Archive for the ‘Internet Marketing’ Category
About The Legal Marketing Association
“The Legal Marketing Association was founded with the idea that the individuals working to market legal services needed a forum to share and exchange ideas with each other. That basic principle holds true today. LMA is a vital resource — a lifeline — for anyone working in the marketing of professional services. You simply can’t be in this profession without being a member of the Legal Marketing Association.”
The Legal Marketing Association (LMA) – which was founded 25 years ago – is a non-profit organization that offers a vast variety of helpful tools, information and knowledge that allow those in the legal world to succeed in their practice. With over 3,000 members from the U.S. and 11 other countries, the LMA has a total of 17 chapters located all across North America and Canada.
The members of the LMA are mainly marketing professionals of all different positions who support legal marketing and help lawyers successfully develop their practices by offering professional and educational opportunities and valuable information.
To join the LMA or to explore its information-filled website, visit http://www.legalmarketing.org/ to learn more.
Good Content is Key
People surf the web for information about anything and everything. Whether a person wants to find a product to buy or find a professional or company to help them with a matter, the internet is where everything can be found.
For every business, getting yourself on the internet is the easy part. How well your content is written and optimized and how well your site ranks on various search engine lists is what separates well-marketed businesses from those who simply just “exist” on the web and are hardly visited.
The content on websites is the most important aspect of a good marketing plan for any business and it’s what immediately draws viewers and consumers to continue exploring that company’s site.
Particularly in the legal market, developing good content is extremely important.
The best thing a law firm can do on its website is first outline exactly what services the attorneys provide. Instead of including a bunch of legal jargon and terminology, it’s essential that lawyers also post content that will appeal to anyone and everyone. Not only should everything be grammatically correct, spot-checked and edited, but the vocabulary and terms used should be easy for anyone to understand. If you’re a lawyer explaining various aspects of criminal law, for instance, make sure to define all terms that everyday people (and non-criminals) may not be familiar with.
Nothing looks more unprofessional than sloppy, unorganized and poorly written content on a website.
If a woman’s looking for a divorce lawyer and the law firm’s website is unclear with grammar mistakes interwoven throughout, she’s going to move on to the next family law attorney. People don’t want to take the time to translate your content. It should be informational, straightforward, organized and well-written.
Once you have a steady stream of good content posted throughout your site, make sure to keep it updated. Especially if you offer “legal news” or “newsletters” pages, it’s important to always keep it up-to-date and fresh.
Google’s Latest Toy – Can it help a real estate lawyer?
There was an article on an internet marketing website reporting that Google is planning to display panoramic and 3-dimensional real estate ads for customers searching Google Maps for properties. Can this tool help the legal industry? Yes, it can and here’s how. If this concept becomes a popular reality, then advertisers and businesses involved in property management, commercial properties, or residential properties, may also be displayed in the same manner. Coupons, hours of operation, etc. may eventually be displayed in pull-down menus.
What can that do for your business? It can make you more visible in a popular modality, and make your sellers’ properties more visible also. Selling a home in any region in this market needs advanced marketing techniques.
You can read more about the Google’s to the US Patent Office by reviewing their application.
How to Convert Legal Assistance Calls to Loyal Paying Customers
Legal marketing budget can run into several thousand dollars a month. This may include everything from tv ads, direct mail, email marketing, PPC, SEO, advertisements in local publications, seminars, yellow pages, directories or other kinds of online and offline media. When your firm’s phone starts ringing as a result of your marketing efforts, you are ecstatic and consider your marketing investment to be money well spent.
But is it really?
Not until you master the art of turning those phone calls into money in your pocket. Unfortunately, many of you are losing a whole lot of coin because you are investing in marketing without making the same investment in conversion.
Fortunately, converting leads into clients won’t cost you much more money than you are already spending to attract those leads, but it does require an upfront investment of your time and energy. Best yet, once you get it down, your lead to client conversion process can run without your involvement. The place to start is to get a crystal clear understanding of where you are right now. Here’s what you’ll want to do:
1. Over the next month, make a commitment to collect the metrics data you would need to track your numbers.
2. Have whoever answers your phones log every phone call.
3. Require that all inquiries be recorded on a prospect intake form, which captures how the person heard of you, all of their contact information, specifics about their situation and whether they made an appointment.
4. Use a spreadsheet to track how many actually made it in for their appointment and finally how many of those callers became paying clients after meeting with you or the other attorneys of your firm.
Each week, sit down with your team and review your lead to prospect conversion number (this is the number of phone calls you received that turned into appointments) and your prospect to client conversion number (this is the number of appointments made that turned into clients). If these numbers are not both at least 75%, don’t spend any more marketing dollars until you fix your client engagement problem because otherwise you are pouring money down the drain. There is NO POINT in spending money on marketing if you are not doing as well as you can to convert your prospects into paying clients once they pick up the phone to call your office.
Here are a few diagnostic clues to find the “leak” where your prospects may be getting away during the client engagement process:
- Your phone is not being answered in the correct way
- There is no system to follow up with prospects who want more information
- There is no system to follow up with prospects in the time period between when they make an appointment and come in to your office for their appointment
- You are not following a script during your client engagement meeting
Well begun is half done! Make a good start by collecting hard numbers on what’s actually happening in your office so you’ll be ready for the fixes as they are presented and understand which fix you need to focus on. You may be quite surprised by what you discover once you begin collecting your numbers.
We can take for example the NJ criminal defense lawyers of Benedict & Altman who have started focusing on optimizing their website to convert more leads into customers. With a site that includes several calls to action for visitors to email and phone the firm, they are set-up to win in terms of gathering leads. Now, they just need to follow the steps above to convert those leads into customers.