Your Business, Your Choices
Michelle Pippin leveraged her experience as a virtual assistant and direct response copywriter into a career as a coach and mentor for entrepreneurial women. As founder of Women Who WOW, Michelle spends her days helping business owners across the United States (and eight other countries) reach and exceed their goals.
Michelle serves up her simple but effective ways to tweak marketing that will make a huge impact for small businesses—entirely on their terms.
Write Your Own Script for Success
Taking charge of your marketing strategy can mean the difference between intentional growth and treading water to get by. Driven by her own journey, Michelle is on a mission to help small businesses write their own scripts and custom-create success.
Michelle offers this analogy for entrepreneurs:
“My dad’s a builder. We live on the Outer Banks and his houses make it through every storm because he has solid construction. And I realized that in business, regardless of industry or how many years you’ve been doing it, the same principles of solid construction apply.”
You can build your business any way you want as long as you focus on solid construction first.
6 Ways to Simplify Marketing for Your Small Business
Once you have built your business, you can make your business engine run on whatever you want to feed it. Whether you’re sending direct mail or running multiple social media accounts, once you’ve established a strategy that works, you’ve struck marketing gold.
As a direct response copywriter and former direct mail marketer herself, Michelle is familiar with how much hard work marketing requires. Luckily, she’s also discovered some gold nuggets of wisdom that can be used for marketing regardless of industry.
1. Cut out the fluff.
Don’t worry about being present on all of the marketing channels. You’re just one person, not a team! Instead, start by mastering one channel. Get that channel working well and use it as the foundation for your marketing rather than spreading yourself too thin trying to do everything at once.
2. Look at what everyone else is doing…and do something else.
Don’t fall into the trap of trusting a “business guru” with one “surefire” way to help your business grow with marketing. If you do, you’ll end up with a standardized playbook that’s just like every other business. Create your path instead of following the masses. Consider where your audience is and how you want to reach them, and build a marketing plan around those pillars.
3. Take your time before scaling.
While Michelle is the first to tell you she’s all about scaling, she’ll also warn you that you need something to scale first. Before you start worrying about scaling, make sure you have a process in place that’s already working for bringing paid clients through the door. Otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for big losses.
4. Close the gap between seller and buyer.
Attorneys should always be in conversations that attract clients in some capacity. As a small solo firm, this might mean a lot of one-to-one conversations to build relationships and networks. As you grow and scale, this will likely shift to one-to-many conversations (such as through newsletters, emails, social media, and blogs) since you don’t have time to interact with every potential lead. Use your conversations to remove sales friction by answering common buyer questions, showcasing your authentic self, and providing value to audiences.
5. Get creative.
Michelle shared a story with us about a female attorney who works solely with fathers seeking custody of their children. By organizing meetups for fathers in this situation, she was able to reach her audience at a low cost while nurturing relationships with potential clients.
As a solo practitioner, you’re only limited to your imagination! It might seem like having a big budget and tons of time would be the best-case scenario for your business, but it can be a hindrance. Without those luxuries, solo attorneys get creative instead of using the same prescriptive playbook that bigger firms are using.
6. Stay in conversation with your market.
Staying in conversation with your market should be easy if you love what you do. It’s okay to keep the conversation short and fun, even as a professional. Remember: not everything has to be a dissertation! You might share a tip or a story with your audience, or even just a word of encouragement.
Create Messages that Wow
If you’re a woman entrepreneur in law looking for resources to grow your small business without compromising on what matters most to you, check out Michelle Pippin’s episode of Solo de Facto here.
Where do you keep your list of usernames and passwords? How easy is it to share them with team members and new hires? How often do you forget a password and find yourself going through the tedious reset process?
Meet Carol, one of our Senior Legal Intake Specialists!
It’s easy to lose track of how long it’s been since you last spoke with a client. You’re working around the clock on cases, and you know you’re doing everything you can for them.
Are your clients are constantly calling you or your office (and maybe driving you a little crazy) just to ask for an update on their case? That’s not a great sign.
From the first day that you work with a client, make sure they know when they will hear from you next. Consider setting up a regular check-in schedule. Depending on the nature of their case, you could set up weekly or monthly check-ins. For example, let your client know that you’ll send them an email every Friday with an update. If you have information to discuss, you could even include a scheduling link in the email for your client to schedule a meeting with you!
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