Category: Legal Marketing

How to Build a Lead Generation Machine Online with Content Marketing (Part 1 of 2)

The Rainmaker Institute

If you are looking to drive more high quality traffic to your law firm’s website, one of the best ways to do so is via unique, high quality content on your blog.

lead generationIt is estimated that 95% of law firms already have a website, but too few attorneys are consistently generating quality leads from their online presence because they lack great content.

Google has made it increasingly difficult to rank high without putting a lot of quality content on your website.  If you want to continue ranking well on Google, which drives more qualified traffic to your website so you can generate more online leads, you must put more and more content on your website.

Here are the first 4 of 8 best practices in content marketing:

Best Practice 1: Create content prospects will connect with and will want to read. If your website is the first to pop up in a Google search, but a potential client reads your home page and finds it littered with meaningless legal jargon, then chances are they are going to move on to website number two. People hire attorneys they feel a connection with. If the viewer doesn’t connect with your website, then chances are they aren’t going to call you.

By creating content that viewers find informative and relevant, easy to digest and in multiple formats (like audio or video as well as written) you are encouraging them to spend more time on your site. By filling each page with informative and easy-to-understand language, an attorney is boosting their visibility on the web and converting browsers into believers.

Best Practice 2: Know the critical keywords prospects use to search. While Google is making sure the context fits the keywords, websites still need to focus on certain keywords. Start by making a list of at least 20-30 terms you believe an interested prospect might use to search for your kind of services. Then do your research.

I recommend two sites: Google Keyword Tool and WordTracker.com. You can find the first one simply by searching on Google for it. The terms definitely emphasize Google’s pay-per-click model, which is why I strongly recommend double checking your findings against the results from WordTracker.com. Use only one or two key terms per blog post and do not post duplicate content.

Best Practice 3: Make sure your blog is on the same domain/subdomain. I used to recommend having two different sites: your primary website and a separate blog site. Due to the recent changes in Google I now recommend keeping your blog on your website (use ABClaw.com/blog instead of blog.ABClaw.com). If you already have two separate sites don’t combine them unless they are less than six months old.

By integrating your blog and your website in one place, you can increase your rankings by adding more content via your blog. Topics for your blog can include recent cases you have handled, commenting on current events or stories in the media, answering frequently asked questions, and discuss aspects of the law.

Best Practice 4: Create geo-targeted pages. You need to write several pages for each city you want to target. For example, if you are a business litigation attorney in the East Valley of Phoenix, you want to have several pages of content focusing on each of the following cities: Phoenix, Tempe, Chandler, Scottsdale, Mesa, Gilbert, etc.

Do not make the mistake of only targeting Phoenix because every single other attorney is doing that. Put as many pages of content up there for the secondary cities. Even though you will not receive nearly as many hits for those cities the competition to rank on the first page of Google will be significantly less.

Come back here tomorrow where I will share the last 4 of 8 best practices for content marketing.

ARTICLE BY

Stephen Fairley
OF
The Rainmaker Institute

Simplify to Maximize: Register now for the LMA New England Regional Conference, Nov 13-14, Boston

The National Law Review is proud to bring you information about the LMANE 2014 Regional Conference. Register today!
LMA-NE-2014-3

 

When

NOVEMBER 13 & 14

Where

Revere Hotel, Boston, MA

REGISTER NOW!

There are many benefits to attending the LMANE Regional Conference, below are just a few:

LMANE Legal Marketing Association New England Boston Regional Conference

You will walk away feeling energized and full of new ideas to bring back to your firm!

 

How to Measure Your Email Marketing Performance

The Rainmaker Institute

Email newsletters have proven to be one of the most effective methods for attorneys to market themselves to prospects, clients and referral sources.  Every year, email marketing service provider MailerMailer provides a report on email marketing metrics across 34 different industries, including Legal.

They have just issued their 2014 report, based on data gathered from 62,000 newsletter campaigns totaling 1.18 billion emails sent between Jan. 1, 2013 and Dec. 31, 2013.  Here are the results — and what should be your new benchmarks — for your law firm newsletter:

Open rate (what percentage of your recipients opened your email):  13.5%

Click rate (what percentage of your recipients clicked on a link in your email)::  1.6%

Click-to-open rate (of the recipients who opened your email, what percentage of them clicked on a link):  11.8%

Bounce rate (the percentage of emails that cannot be delivered):  2.4%

Every email service (Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, iContact, etc.) provides these statistics for each newsletter you send out.  If your newsletters are not delivering at rates that meet or exceed the benchmarks above, you have a problem.

Here’s what you should consider to improve your click, open and bounce rates:

Are your subject lines engaging to entice people to open your email?  Short subject lines — 4 to 15 characters — generate the highest open and click rates.

Are you sending emails on the right day and at the right time?  The highest open rates occur on Mondays and the highest click rates occur on Sundays.  Open rates peak during the early part of the day, between 8 a.m. and noon.

Is your email list updated regularly and cleaned of old, undeliverable email addresses?  Bounce rates are inescapable but can be improved if you send out emails on a regular basis.

Have you segmented your email list so you can tailor your content to your different audiences?  Targeted emails deliver 18 times more revenue than general blast emails.

Are your emails personalized? Personalizing the message content can boost open rates significantly.

Do you use a responsive design template so your emails are displayed properly for every screen size?  More than half of emails are now opened on mobile devices.

If your newsletters are performing at or above these benchmarks, you may still have some work to do: if you don’t know the source of your success, you can’t repeat it.

ARTICLE BY

Stephen Fairley
OF
The Rainmaker Institute

Common Social Media Profile Picture Mistakes

Consultsweb Logo

How you present yourself on social media can either draw clients to you, or send them packing.

What’s the first thing you notice about someone’s social media account? Their profile picture. There are over 645 million active Twitter users, 829 active daily users on Facebook, and over 200 million users on Instagram. Profile pictures are the first thing any of these users will see when your account is searched or suggested on social platforms, so it is vital that your picture send the right message.

Do’s and Don’ts of social media profile pictures:

DON’T make yourself so far away that the person has to play a strategic game of “Where’s Waldo” just to identify you.

Where's Waldo

DON’T filter your picture so heavily so that the viewer can’t even imagine what the original looked like.

Filter 2

DON’T pose like you’re on the cover of a magazine. There is a time and a place for glamour shots, but your professional profile is not it.

Model

DON’T set your profile image as a picture of you and your spouse. Marriage is a beautiful thing, but this is your profile, not yours and your significant other’s.

Spouse

DON’T make your profile picture your firm’s logo. While it is important to gain exposure for your firm, your profile picture isn’t the ideal place to do so. A profile picture should personalize you as an attorney. You can, however, put something like a logo as your cover photo so that it is the background to your profile image.

Logo

DON’T leave your image as the default, such as the signature Twitter egg. Doing this will not only look impersonal, but also come off like you didn’t care enough to put in the effort to change the photo.

Twitter egg

DO follow these guidelines for profile pictures:

Profile Picture

  • Crop the picture so it is an up-close, professional shot of your face.

  • Make sure it is well-lit and that you’re looking directly at the camera.
  • Smile! This can showcase how personable you are and also be inviting to the people who see it.
  • Don’t have anything directly behind you; it is ideal to have professional head shots in front of a green screen.

  • Your profile picture needs to be large enough that it can be recognized without actually having to click on the image. Be mindful of general size requirements across social media networks.

ARTICLE BY

Samantha Hicks
OF
Consultwebs.com, Inc.

A 10-Point Health Check for Your Law Firm Marketing

The Rainmaker Institute

A legal news aggregation website called LawFuel.com recently ran a post with a 10-point checklist of how law firms can gauge the health (and effectiveness) of their legal marketing programs.

Here’s the list — how are you performing?

1.  Does your firm encourage cross-selling among attorneys?  If you have multiple practice areas and lawyers who specialize in each area, then those lawyers should be cross-selling your services.  Make sure all your attorneys understand your total offerings.

2.  Is your staff involved in marketing?  Your legal marketing efforts should touch every member of your staff, who are your ambassadors to pass along your expertise to their contacts.

3.  Do you have a program for keeping in touch with former clients?  This is a no-brainer.  Add them all to your monthly e-newsletter list and establish a system for sending out keep-in-touch emails that doesn’t require any babysitting from busy lawyers.

4.  Are all your lawyers engaged in business development?  If not, implement a training program on your marketing messaging and encourage them to get out and network.

5.  Is your website current?  An out-of-date website tells prospects that your firm is out of date.

6.  Is anyone managing your online reputation?  Reputation management is critical for law firms.  You should have this task assigned to someone (internal or external) who regularly conducts online searches for your firm name and attorney names. If something bad pops up, you should have a process for dealing with it effectively.

7.  Are all your attorney bios up to date online?  Every attorney should have a complete and current bio with a professional photos on LinkedIn, Avvo, Martindale, etc.

8.  Do you have a blog?  A blog is one of the best ways for you to market to your niche, highlighting your practice areas and pumping out fresh content that showcases your expertise in each.

9.  Are you providing added value to clients?  Providing clients with value above and beyond what they are paying for will keep them coming back.

10. Are you micro-managing the client experience?  Do clients have to wait when they show up for an appointment?  Are you offering them something to drink and making them feel at home?  If not, you need to take another look at how your firm treats clients because they are measuring you not just against other law firms but against every service provider they know.  And if they don’t like the fit, they won’t be back.

ARTICLE BY

Stephen Fairley
OF
The Rainmaker Institute

Register for ABA's National Institute on International Regulation and Compliance: FCPA, Economic Sanctions & Export Control

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For the first time ever, the American Bar Association is putting together an inaugural comprehensive program on the FCPA, economic sanctions, and export control.  Led by the Criminal Justice Section and its Global Anti-Corruption Committee, and co-sponsored by the Business Law and International Law Sections, the ABA National Institute on International Regulation and Compliance is a three-day program (October 1-3) in Washington, DC tackling some of the most pressing challenges in cross-border regulations affecting in-house and outside business and transactional lawyers, litigators, investigators, compliance professionals, and forensic examiners, as well as their organizations.

Attracting many of the country’s leading thought leaders and practitioners in their respective fields – and drawing from the membership of all three Sections – the Institute is anchored by an exceptionally strong faculty with deep knowledge of, and experience in, their respective topics.  In addition, the Institute benefits from the participation of a cross-section of government and former government lawyers, who are important contributors to the Institute’s program-content dialogue.  So come be a part of an important, cutting-edge conference with many benefits, including:

  • Fair and balanced program content targeted at both experienced and less experienced professionals in different legal fields
  • Satisfying your state bar legal ethics requirement
  • Increased networking opportunities

Register today!

Tips for Improving Your Client Retention Rates [INFOGRAPHIC]

The Rainmaker Institute

Client retention consultancy Sparked counts some of the world’s most successful brands as its clients, including Microsoft, Google, Kraft, SAP, Barclays and more.  So it’s worth lending an ear when they release research that shows a mere 5% increase in a company’s client retention rate can increase profits by as much as 95%.

Many firms don’t place much emphasis on client retention, believing such fallacies as one or two poor experiences can jettison a relationship (actually, clients leave because of poor performance overall, not just a few isolated incidents).

Sparked has created this infographic to show where firms go wrong when it comes to client retention and provides the remedies for correcting it:

ARTICLE BY

Stephen Fairley
OF
The Rainmaker Institute

Six Ways to Build Momentum in your Practice

We have all ‘been there’ finding ourselves too busy with client work to breathe and then the rollercoaster heads downward and we’re searching for new projects. It can be challenging to devote any time to developing new work when your plate is already full. But, what happens when we’ve eaten what we’ve killed, proverbially speaking?

I work with law firm clients consistently who voice the same complaint: “I’m so busy, until I’m not.” This common thread began my wheels turning on how to stabilize the perennial ebbs and flows of business development and how, if at all, can lawyers take proactive steps to get and keep momentum in their practices.

At the outset, I will directly state that those who engage in random acts of marketing such as sporadically reaching out to their network; infrequently scheduling coffee/meal dates with top clients; and other high impact business development initiatives need to just stop it – – – now. It’s a waste of all your resources and, in the end, doesn’t reflect well on you as a business owner. Instead, I offer a better approach: development and maintain a balance approach by creating momentum to your business development efforts.  Read on to learn what you need to know.

Word of the day: momentum. Webster defines it as the tendency of an object to continue movement in a single direction. And, the speed of the movement increases in exact proportion with the degree of momentum. If the speed is very slow, there will not be much momentum, period.

When lawyers genuinely invest in building a prosperous practice, one of the quickest ways to get there is by focusing your time and energy on the concrete steps that matter most: delivering extraordinary service to existing clients (to sow the seeds for recurring assignments) and targeted relationship-building to develop new clients and referral sources.

By taking concrete action in a meaningful and purposeful way, you will generate a certain momentum which must be sustained to build traction with your business development efforts. The more you can ‘just do it’, the more and more momentum you will build, the more comfortable you will be with doing that activity or task, and the more productive and effective you will be – closer to reaching your end goals.

What we often see with clients if they may begin on a high note, commit themselves to one or two business development initiatives, then they really struggle with sustaining the momentum and follow through which is critical to building a prosperous practice.

In short, the momentum is stunted and whatever traction the client created is lost. Among the value that we bring to clients, guiding them along in the business development strategy and execution process and holding them accountability is highly rated, according to our client feedback.

Below are steps lawyers can take to create momentum in building a prosperous practice and sustain it over the long term:

1. Plan for Success – Once and for all, stop the random acts of marketing that wastevaluable resources and, most likely, ends up making you feel like you are failing. Develop a 6-month plan by writing down concrete action steps you will take on a weekly, if not daily, basis to meet your goals (sometimes, getting crystal clear on your goals is the first place to start).

Then, schedule these concrete action steps (such as reaching out to 2-3 referral sources every week for either a coffee date or lunch/dinner; draft a blog post twice month, etc.) in a calendar, whether that is paper or digital, do what works best for you. These should become “non-negotiable” commitments that you will honor and discipline yourself to take. Don’t be shy to reward yourself after each action that you take.

By taking consistent, persistent action on a regular basis, you will create momentum; it’s not good just making an activity a ‘one-off’. One must take purposeful action regularly to build and sustain momentum to carry through to your goals. To make something happen routinely we need to be persistent. Persistence is what separates the men from the boys. Education is great, high intelligence is better, but, it takes a persistent approach to build momentum and build a business.

2. Get Moving – Start reaching out according to your action steps. Begin researching blog topics. Research your LinkedIn connections for prospective introductions. Choose one action item that will contribute to one of your goals and take immediate action. Get moving, today.This means no postponing, no delaying, no procrastinating, no excuses.

3. Stay Focused– Remind yourself of your goals every day and stay focused on them. Post visual reminders on your mirrors at home, on your computer screen at work.  When you find yourself distracted by something that is not directly in line with your goals, ask yourself, “Why?” Identify how you will manage future distractions and look for ways to eliminate them.

4. Stay Active– Do something every day that will bring you closer to your goals. It need not be big – it must be consistent and persistent. If too many days pass between actions, momentum will dwindle and eventually die.

5. Avoid Paralysis by Analysis– Nothing slows momentum more than indecision. Decide as quickly as possible and then take some immediate action to support the decision – no matter how trivial it seems.

6. Seek support- Many successful rainmakers say that you must have an insightful coach and trusted advisor to guide you along the way. Build a strong team of supporters to help you to get and stay focused and to support your desire to bring cohesion and build a strong momentum to your business-building vision. All things are possible, if you keep your eye on the goal.

Remember, my mantra – marketing success comes only through the consistent, persistent massive amounts of action over a prolonged period of time.  There are no magic bullets or shortcuts to success!

© 2013 KLA Marketing Associates.
ARTICLE BY

Kimberly Alford Rice
OF
KLA Marketing Associates

How to Build Trust Online by Being Human

The Rainmaker Institute

All you have to do is troll your own Facebook or LinkedIn account to know that there is LOTS of content online.

In fact, a recent post at Buffer.com noted that more content is published every day on Facebook than is found in every book published in human history!

Building Blocks with Trust

So how do you stand out from that enormous crowd and earn the trust you need to succeed with your social media marketing program?  Buffer provides these tips:

Use personal pronouns.  Using personal pronouns in your posts — I, we, you, me, etc. — and being more conversational elicits empathy from an audience, getting  you a better response.

Use simple words.  By using simple words, you can convey your idea in a way that people don’t have to think about before understanding it.  Big words and legalese will tend to alienate people, not draw them in.

Use stories.  Since the beginning of time, humans have communicated by telling stories and the propensity to listen to a story is ingrained in our DNA.  A Buffer study showed that adding a story to your blog post can increase readership by 300%.

Use contemporary culture references.  Weaving a pop culture reference or two into your post, especially if you’re able to add a celebrity name or two like Beyoncéor George Clooney (see how I did that?), helps boost readership and interest.

Use the Shaq Rule.  Shaquille O’Neal is a social media powerhouse, with a Twitter following of 8.5 million and 4.7 million Facebook fans.  His rule for posting is that 80% of his posts must be entertaining, 15% must be informative and only 5% should sell something.  People can sniff out a sales pitch online immediately, and just as quickly they are on to the next thing.

ARTICLE BY

Morgan Kennedy
OF
Covington & Burling LLP

Grow Your Email List for Free in 5 Simple Steps

The Rainmaker Institute

Lots of law firms struggle with compiling and maintaining a robust email marketing list, and they really struggle with how to keep adding qualified names to help them build a better list.  If you are recognizing yourself as you read this, then the good news is that you can actually build a great list for your firm and it doesn’t need to cost you a dime.

Here are five simple steps you can take to keep growing that important list of people you want to market to:

Grow Your Email List for Free in 5 Simple Steps, Money Tree

1.  Provide something of value.   Take the top 5 or 10 questions that clients ask you most often, write down the answers and turn that content into an e-book or report.  Post this on your website and blog and offer it as a free download to people who provide you with their name and email address.  The people who take you up on your offer are good prospects since they are clearly interested in the kind of problems you solve.  Add their names to your email marketing list to continue the conversation.

2.  Tell them what to do.  Your e-newsletter, your website and your blog should always contain easy-to-find calls-to-action that invite readers to subscribe, download a free report, make an appointment for a free consultation — anything you’d like them to do that could lead to business for you.  All your calls-to-action need to be simple and have the ability to collect email addresses for you.

3.  Keep reviewing your offers.  If your readers are not responding well to your calls-to-action or offers, then what you are offering is clearly not appealing to them.  First be sure that they are easy to understand.  If you’re still not getting a good response, change up your offers.  You should do this anyway every few months to keep things fresh.

4.  Use social media.  Using social media to spread the word about your valuable content and offers is a great way to attract more prospects that you might have otherwise missed.   LinkedIn groups are a great way to spread the word, but be sure you’re not being too promotional too often.

5.  Pay attention to the analytics.  You can gain valuable insight into what people are responding to on your website and in your e-newsletter by scouring the statistics.  Google Analytics is a free add-on for your website and blog and provides great information on what pages people are spending time on, and what isn’t working so well.  If you use Constant Contact or a similar service for your e-newsletters, these services provide information on how many people opened and read your newsletter and what they clicked on. 

By using these five simple steps, you are not just adding names to your list, you are getting truly qualified leads for your marketing efforts.

ARTICLE BY

Stephen Fairley
 
OF
The Rainmaker Institute