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Automated Intake for Law Firms

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Marketing, Messaging

How to Talk to Legal Consumers Now, Part 2: Expertise

In this three-part series, we’ll discuss how lawyers should talk to today’s legal consumers across three primary areas of interest: money, expertise and the legal process. These are the categories in which legal consumers have the most urgent questions.  And, it’s imperative for law firms to increase their chances to convert leads to clients by addressing each of these broad topics in ways that place the law firm in the most favorable light possible. In part 1, we addressed how lawyers should talk to potential clients about money.  Now, we’ll turn our attention to how attorneys should best express their expertise.

Lawyers have been excelling at part of the expertise-selling component of marketing for quite some time now.  The other half?  Not so much.

What law firms are really good at is optimizing their attorneys’ experience.  I mean, look at any law firm bio page, and it’s all there.  The blue ribbon educational experience.  The dope internships.  The community involvement.  The bar association participation.  The awards.  Lord, the awards.  Super lawyers.  AV-rated lawyers.  Super-duper lawyers?  The point is that law firms are very good about hitting consumers over the head with information about how special their lawyers are.  It’s been the primary marketing posture for law firms since at least the early 70s, when law firms were formally allowed to advertise.  And, it works.  Clients want a lawyer who evinces expertise.

Of course, where potential clients are accessing that expertise is changing.  Traditionally, attorneys have ground down their bios with such fare; but, they have not extended all of that to other online profiles.  So, since more mobile searches are taking place in applications than ever before, it’s more important than ever before to also place this sort of information about their expertise on social media profiles, review platforms and other webplaces that aren’t their websites.  The information that a legal consumer can access about a lawyer from the law firm website should be accessible elsewhere online to the same degree.  Consistency, attached to a call to action, is extremely helpful, in this case.

That still, though, only addressees the extension of a lawyer’s general expertise to the further flung recesses of the web.  Legal consumers, however, also want to know about a lawyer’s specific expertise.  Specifically, they want to know how an attorney can help them with their particular issue.  Legal consumers, in order to hire a lawyer, have got to feel like the lawyer they will be working with can be their guide on a journey.  Is the lawyer going to be able to answer the specific questions the would-be-client has about her case?  In other words, does the lawyer have a niche practice, and to what degree?  In much the same way that you wouldn’t want to hire a literal sherpa to lead you through the streets of Manhattan, a legal consumer doesn’t necessarily just want a personal injury attorney — he may want someone who specializes in motorcycle accidents.  Or, he may be looking for a divorce attorney . . . that specializes in mediation.  Or, perhaps he wants a litigator who’s focusing on claims related to yachts.

This all cuts against another tenet of traditional law firm marketing: that you open yourself up to take more cases, not fewer.  Many law firms still exist as general practice firms precisely in order to cast wider nets.  But, settling on a niche that works serves to reduce direct competition, and is also an effective way to drive revenue in that segment.  Furthermore, it answers the only real question a potential client has about a lawyer:

Can you help me with my case?

Marketing, Messaging

Short Tail Cat: How Modern Lawyers Find Referrals

Referral marketing ain’t dead; but, I do have some bad news: it’s becoming a less successful method for building a law practice, where it was traditionally the absolute best way to launch and maintain a law firm.  And, the reason for this is that consumers, especially millennials, are far more comfortable seeking out referrals for service providers online.  In other words, new school law firm clients don’t require a personal recommendation — or, probably more importantly for purposes of this discussion, an in-person recommendation.  And, that’s a big problem for attorneys who rely on traditional referral marketing, which is based almost entirely on the need for in-person recommendations.

Attorneys (and, it’s still the majority of attorneys) who have built their entire book of business on personal referrals meet one person at a cocktail party and tie to that relationship the fervent hope that that one person will meet another person at another cocktail party, and will then remember that prior conversation, and then make a recommendation.  That still happens, don’t get me wrong: it just happens less and less often.  These days, consumers searching for lawyers probably don’t know another lawyer who can make a referral to a colleague, and they’re also far more likely to perform due diligence on their own, rather than wait for an opportune time to get a recommendation from a heretofore unknown person, at some late date.  The modern consumer is not as patient as the traditional consumer; and, frankly, it’s far easier to do your own research online than to go try and find somebody who can recommend somebody else.  That’s a lot of degrees of separation for a person who can just watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones by asking their Smart TV to put it on for them.

So, as a modern lawyer seeking out referrals, you can’t any longer just rely on word of mouth, because even those outlying consumers who want a personal recommendation from another human being will fact check that recommendation online, just to make sure they’re not missing out on any dispositive information.  What does that mean for you, referral marketing attorney in this day and age?  Well, you just have to be sensitive as to where modern consumers are going to look for or make choices about particular service providers, and make sure that you control the narrative in those spaces.  Since even those consumers who have a referral in hand are going to Google you, you need to know what shows up when your name is Googled; and, if you don’t already know, you need to control that vanity search, in that only information that you want populating populates.  Part of controlling that narrative is making sure that your directory profiles and social media landing pages are completed; not only will this drive more compelling search results, it will also cover for those consumers who perform ‘in-app’ searches for service providers, by going to social media and other applications directly, without ever making it to a Google search.

The truth about modern referral marketing is that, even for those consumers who are willing to take a personal referral, the modus operandi is trust but verify — whereas, previously, the verification process was either bypassed, or not as robust as the internet has allowed it to become.  In short, law firms leaning on referral marketing now cannot ignore the requirement of a robust and targeted online presence.

Marketing, Messaging

Long Tail Cat: How Modern Consumers Find Law Firms

Modern consumers are different from old school consumers, in part because they access information about service providers via different methods than have traditionally been used.  And, even those methods are changing rapidly.  It was only fairly recently, for example, that mobile searches overtook the searches from traditional hardware, that had previously dominated the market.

So, for law firms that want to compete, in what remains a highly competitive market, it’s essential to understand how consumers find you, to access your services.  The more you know about that, the more calculating, exacting and effective your marketing becomes.  So, that begs the question: How do modern consumers find law firms?

At a very basic level, there are two ways that consumers find lawyers: (1) because they’ve been referred to someone whose name they now know (and fewer and fewer millennials receive personal recommendations for lawyers — they’re more apt to look online first) or (2) via an online search for a legal topic.

If the consumer already knows who you are (if they’ve been referred to you) they’re likely to execute a Google search.  So, you’ve got to own the ‘vanity search’ for your name.  If you don’t know what the first page of Google looks like when someone searches for you name, try it yourself.  I guarantee you will be surprised by the results.  When you are, you’ll know what work you need to do to beef up your personalized online presence.  When does your website come up in search?  What about directory profiles?  Do your social media profiles appear?  Are there websites containing information about you that you do not control?  To what extent is any of that information negative?  What portion of the information does not relate to you or your business at all?  Now, at least, you’ll have an idea of what you need to tidy up, so that you’re putting your best foot forward in terms of the first things that your leads learn about you, or confirm about you.  But, keep in mind that consumers are not only searching via Google.  With the rise in smartphone usage, lots of consumers are now performing what are called in-app searches, which means that they never get to Google at all.  Instead, they’re going directly to a particular app on their phone, and starting their search there.  So, you need to also make sure that, not just the links to, but your actual social media profiles themselves, are locked and loaded — because that may be the only glimpse a consumer gets into who you are, and what you do.

When consumers don’t know who you are (where there’s been no referral), they’re then searching based on a specific need they have, for which they require guidance (yours, hopefully), and a guide (you, hopefully).  A number of those searches are done using keywords, like ‘real estate lawyer new york’ or ‘personal injury law las vegas’, which big players will spend big dollars optimizing for — but, maybe that’s not you.  If it isn’t, you can build out your marketing strategy in a different way.  Consider that many consumers search for legal services by asking questions, like ‘If I have to sell my house how do i find a lawyer for that’ or ‘i was hurt in a car accident, what do I do now’.  It’s, of course, more difficult to find keyword combinations to fit that search type, especially because lay consumers are not going to be searching for things like ‘tort law indianapolis’.  The way that you can optimize for these ‘long tail’ searches, then, is by utilizing content market.  So, if you write a blog post that reads ‘How to Find the Right Lawyer When You Need to Sell Your House’ or you create and publish a short video titled  ‘What to do When You’re Hurt in a Car Accident’ — and, if you can widely distribute those content pieces online, across social channels and via backlinks — you can generate significant traction in search for short dollars.  Think of the top 10 questions that your clients ask you, and create content pieces around those topics, then publish and share them.  If you can do that, you’re replacing, or supplementing, a traditional SEO spend, with relevant content driven by elbow grease.  Optimize for long-tail search to save money, and show up in places your competitors least suspect you to be.  And, that starts with building an aggressive content marketing engine.

Then, when it comes to your revenue, you won’t be the one who’s a long tail cat in a room full of rocking chairs — your competitors will be.