Law and Justice

Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

Many of the most prominent and successful law firms are increasingly dependent on the internet and their firm’s website to bring in new clients and potential prospects. Even though there is an assortment of praiseworthy law firms that are promoted online, many consistently do not obtain a high amount of traffic to their web pages. Can one be surprised by this problem? There are virtually hundreds or more websites of reputable attorneys and law firms saturating the World Wide Web. With the variety of law groups to choose from online, how can any one firm attract more attention than that of their competitors? Law Firm Search engine marketing is the answer.

Whether you are the head of a successful law firm in New York City or have just begun a small practice in Phoenix, Arizona, search engine marketing is an important aspect of successful promotion for every serious business owner. In fact, search engine marketing is becoming so increasingly important to businesses that it’s an option your law firm may not be able to afford to ignore. The continuous advance of technology in our society is pushing more law firms of all specialties to invest more into their websites and the online marketability of their services. Search engine marketing can aid your law firm in succeeding in these two important facets of website optimization.

As you are well aware, search engines are an increasingly popular tool used by online shoppers to find the best assortment of products and services they’re looking for. Law firms fall under no exception to this to this trend and are often found by using popular search engines like Google or Yahoo. These search engines allow online consumers to search through a variety of options without having to leave home and without feeling as though they are under any obligation or pressure to buy something they don’t want. Though the extent of results listings is vast when one is looking for a lawyer, it is surprising how few consumers look past the first couple of pages in their search for anything online, including law groups and legal services. Unfortunately for the large amount of legal websites that inhabit the end results of search listings, most consumers stay within the first few pages of their search and choose from a much smaller range of options. If your law firm resides toward the caboose of the results listings, you may not get much traffic to your websites and could potentially be missing out on an assortment of new clientele.

SEO Consultants & internet marketing specialists use search engine optimization tools like key phrase research and link building, among others, to help your website reach the top of search engine results listings. With your website in the first few pages of these listings, you firm will be much more likely to experience more online traffic. Though search engine marketing techniques do not guarantee that curious website guests will become new clients to your law firm, the chances increase dramatically as consumers are able to view the services you have to offer.

Before you can effectively employ the strategies of law firm marketing, you will need to clearly understand precisely what “legal marketing” is. Many attorneys confuse “marketing” with “advertising”; in fact, the two terms are often used interchangeably. That is a mistake because they don’t mean the same thing, not at all.

When in doubt, go to the source for an explanation. Following is how Merriam-Webster defines marketing: To expose for sale in a market or to sell; to deal in a market.

No wonder so many attorneys are confused about “legal marketing”, even the quintessential word gurus are not clear on the meaning. Marketing for lawyers is like any other form of marketing and simply consists of building relationships with people and sharing with them how you can help them.

You need to be able to present clear, compelling reasons why your clients need you and your firm. That will take a little bit of homework on your part. Know exactly how the client will best benefit from your services and tell them about it. Tell them about it over and over and over again.

The failure to find and retain more clients is fundamentally a marketing failure; it truly is that simple. Here are four keys that will help you make marketing your law firm easier.

To be an effective form of legal marketing, the message and image you present must meet the following four criteria:

1. Consistency is the key to success: Once identified, continue to reinforce the same reasons why your clients need you. If you do not stay on point, you run the risk of confusing them. Repetition of your core message is essential to successful marketing for lawyers.

2. Keep it short – Keep your message short and to the point. Choose your words carefully when engaged in legal marketing; people do not have the time or interest in reading dense paragraphs. Keep it clear of legal terms and focus on presenting solutions, not a litany of your legal services.

3. Share your enthusiasm – Your belief in your law firm marketing is contagious; share the wealth! Without implementing this key component, you run the risk of getting lost in the crowd. Once lost in a crowd, it is very difficult to re-establish why you are better than the rest. Too many attorneys make the mistake of trying to appear so professional that they end up being boring. This is the most deadly marketing mistake a attorney can make.

4. Communicate at their point of need – If you are not telling them exactly what it is they need from you (what they absolutely must have that only you can provide), you will be wasting your time and energy. Marketing your law firm is different than marketing other kinds of professional services, but to build a bridge to your prospective client, you must come down out of your “ivory tower” and meet them at their point of need. Strive to connect with them emotionally as well as cognitively.

Frequently, the best answer is the simplest and it is right under our noses. Your law firm marketing strategies must be consistent, concise, compelling, and contagious. Follow this notion and you’ll see results immediately!

After a number of years of watching law firms fail and succeed, it is easy to see that there are definitely some do’s and don’t's that come with this business. There are a lot of jokes about lawyers being cutthroat in the courtroom, but what so many lawyers aren’t aware of is how early this needs to start. If you are a small firm, I believe that you need to hustle twice as hard to get somewhere as the firms that are larger, but you’ll find that you also have quite a few advantages as well. When you are looking marketing tips for small law firms, you’ll find that there are a few things that you should remember.

First, keep in mind that your small size is going to be an asset in some very real ways. People see the larger firms and they see something that is large, doesn’t have their best interests in mind and will end up charging them an arm and a leg just for being in the office. On the other hand, when they look at you, they’ll see a small family setting. Even if you and your associates are not related at all, you’ll find that you give an air of approachability.

There are several ways that you can emphasize this aspect. Make sure that you have someone who will visit with your clients looking for feedback. When you are a small firm, you can afford to give your clients a lot of one on one interaction, and you’ll find that this goes a long way. The personal touch still counts for a lot, so make sure that you make the most of it. Ive seen firms that will do things like hold barbecues or cocktail parties and answer all of their clients questions in a very friendly and personable space.

When you are looking for marketing tips for small law firms, make sure that you capitalize on the fact that you are small and that you are fluid. If your client has needs that you usually don’t cover, try to find a way to cover them. Make sure that you network with other small firms and that you can do referrals with ease and grace. You’ll also find that a certain amount of your time needs to be spent “rainmaking,” or developing new customers. I’ve seen firms that will only work on rainmaking when they are painfully aware that they need it. If you are in a situation where you really need customers, you have done something wrong, so make sure that you don’t get to this point

As a small law firm, there are simply somethings that you can’t do. You can’t handle every legal need that your client may need handled, but remember that your attitude should be that you want to help them get their problem solved. Take some time to make sure that you are in a good position to take advantage of these marketing tips for small law firms and make sure that you use them!

Incoming search terms:

Many of the most well-known and thriving law groups are becoming progressively more reliant on the internet and their company website to attract new clients. Although there are many admirable and worthy law groups that are advertised on the web, many regularly don’t receive a good amount of online traffic to their websites. The problem lies in the fact that there are practically hundreds of thousands of highly regarded lawyers and law groups that inundate the internet. With that many law firms to compete against, how can one law group in particular succeed in attracting more attention and more website traffic than the others? Many law firms are surprised to find that the best answer can be found in search engine marketing.

If you’re the head of a law firm and haven’t created a company website yet, now is the time to do so. Many consumers rely on the internet to help them find the products and services they need, and law firms are no exception to the trend. Without a company website, your firm could be jeopardizing one of its most progressive methods for attracting new clientele. After your website is up and operating, however, it may require more than simply putting up that electronic “Open” sign to attract new business to your firm. With the multitude of lawyers and law firms advertised online, it’s important for your law group to recognize the potential benefits of search engine marketing. Search engine marketing (SEM), as alluded to in its title, works to promote a website’s popularity and products on search engines like Google and Yahoo. Just as your law firm may specialize in certain areas of the law, SEM consultants specialize in marketing websites online via search engines in order to differentiate one company from another.

As you’ve probably experienced firsthand, the scope of the results that often populate a search engine can be daunting and even intimidating. Because of this many, and perhaps even most search engine enthusiasts stick to the first page when looking for products, services, or in your case, legal representation and counsel. This means that if your firm’s website isn’t ranked within those first few pages on a search engine’s results listings, it may never be seen by your prospective clients. This is what SEM consultants strive to change. Rather than simply working to make your website more appealing to those who do visit, SEM consultants use their training and expertise to attract more visitors to approach your law firm’s webpage. Simply put, regardless of how attractive your webpage may be, it still may not receive a high volume of traffic if it’s not first promoted effectively on search engines.

SEM consultants use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques such as keyword analysis and link building to push your website to the front of the pack in search engine results listings. These tools are customized to accommodate the particular needs of your law firm and can dramatically increase your chances of receiving new website traffic and new prospective clientele.

With the astounding growth of the online world, it has become absolutely necessary for every personal injury attorney to have an internet marketing strategy.

The basic idea behind law firm marketing on the internet is to be found wherever your prospects are looking. According to Pew Internet and American Life Project’s recent “Internet Impact” report, 73% of all American adults are online. That means that unless your law firm is using internet marketing to its advantage, you are missing out on an incredible amount of new business!

Consider your law firm’s target market and have a look some of the study’s more specific findings:

88% of 18-29 year-olds go online

84% of 30-49 year-olds go online

71% of 50-64 year-olds go online

80% of adults with a household income of

between $30,000 and $50,000 go online

86% of adults with a household income of

between $50,000 and $75,000 go online

91% of adults with a household income of over

$75,000 go online

The widespread adoption of the internet has made it possible for you to become more visible than ever before while also giving you the opportunity to position yourself as a personal injury lawyer that can be trusted.

In today’s world, when somebody is looking for a personal injury attorney, they no longer refer to the phone book or the local paper; they turn to search engines such as Yahoo or Google. Unless your law firm is ranked well in the search engines or has a healthy pay-per-click program, you won’t be found.

Even if somebody isn’t looking for a personal injury attorney, but simply searching for information about injuries and the law; your law firm can still be found through other methods of internet marketing, such as article marketing or blogging. These strategies will allow you to build trust in case they need a personal injury lawyer at a later time.

Another great thing about internet marketing is that it’s one of the least expensive methods for your law firm to reach its key prospects. Creating a website is a one-time fee, article marketing and blogging are free, and paying for hosting is dirt cheap. In fact, even pay-per-click campaigns can be much more affordable than offline advertising. The bottom line is this: if you’re looking for a strong return on investment, you will certainly be pleased with internet marketing!

Instead of searching for clients high and low, go where they are searching when they need a personal injury lawyer… go online!

There are marketing challenges that are unique to legal web sites. When you’re a retailer of products or you have a passionate concern that you want to blog about, you set up your web site, choose your keywords, establish as many reciprocal and back links as you can and produce content about those products.

Marketing a legal web site, however, is different. You’re selling a service, promoting relevant and up-to-date knowledge, and the language is more formal. If you want your legal web site to pull in clients, you need to engage in internet marketing and search engine optimization that cater specifically to the type of legal service you’re promoting.

Benefits of Internet Marketing for Legal Web Sites

You gain added benefits by using the right mix of internet marketing elements to promote your web site.

For instance, if your service is strictly litigation, then your web site has to deal with litigation issues and jurisprudence. The lawyers on your staff must be litigators and must be familiar with court procedure. You’ll want to include judgments released recently by the state court ? or if it’s a famous case ? by the Supreme Court.

If your specialty is business law, then your SEO strategies must be geared to commercial activities that inevitably deal with legal issues: you may want to include topics like business law, corporate taxes, social security for employees, local and international contracts, ISO standards, and recent rulings.

When a businessman surfs the Internet, he wants to be able to connect with a lawyer that can provide all the answers to his questions about his start-up business. He must be made to feel that your law firm has all the answers in one place, thus saving him the trouble and time to look at other law web sites.

To attract more visitors, your law firm web site must use specific keywords. For example, if your site is about business laws and regulations, you may want to use keywords like business law, business lawyer, contract, legal statutes, business filings, business case, business tax, etc. By using these keywords, you’re targeting the business aspect of your search.

Combine that with words frequently used in law ? contracts, litigation, rulings, legal procedures, legal agreements, statutes, etc, and you’re also targeting the legal aspect. Search engines will therefore be able to direct surfers to your web site if you have employed the right search engine optimization strategy.

Most importantly, pay attention to content. If your law firm wants to rank high among search engines, you need quality content. You will need to establish your core competencies by including articles about law that are relevant and current ? and controversial. Those articles must be accompanied by insightful legal analysis.

Virtually all of today\’s biggest law firms are greatly reliant on their internet websites to attract new clients and future prospects. Although there are plenty of commendable law groups that advertise on the internet, most of them don\’t receive a high level of traffic to their web pages. And is it any wonder why?

Thousands of websites advertising attorneys and law groups saturate the online world. So how can one in particular make themselves or their law firm more marketable online? The answer lies in search engine marketing. The internet is one of the best ways any company can acquire new customers in our technically advanced society. If you\’re interested in gaining new business via your company\’s website, consider investing in search engine marketing. Regardless of whether you are the head of a large law group of an individual lawyer looking to start your firm, search engine marketing is a crucial form of advertising and one which you may not be able to afford to overlook.

The technological advances of today\’s computer-savvy society are pushing more and more businesses of all types to pay close attention to the marketability and appeal of their customer websites. Search engine marketing can help your business succeed in both of these vital aspects. Search engine marketing, also known as SEM, can involve a multitude of technological tools to help your law firm\’s website gain popularity with potential clients.

One of the most important ways in which this is accomplished is through utilizing the skills involved with search engine optimization (SEO). SEO can include a variety of options, one of which is keyword correlation. Keep in mind that a majority of internet consumers look to search engines to help them find new businesses, services and products. As previously mentioned, there are thousands of legal web pages to choose from online, and it\’s important to make sure that your firm\’s website is seen.

This is where SEO keyword correlation comes into play. SEO keyword correlation takes into account the most popular words that could be used in searching for a law firm like yours. For example, many who look for lawyers will typically use the word \”lawyer\” in a popular search engine like Google or Yahoo.

Many consumers use even greater detail in their keywords and phrases, a demonstration of this being \”lawyers in New York City.\” Perhaps someone has experienced a personal injury and types in \”personal injury lawyer in New York City.\” Although there may be hundreds of personal injury lawyers in the Big Apple, with optimum SEO techniques, your website could be targeted toward the top of the results listings on search engines, increasing your chances of getting new contacts to your website.

In addition, SEM consultants can design for you a customizable SEO plan that accommodates the unique characteristics of your law firm. Online advertisements and promotions are another feature available that can potentially popularize your company website as well. In short, a reliable SEM company can help you get more website traffic and more potential clients.

Incoming search terms:

Marketing your law practice is one of the most frustrating aspects of running a small law firm. No one ever taught you how to market in law school and the typical lawyer marketing article in your state bar journal tells you all the things you can’t do.

Here are eleven major mistakes that personal injury lawyers make with their advertising.

1. Failing to make a decision as to what the perfect business and perfect customer look like. You can’t develop a marketing plan (or purchase advertising media such as Yellow Page ads, TV commercials or websites) without understanding where you are going. What does your perfect client look like? What do you want your law practice to look like? The correct answer to the question “why do you want to spend any money on marketing?” should not necessarily be, “more cases.” Not drawing at least a mental picture of what it is you are after with your practice is like getting on an airplane and saying “take me anywhere.”

2. Failing to accept that marketing and practice building is the most important thing you can do in your law firm – look around. Is it only the best lawyers, real estate agents, doctors in your town who get the best business? Just being a good trial lawyer, (even the best) doesn’t cut it anymore. Isn’t it frustrating to see a lawyer whose has never tried a case get better clients than you do and then brag about it later? By understanding how to market effectively you put yourself into a position to see more cases from which you can choose the ones that match your “perfect customer” profile.

3. Thinking That Copying What Other Lawyers Are Doing With Their Marketing Will Get You A Better Result. Earl Nightingale, one of the world’s foremost experts on what makes people successful, had some good advice for lawyers and other business owners who want to market their practices. He said, (and yes, I am paraphrasing) that if you wanted to learn a new skill in business, and you had no mentor or guide you could trust, that the best thing you could do was figure out what everyone else was doing and then do the opposite. What the majority does is, at best, average. So it is with marketing.

4. Ignoring the Gold In Your Files Right Now. It costs at least ten times a much to obtain new customers as to keep in contact with old clients and indeed, everyone who contacts you. Your files are filled with names of folks who know you. Those folks generally have at least 50 other friends in their “circle of influence.” (Read How to Close Every Sale, by Joe Girard.) Personal injury lawyers are happy to spend thousands on Yellow Page and TV marketing while ignoring completely those who they already have some relationship with.

5. Failing to capture the name of every new person who indicates that he/she is interested in what you have to say. Lawyers spend thousands on generating new leads (potential client inquiries) yet never market back to the cases they don’t accept. In most offices that’s MOST of the new inquiries. Yet this is a goldmine of people that you can directly market to in the future. You can’t rely on the fact that if they or someone they know needs your services or products that they will remember you tomorrow because they called you once in the past.

6. Failing to get ahead of the marketing curve. How many lawyers spend any time trying to start a relationship with a potential client BEFORE that person has a problem? Most personal injury lawyers view marketing as reactionary. That is, the relationship starts once a person is injured and they start trying to find a lawyer. How about if you offered a good reason for people to call you BEFORE they get hurt (good quality information on how to buy car insurance comes to immediate mind), BEFORE they need you. Once they tell you who they are they are inviting a conversation and giving you their permission to market to them directly and as frequently as you can afford to. If you can develop a “herd” of people that listen to you before they have need you, they won’t be looking in the Yellow Pages after they have an accident or need your product.

7. Being an advertising “victim”-most business owners think about their advertising and marketing plan the 30 minutes or so before the Yellow Page rep comes walking through the door. They don’t do any independent research or study. They follow the crowd because “it must be working or else everyone else wouldn’t be doing it.” If it doesn’t work they then take the Yellow Page rep’s advice to “buy more, and use color.” A real sign that you are an “advertising victim” is that you allow the Yellow Page rep to design your ad. This is usually a huge mistake. Think about it–the goal of the Yellow Page rep is not to make your ad beat all the other ads in the book.

8. Failure to accurately measure resultsdo this test. Ask anyone who spends a lot money on advertising exactly how much revenue is returned (ROI-return on investment) they get from a particular TV spot. Better yet, ask the folks running double truck (huge, 2 page) ads inside the Yellow Pages how much revenue those pages generate vs. the outside back cover they are also buying. They won’t be able to answer that question. Would you buy mutual fund without demanding a specific accounting of actual results? 9. Failure to develop a terrific referral system–we all know that the best clients with the best cases come from referrals and are pre-sold on you. Strange as it may seem, clients don’t always know how to refer. The lawyers who really understand marketing have figured out ways to have current friends and customers refer new consumers to them BEFORE they need an attorney. Developing good consumer information products and backing it up with an interesting firm newsletter that it consistently mailed is a terrific way to greatly expand your referral base without using high priced TV marketing.

10. Failure to Diversify Your Marketing-”one” is a very dangerous number. Don’t forget to see what other industries are doing. There are lots of media out there, for example, media not traditionally used by lawyers. While most lawyers think in terms of Yellow Pages, TV and websites, sophisticated lawyer marketers understand and also use low cost coupon media, postcards and free standing inserts. The key is to choose media that is relatively easy to test and then to measure results.

11. Trying to Win the Advertising Game by “Shouting Louder”Most injury lawyers try to differentiate themselves in print and TV media by simply spending more money to “shout louder.” This is accomplished by buying more color, more space, or more TV as spots. The two fold problem of this approach is that (1) it’s an expensive way to run a business and (2) there will always be someone who can spend more than you can.

Personal injury lawyers need to learn to “make a different kind of noise” with their marketing.