Larry Bodine Law Marketing Blog : Law firm marketing, legal editor, legal marketing, attorney marketing, business development, marketing consultant, legal consultant, business development

Samantha Miller, the Senior Director of Product Management for Web Visibility Solutions at LexisNexis, recently posted about high bounce rates.  Is yours too high?

A website "bounce rate" is like a blood pressure reading. If either is too high, it's time to make some serious changes.

A bounce rate is basically the percentage of single-page visits to your website — or visits that do not result in consumers clicking on additional pages, including completing contact forms. For a small law firm or solo practitioner relying on a website to generate quality leads, a high bounce rate can be a problem.

How to Lower Your Bounce Rate

A bounce rate is not the only measure of a website's success. Bounce rates can vary widely by industry, and even by practice area within the legal vertical. There is no agreed-upon standard for acceptable bounce rates. However, if more than 50 percent of visitors to your website view only a single page, ask yourself the following questions:

Is my firm's contact information prominently placed on every page? A visitor may only need to view a single page, if your content is optimized properly.

Find the remainder of the questions here.

Hot off the press: download your free copy of the latest research "How Today's Consumers Really Search for an Attorney" just released by LexisNexis.

This dramatic new research presents solid information on how consumers' minds work when they search for and select a lawyer.

The key takeaway is that more than three-quarters of adults who have looked to hire an attorney in the past year—76 percent—used online resources at some point in the process.

Other highlights of the new data:

• Potential clients start by researching their legal issue (not seeing a particular lawyer). Therefore it is important to be found early in a consumer's search for a lawyer.
• Facebook is the top social medium for consumers to find a lawyer. Social media is key in law firm marketing, because everybody's friends, colleagues and co-workers are one social site or another.
• One-third of clients started their search in an online legal forum, like Ask A Lawyer. Online legal advice forums are great marketing tools. They are the second-most popular online option at this phase, just behind search engines.
• Consumers expect to see a rating of the business they are considering -- like Yelp for restaurants or TripAdvisor for hotels. This means that online directories that have client ratings and peer reviews are important in law firm marketing. Among those who sought an attorney in the past year, 31 percent used online directories.

I just presented the research with my esteemed colleague Rocco Impreveduto in a webinar. You can listen to the entire program for free by visiting http://bit.ly/QxPuML

This is an outstanding guest blog post by Aaron Hall of Twin Cities Law Firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

One of the biggest mistakes I see new lawyers making is spending too much money on logo design and branding. It's fine for the large law firms to focus on a particular brand, but for solo attorneys, the attorney is the brand. A professionally designed logo is helpful to communicate professionalism, but that is all that it can offer. You can get a logo designed inexpensively at a site like 99Designs.com, which is where our law firm designed our logo.

There are a number of reasons why a small law firm (or solo attorney) should focus on its attorneys as the brand rather than a logo, tag-line, or some other branding element.

Logos have their place in marketing. If you're a large company, it makes sense to have a brand built around a product, but for a small personal services company, it is going to be virtually impossible to make a branding impression on the mind of your target audience without a massive marketing budget. 

Think about it. For any small business where you are a customer or client, what has a stronger impression in your mind: their logo, their branding, or the person you know there? This is even more important when the service you are buying is provided by an individual professional like an attorney, tax preparer, CPA, plumber, or electrician.

If you speak with professional business appraisers who understand how to appraise the value of a professional services firm like a law firm or CPA firm, they will tell you that most of the reputation, goodwill, and value is connected with the professionals providing the services, not the name of the business, its logo, or other branding elements. In succession planning, attorneys or business brokers need to put together a plan to transfer the goodwill of one professional service provider to the new owner by having a gradual handing off of the baton. The goal is to transfer the goodwill over a period of time from one owner to the next. If all of the value were tied up in a logo, this wouldn't be as crucial.

I'm not saying you should not have a professional logo, website, or other marketing materials. The point is not to spend an unnecessary amount of time picking the right images in your logo, spending too much time thinking about a slogan, or other techniques that big marketing companies do for large companies.

Careful branding, logos, and slogans work well if you are Nike, Apple, or another major brand, but for attorneys, you are the brand. You are the image of the business, its mascot, its spokesperson, and the impression in the minds of your target market.

If you are launching a new practice, spend a minimal amount of time picking a logo that you can place on letterhead and your website. Don't worry about branding certain attributes and themes like quality service, professionalism, low prices, value, etc. Instead focus on how you are experienced in your niche, the way that you can solve problems for your clients (your target market), and your expertise. This can be done through speaking, writing, and other marketing tips discussed on this blog.

Do you need a logo at all? This is largely a personal decision, but I recommend you have some logo—potentially just your name in a nice font—to make your letterhead, website, business card, and other materials have a common, professional mark associated with them. Generally, this can simply be your name in a nice font and color, and possibly an image (a very simple image) or slogan focusing on your practice area. Keep in mind that your practice may evolve over time, so it is nice to have a logo that doesn't box you in too narrowly. Also, it is somewhat expensive to update a logo, so it's worth having a professionally designed logo in the beginning. The expense of updating a logo in the future will include updating your website, business cards, and all other marketing materials.

Summary and Tips

If you don't have a professionally designed logo, go get one at 99designs.com. Have the logo include just your name or a simple image. Use that logo on business cards and your website.

Instead of printing stationary, save money by putting the logo on a Word document that you use as a template for all letters and correspondence. Then you can print that logo from your printer in the office. This is much more convenient than having to load stationary into a printer whenever you want an official letter sent out.

If you decide to print your letters with your logo, this is another reason why your logo should be simple, and preferably one or two colors. Also, avoid gray scale images or fonts because they can look unprofessional when printed on a black toner printer. By focusing less on marketing a logo or slogan, you can focus more on marketing yourself.

About the Author: Attorney Aaron Hall practices business law and litigation at the Twin Cities Law Firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He also writes for MinnesotaLawyer.com.

Most attorneys recognize that the consumer of the 21st century has access to a much wider range of information than the consumer of the last century, but it's not as obvious which specific sources of information have the most influence on people when it comes to searching for a lawyer.

On September 25, 2012 at 12:30PM ET, LexisNexis® Martindale-Hubbell® will present a free webinar that will share the results of some new research on this topic. The one-hour program, "How Today's Consumers Search for Attorneys," will present some of the key findings from this new study, including how consumers gather information about their legal matter, find a lawyer, validate a lawyer's credentials and ultimately select a lawyer to represent them.

Here are some of the questions we'll address during the webinar:

• What are the primary ways that consumers search for attorneys?
• How important are law firm websites, blogs and legal forums to consumers looking to find lawyers?
• What value do social media sites — such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — have for consumers when they're searching for a lawyer?
• Are online legal directories still relevant to today's consumer?
• How much attention do consumers pay to peer and client ratings of a lawyer's skills?
• What role do mobile devices play in consumer research and what does that mean for attorneys?

Our goal with the webinar is to provide you with the latest market intelligence about how your prospective clients find attorneys so you can make sure that your marketing efforts are aligned with today's consumer. I hope you'll join us on the 25th!

To attend the webinar, please register here.

Next month, I am moderating a panel discussion at the 2012 Legal Marketing Technology Conference/West

Today's post is a by a guest author from LFS Legal, Belinda J. Darling.

Running a business of any kind- be it a hairdressing salon, a media monitoring business or a national chain of furniture shops- entails making multiple decisions every day. Some of those decisions have small consequences- who is going to man the phones while the receptionist takes his break?- while others have much larger and far reaching consequences. Learning how best to approach the decision making process will mean your business runs in a more harmonious and productive manner.

Many of the business choices you’ll face will involve staff. People managing is a tricky business but with a considered and respectful approach, you’ll create a positive and proactive working environment. Let’s look at some examples of the types of decisions you might face. Your chief sales manager is good at her job- but it’s fast becoming apparent that her skills and knowledge would be better suited to a marketing role. You can see that installing someone else in the sales role would boost revenue, while utilising the skills of the sales manager in the marketing department would be beneficial in drumming up new business. The problem is, your sales manager loves her job and has never registered any interest in switching departments.

The key here is to make your sales manager feel she’s an invaluable member of the team. It’s been repeatedly established in studies of the workplace that employees thrive when they feel valued. Suggesting to your sales manager that the marketing role needs HER unique contribution will help her understand and accept that rather than being pushed out of her job and cornered into another role, her talents are being recognised and her skills put to use accordingly. To learn more about making the right business choice, get in touch with the experts at LFS Legal.

The benefits of making the right business decisions, particularly where your employees are concerned cannot be overstated. Happy employees work harder, feel personally invested in the business, and have better retention rates.

Consumer Reports recently evaluated the efficacy of online Do It Yourself websites.  Here is a snippet of the results:

For a fraction of what you’d pay a lawyer, websites such as LegalZoom, Nolo, and Rocket Lawyer can help you create your own will, power of attorney, and other important legal documents. But can they really save you a visit to a lawyer?

We recently evaluated those three services. Using their online worksheets or downloads, we created a will, a car bill of sale for a seller, a home lease for a small landlord, and a promissory note. We then asked three law professors—Gerry W. Beyer of Texas Tech University School of Law, who specializes in estates and trusts; Richard K. Neumann of Hofstra University, a contract specialist; and Norman Silber, an expert in consumer and commercial law at Hofstra and Yale—to review in a blind test the processes and resulting documents.

The verdict: Using any of the three services is generally better than drafting the documents yourself without legal training or not having them at all. But unless your needs are simple—say, you want to leave your entire estate to your spouse—none of the will-writing products is likely to entirely meet your needs. And in some cases, the other documents aren’t specific enough or contain language that could lead to “an unintended result,” in Silber’s words.

Read more specifics here.

                         Register for this event!!

Senior Director of Consumer Marketing at LexisNexis, Rocco Impreveduto wrote an interesting article about a new app from LexisNexis.

In an effort to reach as many consumers as possible while they’re online and seeking legal information, we’ve created a new Lawyers.com^SM Legal News Headlines application that can be downloaded and easily integrated into the 54 million websites that use WordPress.

The new widget can be used to immediately enhance and enrich the content offered by any site owner (mainly news aggregators) or bloggers. It allows anyone who uses WordPress to display a stream of legal news articles on their own blogs or sites, at no charge.  If a visitor to the site sees a headline of interest, he or she can easily click on the link and go directly to the full text for that story on Lawyers.com.

WordPress is the largest self-hosted blogging application in the world, used on millions of websites – including CNN, TechCrunch and CBS Radio – and seen by tens of millions of people every day. This new widget from Lawyers.com is another investment we’ve made to syndicate our unique content in order to drive more traffic to the Lawyers.com site, increasing visibility for the attorneys listed on Lawyers.com.  

The content we use for this continuous stream of articles is the Lawyers.com blog, which contains original articles posted daily by a team of independent journalists headed up by Larry Bodine, a nationally known legal blogger and law firm marketing consultant. 
 
The new Lawyers.com-powered Legal News Headlines app is available now in the WordPress gallery for news aggregators to easily download.   Within the first two weeks of availability nearly 200 site owners downloaded the application.  

This new offering is part of our ongoing strategy to engage consumers earlier in the lifecycle of their legal need and make Lawyers.com the only online destination they think of when they seek legal help.  We’ll continue to expand our digital footprint and diversify our marketing channels in order to reach as many consumers as possible.

Watch this video to find out how a Profile on Lawyers.com increases your law firm's visibility, demonstrates your credibility and showcases your personality to over 28 million visitors a year. Learn about the comprehensive, online marketing strategy used to drive traffic to Lawyers.com which is optimized for lead generation, a powerful program law firms simply cannot do on their own.

Contact a marketing specialist today and LexisNexis will show you how to get your profile working for you.

Author  Nadia Jones offers an intriguing insight into the pop culture world of law.

Believe it or not, the image of lawyers in the public imagination isn’t all bad. Just think how many people obsessively watch Law and Order. It’s got to be the most endlessly rerun TV show of the past fifteen years, especially if you figure in all the various spin-offs. (And yes: many of the most addicted viewers out there are lawyers themselves, but not a majority, probably not even a plurality.) 

Ordinary people often do see (some) lawyers as heroes. They stand up for the disenfranchised, fight the powers that be, and ensure that justice is carried out as faithfully as possible. As ancient a pedigree as the lawyer jokes have (everyone remembers Shakespeare’s quote, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”), we have also always admired those who fought, by persuasion and reason and research, for the betterment of society. In real life, for instance, we have the dignity of Cicero to look up to, the martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, the brave dedication of Thurgood Marshall. In the fictional realm, mythic figures linger in the unconscious of every potential client, shaping their ideal view of what a lawyer should be. Here are a few of those characters and the values they embody:

Character: Atticus Finch

Source: To Kill A Mockingbird

Prime Attribute: Decency

Certainly the greatest and most beloved lawyer in American culture, Atticus Finch is certainly the hero of Harper Lee’s novel and Robert Mulligan’s film (both canonical in their respective media). But he is, importantly, not the protagonist. As praiseworthy as his defense of a wrongly accused black man is, it’s the family aspect that lifts the story from a didactic political drama to classic status. We see him through the eyes of his own daughter Scout, and therefore he is a comforting, rock-solid presence. This cuts through the most negative stereotype about lawyers: people don’t trust them.

Character: Perry Mason

Source: Perry Mason

Prime Attribute: Acuity

Perry Mason was the star of a pulp novel series, then a radio show, then an endlessly-syndicated TV show with Raymond Burr. The plot was formulaic: Perry defends a murder suspect with the evidence stacked against them, but manages to unravel the case and cause the real murderer to break down on the witness stand. Repetitive, implausible...and irresistible. Sonia Sotomayor, for instance, now of the Supreme Court, testified in her Senate confirmation hearing that Perry Mason inspired her as a young girl to become a lawyer. Every client wants a lawyer like sharp-eyed, unflappable Raymond Burr, who will focus like a laser on their case and blow it wide open. 

Character: Vincent “Vinny” Gambini

Source: My Cousin Vinny

Attribute: Relatability

Joe Pesci’s wisecracking, questionably-credentialed New York attorney comes to the rescue of his cousin wrongfully accused of murder in a suddenly not-so-hospitable South. If you’re a lawyer, you’ve probably seen this excellent 1992 comedy, and if not, get on it (it was written by a lawyer and is renowned for its fairly impressive accuracy, even being used as a teaching tool in law schools). The great thing about it is that the abrasive Yankee eventually proves so lovable to the instinctively suspicious Southerners, even the judge (played by Fred Gwynne of Munsters fame in his last role). He’s not a great mind, or a perfect hero, yet he wins not only the case but the hearts and minds of those around him, through sheer devotion, frankness, and authenticity.

These intangibles may sound too fuzzy to work with, but they’re absolutely crucial for you to consider when you’re crafting a marketing image for your firm. These works of storytelling offer us examples of how we can create those feelings in the minds of clients and inform the way the public thinks about the practice of law. You could do worse than to take a page from the great attorney-heroes of literature and film.

Nadia Jones is a full-time education blogger based in Houston, Texas. Interested in all things academia, Nadia frequently writes at onlinecollege.org for those interested in the realm of online education. For questions and comments reach her at nadia.jones5@gmail.com.