Digital marketing’s flexibility comes with positives and negatives. On the positive end, you can try many different types of digital marketing strategies and find one that works best for your law firm. At the same time, the extensive options can overwhelm any attorney and can lead to money and time spreading thin. Right now, there are some priorities that any law firm with successful digital marketing focuses on.
Website Security
Online safety and privacy concerns have become a bigger topic in the news, but webmasters always faced off against hackers to keep user information safe. When someone puts in their info through a contact form or other method on your website, you have an obligation to provide some level of protection. Beyond user safety, a hacked website can harm your search engine rankings to the point that it won’t show up at all. If someone navigates to your website manually, your potential client may get scared away when their browser warns them that someone may have hacked the site.
Website Speed
Clients get frustrated when a browser takes too long to load or hitches because of a large image. You don’t want to lose visitors because of a cute background or plugin that leads to a memory leak. If a page takes longer than 3 seconds, then you’re past the waiting limit for most internet users. Checking your website with your computer may not give you accurate results on how fast your load times are, since factors regarding your web hosting (like where your servers are) may skew the speed. You can use external measurement tools like Google Page Speed Insights and Pingdom for a more accurate test.
Tracking
Imagine spending hundreds to thousands of dollars a month on legal digital marketing that can’t provide you with tracking data. That would be like throwing cash down a black hole, but many law firms do just that with their advertising campaigns. Keep your finger on the pulse of your marketing team’s results. Successful law firms look at metrics like:
- Cost per Client
- Tracking from various channels (Google search, website referral, social media referral)
- Rankings
- Geographic traffic (How many in New York are finding you? How many in New Jersey?)
- Conversion tracking (Phone calls, filled in contact forms, call to action clicks)
Google Analytics provides many of these tracking options with the flexibility to do more.
Do Your Job
Word spreads through the internet like wildfire, perhaps faster than in real life. As a law firm, you can’t keep throwing money at SEO and legal digital marketing services in a vain hope to crawl up the ranks as poor service eventually catches up and can beat your ranking down. While many potential clients may not know what it means to be an experienced or skilled lawyer, they can figure out when someone is not respecting their time, treating them seriously, or is simply rude.
View this as an opportunity to make the best of your networking and social skills. Listening to your clients and providing them respect also makes an impact. Beyond these priorities, you’ll still have to find what marketing strategies work for your law firm. If you’re still looking for your marketing plan, contact us at marketmymarket.com/legal-marketing/ for an expert consultation.