Changes in expected corporate and client communication require law firms to adapt their marketing strategies to new social networking marketing methods, or perish
The new era of marketing relies heavily on the web and social networking. Additionally, the new marketing methods heavily rely on building relationships in new ways, specifically social network relationships. This requires a significant portion of law firm resources to be put toward development of new socially effective marketing programs. Research indicates the web medium will continue to grow. For example, we now know that regardless of how prospective clients find us, at some point in the various stages of the buying process, 95% of those prospects use the web ot make the buying decision, even in the professional service markets. This is a statistic that no law firm can afford to ignore. Most importantly, future generations who natives to the web, will expect that any law firm, regardless of its size be able to adapt to the new socially adept and reliant prospects.
If your law firm is complaining about lessened revenues in the recession, it probably has not fully explored and developed the its new social marketing tactics:
For each firm which complains about a reduction in billables, there are those firms which have embraced the opening of new markets by the use of social networking media on the web. Just think, 10 years ago, only the large law firms were advertising on a national basis. Now, solos and small firms are able and are advertising on a national level on the net. If your marketing strategy has slowed, your firm must rethink and develop new marketing strategies beyond its current ones.
Here is why:
Even if the type of legal service you provide limits you to the local client, the new marketing strategy enables you to establish lawyer-to-lawyer contacts and bonds throughout the United States which ultimately get you to develop a larger local market.
Limitations:
Social networking on the is not a substitute for a plan or strategy, this is simply a newer method of markeing with a variety of tools which need to be mastered. This article does not prioritize, nor should it be considered formal analysis. A marketing strategist should first identify objectives, develop a plan only then choosing tools, and in that order.
The Stats:
Online ad spending was expected to reach 20 percent of the total U.S. ad spend in 2007. That's according to an annual ad spending study for 2007 released by Outsell.
A survey of marketers found companies plan to increase their online spending 18 percent in 2007. The Internet channel is expected to reach 20 percent of total ad spend. Online will continue to chip away at print, which is expected to maintain 40 percent of ad spend. The share held by TV, radio, and movie ad spending is expected to slip 3.5 percent this year.
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads will take a one percent hit this year due to concerns over click fraud and almost half of the advertisers surveyed (49 percent) have reduced or plan to reduce their PPC spending.
Online sponsorships are expected to increase by 12 percent.
Total ad spending is likely to increase by 5.8 percent. That's an optimistic outlook compared to 2.6% grown estimated by TNS Media Intelligence. The TNS data excludes search and sponsored listings.
New Web Era Marketing Methods:
The Master of the Domain
Domain ownership has been the standards since the late 90s. Nearly every company, large, small, medium, and mom and pop boutique law firm now has a web presence. The main purpose of domain ownership is to provide the public with information about your company, it’s services, staff, products, and anything else they may need. Corporate websites must compose of several features that are listed below.
Corporate Site
Law firms continue to establish websites around their brand, building the content around marketing products, support, and corporate information. Despite the mass effort to perfect the corporate website, much of the content is irrelevant which drives prospects away from the site.
Portal Strategy: A widely popular strategy was intended to serve up all user information on one page, and keep users on one’s domain. A few well known portals now exist such as MyYahoo which is a form of a feedreader. Most modern marketers realize that content is now distributed.
Microsites for Segmentation: Typically deployed around new product launches, and new services, these campaign focused sites targe specific market segments. These often short term websites are used for calling specific attraction. They typically have a unique URL and are tied to an integrate campaign. See Microsoft’s Origami microsite. The problem with this strategy is that when it is over deployed, these microsites and end up with an unfocused web strategy.
Interactive Web Marketing: We tend to forget that we have 5 obvious senses (altough my kids would tell you, I have 6) and not everyone responds positively to marketing targeted to the sense of vision. Because prospects differ in the ways they absorb the message, companies which make the website interactive, through new dynamic engagement tools are most successful. There are varieties of technologies to use from uses of Javascript, AJAX and Flash based. Of course, one can only go far where the limitation is that it is still a ‘user to computer’ interaction.
Intranet: Because the web is not just for communicating to prospects and customers, similar strategies apply to your employees. You can get more information by joining the intranet user experience groups, or find other online resources to this specific field.
Extranet: Used for communications with partners, or customers, extranets are secured websites that companies grant access to. Features could include dashboards, updates, support information, and detailed product information. In-house marketing is a tool which many large law firms tend to underemploy when developing a marketing strategy.
Regionalization: In today’s global legal markets, websites are translated, reformatted and segmented by region, culture, class. Be sure to focus on France, China, and Japan as fast emerging languages. More locally, firms are creating sites which include spanish versions of the content to allow the spanish speaking clientelle to emotionally connect with the firm.
Search Marketing:
Many prospects use Google in the ‘hunt’ phase for a product. I’have heard a variety of stats demonstrating success of natural vs paid results, however the ROI is usually positive. It’s likely your firm's competitor is also present on the Search results page.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Many web groups at large corporations have a document, a process, or even a dedicated resource who’s goal is to make sure web content is easily found, indexed, managed and correctly served in search results. The main problem with SEO is that search engines constantly change their search algorithms and SEO strategies have to be constantly revised. This can get extremely expensive.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Frequently, companies will hire a specialized search company to purchase keywords that will help drive contextual links in search results. These ads are contextually displayed based upon the search query.
Email Marketing: Modern email campaigns for law firms must be aware and incorporate the anti-solicitation laws. Therefore, the most effective use of email marketing is lawyer-to-lawyer email marketing which is geared to keep your name in front of other lawyers who will over-time refer to you.
Lawyer-to-lawyer email marketing involves personal emails blasted out to individuals on a mailing list. These modern versions typically have the option to be HTML based, and have hyperlinks brining users back to the corporate site or Microsite. I hear the conversion rate for these are 2-5%, and typically deploy a positive ROI.
Syndicated Content and RSS: You can lump Syndication into this category as I see it as being an evolution as marketing shifts from Push to Pull. RSS is quickly becoming a method where users can opt-in for additional content.
Brand Extension: This is not a new concept. It has simply been applied to various web properties. A consistent brand is one which includes an identifiable logo, and a phrase which prospects have no choice, but to identify with your firm.
Web Advertising: Law firms need to be familiar with the banner, tile, or skyscraper advertising (IAB) model on websites. This age old strategy simply suggests that if there are eyeballs your brand should ‘impress’ upon the users. Click through rates are typically in the 1% or lower rate, sometimes success is measured by brand impressions, (visitation by traffic). These ads are static and do not change even if the content on the webpage changes.
Contextual Advertising: These targeted ads will be served up on the webpage depending on the content that’s on the page. This is a more ‘intelligent’ and therefore more relevant than Web Advertising, which may not be targeted at specific content. This form of advertising can be text, images, media or other form and are common on websites, blogs, and are now appearing on web based emails sites.
Sponsorship and /Cross branding: This is a method of promoting your law firm brand with the right audience in which the property is rewarded for integrating your brand. This will occur on content sites, shows, media properties, blogs, podcasts, and just about everything else.
Social Advertisements: Having just appeared this year from Facebook, it uses contextual information from users who become "fans" of the brand, then ads are served to their network, in an endorsement. This has been highly controversial, and the return on investment is not yet known.
Widget Advertising: This form of advertising has appeared in sites like Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, and Friendster, widgets have proliferated at an amazing growth rate. Expect advertising networks to form over the next year, where a brand can purchase space on any number of widgets across different social networks and communities, groups such as: RockYou, Slide, Widgetbox, and Watercooler to start with.
In-Firm Affiliate Marketing: In firm, affiliate marketing programs compensate partners and alliances that bring referrals, leads, or sales. While it overlaps with other forms of marketing, the goal is to provide each partner, and each associate, the right content or products to the target demographic and an incentive to earn. In firm affiliate marketing may be used to encourage associates to write e-books on specific legal tactics, and to market the e-books to other attorneys for a percentage of a the profit.
Community Marketing and Social Media Marketing: Research has indicated that social media marketing is the fastest growing area of growth in marketing. Typically, the awareness rate is around 25% and deployment 10-20% for most corporations. Some of the tools listed below are not new, while some become critical in how prospects find information about products.
Social Networking, Forums, Wikis, and the use of Collaborative models: My firm is trying many of these strategies together. More of these strategies are starting to merge in many modern versions. While founded from early usenet days, forums allow for communities to form around similar ideas and collaborate. Approximately 33% of companies deploy forums. Wikis have also been used to tie industries together as well as. Savvy marketers have realized the power of social networking sites in every flavor of focus, including image sharing sites like flickr for marketing.
Syndicated Marketing: Article syndication is another strategy which needs regular attention. Posting and sharing articles on other lawyer's blogs and sites can be combined with your social networking strategy.
Podcast Marketing: Many firms are reaching their community though on demand content on mobile devices, the key to this medium is certainly in the ‘pull’ strategy.
Blogging: I estimate about 30% or less of businesses are considering blogs (web logs) as forms of business communication. The subject has been the topic of controversial discussions among lawyers in determining whether actual "legal advice" is being rendered, and whether a prospective client can be educated without creating an "attorney-client relationship."
Widget Marketing: Widgets are light weight web applications that are being embedded in websites, blogs, forums, and social sites. Flickr badges, MyBlogLog, and in ways even the Firefox community marketing campaign are companies that are engaged in this way. This isn’t anything new. See Widgetbox as an example.
Online Video and Live Streaming: Online Video has existed for many years on the web. What has been notably gaining traction is video blogs, or video sharing sites of great popularity such as Google Video, or it’s recent acquisition YouTube. This also includes live streaming where participants can webcast video in real time, often accomplished by chat features.
Instant Messaging, and Presence: Some savvy legal marketers are figuring out how to involve real time conversational media using Instant Messaging tools, presence, and status tools, such as Twitter . These tools tie to online and mobile devices. My experience with Generation Y lawyers is that they are using IM as their primary way to communicate over all other mediums.
Tagging, Collective Tools: Tagging can be used to harvest marketing intelligence as well as help your SEO results. Properly tagging content as well as researching how tags are used will help communities find your content.
Voting Features: Popularized with the website Digg, members submit news stories and they are voted up by the community. More representative than democratic, there’s criticism that only a few hundred users can control the content that makes it to the front page.
MicroMedia: Microblogging tools allow users to share bite-sized information with their social network or from mobile phones. With the launch of Twitter spring 2007, it started to gain traction, as well as Pownce and Jaiku. Expect this form to be a major form of communication for lawyers in 2008, as it starts to gain hold. The downside of sites like Twitter are that more of your privacy will be eroded as your secretary, your spouse, your significant others, business affiliates, and clients can follow you around on Twitter.
Virtual Worlds: Tied to social networks, the virtual world emulations have gone from experimental to a haven for some immersive communities. Many law firms are now interacting with clients and prospects in the virtual worlds. The virtual law offices which use these virtual worlds tend to offer services such as patents, copyrights, and immigration where the market is more national than local.
Second Life is being tried by large companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Sears and a variety of retailers, although there are many other virtual worlds such as ViOS, ActiveWorlds, Entropia Universe, Utherverse (Redlight Center & more)
Online Games: Gaming networks have started to create mini-flash games such as mini-clips, Yahoo Games, and other networks. Supplemented with advertising or sponsored branding, these can be embedded and spread to other websites.
Related Mediums: The web will be a platform and will extend to other mediums as well as create new ones.
Internet TV (IPTV)
While still emerging, the web will marry the TV and content, communication will evolve to a new form of media we’have not not yet seen yet. I doubt it will be as simple as ‘TV content online’ or ‘Reading websites in the living room’. Something new will appear, and it will impact your web team. In my opinion, YouTube will likely replace TV in most households at some point, but this will take a while to occur.
Mobile Content: Law firm sites are already being viewed on mobile devices, either full browsers, or fast load browsers. Many executives, decision makers, road warriors and techies are accessing the web using mobile devices, so a strategy to deliver correctly to this medium is necessary.
To Watch: Here are some following emerging forms of advertising and marketing to watch this coming year:
Portability of the Social Graph
Social network members have to add new contacts, and inaccuracy between various social networks is fairly common. Most of the social sites will soon have members interacting with each other as the social graph extends to static websites.
Vendor Relationship Management: As a new concept, you can expect a systems to emerge which rely on the socially communicated intents of prospects or buyers to emerge, which will anonymously signal to vendors to bid for the needs of customers.
Mina N. Sirkin is a Certified Specialist Attorney in Estate Planning, Probate and Trust Law by the Board of Legal Specialization of the State Bar of California. She practices law in Los Angeles County, California. [email protected]. http://www.SirkinLaw.com.
