Digital Marketing Strategies for Lawyers

Yes I said it - SEO matters.

But far from the domain of the ultra-nerdy, or perhaps the super-technical lawyer, SEO is a necessary skill for any legal business owner.

But why? Why can you not simply delegate everything to an SEO agency and hope that they're going to do a bang up job?

Here's why...

Lawyers have lots of opinions about lots of stuff. 

But when it comes to your opinion on social media, digital marketing, blogging or anything else that might be a little outside your comfort zone... what are you basing those opinions on?

Are you going with the people who have experience and success in the area? Or are you going with Joe, the guy you spoke with yesterday who has strong opinions but no actual experience?

You probably get a few email newsletters yourself, right? They come in packed with promise, articles, links, quotes and much more.

So the question of the day is... should YOU produce an email newsletter.

Will it WOW your readers, build your audience and work wonders for your firm?

Or is it just a waste of time...

Vanity, vanity, everything is vanity...

Including the metrics that many marketing teams tell their firms mean they're doing well on social media.

But then, not everything is always as doom and gloom as all that - sometimes vanity metrics actually mean something. But does that make them not vanity metrics anymore?

It's all very confusing - just listen to the episode and it'll make more sense.

It's not because social media is bad, and it's not because the platforms are hard to use.

It's because you don't have a plan.

Spending enormous amounts of time on social media, scrolling through news feeds, clicking random buttons, and hoping that something good will happen.

This is the social media "strategy" of many lawyers. And it's a terrible one.

Lawyers love to overspend on website design. We get custom bells and whistles, hard coded solutions to non-existent problems, and complicated sites that we don't understand how to use.

Or, we could go for a DIY website where we understand the nuts and bolts, how to use it and what to do with it.

But is that really the best idea? After all, you don't really want the home-made look when it comes to your website design.

So what's the deal?

https://youtu.be/cC6ob8sw02A

Many lawyers I speak to are reluctant (read: totally unwilling) to share anything at all created by another lawyer.

The concern is, of course, that when they do so everyone who sees it will think "ah-huh! Lawyer A is clearly inferior to lawyer B, because they shared lawyer B's content. Therefore all our business in the future shall go to lawyer B".

In short, it's the mentality of someone living in competition land.

So let's think about this for a minute - is that concern justified, or irrational? If you were interested in curating some content rather than producing everything yourself, how could you do it without crossing that line?

Lawyers were pretty late to the party when it comes to getting a website up and running.

Now, in an effort to catch up with our past laggard status, we've embraced the concept... by finding the most expensive custom website designers we can possibly find and paying them enormous amounts of money.

For very little benefit.

Find out what I mean, and what you can do about it at a threshold level before you even start sketching out a wireframe for your next website, or talking with a designer.

It's an odd thing, but although many firms have systems for collecting email addresses into a gigantic database, not many are actually using that database effectively.

When I explore this, it's often because the lawyers are afraid of putting off their prospects or clients by sending them emails.

Which leads to this question: why collect the information at all, if you're not going to use it?

Pretty much all law firms and lawyers accept a basic need to have social media be a part of their marketing efforts.

Unfortunately, despite that, many have also decided that social media is such a risky minefield of danger that they put in place an unlimited set of barriers in place to prevent their lawyers doing anything "wrong".

The outcome usually isn't safety - it's complete and total inactivity.

With the result that your attempt to save your firm is in fact going to kill it.

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