Legal Marketing & PR

Turning Your Bio into a Magnet for Business

By Larry Bodine

Smart lawyers turn their bios into a marketing magnet that generates leads, as opposed to a mere resume or a CV, which recites only your education and experience. The trick is to turn a feature of yourself into a benefit to the client. In other words, if you've done a particular activity, you need to answer the question, "So what?" If a client knows you've done something, how does that benefit them?

A "feature" is what something has, like a car with four doors or a new improved formula. A "benefit" is what it does for clients: "This car has four doors to accommodate growing families."

For example, consider a hardware-store drill. You look on the box and it tells you the volts and amps and RPMs, but what you're really buying is a hole. If you're buying lipstick, it can have a fancy formula, but what women are buying is something that makes them more attractive. And the same thing with pants. If it's got Lycra panels, what you want is to look ten pounds thinner.

Benefits bring new business

This analysis applies directly to lawyer bios. Benefits are what will generate leads for you; they are going to turn your bio into something that's going to make people call you. If you're trying to reach businesses that want to retain you for legal services, they are looking for business benefits. They want to:

• Make more money
• Keep more money
• Save time
• Cut costs
• Reduce risk
• Importantly, they want you to make them look good

If a CEO client has a troublesome issue that he must present to the Board of Directors, you can work with the CEO to put a good spin on it; you've just saved the CEO's job and made him look good. Or, if its litigation and you're working with the CEO, you want the company to look good to the shareholders. Those are the sort of benefits that clients are looking for.

If you look at a lot of attorneys' bios, you'll find few there are not a lot of distinctions or differences between them. Many partner bios begin with "Mr. Jones is a senior shareholder and is chair of the firm's corporate practice group. He has 25 years experience." So what? These are features.

Let's revise it to say....

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Full post as published by Larry Bodine's LawMarketing Blog on April 22, 2010 (boomark / email).