Tag: Legal Marketing

Join Inside Counsel in D.C. Next Week! Women, Influence & Power in Law Conference, Sept 17-19

The National Law Review is pleased to bring you information about Inside Counsel’s Women, Influence & Power in Law Conference.

Women, Influence & Power In Law Conference

September 17-19, 2014
The Capital Hilton
Washington, DC

A Unique Conference with a Fresh Format

The Only National Forum Facilitating Women-to-Women Exchange on Current Legal Issues.The second annual Women, Influence & Power in Law Conference has a uniquely substantive focus, covering the topics that matter most to corporate counsel, outside counsel, and public sector attorneys. The event is comprised of three distinct and executive level events.

 

This unique event is the only national forum facilitating women-to-women exchange on current legal issues. This conference is led and facilitated almost exclusively by women, encouraging an exchange between women in-house counsel and women outside counsel on the day’s most pressing legal challenges. With 30 sessions, the event will have a substantive focus, covering topics that matter most to corporate counsel, outside counsel, and public sector attorneys.

The Women, Influence & Power in Law Conference is not a forum for lawyers to discuss so-called “women’s issues.” It is a conference for women in-house and outside counsel to discuss current legal topics, bringing their individual experience and perspectives on issues of:

  • Governance & Compliance
  • Litigation & Investigations
  • Intellectual Property
  • Government Relations & Public Policy
  • Global Litigation & Transactions
  • Labor & Employment

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

What’s the Deal? Why Do Accounting Firms Use Initials Instead of Names? – Part 2

Fishman Marketing logo

We know that for many professional-services firms (e.g. law, accounting, consulting, etc.), using initials is simply a necessary compromise — a less-controversial way to abbreviate the firm’s name.  You get to shorten a cumbersome name without seeming to favor the first one or two people over the others whose names come later on the door. It seems like a reasonable solution, but it’s actually a big step backwards, as we discussed in our previous “Don’t Use Initials” blog post.

Some of our valued blog readers wanted more supporting evidence, another way to explain it to their firm’s own professionals.  This post shows how I explain this issue to the marketing committees, to help them make a good decision:

1. Look at this random collection of accounting firm logos I found on Google. (Disclosure: We don’t work with any of these firms.)

Look carefully:

Initials Accounting firm Bad Logos Page One copy

2. OK?  Got it?  Now I’ll shuffle them around and changed just one of the logos.

See the group below? Can you tell which of the following logos is different?

Initials Accounting firm Bad Logos Page TWO copy

You couldn’t tell, could you?  Of course not.

3.  OK, now I’m going to shuffle them around again and insert a new logo we designed recently.

Can you tell which of these logos, below, was added to the mix?

Initials Accounting firm Bad Logos Page THREE copy

It’s pretty obvious, right? 

Here’s the true test of marketing:

If you needed to find one of those companies on Google tomorrow, which one of them would you remember?

So, before changing a perfectly good name to a random collection of forgettable initials, think whether you’re advancing the firm’s strategic goals, or actually making your existing marketing challenges even harder to achieve.  Most of the time, a name, even a challenging one, is a better option than the firm’s initials.

ARTICLE BY
Ross Fishman

OF
Fishman Marketing, Inc.

Fix These 4 Problems on Your Blog to Maximize Search Engine Optimization

Consultsweb Logo

1.   Make It Useful

Write about something that will provide value to the person reading it. Write with your audience in mind. Keep the writing simple but professional. Remember: Your clients do not have a law degree and if your writing confuses them, they will look for answers elsewhere.

Legal MarketingThink about your client base. Are they middle aged woman, seniors, mostly male, individuals with physical handicaps? Target your posts to their interests, needs and questions. Avoid general articles that could be for anyone. Have the reader in mind when you are writing content and show your expertise. Answer the reader’s unasked questions.

Targeting a specific demographic will help with the social signals as it will probably be shared more and will earn links. Fluff content may get you some rankings for staying relevant and regularly updating your website, but if an actual human goes on your site and does not find value in what you have posted, chances of a return visit are slim—and your ultimate goal should be people returning to your site based on the quality of its content.

2.   Make It Local

Think about your local area and any news or hot topics that you can cover in blog updates. Can you add unique value to these stories? The more your topics and writing speak to your local audience, the more engaged they will be with your site. Write about charities or events you are involved in.

3.   Engage the Audience

How does the page look? Content is not just words. Content can be text, images, videos, charts, graphics and data. Use video and image assets to help tell your story. Visual content engages the user and instills respect for the quality of the information presented on the page.

Also, long blog posts allow you to fit a lot of good information and keywords onto the page, but you will need to divide it in to short sections or into an FAQ format to enable visitors to scan the page for the information they seek.

Use your employees for feedback. Ask them to share your content. If three months have passed and no one has shared anything, it is time to start asking why.

4.   Get the Technical Details Right

Effective title structure is key to generating good organic traffic and a high-quality user experience. Utilizing headings (H1, H2, H3), alt text and description tagging is important for user experience (UX) and for search engines to understand and optimally display your content.

Article By:

Tanner Jones
Of:
Consultwebs.com, Inc.

How to Increase Your Engagement on Facebook [INFOGRAPHIC]

The Rainmaker Institute

If you’re using Facebook to “sell” your practice, you are probably disappointed in your results.  You see, Facebook is about engagement and anything that smacks of a hard-sell is usually tuned out.

facebook like

You will get much better results if you simply surrender to what Facebook can deliver, which is an opportunity to meet new prospects and to share your knowledge that may someday lead to new business.

A lot of new business connections occur on Facebook based on people you used to know –old high school or college friends that you connect with there and then educate them naturally on what you do now.  In that sense, approaching Facebook as a referral source cultivation opportunity could be a mindset that will pay you big dividends in the future.

That said, there are certain things you can do that research shows leads to more engagement with your Facebook posts.  This infographic lays that out:

Facebook engagement marketing

Article By:

Stephen Fairley
Of:
The Rainmaker Institute

Serve Up a Strategic Marketing Approach

KLA Marketing Logo

Here it is more than halfway through the year and a lot of you who began 2014 committed to changing your marketing approach now realize “wow, nothing has changed.”

Below are ten steps to be more strategic in this year’s marketing planning:

1. Having good intentions in January is not the same as making marketing a priority.In other words, you jotted down some ideas, threw them in a drawer and went about your business. Marketing is often an afterthought.  If you do not make building and growing your practice a priority by scheduling it into your daily calendar and then “live and breathe” the concepts, how do you expect progress to be made, by you and other team members?

2. Develop cash flow budgets and projections are imperative so that you would have something to measure progress by. Businesses run with numbers. Law firms are no different. When creating a marketing plan, be as specific as possible. Set concrete goals as such as below:

  • Increase employment law cases by privately-held businesses cases by 15%
  • Acquire at least one new client each quarter with billings of at least $90k per quarter.
  • Increase revenue per existing top five clients by 20 percent

3. Creating metrics to measure the success or failure of your plans and activities against projections developed in number 2 is an ideal way to track your marketing initiatives by results achieved. Items such as response rates, average new billings per new clients, average billings from repeat work of existing clients…etc.  Do you have any written metrics and do you constantly monitor them? If not, this is a critical component for measuring success.

4. Assemble the right team.  Get the right people “on the bus and the wrong people” off the bus.  If your firm is full of worker bees, you will be challenged to produce marketing results.  However, if you support and empower those lawyers who are motivated to become a producer, a rainmaker, you are more likely to have a stronger marketing focus and better marketing results.

5. Retain professional training.While many lawyers “think” they know what to do, and they may, most do not know “how” to engage in high impact business development endeavors successfully. Effectively marketing and promoting a law practice ain’t what it used to be. Gone are the days when deals are just a handshake away and a matter of spending the afternoon on the golf course.

Seeking outside support to fully learn, from soup to nuts, the sales process, how to efficiently fill your pipeline AND persistently track your sales (i.e. new client engagements) are things that do not materialize from amorphous. Retain a professional trainer/coach and you will never go back.

6. Set a clear and powerful direction.  It is a powerful exercise to have regular meetings with your team to cultivate a marketing culture within a firm and to outline the marketing expectations.  Team meetings can serve multiple purposes of parlaying business opportunities, sharing knowledge, and achieving positive marketing results.

7. Turn up the focus dial. Most likely, if you do not focus like a laser on identifying targeted clients, markets and niche areas of practice, you will likely become discouraged and ease up on your marketing commitment. Thus, it is imperative to narrow down exact targets so you know who you are looking for. An example of this for a construction litigation practice may be commercial developers on the East Coast with revenues between $50-150 million a year. That description will narrow the companies you are looking for and are simple to find with basic online market research.

8. Assemble the marketing tools. Having the right tools is essential to ensuring you derive the most out of your marketing strategies. Tools are no longer limited to printed brochures, email and promotional items. Video, social media networking, SMS texting, webinars, podcasts, and creative interactive websites can also be highly effective, depending upon your marketing goals and objectives. The increase in marketing tools equates to greater options in your toolbox. It also means that selecting the right tools is more important than ever.

9.Invest in the right things.  Decadent offices, random acts of lunch, and token “shotgun” expenditures in the name of marketing do not attract new clients. Invest instead in strengthening relationships with key clients, communicating to existing clients and prospective clients how you are improving their businesses and/or personal lives.

10. Action, Action, Action. One of themost impactful ways you can be more strategic in your marketing planning is simply to execute on the plan. Marketing must be an integral part of your business, not a “set it and forget it” aspect of your business. In order to ensure that your marketing plan succeeds, you must be actively engaged in working that plan.

The means by which to instill a more strategic approach to your marketing are vast. Reiterating my mantra that marketing success comes with “consistent, persistent massive amounts of action over a prolonged period of time”, all the strategic marketing spokes (Internet marketing; communications program; reputation management, etc.) must be moving forward at the same concurrently. Anything less and the wheels just spin.

Article By:

Kimberly Alford Rice
Of:
KLA Marketing Associates

Making These 3 Errors in WordPress Makes Your Law Firm’s Blog Less Effective

Correct Consults Logo

Here are three common WordPress mistakes that will make your legal website less effective than it should be:

  1. Posting content that is not unique, engaging or well designed. Unstructured information, filler materials and overly general articles do not motivate a user to interact with the site. Your goal should be to create content that users want to share or bookmark or research further by following your in-text links.
  2. Getting caught up in finding the perfect WP template and design. Many inexperienced website authors expend all their energy before even considering content development. A lot of sites use generic content that reads like it was added as an afterthought. It is hard to schedule time to generate good content but when most people say, “Oh, I’ll come back to improve that later,” they never do.
  3. Failing to design each page for its intended purpose. Out-of-the-box WordPress themes use similar forms and sidebars on every page. It is important for the design (as well as the content) to serve the page’s purpose.
Article By:

Tanner Jones
Of:
Consultwebs.com, Inc.

Tips for Growing Your Fan Base on Facebook

The Rainmaker Institute mini logo (1)

One of the biggest challenges for anyone seeking to have a large social media following is growing your audience to a healthy level.  Sometimes it almost feels like we’re back in grade school, looking for other kids to like us!

Inbound marketing firm Hubspot has a number of informative presentations on Facebook marketing, but this quick slide guide with five tips on how to grow your audience is particularly useful since it visually walks you through the steps you need to take on your Facebook page to reap the rewards from each tip:

One of the biggest challenges for anyone seeking to have a large social media following is growing your audience to a healthy level.  Sometimes it almost feels like we’re back in grade school, looking for other kids to like us!

Inbound marketing firm Hubspot has a number of informative presentations on Facebook marketing, but this quick slide guide with five tips on how to grow your audience is particularly useful since it visually walks you through the steps you need to take on your Facebook page to reap the rewards from each tip:

5 Quick Tips For Growing Your Facebook Audience from HubSpot

Article By:

Stephen Fairley
Of:
The Rainmaker Institute

The One SEO Rule You Need to Know About Alt Tags for Images

Correct Consults Logo

Wikipedia says alt attributes (alt tags) are used in HTML documents/Web pages “to specify alternative text (alt text) that is to be rendered when the element to which it is applied cannot be rendered.”

Alt Tags Images

To optimize your website’s content for search, remember one simple rule for image alt tags: An image’s alt attributes should describe the visual. Including keywords in alt tags is a good practice as long as it’s not spammy. Alt attributes used to have a larger SEO impact in Google searches before the company changed its Google Image search design. Traffic has decreased considerably from image search since then.

 

 

 

Article By:

Tanner Jones
Of:
Consultwebs.com, Inc.

The Right Way To Get Free Publicity

Great Legal Marketing

 

There’s a saying that goes “any publicity is good publicity,” and while I’m not so sure about that, I do know that positive publicity can do wonders for your law firm. But do you know what’s even better than positive publicity? FREE positive publicity.  That’s right, you can get great publicity that won’t cost you a single penny and I’m going to tell you how:

  • Contact your local TV news station.  Email, fax, or call your local news station and introduce yourself. Tell them who you are and what you do, and don’t forget to mention what you specialize in. Tell them that you are available if they ever need an expert to speak on a legal topic, especially in your niche.  Do this once a month until they contact you to be interviewed. If you do a good job, they’ll keep coming back to you and your face will continue to be broadcast on local television for free.
  • Notify different mediums of the media.  Once you’ve been interviewed on TV, let your local radio stations and newspapers know. They will see you as a leading expert in your field and they will follow you and want to ask you to interview with them.  This way, you can recycle interviews and information without being redundant.
  • Clip and recycle.  Once you have been interviewed on TV a few times, you’ll want to compile all of your interviews into one video that you can share online and use on you website to show potential clients that you are the leading expert in your field. With an easy editing software, you can clip the highlights of all your interviews and recycle them into one powerful, credibility-building video.
  • Testimonials.  If you host an event or seminar, bring a cameraman along with you.  After the event, have your cameraman politely ask attendees if he can interview them about their experience. If you’re a great lawyer, then I’ll bet you can host a great event, so you know that everyone who agrees to do an interview will do nothing but rave about you and the knowledge you possess. Take these testimonials and upload them to YouTube, your website, and social media so everyone can see how awesome you are.
  • Be educational.  The best way to show that you are a credible expert in your field is to prove it rather than just advertise it. In order to prove this, you need to be the source of information for all questions and topics in your field of law. So, you should blog, write articles, make videos, and even publish books on your wealth of information that you have about your practice area(s). When you hand someone a book that you authored instead of a flimsy advertisement with your face on it, you are creating great publicity and credibility for yourself and your firm.
Article By:

Ben Glass
Of:
Great Legal Marketing, Inc.