Beware These Legal Marketing Mistakes on the Ides of March

Going to the Forum seemed like a good idea. After all, everybody was doing it! However, we all know how that turned out for Julius Caesar.

With an eye toward the fact that it’s The Ides of March, here are some legal marketing mistakes that other agencies might tempt you with. Don’t fall for it! Learn the lesson Caesar didn’t – heed our words and steer clear if you want your firm to survive.

• Search results are all that matters: Search results do matter, but they are not the be-all end-all. First, search results can differ based on where a consumer is located and what sort of device she is using. Then, consider all the things she’s likely to do once those results are pulled up: look to see if you have any reviews, search for you on Facebook, skim Twitter, glance at your website. If you focus solely on your search results, you’re just getting your consumer to the door. You’re not doing anything to usher her inside.
  • Not convinced? “The Futility of Chasing Silver Bullets” dismantles this idea (and others) clearly and articulately.
• Stay away from reviews: It’s hard to put yourself out there, but a lawyer who avoids reviews entirely is cutting himself off from a resource legal consumers find very valuable. Today’s consumers want to look before they leap, and that means finding out what other people like them have to say. Worried about an unfairly negative write-up? Seventy-three percent of consumer believe seeing a business’ response to a negative review is helpful. In other words, even a very off-base negative review of your firm is an opportunity for you to show that you’re poised, responsive and professional – it’s an opportunity for you to impress a potential client.
  • Our free white paper “You Can’t Control Your Firm’s Reputation (But You Can Manage It)” expands on ways attorneys can exert a positive influence on their reputations.
• Any SEO is good SEO: There’s good SEO and there’s bad SEO. Rather than give a detailed and time-consuming explanation of the difference, we’ll just say this: Write for people, not for search engines. It’s great if you can naturally employ highly searched terms, but if you stuff your content so full of them that it stops making sense, you’re overdoing it. Not only will poorly written content turn off readers, but search engines will penalize it, too.
  • “Why Most Law Firm Websites Are Designed to Fail,” our free white paper, takes website performance concepts and makes them easy for busy attorneys to understand.
• Social media is frivolous: Has there even been a party you didn’t want to attend, but went to anyway because it was important to be there? That’s how social media is. Even if it doesn’t appeal to you, it’s important that your law firm establishes and maintains a presence on key platforms. If you don’t tell your story, someone else will.
  • To explore this topic in greater detail, download our white paper “From Novelty to Necessity: Pragmatic Social Media for Law Firms.”