In recent months, the internet has been your shop window more than ever before. As we continue to move forward with the easing of personal and professional restrictions, we thought that now would be a good time to update our digital marketing “Top Tips”. Our update is based on our experience of having worked closely with our law firm customers during this trying period and takes into consideration some of the trials and tribulations (and opportunities) that this new normal presents.
In the last issue of the Newsletter, I made a case for individual lawyers cutting back on use of social media. Let’s now consider some alternative marketing techniques to which firms’ social media budgets can be diverted, which may deliver more bang for the buck.
Long, long ago (2012) I wrote an article on this topic for the Newsletter and asked firms who had said that they were willing, in principle, to give some free initial legal advice, whether they thought it was worthwhile. Broadly, most of them did. You can read this article at http://bit.ly/INL1201venables.
This year I again invited a wide range of firms, via Twitter and LinkedIn as well as by email, to give me their views on this topic. The answers people provided are very interesting but no one is now unequivocally saying that “giving free initial advice is good” and I think that there has been a marked move away from this view over the intervening years.
Here are the contributions, in no particular order.
Facebook is the grandaddy of social media. Founded in 2004, it is by no means the oldest service, but by a huge margin it is the largest, boasting in excess of two billion users worldwide. Although it is used primarily for personal networking purposes, documenting the lives and thoughts of its users to help them keep in touch with family and friends, it is also a highly effective business marketing platform.
This article is about a new product created by my firm called Crosselerator™ which I immodestly believe is likely to be one of the most profitable pieces of software for users that they’ll ever own. It was producing enquiries for us almost as soon as we started using it, and as I write this (Jan 2018) we are still 2 months away from any serious marketing. If you want to skip the “why” and just look at the “how”, scroll down to “How it Works”; the detail is in the series of videos on the Crosselerator YouTube channel. It takes only 15 minutes to watch them all.
We describe Crosselerator as “the software that turns everyday email into income – every day”. It is the first tech product our firm has built where the target market is not specifically professional practices: it can be used by any “silo” business (most largeish businesses are).
The legal directory industry shows no sign of decline. With the advent of the internet it would have been reasonable to expect the directories business to fade away as more people took to search engines to find their preferred counsel. However, the directories have embraced the internet by providing online versions with relevant information and as a result they are doing better than ever.
As you might imagine there are a number of directories to choose from. However, it’s worth noting that they are run in very different ways. For example, both Chambers and Partners and Legal 500 spend a great deal of time and resources researching the legal market, both in the UK and overseas. Their results are both unbiased and unambiguous, ranking the top-rated counsel (as found by their research) in each practice area in each jurisdiction. Martindale-Hubbell and Who’s Who Legal appear to be more listings services rather than publications that have been methodically researched and ranked (I’ve received emails from Who’s Who inviting me to buy a profile in their directory and suggested that I would fit into the litigation category …. Scary thought for a marketing agency!). Practical Law Company’s directory ceased to be operational in 2013. It is worth mentioning that all of the directories have a cost associated with them. However, both Legal 500 and Chambers and Partners will still include the firm/chambers and lawyers in the directory rankings even if they choose not to purchase a profile. It’s not clear from the Who’s Who website how they deal with this.
In February of this year Google made a substantial change to the way it inserts some advertisements into the search results when searching from a desktop computer.
The advertisements on the right hand side of the screen, known as the “rail”, have all been removed. And Google now serves up to four text ads above the organic search engine results (SERPs) and a further three ads at the bottom.
Outsourcing generally makes the media headlines when a multi-million pound government contract hits the buffers, and we all moan when having to deal with an overseas customer contact centre where the quality of the phone line and the quaint accent of the operator combine to leave us frustrated rather than delighted.
In the legal sector, media coverage of outsourcing has mainly focused on the wave of legal business process outsourcing to countries far and near.
As firms have become more confident in the use of outsourcing, they have extended its use to an increasing number of non-core services, ranging from telephone answering to cloud technology services. This article is concerned specifically with the outsourcing of marketing activities.
Law firms are increasingly competing for attention on the internet and, with content marketing being one of the main ways for firms to generate quality leads, the online space is becoming increasingly saturated. Regardless of which online channels firms choose to focus on (eg Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube etc), it’s becoming ever more difficult for law firms looking to be noticed to stand out from the crowd and drive more business online.
As difficult as it can be to get lawyers to write content for online publication, even once a great piece of content has been written, there’s no guarantee of it being seen or shared online. Due to the sheer amount of competition online, regardless of the talent you have at your law firm and no matter how well you think you differentiate yourselves from your competitors, it is still possible for great, unique content to go unnoticed. To put it bluntly, simply creating good content does not cut it anymore.
One of the most difficult aspects of my job is helping people outside of the digital marketing industry understand the way search has changed over time and convincing them that when they come to us asking for “SEO”, now what they really need is digital marketing.
It’s not that people do not understand, at a basic level, what it is that we do; it’s more that what constitutes SEO has itself changed, as search engines have developed and become more sophisticated and as the online environment itself has matured. People’s understanding of SEO remains slightly behind the rapidly-changing search marketing environment.
Much of the free content we enjoy on the web is supported by the advertising publishers sell on those pages. Until recently we have readily accepted this bargain. However, as advertising methods have become ever more distracting and intrusive, users have in increasing numbers taken to installing ad blockers to mitigate the effects: they facilitate a faster and cleaner browsing experience, enhance privacy, reduce the chances of picking up malware and save data.
According to a recent report by “anti-ad blocking” company PageFair, ad blocking has grown by over 40 per cent globally over the past year, taking the worldwide numbers of ad blocking users to almost 200 million. However, UK ad blocking users rose at a far greater rate over the same period, by 82 per cent to 12 million.
This article first appeared in Legal Web Watch October 2015. Legal Web Watch is a free monthly email service which complements the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers. To receive Legal Web Watch regularly sign up here.
Ad blocking has been much discussed recently, particularly since Apple allowed apps with ad blocking capabilities to operate with Safari in iOS 9. However, the steam had already been building for some time as users have got increasingly frustrated with intrusive advertising and web browser tracking degrading their experience.
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