Using Information to Market an Lnc Practice

USING INFORMATION TO MARKET AN LNC PRACTICE

PAT IYER

www.patiyer.com USING INFORMATION TO MARKET an LNC Practice

Using Information to Market a Legal Nurse Consulting Practice by Pat Iyer

These are advanced marketing techniques you may use to market your services to lawyers and law firms and get new lawyers to pay attention to you. I will also cover the process of nurturing the clients that you have to stay in front of them so that they don't call the next nurse consultant who just happened to send them a brochure.

Many legal nurse consultants market by sending out sales letters and follow with phone calls to get an appointment. In this approach, the LNC hopes the attorney will pick out him or her over all of the other LNCs who are also sending mail to the attorney. This chapter looks at the secrets of information marketing, which provides an alternative way to approach attorneys. It is based on the concept that you demonstrate the value of your services when you provide helpful information to attorneys. The techniques in this chapter take work. They are more time-consuming than doing mailings. But they work.

Work Product First and foremost, the most effective marketing strategy is to have a well written and presented work product. All of the advanced marketing secrets in this book will not do you any good if you are not excellent at your craft. You will get calls from attorneys who have seen your reports and want to hire you. When I asked a client for a comment about the importance of writing skills he said, “It’s important to remember that a report that a legal nurse consultant or expert writes, could be seen by ten or twelve attorneys over the course of the litigation. You have that opportunity to impress other potential clients with your skills.” If you’ve written that report well; it’s free of typos; it’s got great content, and it shows your analytical ability, it is marketing for you. If it’s poorly written, it’s going to turn off other people, who could be potential purchasers of your service.

2 If you need to buff up your writing skills, get Patricia Iyer, Writing Handbook for Legal Nurse Consultants at www.patiyer.com. This almost 600 page book and two DVDs give you the tools to write proficiently. I also cover this subject in Honing Your Legal Nurse Consulting Skills, at www.patiyer.com

Expertise We've built our business at Med League based on a combination of factors: my publications, success as an expert witness, the skills of the expert witnesses we provide, great customer service, a customer-oriented approach, newsletter mailings and exhibiting at trial lawyer conferences both regional and national, followed with mailings.

How can legal nurse consultant demonstrate expertise? In addition to a sample work product and marketing messages, how does the legal nurse consultant get beyond the brochure mailing and the cold-calling into other methods of marketing?

Notice Me, Notice Me! For most small business owners and legal nurse consultants who market, the marketing is sort of ad hoc. It typically is in the form of a brochure which is all about me, me, me, (that is the nurse consultant). He or she typically touts how many years they've been doing it, where they went to school and how many degrees and initials they have after their name. That style of marketing consists of the LNC just begging to be noticed and hoping when that brochure comes across the attorney’s desk, that he or she actually has a need that day. At a National Speakers Association Conference, I heard Orvel Ray Wilson, one of the people who co-authored Levinson, Smith and Wilson, Guerrilla Marketing, talk about your marketing materials. Every time you see the word "I", figure out how to use the word "you" instead. He was very adamant about get rid of the "I,"I,"I," focus.

This “notice me” approach is contrasted with information marketing, which is creating something that makes the attorney think that you are the wise man or woman at the top of the mountain. You do that by not telling the attorney all about you, but by providing information that is helpful to the attorney. For legal nurse consultants most small business marketing and advertising practices in general just are not that effective.

Apple or Allstate can spend millions and millions and millions and people will recognize your brand and your name. But if you're one of us, mom, dad, running a small business trying to make do, we really have to figure out how to get attention. We need to figure out how to really deliver a value before somebody actually needs us. When that time comes and that case comes into the attorney’s office, you want to be the only one she is thinking of. This results in more predictable success than

3 sending a brochure here or a little gadget here, or the attorney seeing you at a conference someplace where you're at a table as an exhibitor.

Recognize the Needs of Prospects Legal nurse consultants have huge knowledge about the things lawyers need help with, so how can you really position yourself as an expert? This chapter offers several suggestions of how to use the information marketing approach. For example, does your website contain the most frequently asked questions that you get from your clients versus a picture of a gavel, stethescope, courthouse, and you? By providing answers to frequently asked questions, you are saying to the market you know what's running through their heads; you know what questions they have. What you are trying to do is instantly provide the answers to those questions and give your client a way to raise her hand and tell you who she is and ask for more information.

Here is a methodology for crafting messages to your prospect. First do research. Look at every single legal nurse consultant website and brochure, booklet, whatever they have that you can find. You want to know what messages are being sent to the marketplace. Look at the common themes, and determine how you can be different. Think of your prospect’s problems. Here are three examples:

1. An attorney sitting in the office with cases, some of which involve areas of medicine, typically needs to get up to speed on a certain area of medicine. She may have a medical malpractice case and wants to know what's involved from a scientific or standard of care perspective. She has to explain that to the client in a relatively efficient way. That's the problem running through her head.

2. Another problem that might run through the attorney’s head is, "I've got all these cases and they're getting backed up. I get new sets of medical records coming in every day and I don't have time to go through them all. I can't read half of them because their handwriting is bad. The electronic medical records are a mess because all they're doing is cutting and pasting." So the second problem would be the attorney needs somebody who can take all of those off of her desk and give her something that she can read and understand and explain to an insurance adjuster and client.

3. The third big problem that preoccupies the plaintiff attorney (in particular) is, "The insurance industry and the guys I'm up against, they all have unlimited funds. They seem to have unlimited experts. I need somebody who can actually go out and do the hard work that's involved in getting legitimate expert witnesses.”

4 The attorney really does not care about your background. She does not care about your big long list of services if it isn't emphasizing one of these three problems as examples of her needs. In fact, the more services you list on the front end of your marketing, the more you shout, "I'm just very average and I'm just like everybody else." She does not really care about your guarantee. She just needs work taken off of her desk.

You can certainly show to your lawyer clients your breadth of services and your whole team later, but right now she has problems she needs solved. She is concerned about doing all of this efficiently. She knows the high costs of litigation. It does not do the attorney much good to have a legal nurse consultant track down an expert who either isn't qualified to testify or who she pays a bunch of money to and then she finds out that the doctor would never testify for a plaintiff or he hasn't done an operation in 14 years. The attorney is relying on a legal nurse consultant to solve those problems for her before they get to her because what she needs upfront is good medical information, quality experts, and someone to explain this all to her.

Marketing Materials Given the need to assure the attorney that you understand his problems, your materials should say something like, "You and I both know those medical files are piling up on your desk just waiting for you or some young lawyer assistant who doesn't know any more medicine then you to digest them. We can make it easy for you."

Demonstrate your expertise by showing what your timeline product looks like. Show the attorney that when you deliver a report it's easy to comprehend, even for a person who does not know anything about medicine. (See Patricia Iyer, Honing Legal Nurse Consulting Skills at wwwpatiyer.com for how to produce a superb work product.) The attorney knows how to tell stories, write briefs, and make arguments. The attorney can study medicine related to a specific case, but he is never going to learn as much about medicine and nursing as you know. He learns only enough to be able to tell a story.

Shift your marketing materials away from a long list of services to showing you understand how to help the attorney with medical issues – “you’ve got problems and I have answers”. This enables you to attract what we would call a tribe, a herd, a group of raving fans. Once you get them into the herd and they have a relationship with you, you will do things that make the attorney not even see the brochure that the next legal nurse consultant sends him. That’s how LNCs need to start to change their thinking about marketing, away from trying to compete by saying, "I got more initials after my name than anyone else” to “I can actually solve your problems."

5 Writing Books One of the great tools that I have discovered, as have many others, is the tool of writing and becoming an author. Since 1980, I have written, coauthored or edited 180 books, articles, online courses, chapters, or case studies. I’ve written over 500 blog posts. You hand somebody a book instead of a business card and they never throw away the book. We have gotten great responses when we have given away my book on social media. (See Patricia Iyer, Social Media for Legal Professionals: How to Gain From Its Power, at www.patiyer.com.) We gave away a Mini Buk I created called Medical Chart Bloopers. A MiniBuk is a small book that measures 3.5 by 5 inches and can vary in length from 16-64 pages. It is a convenient attractive way to share information with your market. I have plans to create more books to give away to attorneys. Learn more about crating Mini Buks by emailing me at [email protected].

A very strong emphasis in our business has been all of the books that I have written or edited on nursing malpractice, pain and suffering, nursing home litigation, and medical record analysis. You can still effectively market using these advanced techniques without the body of publications that I have. However, writing is a very credible way of getting clients. Showing that you are an expert in the subject matter is very important. Think about what expertise that you have that is unique to you and valuable to the audience that you are trying to reach.

You may complete books in a number of ways – as the sole author, the editor or the coeditor. There's really no escape from the fact that if you want to create this book and it's going to be your work that you have to look at your life and say, "How can I fit this in?" I've written books when I've had young children. I've written books when my children have grown and they've left the home, but there has to be something in your life that has to give. It's sometimes very challenging to set that priority. I worked with a co-author who didn't understand that concept and she tried to do everything. She was not willing to set aside anything in her life. She found it very stressful when she added on writing and editing chapters.

I know of people who lock themselves in a hotel room and write books and spend a weekend writing a book. I've heard of people who get up at 4:00 in the morning which I think is an ungodly hour in which to be awake. They write from 4:00 until 7:00 and then go on with their life, but it requires a lot of perseverance.

You can't write a book at one time. You write a chapter at a time or you write it a few pages at a time, but in all likelihood you're not going to be able to sit down and do it in 16 hours at a stretch unless it's a fairly limited book and you've got all the resources together. But some of my books, which have been contributed books (other people wrote some of the chapters) have had as many as 52 chapters. In that

6 situation, the editor’s role becomes guiding other people who want to participate in the process and making sure that they stay on target.

Your goal may be to have a never-ending series of books with your name on them. The more you write and the more you give people reasons to come to your website and get your books, you're getting good traffic from Google; you're establishing yourself as an authority.

If you cowrote a book with an attorney, you would give him a favor and he would owe you a favor. That pays off over the long run, so it can be a very effective way of getting a book done. You need to find author partners who see the value of completing the project and will work to get the book done.

It takes work to write. How do you create books? Know your audience and their problems; this guides you in picking topics. I did an article a couple of years ago for our newsletter that dealt with knee injuries. It just turned out that the newsletter arrived just at the time that an attorney was handling a knee injury case. So, it was just a matter of him picking up the phone and saying, “I’ve got this identical case.” He hired me to work on his case. The case paid the postage for the mailing of that newsletter.

1. Assemble books from blog posts. As discussed in Chapter 1, use the categories to collate all of the posts related to a topic. Edit and assemble them into a chapter. Your chapters could focus on working with experts, understanding medicine, screening a medical malpractice case for merit, personal injury topics, and more.

2. Get together with noncompeting legal vendors. These could be legal vendors who work with your target market or you could identify noncompeting legal nurse consultants. By non-competing, I mean people in other parts of the country, or ones who offer services you do not. They each write a chapter about their specialty. For example, if you are focusing on malpractice, what are the top three kinds of orthopaedic malpractice issues? You could assemble 10 legal nurse consultants with 10 different specialties each writing a chapter and now you've got a 10 chapter book. Each legal nurse consultant puts their own cover and their face on the front. Each person can give it away to clients and prospects. Read Patricia Iyer and Alex Brown, How to Get Published for specific tips on working with other people to assemble a book. This is available at www.patiyer.com.

3. Write one special report a month for 12 months. You can pick dissecting preexisting conditions from what went on in this accident; what are the things you need to look for. In terms of some general medicine, you can pick

7 topics like how to read lab results, what you need to know about operative anesthesia, things that are simple little primers. Provide a binder so there is a place for them to go. The attorney will not throw it away because he is expecting an update every month. It is always on schedule and now you are showing the attorney, not telling him, you're an expert. You're showing him that you are an expert in medicine. From time to time you're showing the sort of cases that you have worked on and the result that you helped the attorney achieve and you can do this without disclosing the name. Give real life examples. You are showing him case examples of how you found the golden nugget in a surgical anesthesia type case. In 12 months you've got 12 chapters now for a book and so it wasn't that hard.

The best thing that you can do is develop some sort of an educational resource that comes either monthly or quarterly with a binder that the lawyer can then put things into. And now he's got a library and guess what, it's your name on the library. You have built an iron fence around that lawyer so he doesn't succumb to just whatever the legal nurse consultant brochure of the week is that may be sitting on his desk. In this model of informational marketing, the LNC is asking, "How can I help the attorney first? How can I serve him? What are some of the things that lawyers run into and have questions about most frequently?” You step in front of the herd when you do this.

4. Interview a coauthor. Spend several hours interviewing a coauthor on her area of expertise. Use the content to create a book. I followed this method with Patricia Iyer and Alex Brown, How to Get Published at www.patiyer.com. Alex interviewed me following an outline of questions. He deviated from the questions as we went along and added more of his own. Then I added a great deal more content to the edited transcript. He added his contributions and it became a book. You can also employ a ghost writer to edit the transcripts before you touch them up.

The manuscript can be turned into two books. Both of you end up with a book; there can be two versions of it. Your couthor can put her name on the top with a different cover. Your version has a different cover and your name on top.

5. Record your presentations. Speaking at conferences is effective as a marketing tool and more effective than having a booth out in the hall because anytime you speak, you establish your authority. Have the session recorded with video, if you can arrange it. Divide the recording into segments of 2-3 minutes. (The next chapter provides more detail on how to do video recording.) At the minimum, put a digital pocket recorder, about

8 half the size of an iPod, in your pocket and attach it to a microphone. Record your voice. Get the talk transcribed, and it becomes a special report. Think about how you can make a product out of your presentation. A one hour audio recording transcribed can be 60 blog posts by someone who understands this.

6. Dictate your book. Follow an outline and dictate the content. Then get the information transcribed and polish it up. Sometimes the hardest thing is just to get started. Begin at chapter 9 just to get started and work backwards.

7. Turn your blog posts into audios. When you post stories about subjects in the medical legal field on our website, include an audio version of the article. Now you've got an audio product. Purchase inexpensive pen drives. Instead of sending food at holiday times, create a message with a couple of hours of neat audio of experts you have interviewed about different areas of the medicine. It can be slipped into the computer or burned on a CD to be listened to in the car.

All of these methods of generating content establish your authority without you saying you're great. These are terrific ways to keep the attorney interested because now it's coming to him consistently or he has subscribed to it either in writing or you're sending it by email and it's interesting. (Remember that you need to provide a way for the attorney to unsubscribe to your mailings if he is not interested in continuing.)

Give away your books to prospects and clients. When you put in the effort to create books, you will then have a stack of books of different types to share. Put a handwritten note in the books and send them to people.

Think beyond books you create to books you can buy for people. If you see something of interest, spend the money to get the book. Two of my clients were very interested in the subject matter of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Outliers. I bought the book for them and had Amazon ship it to their offices. They were both thrilled with the book. It generated much good will. Watch the media for mentions of your clients. You know maybe there's an attorney who got his name in an article. Send a book with a note: "I saw your name in (name of paper). I thought you might like this book on (fill in the topic)."

There are sources for books that are like about nine months old, so they’ve been to the book stores. Now they're on a sort of secondary list. If you go to places like BookDepot.com you can find neat books at pennies on the dollar. Buy 20 or 30 of them at a time and they just make great little surprise gifts for people. For example, 9 you have 30 lawyers that you work with regularly. Twice a year send them a cool book where you've written a handwritten note. It's powerful and even better than sending them food.

Try a few of these strategies now to see how you can demonstrate your expertise to your clients.

Source: Secrets of Expanding Your Legal Nurse Consulting Practice, available at www.patiyer.com.