In this week’s edition of Thing I Wish I Knew, Joleena Louis, shows us the favorite tools she uses to market her solo practice.
Recently I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the tools I use for my email campaigns and social media posts.
Like many solos I’m always busy, so I’ll try anything that can save me time.
Here are my 6 favorite tools for marketing my solo practice:
1. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is email marketing software that helps you create, design, and send professional email newsletters and marketing campaign. It’s free for email lists with less than 2,000 subscribers, although you have to pay to send automatic emails. I’ve had a profound increase in leads since I started using Mailchimp and focusing on my email list.
2. Canva
Along with Mailchimp, Canva has completely elevated my marketing. Although I’m proficient in Photoshop and InDesign they can be very time consuming to use, which discouraged me from regularly creating custom visual content. Canva, and the included templates, is a super easy way to create professionally branded social media images, infographics and slide decks.
3. Trello
Trello is a project management collaboration tool. While it has many uses for teams, I’ve found it very useful as an editorial calendar for a solo. And the best part is it’s free.
4. Buffer
Being active on social media is time consuming, but Buffer makes it easy. Instead of spending 20-30 minutes a day posting to social media, I can schedule my posts for the entire week in less than 20 minutes. Whenever I come across something interesting to share, I just add it to my queue so I alway have fresh content.
5. SumoMe
SumoMe is a WordPress plugin that helps increase leads and conversions on your site. From collecting emails to making posts tweetable, this tool makes people stay on my site longer and increased the amount of email sign ups a get each week.
6. Facebook Ads
I fought against paying for any sort of advertising for a long time, but after testing out Facebook ads, it’s a great fit for my practice. I love the ability to narrowly target your audience and to set your budget as low as $5 a day. I used it to advertise my child support workshop and I got great results even though the ad only ran a few days. I plan to do a lot more with this in the next few months.
Now that I have the hang of it, using these tools I can plan out my social media and marketing for the entire month in about an hour. And, other than Facebook ads, you can use them all for free.
What are your favorite tools for law firm marketing? Comment below and tell us your thoughts.