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Websites for Law Firms Must Convert Leads to Cases

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Get your digital marketing up to date or risk losing new business.

Law firm web development is going mobile. Why? Because more than 50 percent of search traffic now comes from mobile devices, with Google reporting it currently gets more U.S.-based search queries via mobile devices like smartphones than it does from people searching on a PC.

If your legal website isn’t yet optimized for mobile use or updated to make on-the-go browsing easier for potential clients, your case load is probably falling short too.

This cultural shift of consumers preferring mobile search should be driving all facets of digital marketing for lawyers, but let’s start with your website.

Here are three ways Network Affiliates helps improve websites for law firms to make them more mobile-friendly—and better at generating cases.

Update: With Google’s newest algorithm update (which happened 90 days ago!), the search-engine giant now boosts the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile search results. For a consumer that means it’s easier to find and read relevant search results without tapping or zooming. For an attorney that means your website better be optimized for mobile or competitors’ sites that are will quickly start to outrank yours. Check to see how mobile-friendly your current site is by simply typing in your URL right here.

Analyze: Once you start to review Google Analytics on the performance of your site, you’ll quickly grasp how and how many people get to your site and just what they do there. Remember, what’s critical is that potential clients stay on websites for lawyers long enough to gain the right insight to make a call or quickly understand how they can take action. Monitor your unique visitors and you might be amazed at how many people are actually seeing your law firm’s website—and, more importantly, how many of those could convert to cases.

Optimize: The next step is starting to leverage the presence you do have on the Web. If your website is not mobile-friendly enough, start there. If people are not staying on your site very long, consider how you can beef up original content and set your firm apart as a thought leader. If visitors are rarely converting to cases, add a call to action on each page and use tracking numbers to gain metrics on phone calls. Consider adding video to further engage visitors and help people make a more informed decision about choosing your firm.

Consumer behavior, namely searching on phones, is driving SEO. As such, it should also be driving digital marketing strategy for lawyers.

Not sure where you rank these days? Give us a call to find out where you stand 303-817-7313. 

Surprise, Law Firms Still Have to Advertise!

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As the oldest-operating law firm advertising agency in the country, Network Affiliates has seen a thing or two in the industry. Namely: You can’t market like lawyers used to and still expect the phone to ring. These days, advertising for law firms has an entirely new set of operating instructions, and the best way to stay ahead of your competition and maximize ROI is to stay on top of attorney marketing trends. Here are three questions we answer all the time for legal clients:

I’m busy. Why do I have to advertise at all?

It sounds counterintuitive, but the time to advertise is when you are busiest and your firm is most lucrative. What often happens is lawyers get swamped with a couple of big cases and cut back on or cease all marketing and advertising as they ride the enticing wave of a large commission. However, that’s also the time they fall behind, as competitors continue to reach new prospects via TV advertising, communicate with existing clients through ongoing email marketing and hone their intake processes to harvest the better cases going forward. The point is if you let advertising slip, how do you guarantee new cases will come in the door after you’ve closed the ones you’re working on? Long-term survival requires thinking ahead, and attorney marketing is all about momentum—you have to keep it going to ensure a profitable flow of business in the future.

Can I afford to advertise?

Yes. In fact, we know that lawyers today are grossly underestimating what they can—and should—spend on marketing and advertising. American Lawyer 200 firms, for example, only devote about 2% of gross revenues to marketing efforts, which is on the bottom end of the spend long recommended by law firm management consultancies. To see real ROI, that number should be closer to 5%, and even more in the aggressive arena of personal injury law. The point is you can’t afford not to advertise. Start to build in marketing as a real line item—not an afterthought—in your law firm’s annual budget.

What’s the best way for me to advertise today?

The short answer: Develop a broader marketing mix. TV advertising continues to work exceptionally well for firms that can afford it, however what attorneys often overlook is power of digital advertising. Any full-service advertising company will tell you that having a digital strategy is critical to both supporting a TV campaign and building returns all on its own. In fact, social agency New Media Strategies found recently that trial law firms who have grasped the trend are now spending millions of dollars to create and maintain of websites, Facebook pages, Twitter handles, blogs and YouTube channels, and upwards of $50 million on Google-keyword advertising alone.

Wondering if you’re heading down the right path with your TV advertising and digital marketing? Give us a call for a complimentary consultation 1-888-461-1016.

The Best TV Ad Strategy for Your Money

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A surgical approach to placing TV ad dollars. Why a creative, flexible strategy pays off in television legal advertising.

Evaluate your legal TV advertising spend and pretend you’re a doctor instead of an attorney. Why? Because a precise, surgical approach to placing your law firm television advertising in the right market at the right time will more than pay off in ROI.

It used to be that daytime ruled the airwaves. That time frame best maximized ad spends, because people were tuned in—something that agencies marketing for attorneys could track and demonstrate to clients in ROI-based results. However, times have changed, and daytime TV has become an overcrowded space for law firms. Especially in highly competitive markets, too many attorneys are targeting the same audience over and over, leaving little room for law firms to truly distinguish themselves from the competition – and find new audiences or clients!

The smartest, most calculated approach in the saturated law firm TV advertising market is simply to get more creative with ad placement time slots. For example, Network Affiliates’ skilled media strategists regularly help lawyers test targeted ad campaigns during off-peak hours, such as early in the morning, during the late news and on surprisingly popular Sunday nights. Some of these ad buys even come with free overnights. Are you getting yours? This methodology does require some trial and error, but then again, you’re lawyers—and you’re used to that, right? Often law firms find that their legal marketing message is better received and calls come in quicker as they move away from the daytime advertising swarms and focus on singular calls to action during specific times when a group of viewers is intently tuned into TV.

Here are the three general rules of thumb to follow to ensure you are getting the most out of your television advertising.

Step 1

The first step in choosing an ideal advertising time slot is surveying the competition. If equipped with the right (and expensive!) software, your advertising agency can pull this type of competitive analysis to help you make a smart and strategic plan of action for advertising placement. Not all agencies have access to the tracking tools and applications that show the length of ads, purchased time slots and every single one of your direct competitors’ commercials. However, that kind of big data can lead to big payoffs in terms of ROI. You might think of it like a game of chess: You’ve got to see the whole board to outwit your opponent and get one move ahead.

Step 2

The second part of strategic attorney television advertising placement is asking for what you want. And not just in your creative campaign. Your ad placement professional should know what questions to ask and how to negotiate a better ad buy to get your law firm more for its hard-earned money. We call that value! Television stations have all kinds of negotiating options up their sleeve, and only a few legal ad buyers know how to get the greatest added value for every ad placed.

Step 3

Lastly, to ensure that your targeted creative message, pinpointed time slot and added-value bonuses are actually paying off, you must track your advertising effectiveness—and adjust if necessary. The most successful attorney marketing strategies are nimble, aggressively monitored campaigns. Your agency must be meticulously tracking and openly reporting to your law firm on the success—and even failures—of ad placements. Adjusting and fine-tuning is just part of the process, an activity that your firm should be fully involved in.

Wondering how effective your ad strategy is? Why not call for a free, confidential consultation of your law firm’s TV advertising. 303-817-7313.

Are you maximizing the power of past clients?

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Why referrals are the best cases that come into legal offices.

Ever met a lawyer who wouldn’t prefer more qualified cases? Thought not. The most valuable cases—both financially and professionally rewarding—come from referrals. Generally speaking, referred cases tend to have the lowest cost of acquisition and come with some helpful level of “prequalification” through a past client who knows your legal competence.

In fact, industry research shows that only about 25% of legal cases come from other attorneys. Did you just do the math? That means three-quarters of all legal referrals could be coming directly from your satisfied clients. Interestingly, even tempted by this potentially low-hanging fruit, we know that most lawyers don’t spend near enough time and effort maximizing their referral marketing programs.

Why? Well, it takes work and planning—and that requires someone’s valuable time. Past clients need to be reminded not only that your attorneys did a great job and created a favorable outcome in their cases, but in what areas your firm concentrates, what references would even make sense, and how to get leads to your office easily. Law practices that are doing referral marketing right are in front of past clients and constituents. They win cases, plain and simple because their attorneys are most top of mind when it matters.

Think you could be staying in touch with clients a little better? It’s not as hard as it seems.

Here are a few ways to start giving your referral marketing more TLC:

1. Build your database.

Start with the information you have on all past and current clients, and go from there. This will become routine if you build data collection right into your intake process, including capturing basic intelligence on anyone who contacts the firm. Don’t forget to ask (and track) who, if anyone, referred the person to your office when they do call.

2. Stay in touch.

You can’t rely on the fact that since you did good work for a past client he or she will remember you in the future. There are simply too many marketing messages and alternative options out there to rely on that sliver of hope. Instead, create a plan for communicating with former clients—email campaigns, direct mail, in-person networking, informational seminars—after a case is closed.

3. Respect every relationship.

Even if you cannot help an individual with specific legal matter today, doesn’t mean that person won’t turn to your attorneys next time they need advice. Remember, you could be paying up to $300 per lead. That’s a lot of money just to say no. Nurturing relationships, even currently unqualified referrals, will build your firm’s reputation—something that while it doesn’t have a dollar sign on it today could pay off big tomorrow.

4. Leverage TV views.

Television advertising remains a crucial part of the marketing mix for law practices around the country. Use this massive platform to leverage strong testimonials from past clients, and you’ll have a smarter way to tell the world exactly what kind of cases you want in the future. Better yet, combined this visual advertising with a strong database marketing plan to keep your firm squarely in front of past contacts—and potential cases. Remember, you have to be available to victims when they need you most.

Interested in learning more about leveraging past clients? Network Affiliates’ digital marketing experts can walk you through “Why referrals are the best cases that come into legal offices”.

The call is free and confidential. The advice is excellent and will help you capitalize on this opportunity. What are you waiting for? Call now: (888) 461-1016

If you don’t keep score, how will you win?

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Why tracking your Google Analytics pays off.

By now law firms should know all about Google Analytics. Do You?
But what to do with those statistics on website performance? That’s a whole other story.

If this sounds like your office’s level of knowledge regarding your website, you’re not alone. Many law firms simply haven’t learned—or been taught about—how to read and leverage the numbers spit out by Google each month.

But ignorance is no longer an excuse. Laziness is not an option. These figures—free of charge to you—are really worth understanding, because they can dramatically impact how your website performs in the future, which can lead directly to new business you didn’t even know you were missing.

Remember, what you don’t know, you don’t know!

Likewise, prioritizing a wide-reaching TV campaign over your website is no longer acceptable. Your website should not only be the hub of your Firm—the platform for disseminating the information people need to know most—it should work in tandem with your TV efforts.

The point? You can no longer overlook this critical component of your legal marketing strategy.

Google Analytics 101

So what’s so great about tracking Google Analytics, anyway? Well, the search engine’s auto-generated statistics show both a big-picture view of how well your website is “performing,” as well as micro measurements that can provide helpful insight into how you can shift things to gain better traction on the Web.

Google Analytics gathers vast data on advertising campaign performance; audience characteristics and behavior; cross-device and cross-platform measurement; data capture; mobile applications; conversions; and more. It’s a tool worth getting to know better. Once you’re familiar reading the numbers, which are neatly broken down by category, you can very quickly glean information like:

Visitor type: Learn a user’s geographical location, dominant language, which browser they used, their screen resolution, whether they’re on a mobile device or desktop, etc.

Usage behavior: See how long users stay on your website, what pages they are visiting the most, which page is causing visitors to leave most often, how many pages an average user is viewing, etc.

Origination: How did the user find you—a search engine, popular social network, link from another website or direct type-in? Google Analytics also breaks down each traffic source, so you can focus on specific ones.

Content interaction: Gather knowledge about how users interact with your site’s content. For example, you can see how many users clicked on a specific link.

Timing: Find out what time of the day is the hottest for your website.

Google Analytics numbers are shockingly positive. Take a look: You might be surprised to learn just how many new people—called unique visitors—are actually coming to your law firm’s site.

Remember, anyone interested in doing even a quick background check might navigate to your home page, if even for a minute. Others might dig surprisingly deep on a blog post or attorney’s bio, for example. The details you can uncover are eye opening, and can help you adjust and re-target your marketing efforts.

So the question is no longer whether or not you’ve heard of Google Analytics. It’s how are you using this powerful resource to take marketing to the next level.

Google Analytics simply put, tells you exactly what is going on with your Website!

Anyone in this world that we live in that wants to know anything about you, looks you up online. Do not kid yourself by not engaging in this MUST DO part of today’s world.

Be honest with yourself and take responsibility for tracking all of your advertising. If your current agency is not pushing you to track your internet or the rest of your advertising activity and ROI, you should ask why.

The answer is they do not really know how to increase YOUR business.

Interested in learning more about making the most of this FREE online tool? Network Affiliates’ digital marketing experts can walk you through an introduction to tracking your Google Analytics.

The call is free and confidential. The advice is excellent and will help you capitalize on this opportunity. What are you waiting for? Call now: (888) 461-1016

Are you feeding your website what it needs ???

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Your digital hub deserves devotion—right now, agree?

One of our attorneys logged 131,000 unique sessions last year. A session is defined as activity that a user with a unique IP address spends on a website during a specified period of time—and in web-speak that’s a lot of traffic.

But our client didn’t get stats like these by turning the other cheek; this law firm gave its website the attention and nurturing required in a constantly changing environment.

Perhaps this makes you wonder how effective your website is.

Technology has advanced in warp-speed. No longer is a slick, eye-catching website design and compelling content enough go live with pride. No one makes a move without consulting Google, and to make things more challenging, the search engine giant keeps changing how it ranks websites altogether.

Keywords used to be key. Now original content rules. We must weigh the importance of page titles, meta tags, URL structure, anchor text, image optimization, heading tags, crawlers and so much more. Search engine optimization (SEO) is an ever-moving target, but you have to have the know-how to take an accurate shot.

Today, law firms are tasked with monitoring all types of traffic stats and staying on top of industry changes. The overwhelming prospect often leads to lawyers to turning it all over to a digital marketing agency. Working with professionals whose jobs are dedicated to keeping up with digital shifts, while positioning websites in the smartest ways possible to drive people to them, can pay off in stress relief alone.

What do I give my attention to?

If your website is a year old, it’s already time to start thinking about a refresh, which should include design and content updates, but also strategic methods for leveraging the brand equity you’ve already built through your website. It’s time to let your web presence move front-and-center and treat it with the respect it deserves. After all, if it converts one big case, it has more than paid for itself.

Start by considering your own web habits. Think about how you use the Internet to look someone up, check a restaurant’s reputation or dig deeper on a topic. If what you heard about is not what checks out through a Google search, you quickly move on to the next person, the next dinner joint or the next topic.

Your legal website is no different. If your web presence isn’t better than the vehicle that drives people there, it may drive them away. If your firm’s website doesn’t pay off your TV commercial or even word of mouth, people will instantly move on to the next attorney.

The competition is fierce. If you don’t stay abreast of what’s happening in the digital marketplace, you might miss out on a new client, a lucrative case or a better chance to represent the brand you’ve worked so hard to establish. Look at things such as:

  1. The first impression your website really makes
  2. How you are driving people to your website
  3. What visitors do when they get there—and how much you’re actually giving them to do
  4. Analytics shows where your site is “off”—so you can fix those broken areas
  5. How (and how well) you’re converting the people who initiative unique sessions to begin with

So as you ponder your next web steps, start by treating your website more like your baby. Give it love, attention and respect. You’ve got to nurse it along to perfection.

How injured victims view your Firm’s marketing

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After 30 years in the legal advertising business, we’ve worked hard to perfect TV ad placement and buying strategy to get our lawyers the best response rates in the market. Numbers, after all, are easy to track and tweak.

However, where advertising for attorneys gets complicated is in the messaging component. While our clients are often tempted to repeat traditional tactics they’ve seen dominating the airwaves, such as speed-and-greed talk, faked testimonials, and a hyper-focus on the size of firms and settlements, Network Affiliates now steers lawyers away from these communication strategies.

Why? Because they don’t work anymore. There are simply too many law firms shouting out brand messages that are too similar, too firm-focused and too overwhelming to victims in need of authentic legal advice. The legal TV advertising marketplace has become commoditized and generalized, which in turn has led to more TV viewers tuning out altogether, either by changing the channel or skipping over commercials.

TV Creative using the victim’s perspective

 

The key, we’ve learned, is refocusing efforts on crafting a marketing message that works a little differently, that causes viewers to stop in their tracks, and that paddles against the current of traditional legal advertising on television.

One way to begin to hone your message —the brand “story” that makes your firm stand out among the competition— is to ask three questions of your current advertising campaign, message and approach:

1. Who is the best person to tell your story?

In the past, many law firms have used a spokesperson or top attorney with a big personality and big cases behind him or her to “sell” the practice’s qualifications. However, if this person does not appear authentic and chest-thumbs too much on the firm’s greatness and not enough on solving a victim’s problem, it’s going to be a hard sell. We call this the “it’s not about you” reminder: Ads that emphasize lawyers rather than the benefits they provide to a potential client will ultimately fail in delivering quality cases.

To counteract this common advertising practice, it might be time to rethink who tells your story, what your story really communicates to a victim, and whether or not a spokesperson is even necessary. Can you “show” your brand through a personal story, animated character, real-life reenactment, or some other fresh messaging approach?

2. Is your story believable?

This is a real problem on TV today—people don’t actually believe what they’re watching and hearing because lawyers have used too many tricks to try to convince viewers to call right now. For example, we often see attorneys staging actors as real client testimonials. This used to work until people started reading the fine print and taking note of the unethical use of actors to misrepresent cases.

Is this the way to build trust with potential clients? We don’t think so, and neither do duped viewers, who thanks to the Internet and social media, can now call out dishonest lawyers and advertising practices for all the world to see. The point of this illustration is to help you examine the “believable-ability” of your advertising message. Are you using illusions when you could express your firm’s value in a more authentic way that might in turn bring you more reliable cases and clients? It’s something to consider.

3. Are you telling a new story?

One of the biggest downfalls in legal advertising is a majority of lawyers are saying the same thing in the same format. Most put lawyers, settlements and testimonials—themselves—first. What if you flipped that practice and started building a new message around what a victim might be feeling right now, what a victim might need from a lawyer, what questions a victim might have, or what expectations you could set for a victim?

There are countless creative ways to convey a new and memorable message to your audiences. As the legal advertising landscape is flooded, lawyers may have to swim upstream to say something differently and really stand out. This is your chance to develop an ad that’s a little out of the box, a little more provocative—something that makes a victim stop and think—or at least not change the channel.

It’s always an opportune time to tune in to how your commercials come across. If your law practice is not connecting with potential clients in an audience-focused, authentic and unique way, you can’t expect quality results. Let’s try taking a new perspective: the victim’s.

Case Study- Baby Safety and The Frickey Law Firm

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September is Baby Safety Month, which was a perfect alignment for The Frickey Law, a Denver based firm. The goal was creating relevant and informative content around car safety for children. Since the firm specializes in car accidents, the infographic was a perfect visual to entice site and social media visitors to engage with the firm.

We started by researching common car injuries for children. Then, we designed a large infographic and posted it on the site and the firm’s social media profiles. The digital team reached out to influential people in the space like local bloggers, parenting groups and national child safety websites. The outreach had one goal: Get the infographic and firm’s name in front of new audiences.

The infographic’s goal was keeping The Frickey Law Firm top-of-mind and driving site traffic using social media and outreach. The measure of success was get the Baby Safety Infographic to rank in the first position of Google Image Search for September… Take a look and see how we did!

Video Transcription: 

Meet the Frickey Law Firm they understand that it’s impossible to create more need for legal services so when the time comes they’d better be top of mind and here’s how social media fit their need to build more awareness of the Firm. They partnered with Network Affiliates to produce a baby safety infographic to be launched during Baby Safety Awareness Month.

The audience was identified as parents moms (eat the stuff up), between the age of twenty and 44 living within 50 miles of Denver. Facebook was chosen as the primary social channels in this gave us a target market 200,000 people.

We set our success calls for the campaign to be awareness at the firm shares of our infographic and a place on Google image search results for baby safety because all of these accomplish the objective of top of mind awareness.  So how did we do?

We generated over 182,000 impressions, nearly 1300 clicks over 100 likes and got 19 shares and drove over 900 people to the firm’s website and best of all our infographic to be found in the number one position on the Google Image Search. With awareness like this it’s safe to say the freaky law firm saw a positive ROI for the efforts.

Case Study- Safe Ride Home

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The attorneys from Hauptman O’Brien have sponsored the Safe Ride Home Campaign throughout Omaha, Nebraska for the last three years. The campaign ran through the holiday season. Its sole purpose is giving people who were drinking and didn’t plan ahead a safe ride home.

Hauptman O’Brien teamed up with a local cab company and paid every cab ride if the passenger mentioned Safe Ride Home or Hauptman O’Brien. Not only did this skyrocket the law firm’s brand and helped them remain top-of-mind, but also improved site traffic and increased online reviews. But the best part was helping the firm’s community get home safely after drinking. All. Night. Long.

Video Transcription: 

Doing good is good for business.  Hauptman O’Brien, Happy Cab and Network Affiliates all teamed up to run and promote the Safe Ride Home programover the holiday season in Omaha Nebraska. The idea is simple: if you were too drunk to drive call a Happy Cab and Hauptman O’Brien will pick up the tab.Where the story gets interesting is how this gesture of good will impacted their business.

Network Affiliates used a combination of TV pay-per-click and social marketing to get the word out the firm’s website saw three hundred percent increase in Google traffic three hundred ninety percent increase in Yahoo traffic and saw a hundred percent increase in Facebook ‘Likes’ over the campaign period and these visitors didn’t just come for the free ride. The average time on site jumped over thirty seconds 43 online chats were converted and 25 case contact forms were filled up 88,000 online impressions were made and over 100 people shared our campaign with friends.

This all led to the best December since 2000 for Hauptman O’Brien with a 35 percent increase in new cases and 57 percent increase in referrals from the previous year.  Oh, and did we mention we kept 1,850 drunk drivers off the road? The campaign was so successful that Hautpman O’brien is extending the program to Saint Patrick’s Day.