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Legal Marketing Technology - January 4th, 2007 |
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 By Larry Bodine, a strategic Web and marketing consultant based in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Larry has helped firms draft marketing plans and coached lawyers in developing individual marketing plans. He can be reached at 630.942.0977 and www.LarryBodine.com.
Your Web site and online marketing should be generating new business leads and new revenue. In my practice, I get 75% of my new business from the Web, and law firms can get the same results. Use this 10-step checklist to see if you are using technology to market your firm with maximum effectiveness:
1. Web site. Your strategy should be "organize around the market, don't market your organization." Most law firms make the mistake by building their Web site around their internal administrative structure. They talk about themselves, overwhelming readers with dozens of practice areas and boring them with a firm history. Instead, firms should display information that visitors want to read.
The three things clients seek on a law firm site are:
[ ] Industry experience. Executives and general counsel want to see your firm understands its business and knows its industry. They don't consider themselves a customer of your practice group. Instead they see themselves as a member of an industry. Show them that you know their products, competition and trends that affect them.
[ ] Representative Clients. Potential clients want to know what other companies you've worked for, primarily to substantiate your industry expertise. Also, in-house counsel tend to know each other and like to be able to check you out with their counterparts at other companies. Many law firms list representative clients on their Web sites.
[ ] Success Stories. It is essential that the firm list as many success stories or case studies as possible. The proves that the firm has actually closed a deal or won a case in litigation. The ideal case study names the client, presents the business problem at issue, states the dollar amount and stakes, and concludes with how your firm saved the day. A success story can be as short at four lines.
2. Start Writing a Practice Group Blog. There are 2,262 lawyer blogs being tracked by www.Blawg.com. A shade less than 20% of the firms in the sample published their own blogs, accoreding to Primary Research Group Inc. in New York. Firms with 20 or more distinct practice groups were the most likely to publish blogs, and nearly forty percent of the firms in this category did so. The time is right to launch a firm blog while the idea is still new.
Blogs are the perfect platform for lawyers who always wanted to be a newspaper columnist, or who would like to publish short capsules of thought without needing to write a full-blown article. You simply jot down your thoughts or observations and publish them instantly to the Web. The beauty of blogging software is that it requires no knowledge of HTML - you just type text in an online box and click "publish."
[ ] Blogging is cheap. Just go to http://www.typepad.com/ and register to set up an account for $15 per month; you can be blogging within minutes. I created a blog and you can find it at http://blog.larrybodine.com.
[ ] Your readers can find your blog by searching for you in Google. Web search engines are always looking for new material, and thus blogs come to the top of many online searches. Some of the better-known legal blogs are In Search of Perfect Client Service by Patrick Lamb, a Chicago litigator, at http://www.patrickjlamb.com; May It Please the Court by J. Craig Williams, a litigator in Newport Beach, CA, at http://www.mayitpleasethecourt.com, and What About Clients by Dan Hull, a litigator and lobbyist in San Diego, CA, at http://www.whataboutclients.com.
3. Optimize your Web site for Search Engines. It's no good having a Web site if no one can find it. You need to tune up your site with elements that Google, Yahoo! and other search vehicles look for.
[ ] Nothing beats hot, fresh content. Frequently-updated information is the primary thing that search engines look for. Web sites are supposed to be showcases for new information (not archives of past newsletters and old events), so you should update your site often.
[ ] Take a look at your Web traffic statistics to see how many referrals you're getting from search engines now; if Google and Yahoo are not the top two referral sources, you need to put some new content online.
[ ] In the HTML code, put keywords describing your firm in the title tags, and always put a name in the image alt-tags, which are two top places search engines look.
[ ] Register your site with Google and Yahoo so that they include you in their databases.
[ ] Several things can deflect search engines and send their roving "spiders" away, so you'll want to eliminate these offensive items from your Web site. Topping the list are Flash animation, JavaScript and frames; they provide nothing for search engines to index, and they'll lower your search engine rankings. Instead, put lots of text on your Web site, this is fodder that the hungry spiders want.
[ ] "Link popularity" helps raise you in the rankings too. This refers to the number of other sites that have links back to your site; search engines consider them as votes for your site's popularity. You can tell how many sites link to your site by going to www.alltheweb.com, typing in your URL in the search box, and checking the results. The more links, the better. The way to boost your link popularity is by putting your content on other people's Web sites. Do this by writing articles for other Web sites, freely granting reprints, and getting involved with newspaper Web sites
4. Offer a Client Extranet. According to surveys of corporate law departments by the Association of Corporate Counsel/Serengeti, corporate counsel want law firms to offer extranets.
[ ] An extranet is a password-protected area on your Web site where clients can:
Review documents online.
Observe and comment on the major decision points and analysis leading up to key decisions.
Research current strategies and progress.
Review schedules, pleadings and filings. 5. Let visitors sign up to get an e-newsletter on your Web site. If you only follow one tip in this article, let it be this one. It's the most effective tip of them all.
[ ] Offer many choices. Some sophisticated sites, like that of WilmerHale at www.wilmerhale.com, allow visitors to pick from more than 50 newsletters with the ease of checking a box in the sign-up form. The approach has met with great success by firms like Baker & McKenzie, which distributes its Global E-Law Alert to more than 30,000 readers.
[ ] Publish regularly. I started my own e-Newsletter, the LawMarketing Newsletter at www.LawMarketing.BIZ, a few years ago and have built up the recipient list to 4,000 names. It grows by about 25 names per week and just keeps getting bigger. Ever two weeks I email out my newsletter to readers all over the world and use it to promote new articles on the LawMarketing Portal web site (www.lawmarketing.com), Webinars that I present, my consulting practice and advertising messages. It's a one-to-one, personal communication with each reader.
[ ] Repurpose your firm's print newsletters for electronic distribution. The beauty of e-mail newsletters is that they do not entail any printing or postage costs; email newsletters are cheap to create and distribute. Be sure to note in the newsletter that readers may "freely redistribute it in whole," which will widen your audience.
[ ] Collect information about who is visiting your Web site in the sign-up form. I recommend that law firm Web sites put a link to their newsletter sign-up page right on the home page. The link should lead to a sign-up form, which requests the reader's name, title, company, address, email and phone number. Ideally, this information will be saved into a database, which can be used to distribute the newsletter.
6. Use Web Usability Techniques.
[ ] This means that your web site should use a layout that visitors expect to see. Many law firms experiment with cluttered, busy or unconventional layouts. They succeed in looking different, but make the Web site difficult to use. According to Web site usability principles, the Web site should mimic the layouts of popular corporate sites that viewers visit frequently. This way, they will be accustomed to the layout of your site from the moment they arrive.
The optimal layout for a Web site should:
[ ] Put your logo or firm name in the top left corner. This is where people start reading a book or newspaper, and where they start reading on your Web site.
[ ] Offer a set of navigation choices down the left site and across the top of the page. These choices should be "persistent," that is, they should also appear in the same place on all succeeding pages of the site.
[ ] The rest of the page -the lower-right part -- should be full of content. This is where you should put news items, newsletter stories and client successes. 7. Avoid Content Mistakes. There are certain things that appear on many law firm Web sites, mainly because the firm wants to put them there, but not because visitors want to read them. Again, turn to your Web traffic reports and see what people are reading. Among the things that executives don't care about and don't want to read will include:
[ ] The Welcome From the Managing Partner. This is regarded as "happy talk" that adds nothing to a visit to the site. It'll contain the firm's mission, the high principles the firm adheres to, and a lot of other material no one cares about. It's a holdover from the early days of the Web (way back in 1996) when people thought it was necessary to explain what they were looking at.
[ ] The Firm History. Typically this is illustrated with sepia-toned photos of Model T cars and views of Main Street before it was paved. The firm history will start with Lawyer A, a white male who was probably the commander of the local fort. One day he met Lawyer B, who represented the general store, and they founded the law firm. Lo, these many years later, the firm is still here. All law firm histories are the same and few visitors want to read them.
[ ] A Links Page. Another holdover from the early days of the Web are the pages that link to other sites. This is a mistake, because all it does is to take traffic away from your site. Further, it assumes that visitors will use the law firm site to conduct research. This is usually not the case, because visitors will use travel and chamber of commerce sites to find out about the locale and will go to Westlaw and Lexis for legal research.
8. Make your lawyer bios effective. As a rule, clients hire lawyers - not law firms. Therefore, the human face of the law firm makes a difference in attracting new business. Your Web bio is your initial introduction to visitors, and unlike random social contacts, you have total control over what you present in your online bio. Exercise this control so that your bio contains:
[ ] A color photo. It should be recent, so that when people meet you they don't note to themselves about how you've aged or put on weight. It should be high resolution so that publications can use it when they publish an article you wrote.
[ ] The industries you represent. Your list doesn't need to be exhaustive - just four or five primary industries that you can talk intelligently about.
[ ] Representative clients.
[ ] Business memberships. It is important to list your board memberships and trade association memberships (note: this does not include law organizations, which clients can't distinguish among.).
[ ] Articles available on the Web site. If you list an article you wrote, be sure there is a link to it on the firm Web site. Visitors expect your Web site to be interactive, and if the article isn't available on the Web site, it's much less impressive.
9. See yourself as others see you, and Google yourself. You are being Googled by your colleagues, employees and your competitors. More importantly, your clients and prospective clients are Googling you to confirm their decision to retain you. They will certainly Google you before they call or ask for your brochure.
[ ] Type your own name in the search box at www.Google.com. The worst thing that can happen is that you turn up nothing. This means you are invisible on the Web. Nowadays, many people use the Web to look up phone numbers and addresses instead of the phone book, so to be missing on the Web is a truly notable absence.
[ ] Google your firm. Let's act as if we were a client or curious executive, and Google your firm. Let's make the test more realistic, and not use the name of your firm. Why don't we type in "lawyer" and an industry, like "manufacturing" and a city like "Chicago." Does your firm appear in the first 10 links? If not, you're going to be pretty hard to find.
[ ] Google a competing law firm and let's conduct some competitive intelligence: Search for it the same way as we did before -- type in the exact name and see what happens. Do they come to the top of the list? Then type in a few terms that the firm is known for -- such as the names of their well-known lawyers or the clients they represent. Does this make their Web site pop to the top?
10. Broadcast Web Seminars. This low-cost alternative to in-person CLE and business development seminars is gaining popularity among law firms. Law firms like King & Spalding in Atlanta, Arent Fox in Washington, DC, Wilson Sonsini in Palo Alto and Winston & Strawn in Chicago are regularly presenting Webinars to clients
[ ] Using phone lines, the Internet and software provided by a vendor that pulls everything together, Webinars create a virtual conference room in which hundreds of clients can assemble and learn new information.
[ ] If you can operate a PowerPoint presentation, you have all the technical knowledge you need. Attendees watch your slides on the Web, and listen to your lawyers speak over a phone line. Webinars are like seminars, without all the travel and room booking. |
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