Welcome to LawyerCastingTM, a new blog from eLawMarketing (edited by attorney/Internet marketer Joshua Fruchter) covering "best practices" in online marketing for lawyers and law firms, including websites, blogs, podcasts, webcasts, email marketing and much more!
Read the posts below and in our archives to learn all the latest tips and strategies for using the Internet to market your law firm and develop new business. Enjoy and prosper!
In recent years, law firm websites have emerged as a primary point of contact with prospective clients. For law firms that take advantage of the right technologies, websites can become an extremely efficient platform for maximizing lead generation. In essence, the website becomes a hub for marketing and business development activity.
MarketingSherpa recently published a chart illustrating key components of an effective website management strategy that can help realize the marketing potential of your firm's website. These components (adapted for law firms) include:
A recent Forbes study found that the number one online marketing tactic for generating sales online was search engine optimization (SEO). There was some discrepancy concerning the second most effective tactic: smaller marketers preferred email newsletters, while larger companies preferred pay-per-click advertising (with email marketing being a close third). While law firms don't close sales online, but simply generate leads, the article highlights the importance of making sure your firm has a strong SEO and email marketing program.
There often comes a time when for branding or other reasons, a law firm may choose to change the domain of its website. Or perhaps a lawyer wants to relaunch his or her blog on a new domain. If you don't manage the process correctly, you could end up losing a good deal of the "reputation" you've previously built up for your website or blog on Google, as well as create "page cannot be found" errors when people click on inbound links that led back to pages on your old website or blog that are no longer there.
Here's a helpful blog post from Google on best practices when moving your website or blog to a new domain.
MarketingSherpa recently published a chart which purports to illustrate that the quality of leads generated by search engine marketing is far more important than the quantity of leads. Frankly, I can't make heads or tails of the chart; maybe some of our readers can help out here.
Anyway, while the point of the chart seems quite obvious, we've previously written here and here about how lawyers struggle with measuring ROI from online advertising. Specifically, a lawyer may think his or her online ads are a big success because they are bringing in alot of leads, but how many of those leads are ultimately converting into clients? Is the lawyer even covering his or her costs in terms of the cash expense of the ads, as well as the time spent sifting through the leads, and responding to inquiries? Clearly, a more "scientific" approach than simply counting the "number of leads" is needed to measure true ROI.
Also, as the MarketingSherpa article notes, more targeted ad copy and landing pages are critical in terms of filtering out bad leads. It's crazy to throw away money on ads and then skimp on the quality of the landing pages to where clickthroughs are directed (or even not have any landing pages at all).
A panel of SEO experts convened at Search Marketing Expo shared research and their own personal views on what SEO tactics work, and which don't. Highlights from the aimclear blog:
A recent AdAge article recently highlighted how Twitter is turning into a boon for local businesses that are able to alert followers to deals when they're in position to act on them. While this model may not work for law firms selling services, the equivalent might be providing quick answers to "tweeted" questions of a local nature (that is, responding to questions relevant to a local jurisdiction such as a child support question related to New York). Tie in GPS technology that would allow users to quickly locate local businesses on the same device from which they are Twittering, responding to a Tweet could bring a potential client in the door within minutes.
Any thoughts on how Twitter might become a killer app for small, local law firms would be appreciated.
We've recently opined that, on Twitter, the quality of your followers is more important than the quantity. In a similar vein, it's certainly arguable that just because someone has thousands (or even tens of thousands) of followers doesn't mean they are necessarily more "intelligent," "wise" or "witty" than someone with only a few hundred followers.
In fact, more often than not, people are able to amass thousands of followers not because they regularly make particularly intelligent observations, but because they spend an enormous amount of time clicking the "follow" button for as many people as possible. The hope is that the people they follow will reciprocate and "follow" them back -- thereby boosting the number of their own followers. It's almost like a Ponzi scheme - click "follow" as much as possible, which increases the number of your own followers, and so on.
Truth is, nobody can follow the Tweets of thousands of people a day. You'd need an army of assistants to keep track - let alone to respond to - so many Tweets each day (assuming this was even a worthwhile endeavor). This only reinforces the point that many people follow other people not because they are interested in what they have to say, but solely because they are seeking reciprocity to boost their own following (and ego?).
What really drove home this point today for me was when I decided to follow a particular individual with an interesting Twitter name, and surprise surprise, they decided to reciprocate and follow me back. But when I received the email confirmation of their reciprocity, I noticed something shocking that had earlier escaped me - this individual had 674 followers even though they had posted exactly zero updates. Yes, that's right - zero updates - they hadn't contributed a single "tweet" and still had 674 followers. How? You guessed it - because they were following 1729 people. In other words, all of their followers were obtained due to reciprocity. Wow!
Which brings me to the Twitter ratio...
Continue... "What is the Twitter Ratio and Why Twitter Should Display It in People's Profiles" »
Google software engineer Matt Cutts has been collecting questions submitted to Google and answering many of them on video in the Google Webmaster Central Channel on YouTube. We highly recommend these educational - often entertaining - videos featuring Cutts' responses to questions posed by webmasters around the world hoping to please the Google spider with optimized website and blog code and URL's.
Some sample questions:
For the next 48 hours only, my colleague Paula Black is offering a collection of FREE bonus downloads from leading legal marketing experts to anyone who purchases her latest book: “The Little Black Book: A Lawyer’s Guide To Creating A Marketing Habit in 21 Days.”
Designed to help lawyers integrate marketing into their daily lives, the "Little Black Book" is a step-by-step guide to building new law firm business through powerful marketing techniques. And by purchasing it within the next 48 hours you will receive special access to information and resources from more than 30 legal marketing experts, including Larry Bodine, Arnie Herz, Ari Kaplan, Ed Poll and Tom Kane.
Hear what one law firm partner had to say about Paula's book:
Douglas L. Waldorf, Jr., Esq., Shareholder at Henderson Franklin.
Paula is an author and coach with more than 20 years of experience in marketing, branding, and positioning. She has worked with law firms ranging from 1 attorney to 1,000, and has, like me, made it her personal mission to give lawyers the tools they need to succeed in today’s world.
Autoresponders are among the most powerful tools an email marketer has to build relationships with new subscribers and turn them into customers. Illustrating the point is a recent MarketingSherpa case study showing how a small mom-and-pop real estate brokerage firm used email autoresponders to make money in one of the worst real estate markets in the country.
The case study holds important lessons for law firms pursuing "niche" markets (e.g., bankruptcy clients, estate planning clients, fleeced investors, etc.) who might also want to consider sequential email marketing campaigns to nurture relationships with clients and other contacts.
According to the case study, husband and wife real estate team Kurtis and Cindy Squyres had been successfully flipping houses in Southern California until the real estate market crashed. In dire straits, the couple hit on the idea of selling fixer-uppers to investors searching for distressed properties. They would seek out such properties, such as bank-owned foreclosures, get the house under contract at a low price, then re-sell the contract to another investor in exchange for a finder’s fee. The question was how to find buyers to whom to flip the properties. The pair decided to try and build an email newsletter subscription list of potential investors who trusted their expertise and to whom they could promote the latest deals they had to offer. Here's the multi-pronged, multimedia-based strategy they followed to successfully build their list and promote their properties.
Continue... "How Law Firms Can Use Email AutoResponders to Nurture Client Relationships" »
The goal of law firm email marketing is to get your emails read by your clients and other contacts. ClickZ recently published a helpful article ("How to Get Your Mail Past the Inbox Bouncers") discussing the main obstacles you need to overcome to reach that objective.
The first hurdle is technical - getting your emails into subscriber inboxes instead of relegated to their junk folders. The best way to avoid getting filtered is to maintain a "clean" email reputation. As we've stressed in the past, this means securing a private IP address unsullied by the email marketing practices of other accounts, and getting your email authenticated so the mail servers receiving your emails know you are a legitimate sender. As ClickZ explains:
"once a receiving mail server verifies your identification through authentication, it applies what it knows about your sender reputation (mainly, how many spam complaints your e-mail generates) to determine whether to send your e-mail to the bulk folder, the inbox, or the virtual wastebasket. Unauthenticated e-mail is more likely to be rejected or sent to a bulk folder."
ClickZ recommends using multiple authentication protocols, including SPF, Sender ID, and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to ensure your email message will get verified no matter which authentication protocol the receiving mail server uses (download our Advanced Deliverability brochure to learn more about our authentication solutions for law firm marketers).
The likelihood of reaching subscriber inboxes is also maximized if your company's "reply" email address is added to client address books (also known as Safe Sender or VIP lists). To encourage this, include a short message in your email header asking recipients to add your reply email address to their address books. An additional benefit of getting added to address books is that the images in your emails may be displayed by default instead of blocked.
Once you reach the inbox, the second hurdle to clear is to get your emails opened and read, instead of deleted. This is a branding issue.
Continue... "How to Get Law Firm Email Newsletters Delivered, Opened and Read" »
There are many Twitter users who seek to maximize the number of "followers" tracking their Tweets. While this may be a useful strategy for stroking one's ego, when it comes to nurturing relationships with the potential to evolve into new business, the quality of one's followers is more important than the quantity.
Corbett Barr recently provided some tips on the TwiTip blog on how to build a high-quality Twitter following. In a nutshell, Barr recommends the following:
Continue... "3 Tips to Develop a Quality Following on Twitter" »
With 78% of the total U.S. Internet audience now watching online videos, according to a recent comScore Video Metrix report, online video has become a viable marketing channel . A recent post on Search Engine Land analyzing the promotional efforts on YouTube on behalf of the new Transformers movie offers some tips useful to law firms as well.
First, from a search engine optimization standpoint, marketers should submit their video files to numerous video sharing sites (rather than limiting oneself to YouTube).This maximizes exposure and opportunities for boosting brand awareness. There are tools available for submitting video files to multiple sites simultaneously that we make available as part of our online video service for lawyers.
Make sure that the text accompanying the video employs keywords relevant to your target audience. Keywords can be used in the video title, description, and even the file name and URL. The right keywords can help videos rank more highly in search engine results generated by target audiences.
When linking to your video from other sites, make sure to use keyword-rich anchor text.This tactic also helps improve the search engine ranking of your videos since Google uses the keywords in a hyperlink to determine the subject matter of the destination page.
And in the video itself, make sure to end with a call-to-action (e.g., website URL, landing page URL, 1-800 number). In this way, viewers are given a way to further engage with your firm once the video is over.
Came across a blog post from Return Path (an email reputation company) that offered tips on how email marketing can help a company be more green. The options include switching from print to email for communications like financial statements, catalogs, and coupons.
And law firms? Replace print newsletters with email newsletters or Flash alternatives.
Consider converting your print brochures to electronic format.
Cut down on pollution by encouraging, where possible, remote webinars and meetings that don't require travel.
Any other ideas?
Earlier this year, ProBlogger published a post discussing strategies for driving traffic to, and building a loyal readership for a new niche blog. We think it's a great resource for lawyers starting out with a new blog who either want to "own" their niche, or perhaps simply enhance their reputation for expertise among their peers and the media.
The first sentence says it all: "[t]he best way to build traffic for a new niche blog is to have lots of content and to post it regularly." Well, there's a bit more to it than that.
Continue... "How to Drive Traffic to a New Niche Law Blog" »
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