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!
Happy holidays and New Year to all of our readers - we're back in action after a month-long hiatus (very busy December! Sorry we fell off people's radar screens!).
It's unfortunate that so many law firms are ignoring online video - it offers so many opportunities to creatively promote a firm.
As but one illustration, play the video below produced by a hospital in Portland to promote breast cancer awareness. Dubbed the "Pink Glove Dance," it has become a YouTube sensation (viewed over 5 million times!), no doubt garnering much positive publicity for both the hospital (even if only as a great place to work!), and the cause of breast cancer awareness. I can envision a law firm, say, producing a video about "going green."
For any law firms or lawyers that want to take the plunge into online video in 2010, we've partnered with a video production firm - we can handle directing, lighting, editing, etc. - download our online video brochure to learn more.
Enjoy!
In an effort to find cost effective ways to dialogue with customers and prospects, businesses are continuing to increase spending on email marketing. A chart recently published by MarketingSherpa showed that a substantially higher percentage of companies across multiple industries increased their email marketing budgets rather than decreased them.
The reason for this trend is that email marketing has an established reputation for delivering a strong ROI. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email's ROI in 2009 was $43.52 for every dollar spent on it!
Law firms should be encouraged by these trends to continue investing in email marketing campaigns that reinforce their expertise with clients, referral sources and other contacts.
Faced with a difficult economic environment, many solo practitioners and small law firms have slashed their marketing budgets. Indeed, I recently spoke with an attorney practicing in a specialized niche that is currently doing poorly - shopping centers - who declined to invest in a blog because "times are tight." I told him I thought this was a big mistake, and advised that the right time to invest in a blog was when business is slow and he had "downtime" to spend researching and writing posts. Over time, the blog posts would reinforce his expertise and reputation for thought leadership in the area of shopping center law, and thereby help him develop a readership of prospective clients that could convert into new business when the real estate industry turned around.
Happily, this advice was recently corroborated in an article on eMarketer, which dicussed a report showing that increasing marketing spending in a downturn can help a company prosper when the economy improves. According to the report (from Hurwitz & Associates), there is a correlation between small businesses that had raised marketing spending and businesses that expected increased revenue. The lesson? You need to spend money to make money.
That is not to say, however, you need to spend lavishly. The report also found that small businesses are shifting marketing spend to less costly online marketing tools such as social media, e-mail newsletters and search engine strategies.
It's well-established that blogs are a great way for lawyers to promote their expertise, and to create keyword-rich content for search engines. But managing a law firm blog with multiple attorney contributors can pose challenges. An excellent recent case study on MarketingSherpa explored how one small accoustical consulting firm got eight of their engineers to begin contributing on a regular basis to a blog that now accounts for more than 50% of natural search-generated visits to the firm's website. Since this consulting firm sells expertise (to architects, building owners, etc.), their step-by-step tactics are useful for law firms.
In a nutshell, here are the steps that the firm followed (to read the full case study entitled "Create and Manage a Team-Authored Blog: 8 Steps to Reap SEO Gains" visit MarketingSherpa; subscription required for access):
Step #1. Establish a goal for the blog
The firm settled on two primary goals for the blog: (i) to educate readers about major issues in the acoustical engineering
industry, and thereby position the company as a thought-leader without being excessively self-promotional, and (ii) to create a new source of keyword-rich content to complement the SEO strategy for their website.
Step #2. Develop keyword lists to incorporate into blog posts
The company developed a list of their target audiences -- architects, engineers, building owners, and attorneys -- and then identified the different phrases used by each group to describe their
acoustical consulting needs. The blogging team also developed keyword lists of different phrases
associated with their major industry sectors, such as: healthcare, auditoriums, industrial, education and worship.
Continue... "Developing a Team-Authored Blog at Your Law Firm" »
Rather than competing, seems email and social media are complementary tools. According to a recent Marketing Sherpa survey, about 80% of marketers agree that sharing email content on social media sites "extends the reach of email content to new markets," and "increases brand reputation and awareness." So it makes sense to embed social sharing tools within your email marketing campaigns (similar to how the "forward to a friend" option has long been included in emails).
See the chart below then click here to read more about the survey.
Do You Agree or Disagree That Social Sharing...
Let's face it. We are always looking for efficient and quick ways to assemble email marketing campaigns. One of the most common shortcuts is the copy & paste function (good 'ol "ctrl-c" then "ctrl-v"). However, if you create subject lines for campaigns in your email marketing software by copying and pasting content from programs like MS Word, you may end up distributing emails that display strange characters in the subject line when viewed by recipients. Why does this happen and what can you do about it?
With each new collaborative technology adopted by the masses - yesterday it was RSS, today it is social media - the pundits have predicted the demise of email as a marketing and communication tool. However, once again, reports of email's demise are exaggerated. As per a chart recently released by MarketingSherpa summarizing the results of a survey on how people share information, email remains a key communication tool utilized in tandem with social media to "increase engagement, deliver relevant content and build contact databases."
As an example, the survey reports that when asked what methods they use to share something from the Internet with their friends or family, such as a video, link or article, 78% of consumers responded that they forward a link to the content via email. Only 22% cited social media as their "sharing" method of choice.
Click here to view a large, printable of the chart displaying the results of the survey.
Click here to read MarketingSherpa's complete analysis.
Lawyers are always looking for new channels to publicize their expertise, and thus catch the attention of prospective clients who require that expertise to address legal issues. In a recent post titled "7 Steps to Using Podcasts to Grow Your Practice," divorce lawyer Lee Rosen provides some helpful tips on how lawyers can use podcasts to develop new business.
Rosen observes that a growing segment of the population prefers to learn by listening rather than by reading, resulting in the growing popularity of podcasts. While attorneys can benefit from this trend by creating their own podcasts, such an approach can be time consuming and expensive.
Instead, Rosen suggests the easier path of becoming a guest on podcasts produced by others (which will often already have a solid audience base).
Rosen proceeds to identify seven "tricks" for becoming a guest on an existing podcast and making the most of these opportunities. We recommend it.
In the world of SEO, there's always a heavy focus on developing inbound links from third party sites. This is good, but what marketers often forget is that internal links within a website can also help search engine rankings. In a recent article, MarketingSherpa spoke with Eric Ward, one of the search industry’s top linking experts, about how to use internal links to improve SEO.
Some key points:
Establish benchmarks for testing: First and foremost, Ward stresses the importance of developing traffic baselines showing, for example, the amount of traffic coming to various pages on your website that you deem important. The baseline numbers will help you measure the impact of changes you may later wish to make.
More and more business professionals are consuming emails on mobile devices such as Blackberries. I'm a Blackberry devotee myself, and regular use has reinforced the importance of "best practices" in email design to ensure that alerts and newsletters are readable on Blackberries.
We've blog before about email design best practices. In the case of Blackberries, it's very important that you:
1. Design banner graphics that are short. Otherwise, Blackberry users have to scroll down too much to get to your main message. Good design can deliver short, but visually appealing banners for regular email users that can still work well with Blackberries.
2. You use ALT tags to describe your images so at least Blackberry users will know the nature of the images they are not seeing.
3. Position key body copy (e.g., alert headlines, calls-to-action) in the lefthand column so Blackberry users will see them immediately at the top of their screen after they start scrolling to read the message (that is, Blackberries won't respect your multi-column layouts - instead, lefthand column is displayed first, then columns to the right).
And on the lighter side, here's a very funny critique of Blackberry users from Jerry Seinfeld.
Marketers often mistakenly assume that font, color, layout and other style guidelines applicable in the print world can also be used for online media. The problem is that online media is typically viewed on a monitor where the resolution is far lower than in print. As such, to deliver optimum readability to clients, prospects and other users, marketers need to follow different style guidelines on the Web (as an aside, we sometimes find that attorneys protest when marketers deviate from the styles the attorneys are accustomed to (e.g., full justification vs. left justify); what needs to be pointed out politely is that styles that work in briefs and other print communications that attorneys are familiar with don't necessarily work well in online media).
Reproduced below is a short list of 10 legibility guidelines published by Tim Ash, a landing page expert, in an article on SearchEngineWatch, that legal marketers should follow when designing and publishing web pages, blog posts and email communications (our additional comments are in italics in brackets):
Continue... "10 Key Style Guidelines for Law Firm Websites, Blogs and Email Communications" »
MarketingSherpa recently published an interesting chart displaying the results of a study exploring how highly marketers ranked social media as a marketing tactic versus email and search marketing, which have been around much longer.
The chart shows that almost all marketers (97%) agreed that social media will complement other marketing tactics like email and search, while a large percentage (88%) of marketers also agreed that social media will become a standard tactic for most companies (with 74% predicting social media will eventually have its own budget line item and staff).
Only a small percentage (24%) predicted that social media will displace email marketing in targeting prospective customers, and an even smaller number (12%) predicted that social will displace email marketing when communicating with existing customers.
Here's a link to a large version of the chart.
At the end of the day, what's needed is a holistic strategy of the kind we preach here at eLawMarketing that utilizes each online marketing tactic in a manner that follows "best practices" and maximizes ROI. In general, for law firms, we find that email marketing is most suited to marketing to existing clients and referral sources (simply because these subscribers are accustomed to receiving emails from attorneys at your firm on a regular basis), while blogs and social media are more effective at marketing to prospective clients, the media and other unknown parties.
Prospective law firm clients often ask us why they should pay a bit more for our email marketing service than they might pay for, say, a standard blast service like Constant Contact or Campaigner. I respond that email marketing is not just about sending emails, but about getting them delivered, and that (among other benefits) they'll get better deliverability with our service using tools such as private IP addresses, and authentication. Plus we can monitor a firm's "email reputation" for any red flags that might affect deliverability, such as blacklists.
To illustrate the point, compare the deliverability and reputation reports for three email alert campaigns distributed recently by three leading law firms.
Continue... "With Email Alert Deliverability, You Get What You Pay For" »
Came across a case study on MarketingSherpa that offered some useful tips on using LinkedIn for lead generation. While the case study was based on the experience of a marketer at a software company, several of the insights would be applicable to lawyers seeking to use LinkedIn to develop more business.
In a nutshell:
1. Join groups related to your area of expertise (e.g., private equity group for a private equity lawyer), but focus on groups with a highly engaged audience, rather than simply the largest audience. This means looking for groups where the discussions elicit multiple comments from members, rather than just one or two (or none). You can perform this research by reading through recent group discussion posts of groups you have joined both to assess group members’ interest areas, and how much activity new posts tend to generate.
2. Freely share white papers and other resources with your group, but not in a "salesy" manner. For example, in the case study, when promoting a new white paper, the marketer would write a message to the group announcing the new title, sharing a link, and asking group members to provide feedback on the white paper itself.
3. Monitor ongoing conversations to find opportunities to comment on other people’s topics. You may include a link to marketing collateral when appropriate, but often consider just sharing an opinion or giving feedback on other group members’ comments.
4. When providing links to materials on LinkedIn consider creating custom landing pages that specifically address the LinkedIn audience for a more seamless transition.
Access the full case study (subscription required).
We are pleased to announce a complimentary webinar series focused on Internet marketing "best practices" for law firms and lawyers. The webinars will be held on Tuesdays at 12:30 PM EST throughout the summer and fall on the dates set forth below. There is no charge to attend!
Don't worry if you can't make a particular presentation. All will be recorded and available for download after the webinar.
Browse the list of topics below, then click a "register" link to sign up for one or more webinars.
Audits (Email Marketing and Websites)
Email Marketing:
Core Edition
Email
Marketing:
Advanced Edition
Flash
Applications
Landing
Pages
Online
Press Releases
Online
Reputation Management
Online
RSVP
Podcasts
Powerpoints
Search
Engine Optimization
Social
Media
Video
Webcasting
Website
Development
White
Paper Marketing
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