I am a small business owner, a law firm owner, and I love it. It is challenging, rewarding, scary, exciting, crazy, and terrible, and those are all the feelings I take in by lunch time. But there is one thing that I think about every day that I know I must do in order to be successful – and that is concentrate on law firm marketing.

See, when you open a business, you learn one thing very quickly, if you don’t have customers (or clients) you not only aren’t working, but you aren’t eating. So it’s important to come up with a law firm marketing plan that helps you reach out to people, to let you know you exist, to let them know what you do, and to let them know how they can get in touch with you when they need your help.

So, today, I’m going to give you the best law firm marketing advice ever. And it really boils down to just four simple words – work your former clients. If you are an attorney, then you know that marketing your law firm is difficult because of the restrictions placed on what we can do. First, we can’t cold call people or really reach out to people without having them contact us unless we do it in a very specific way. And second, we can’t offer referral incentives to people to send us business. That means we have to get a little creative.

That means working your former clients to get you new business. When you have a former client, you aren’t restricted from talking to them and communicating with them about your services – they already know you. And, though you can’t offer them incentives to refer, you can offer their referees incentives, and make it a point to acknowledge any referral in such a way that the person making the referral feels special for doing so.

So this is what I do as part of my law firm marketing plan. First, every month I send out a card to all of my former clients. It’s got business cards, one piece of helpful advice, and a reminder that if they refer someone to me the new client gets an automatic 10% discount on services. Everybody likes to be someone that knows someone, and this allows them to do that. For me, its “Oh, you need a criminal defense attorney, I know this guy, he’s really good, and we’re close. If you tell him I sent you you’ll get 10% off the fee straight away.” People like to be able to do that.

And second, when I get referrals from clients, I immediately send them a handwritten thank you card and put them into my “most important client list.” They get the good Christmas gifts at the end of the year.

Marketing any business is tough. Marketing a law firm is tougher. Follow this advice though, and you are guaranteed to see your business increase.