Internet Marketing Bigger and Better

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Just as lawyers can no longer ignore technology to run their practices and communicate with clients, downplaying the importance of the Internet to marketing your firm and attracting clients in 2015 will be equally fatal.

That doesn’t mean everyone is still on board. A social media survey conducted by Attorney at Work found that 91% of respondents use social media. However, only 60% said it was part of their marketing strategy, and just 4% said it was “very responsible” for attracting new clients. A third reported that no social media platform is effective at attracting new clients. More than half believe that social media marketing is more hype than reality.

These results may say more about the respondents than about social media. According to a recent survey by Capgemini Consulting, 90% of respondents said they “lacked the necessary skills in social media, mobile, internal social media, process automation, and performance monitoring and analysis.” Karen Rubin of Lexology.com writes, “Some lawyers are too concerned about the pitfalls to use social media at all to advertise or showcase their capabilities.”

In other industries, social media marketing is achieving fantuan database phenomenal success. Omobono surveyed 115 senior business marketers, and 79% said it was the most effective digital channel. Social Media Examiner’s 2014 annual survey of over 2,500 marketers found that 92% of respondents said social media had increased their reach, and 80% said it had increased their traffic. In half of the cases, sales had increased.

Blogging and SEO, two activities that are now inextricably linked, have also become so popular that a recent California state bar opinion placed advertising attorney blogs under the same professional conduct restrictions as advertising. Like advertising, blogging to promote a business must not include “warranties, fictitious names, or other misrepresentations.”

Lawyers who are good at online marketing have a distinct advantage over those who aren’t. And that advantage is likely to grow. Realizing this, many are planning to improve their online sales skills. In 2015, Maryland criminal defense attorney Andrew Szekely plans to regularly publish “1-2 posts every two weeks (I’m already a year behind, but moving to an office will make that happen)” on his blog. The aforementioned young attorney Seth Combs plans to better track firm statistics like settlement offers and the number of new clients per month. This is important for measuring the effectiveness of all marketing, including online.

Every lawyer can become better at online marketing in 2015. In Forbes, Ellen Lee offers tips that can easily be adapted to the needs of lawyers.

First, engage when people are around. This will likely depend on your practice area. Corporate lawyers will want to tweet, blog, and share on Facebook when professionals are in front of their computers, typically 9 to 5 in their time zones. Criminal defense lawyers may find it helpful to post late at night and early in the morning. The savvy will likely find, through trial and error, the right time to post content. Posting at the right time doesn’t necessarily require working at that time. Tools like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite allow you to schedule posts. Keep in mind, however, that effective online marketing requires conversations that are best conducted in real time.

Lee offers obvious but often overlooked tips for including calls to action in your marketing materials. For example, if you blog, be sure to include instructions like “subscribe,” “share,” or even “call” or “fill out the contact form” at the end of posts where appropriate. For attorneys, this is a little trickier because of the advertising ban. But that doesn’t mean it’s forbidden or should be skipped. A good call to action is worth its weight in gold.

Lee’s third tip will really set you apart from the competition. She suggests using lots of images in your posts. This advice is backed by a wealth of data showing that blog posts, tweets, and Facebook posts get far more engagement when they include an image. According to Ethos3, content with visuals gets 94% more views, and content with visuals is 40 times more likely to be shared.

People love pictures. They tend to zip around the web, and images grab attention and convey information quickly. Luckily for you, most attorneys haven't quite gotten that message, so here's an easy way to stand out.

Kevin O'Keefe of Real Lawyers Have Blogs recommends separating blogs by topic area rather than having one firm-wide blog. This is good advice for any marketing medium: People don't want to wade through irrelevant content to find what they're interested in, and that's true regardless of the format.

But the most important advice comes from Larry Bodine on his blog:

Track. Hey. Results.

The best thing about online marketing, besides the fact that it is generally cheaper than traditional advertising and marketing, makes it easier to target your communications, makes it easier to switch and try new things, and requires fewer gatekeepers, is that it is also much, much more measurable than any other type of marketing.

The point is that every lawyer, niche, practice, and geography is different. These tips are general and will be better than the alternatives in most cases. But as for what will work for your purposes, the only way to know, and certainly the only way to beat your competitors who follow the same advice, is to test different approaches and measure what works and what doesn’t.

[yadaysrdone]

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