Attorney Marketing

For the second consecutive year, Amicus Creative Media has won a WebAward for Outstanding Website in the Legal Industry. In this annual competition, a panel of judges reviews thousands of websites across 96 industries, evaluating design, navigation and usability. This year, only four websites were selected to the Outstanding Website category in the highly competitive legal industry and we’re thrilled that the website for Hendrick, Rascoe, Zitron & Long, LLC was among those selected.

This award winning site, which is the virtual home of a highly-respected estate planning practice in Atlanta, combines captivating design with intuitive navigation and highly informative copy. Please help us in celebrating the wonderful designers and project managers who helped to develop this dynamic website. And a huge thank you goes out to this firm and its amazing attorneys who put their trust in us with such an important element of their marketing strategy; we are so grateful to be able to bring our clients’ visions to life.

Larger law firms usually have CMOs, business analysts and a team of accountants who are the numbers people. Unfortunately, solo practitioners and small firms usually don’t have this luxury, and in addition to practicing law, attorneys in these boutique practices must also double as business development experts.

Every day, we meet attorneys who are just hanging out their shingles and struggle to know exactly which questions they should be asking and what data they should regularly analyze to assess the health of their practices and business development goals. Below, we’ve compiled a list of questions that all business owners, including attorneys, should be able to answer with ease. 

Over the past few years, as a number of open-source platforms like WordPress have become more popular, the use of content management systems (CMS) has become more prevalent in the legal industry. This software varies greatly in terms of capability; some are very basic allowing website owners to simply edit a few core pages while others give a webmaster full management capabilities with the option to add or delete pages and even do more advanced tasks like manage upcoming events or an e-newsletter distribution list. One complaint we often hear from attorneys who work with even the most user-friendly systems is that the formatting of the content is incredibly difficult to control. 

Recently one of our clients subscribed to a third party e-newsletter service for elder law attorneys. The service provides practice-area specific content for its clients and sends out branded e-newsletters to the firm’s contacts. There were a number of links within the body of the e-newsletter encouraging the recipient to read more. Generally, this isn’t a bad strategy; it can help to get contacts onto your website where there are more ways to engage with your firm. Unfortunately, in this case, the links to “learn more” took the reader to a third party site which was managed by the e-newsletter service (though it was co-branded for the firm). In clicking on any links within this third-party site, the reader was then directed to a hub for elder law content which also featured a directory of local elder law attorneys. In this case, the attorney unknowingly created an action path for contacts which may have ultimately led them to a competitor’s site.

Each year, members of the Amicus Creative team attend a number of legal conferences around the country. Regardless of whether the event is for a local bar association or national professional organization, the members share similar concerns and hesitations when it comes to marketing. In meeting new attorneys, we always ask whether or not they have websites. Over the past few years, the number of attorneys who say “yes” has certainly increased but the indifference or dissatisfaction when it comes to those existing websites seems to have remained rather consistent. The fact is that a majority of the attorneys we meet say they have a website but “it could be better” or that it is downright lousy.  In digging a bit deeper, it is often hard to pinpoint exactly why the firm is unhappy and often it is due to a number of factors. Of course, to correct the issue, you must first get to the root of the problem. Below, we’ve compiled a list of the usual suspects:

When we ask attorneys how many calls they receive each month from visitors to their websites, the large majority are quick to reply that they’re not certain. This lack of information is in many ways understandable, albeit problematic if you really want to measure your site’s ROI. Of course, you can train your receptionist to ask each caller but that system can be susceptible to human error. Even when your receptionist is sure to ask the question of the individual on the other end of the line, callers often fail to answer this question accurately.  You can regularly check your Google Analytics data and try to manually determine which visitors turned in callers but that can be incredibly time consuming. Luckily, there is another way to more definitively track calls from your website – through the use of call tracking.

In your time on the web, you’ve undoubtedly stumbled across an “under construction” page. All too often, these place holders include a generic message to visitors to “check back soon” along with a photo of a construction cone or a stick figure in a hard hat. While some of these graphics may be cute, these templates don’t help the visitor learn a thing about your practice.

If you’re like the majority of Americans (78% to be exact), you likely watch a video on the web at least once per week. Video hosting and sharing sites like YouTube have made it easy to post videos and disseminate them to the masses, revolutionizing video marketing for all businesses, including law firms. We often hear from attorneys who have videos, or are looking to create them, and question whether YouTube is the right medium for their firm.

Every so often, we get a panicked call from one of the attorneys we work with. Our client has been contacted by an online marketing company who ran his site through their “industry leading website grader” and his site got a failing grade of a D. As you can imagine, our response is one of less concern and reassurance that the site is not in any way a failure. After all, we’ve been doing this for years and we know how to develop an effective website.  So what’s the deal with these automated website graders?

As we enter the final days of 2014, there is no more perfect time to reflect upon your firm’s successes, and shortcomings, of the past year. With your website serving as the focal point of your online marketing campaign, it's important that you take time to evaluate its performance. With Amicus Creative’s integrated performance tracking tools in our industry-leading Site Manager, you can learn a lot about your site without spending hours glued to your computer. Consider the following aids to help you understand your site’s success:

You don’t have to look far to find a company that offers Search Engine Marketing (SEM) services. In fact, you can find millions of sites touting these services by doing a simple Google search. To help consumers find knowledgeable experts and set a sort of standard for SEM consultants, Google manages a partner network which is comprised of approximately 5,000 companies around the globe. At Amicus Creative, we’re proud to be a certified “Google Partner”, offering attorneys across the country top-notch SEM services.