Sometimes the most brilliant, black-belt in jujitsu marketing tactic you can come up with to generate more business doesn’t work out as planned.

This could be the result of poor positioning, a price point that’s off the mark, or incorrect messaging. But whatever the reason, the result is not the money-making side kick you envisioned.

Admittedly, I’ve fell victim to some of poorly executed marketing ideas myself. And sometimes–maybe because I’m a slow learner–I just can’t figure out why my great idea didn’t work.

This is the story of one such real-life strategy that failed miserably for me. But I still really, really believe someone out there could make this work, which is why I’m sharing it with you now.

My Failed Attempt to Generate Leads From Lawyers

Below is the basic premise of my failed marketing strategy along with the actual report I used to test .

Step 1: Segment Your Market

For this test, I targeted lawyers in the Fargo, ND area. I like the idea of targeting lawyers because they’re everywhere. Seriously, Google search local law firms versus Starbucks locations and you’ll see what I mean.

If you can find and apply a marketing technique that works for lawyers, you could move from city-to-city, state-to-state dominating that niche over-and-over into eternity. A great example of a company who’s doing just that right now is FindLaw.com.

Step 2: Find Lawyers In Your City or Township

There are a couple of easy ways to do this.

1.) Go old-school: Pick up a phone book to find the contact info for law firms in your area.

2.) Use Google Maps to find an abundance of lawyers and attorneys in your area. I found 325 in Fargo alone. See what I mean:

Step 3: Collect Email Addresses

Get the email address of each law firm you want to target. Most can be found in the footer or contact page of their website. Enter these into an Excel spreadsheet for improved organization and tracking.

Step 4: Create a Special PDF Report

Here’s where you really pique your market’s interest: A PDF report that exposes how other lawyers (chiropractors, doctors, tax preparers, etc.) are robbing their firm of eager clients every month through search engines like Google.

Show them monthly broad-match search volume from the Google Keyword Tool for keywords relevant to their business. In this example, stuff like “fargo lawyers” and “fargo attorneys”.

Next ask them to perform some of searches in Google so they can see first hand who’s beating them out locally.

Step 5: Open The Lines of Communication

Let your prospects know how to get in touch with you and make sure there’s a sense of urgency to the situation.

I gave the limited time for a free site analysis a try, but you will be able to come up with something better. After all, this attempt at lead gen didn’t work out for me.

You can download the “special report” I made here. Feel free to download it and tweak if you want. I converted it to Word Doc format so it would be easier to edit. (The formatting got a little messed up when I converted it back to Word, sorry about that.)

If you find a way to make this work, definitely let me know.

And with that, let me know about some of your failed attempts to develop more clients. This is a no judgment zone–at least from me anyway. I can almost guarantee I’ve had worse ideas than yours.

If you’re interested in hearing about any of these epic failures, ask away in the quotes.