief. It’s also very wrong.
People don't hire the best lawyer. They can’t really know if you're the best lawyer until you're in the thick of things. But what can they know? They can know certain facts about you. They can believe things about you. They can feel things about you.
These factors will get you hired more than technical skill and expertise. Now I'm not saying you shouldn't demonstrate expertise. You absolutely should. We have a duty to be experts and get the best results we can for our clients. But if all you do is demonstrate expertise and don’t pay attention to who you are to them, you're going to miss a huge percentage of the value in creating this kind of relationship in an automated way.
You always need to be thinking about who you are in the minds of the people you market to.
