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Looking forward to a lively carnival.
While a law firm may find it difficult to sign new clients during a downturn, it still needs to reinforce its expertise and value-added with existing clients to keep them onboard. As everyone knows it costs far more to sign a new client than it does to keep an existing one.
A recession may also provide an opportunity to grab market share. Firms that boost marketing while their competitors are cutting back face less competition for the attention of prospects, and thus can more easily get their message out.
With these thoughts in mind, we recently reviewed two MarketingSherpa studies to find out how businesses are adjusting their marketing tactics during the downturn to maintain brand awareness and continue generating leads, and see what guidance we could extract for law firms in terms of online marketing strategies.
The studies show that marketers anticipate investing more in online marketing tactics while cutting back on traditional methods like print and tradeshows. One sample chart shows that 38% are increasing online investment while 36% are decreasing investment in traditional tactics.
What are the top online marketing tactics being pursued during the downturn? Email marketing (albeit to house lists, not rented lists), social networking (Web 2.0), and webinars (sample chart: 52% of marketers are increasing email marketing to house lists, while 47% are increasing Web 2.0 marketing efforts).
The case for law firms investing is email marketing is that it is low cost, targeted and measurable (for example, with email alerts, you can demonstrate how many clients (and which clients) are opening your emails, and clicking to read the full articles).
As far as Web 2.0, while it costs little more than a person's time to blog and participate in various social networks, the "buzz" generated can be substantial (see case study of H&R Block's social media strategy involving Facebook and Twitter), while the positive impact on search engine visibility can be significant over time. By the same token, devoting effort to SEO can dramatically improve site traffic (and increase new leads) with little outlay.
Finally, MarketingSherpa's research shows a shift away from participating in "live" events like tradeshows towards sponsoring online events like webinars. The logic is easy to see: while attendance at an "in person" event entails major transportation, lodging and other costs, running a webinar costs little more than the time of the people involved.
Some final recommendations from MarketingSherpa:
Upsell and cross-sell to your installed base - as noted, it's far easier to increase business with an existing client than to sign a new client
Focus your marketing on the best-performing industries where companies are less affected by the downturn - develop case studies of past successes in such industries to help with pitching new prospects
The complete studies can be purchased on MarketingSherpa here and here.
In other words, clients, prospects and other individuals who interact with your firm will be plugging your firm's name (and the names of its individual attorneys) into Google, and whether they find positive or negative references will play a major role in how they perceive your firm and its lawyers.
As such, it is critically important for firms to:
(i) use tools like RSS feeds and email alerts to monitor traditional media sources, key legal industry blogs, and social networking sites, for both positive and negative references to their firm and key attorneys (and respond as may be necessary - an art in and of itself best left to experienced online PR professionals), and
(ii) proactively seek to develop, publish and promote content that reflects positively on the firm and its individual lawyers (e.g., articles, case studies, press releases, blog posts) through various Internet channels such as PR Web, blogs, social bookmarking sites, and Wikipedia (and not solely the firm's website).
These efforts will stack the deck on Google in favor of positive references to your firm and lawyers (and overwhelm any negative references - hopefully there are none).
For those who missed the presentation, here's a link to the Flash version of the Powerpoint slides (incidentally, for any law firms wishing to convert Powerpoint slide presentations to Flash, feel free to contact us). We also recommended that attendees purchase the book Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online, by Andy Beal and Dr. Judy Strauss, for an excellent overview of the process of monitoring and managing an online reputation.
Given the importance of optimizing a law firm website for the search engines, a good CMS will ideally offer the following five features to assist with your SEO efforts:
Customize the following elements for each web page with targeted keyword phrases: Page title, URL, Header tags (e.g., H1), and Meta Description. Being able to populate these elements with targeted keywords helps Google better understand what each page is about and rank it appropriately.
Add new pages to your website on-the-fly with "deep" links to selected new pages automatically displaying on the homepage under an appropriate heading - this enables you to constantly refresh your website, and especially the homepage, with new content.
Quickly link to different pages on your site from within other pages using customized "anchor text," thereby enhancing your internal linking structure.
Add new pages to your navigation and edit the labels for existing navigational links - while perhaps not on the main navigation bar (which is frequently composed of graphics), then at least the text links in any drop down menus.
Deploy an XML sitemap
I've been told I can invite guests, and so if you're available at the above date and time, I'd be delighted to have you attend as my guest. Just let me know in advance so I can ask the program coordinators to create and leave a nametag for you at the entrance to the conference room.
Here's a link to the LMA Quickstart webpage where you can access further information about the program, including a brochure.
In a nutshell, the case study explains that most companies' website home pages are not nearly as effective as they could be because too often the home pages talk about the company, instead of being oriented towards a visitor's point of view.
To illustrate the point, the case study profiles a company called FairMeasures that sells courses, training materials and other resources related to employment law issues. Before their homepage redesign, the home page said this is who we are, this is what we do, we train your managers, we have a newsletter, we sell books and tapes, etc.
As part of the redesign, the company identified their two key target markets: employers and employees. The homepage was then split into two parts to match these markets’ interests. On the employer side it said, ‘Prevent law suits,’ and on the employee side it said, ‘Know Your Rights.’ While the content remained exactly the same underneath these pages, the homepage was repositioned to be about them (i.e., the customers), and not us (i.e., the company) (note: the company's homepage appears to have been redesigned again since 2000, but the principles used in the original redesign still apply).
Result of the redesign? Within the first week of launch of the redesigned site, the company had more sales response than it did in the entire previous year.
The lesson for law firms? Make sure your website homepage speaks to your target clients. Focus on things like links to case studies and testimonials demonstrating successes achieved for different businesses so clients can see what you've done for other companies in their industries. This will resonate more with them than, say, a bland listing of your firm's internal practice areas.
In connection with that prediction, eMarketer cites a fascinating September 2008 study which found that many Internet users would be willing to pay $2/month to access some of the most popular applications now available for free on the Internet, including, Google (52%), Yahoo (22%), YouTube (19%), Wikipedia (18%), and Facebook (17%). Here's a link to the eMarketer chart with the complete results.
Subscription-based law firm websites anyone?
With that introduction we'd like to share some quick pointers from a 1997 (yes, over 11 years ago!) column written by Nielsen on how to write for the web. Nielsen's studies of how people view web pages revealed that 79 percent of users always scanned any new page they came across; while only 16 percent read word-by-word. The lesson for law firm website copwriters is to use scannable text, which Nielsen describes as:
highlighted keywords (using either hyperlinks or formatting like bold)
Check your website copy today and see if it meets these criteria.
For example, the index shows that Burger King is way ahead of competitor Taco Bell in social media mentions, scoring 84.9 to TB's 46.4. However, a closer look at the data reveals that the two brands have different strongholds, with Burger King netting lots of mentions on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and Taco Bell snagging more references on microblogs like Twitter (as per Forbes).
Run your firm's name through the algorithm for fun and see how "hip" (or not) it is.
The bottom line is that targeted law firm email newsletters and alerts remain a low cost marketing tool that resonates well with existing clients and will regularly remind them of the firm's expertise so they think of your firm first when an opportunity for new business arises.
The upshot of the recent study is that organizations who have an "investment-oriented" view of email marketing - that is, as a tool to build and nurture long term relationships with existing clients and customers - are finding that, even during a recession, the ROI from email marketing continues to increase as measured by higher open, clickthrough and conversion rates.
MarketingSherpa's conclusion?
"Modest investments in testing, best practices, measurement and, most importantly, providing relevant content will generate powerful ROI [from email marketing] - especially in a time when selling to existing customers will be a key to survival."
What lessons can law firms take away from this? The first cardinal rule to recall is that it is always preferable (and less costly) to generate new business from existing clients than to find and sign up new clients (especially during a recession). Second, email marketing remains perhaps the most effective tool for communicating with existing clients. This is because existing clients are accustomed to receiving emails from your firm, often on a day-to-day basis, and also value insights from your firm into breaking legal developments that are relevant to their businesses and industries.
So the lesson to take away is that as your competitors cut back on branding initiatives, email alerts and newsletters remain the perfect mechanism to cost-effectively reinforce your firm's expertise with clients on an ongoing basis. You want your existing clients to continue to think of your firm first when an opportunity for new business arises, and you encourage that by regularly reminding clients that your attorneys are experts who continually monitor developments in their respective practice areas.
Of course, your law firm's email alerts and email newsletters must remain RELEVANT - don't blast out an email about the Supreme Court's latest tax ruling to ALL the firm's clients. That's annoying to the 95% of subscribers who couldn't care less, and thus counterproductive to building long term relationships. Instead, send email alerts about emerging legal issues to those who really care about these developments, and need to know about them to assess the impact on their business operations. By sending relevant email content to targeted client lists, your firm reinforces the notion that it is staying abreast of new legal developments and stands ready to provide advice as needed.
Finally, make sure to track metrics. When clients click a link in a "teaser" in a law firm email newsletter to read a full article, those clients are demonstrating interest in the subject of the article. Your software can tell you exactly who they are. Make sure your attorneys are following up appropriately. If needed, we can show you how.
To update customers on company deals, promotions and coupons (Dell, Starbucks)
Lawyers might consider promoting their blogs via a tool like Twitterfeed, or alerting clients about breaking legal developments (decisions, legislation, regulations) and briefly discussing their impact. Q&A on a timely topic also seems like an interesting idea.
I'd venture that the 80% of the firms who feel they didn't get new business from their SEO efforts weren't properly tracking traffic and conversions, didn't do the SEO right, or did a poor job of closing leads. Basically, it's somewhat difficult not to get new business (or least get new leads) over time when SEO is done right.