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Feature

posted 29 Jan 2010 in Volume 15 Issue 2

MARKETING TO ELDERLY CLIENTS

 We are an ageing population, fast approaching a staggering 65 million people in the UK, and demographically we will have more elderly clients to look after than ever before. If we are to believe statistics, we are, as a nation, 65 per cent intestate, and this presents a huge market opportunity for the preparation of wills and also the more potentially lucrative probate that inevitably follows.

   Assuming that your firm has not specialised in elderly client care in the past, there is no doubt that it will become an ever-increasing opportunity to market legal services in the future. Let’s not kid ourselves – elderly clients demand a very high level of client care and you will have to devote considerable time to their needs to ensure that your service is not only acceptable, but so is the considerable after care involved.

   Don’t assume that, just because you acted for a married couple several years ago when they purchased their home, they consider you still to be their law firm of choice:

• Have you been in regular contact with them?
• Have you encouraged them to have wills written or reviewed?
• Did you inform them about the changes in enduring powers of attorney becoming lasting powers?

In other words, have you been proactive in marketing to your aging clients in the past, keeping them informed of changes or opportunities to help them with their forthcoming retirement or helping and advising those who wished to release equity from their properties?

   Probably not, as the majority of law firms have never considered the essential aspect of marketing to this very niche and specialised market.

   There are of course, two specific markets – the high net worth elderly and the ever-growing, ageing population without pensions or any provisions for retirement.

   Let’s explore the opportunities in reverse order – if you are dealing with publicly funded work, there is a desperate, ever-increasing need to help the elderly with legal services. From Care in the Community to Help the Aged, organisations will need the support of local law firms to assist with care of our aging communities. Taking your will and probate specialists into care homes and offering advice clinics, not generally run as a seminar but as a clinic, will encourage those ageing clients that do not have a will to do so.

   Alternatively, providing a local speaker with an interesting talk sponsored by your firm will encourage a good attendance. I have known some firms to provide a musical evening with local musicians, followed by an open clinic for general legal enquiries. In other words, trying to run a seminar about why we all need a will does not work.

How good is your website?

The internet is used as much by the ‘silver surfers’ if not more than any other generation – do you have a specific section on your site dedicated to both the ageing population and the potentially elderly client? Are you using search engine optimisation to develop your proposition?

   Having a specialised niche website completely separate from your main site has huge opportunities if you can devise simple products to market. If you can productise some of these services you should not restrict your market by your geographical location. We will cover some specific productising of services later in this article.

   Growth of SAGA and other related services (is 60 the new 50?), those high net worth individuals that have purchased their own home and whose children have left further education are an exciting opportunity for the progressive thinking law firm. These ‘free spirits’ remember the feeling that they enjoyed in their youth during the freedom of the 1960s and 1970s – what are their expectations in 2010 and beyond?

   There are four key aspects to a firm’s website that must be right. These are:

• Consistent design and presentation – a good website will be consistent with the off-line brand, for example, the firm’s logo, colours and so on. Getting a letter with a boring square blue logo on and then going to a firm’s website only to find a modern, multi-coloured design sends a confused mixed message to clients;
• Current legal news content – it is no longer good enough to have a few pages of description on what the firm does and a contact page with a map (albeit this is still very important). A good website will have up-to-date content. It is often possible to buy this content in so that time is not distracted from fee-earning;
• Staff biographies – research has shown that the staff pages of a firm’s website are likely to be one of the areas of the site that people look at most. After all, ours is a people business and people like to read about people – it’s why the tabloid newspapers continue to thrive! Many firms will list ALL staff, not just fee- earners. Your elderly clients greatly value the opportunity to see and meet with a face they recognise; and,
• Website statistics – it is sensible to have some kind of web statistics package to monitor activity on the website particularly for those products targeting the elderly clients, for example, using products such as Google Analytics.

Going forward, any website must be kept current. If a member of staff leaves, ensure their profile is promptly removed from the site and, likewise, add new ones.

   The easiest way to update a website is to have it built initially using a content management system (CMS) – such changes could include a change of text on the homepage, the addition of a news story and so on.

Search engine optimisation

Although most law firms’ business comes from repeat clients, referrals and recommendations, new firms may not have a large pool of clients to support this. In such circumstances, it will be key to ensure that the firm’s website can be found easily by people who do happen to search Google for ‘solicitor, Bristol’, for example.

   Research across 200 websites has shown that over 90 per cent of people seeking a law firm are using Google to do their searching. So, for this reason, most search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques focus on what Google is looking for.

   SEO is a very broad subject, but there are four key aspects that firms will need to concentrate on to ensure that their websites will be well indexed by Google:

• Correct coding – the website needs to be built using the latest programming techniques to help ensure that it is fully indexed by Google;
• Meta tags – this is a field that is coded into each page of the website. Each page should have a different meta