A recent study conducted by Keynote Competitive Research in October 2007 tracked reactions of consumers planning to buy an automobile within the next six months as they interacted with microsites for various car models, including the Toyota Yaris. A microsite is a specialized website dedicated exclusively to a particular car model (or more broadly, a particular branded product).
Keynote found that microsites help promote stronger engagement between site visitors and the brand promoted by the microsite as measured by time spent at the microsite and other metrics. The study further demonstrated that higher engagement translates into higher conversion rates.
Similarly, a recent MarketinSherpa study found that marketers ranked "cool microsites" the highest in terms of delivering great results such as stronger conversion rates - higher than other online marketing tools such as online games and quizzes, video clips, audio clips, and e-cards. See study chart here.
What do these findings mean for law firms? Admittedly, many consumer microsites employ animation and other entertaining interactivity that would be inappropriate for a law firm website. See the Toyota Yaris site as an example. However, firms should consider building microsites dedicated to niche practice areas that can engage the attention of clients, prospects and other audiences more effectively than a standard website.
Think about it - the general counsel of an energy exploration company is going to be much more engaged by a microsite aggregating court decisions, legislation, rules and regulations, forms, and other resources relevant to the oil and gas industry than a more generalized law firm website that happens to discuss the firm's oil and gas practice. The same general counsel will also be much more likely to bookmark an oil and gas microsite than a standard website, as well as be more likely to subscribe to email alerts and/or RSS feeds on such a microsite.
Good examples of law firm microsites are Perkins Coie's More Soft Money Hard Law focused on campaign finance law and Law and Ethics Online dedicated to lobbying law (both designed and developed by eLawMarketing). See also Dinsmore & Shohl's Coal Law focused on (what else?) coal law, Mayer Brown's microsite on securitization, and Dykema's Gambling.net focused on casino law.
Blogs essentially function as microsites by aggregating commentary in a niche area of the law, and can be just as effective as more traditional microsites at building thought leadership in a particular practice area. However, in many (though not all cases) blogs tend to consist primarily of chronologically ordered commentary on recent legal developments in a niche practice area, while traditional microsites tend to also feature extensive libraries of resources such as (in the case of Law and Ethics Online) links to lobbying laws, rules and regulations in all 50 States. Building such libraries requires an extensive research effort.
In sum, beyond your standard law firm website, consider launching microsites and blogs in niche practice areas to build client engagement, thought leadership, and stronger search engine visibility.
I've actually just completed developing a tool that might help build microsites. Xenos enables users to subscribe to RSS feeds, then create new feeds by drag/dropping items from the source feeds into new containers. The new feeds can be distributed as RSS, html email newsletters, or web pages.
So a lawfirm's information manager could easily gather the most relevant stories from the day's news, and make a microsite page, or send a complete email newsletter.
The software, Xenos, has been released as a beta, and can be downloaded from www.metanews.biz. Just click on the X.
Posted by: Scott Lewis | May 09, 2008 at 01:49 AM