Lawyer Marketing Mistakes - 4 Mistakes that Will Kill Your Law Firm's Digital Marketing Campaign
ACCESS Newswire
While There are No Guarantees for Success in Digital Marketing, Ensuring the Absence of these Mistakes Will Give You the Advantage Over the Competition
DALLAS, TX / ACCESSWIRE / April 2, 2017 / Has your law firm's online marketing campaign suddenly hit a dead end? It may be that you're making a number of website marketing mistakes that are hurting your efforts.
What is Digital Marketing When it Comes to Law Firm Marketing
"Digital marketing (also known as data-driven marketing) is an umbrella term for the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium." - Wikipedia.
With digital marketing practices always evolving, making sure your legal marketing campaign is in top shape is a constant process. According to Group8A founder, Eric Samson, "Changes in trends and tactics shift quickly with the wind and, as digital marketers, the only way we can keep up is through innovation and information."
Of course, keeping your ear to the ground and adapting to trends and industry shifts at any moment's notice is a lot easier said than done, especially for law firms that don't have a dedicated marketing staff, much less a major marketing department.
Given how volatile digital marketing can be, sometimes the best solution is not to figure out what to do, but rather to identify what digital marketing mistakes you might be making. In this guide, we look at a few of these common issues.
1.You Have No Overarching Strategy
A 2012 Smart Insights study found that as much as 47 percent of businesses are investing in digital marketing without a clear strategy. In an updated survey (2017), Smarts Insights says, "that number has shrunk to 44%...although that is still quite high, and means many are doing digital with no strategy in place."
So what's the big deal? Operating without a strategic approach to your law firm's digital marketing efforts means that you could be missing several opportunities for efficient targeting and optimization.
If you're a small law firm (or a lone attorney), you could certainly get great results from your SEO, content, and social media marketing.
However, playing things by ear can only take you so far. If your campaign's performance has plateaued, a real strategy may be what you need.
With no goals, how could you accurately measure your campaign's performance and success? For many organizations, the problem is not the absence of goals but rather the use of abstract goals, such as:
1. Increasing likes 2. Getting more followers 3. Trending on social media
The beauty of digital marketing lies in the ability to measure pretty much everything you do (on Google Analytics), which is obviously great for determining your ROI.
Smart Insights CEO Dave Chaffey has a developed a system of setting digital marketing goals called the 5Ss of digital marketing, which comprises:
Sell - Growing your sales
Speak - Communicating with your audience
Serve - Adding value to your customers' experience
Save - Cutting costs
Sizzle - Generating online excitement for your brand
Of course, there are many other goal-setting systems out there, but Smart Insights' approach is a good place to start.
With many of your target clients using the Internet as the first point of contact to your brand, you need to invest time and effort in improving your online visibility through search engine optimization.
Rachel Ayre, of Hit Search Limited, refers to a whitepaper titled, Sink or swim: How to adapt to the New Legal Consumer, which showed that "31% of all legal consumers research lawyers online, and 95% of them stated that online reviews matter to them when deciding which law firm to hire."
However, there are a few things to consider when investing in SEO. For starters, gone are the days of old school SEO, which was a free-for-all game of keyword stuffing, article farms, and low-value articles.
Google Panda, a major search algorithm update, pretty much killed off the strategy of gaming search engines with spammy content, while Google Penguin, another update, now penalizes shady link building practices.
So what else is there to do? We go back to what Google has been saying for years: deliver a great user experience to your website's visitors. That means making your site easy to navigate and improving your content, all while making it easy for Google to find you with strategically placed keywords and high-quality inlinks and backlinks.
While SEO is certainly an important aspect of digital marketing, it's organic approach to improving your search rankings takes time to generate results. It's why so many law firms give up on SEO - they fail to realize it's a long-term effort.
It's also for this reason that paid ad platforms like Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, and Bing Ads can be a powerful way to complement your SEO efforts. Each platform offers a powerful suite of targeting options that allow you to run precise campaigns aimed at your most relevant online users based on their demographics, location, and interests among several other things.
In turn, this ensures your PPC ads are only visible to people who are most likely going to be interested in your law firm's services.
Key Takeaways:
As competition among law firms get tighter, the need to stand out and create more visibility especially in the SERPs is of utmost importance if you want higher possibility of getting more leads. Pay per Click (PPC) is quite useful if you don't want your spot in the SERPs getting occupied by your competitors through paid search. Here is a clear scenario. Read Lawyer Marketing Using Google Adwords
SUMMING UP
1. Missing or Lack of Strategy 2. Lack of Defined Market Goals and Measurement of These Goals 3. SEO Audit 4. Paid Media
These are just a few of the most common mistakes that usually have a visible effect on any digital marketing campaign. To set up your digital marketing efforts for success, make sure you have an overarching strategy, set the right kind of goals, invest in modern SEO, and don't underestimate paid ad campaigns.
