Does Your Law Firm’s Website Pass the User Experience Test?

Before the pandemic, law firms used to spend a big portion of their marketing budget making sure that visiting the law office would be a pleasant experience for current and prospective clients. They hired interior decorators and spared no expense on comfortable chairs, elegant doors that opened and closed quietly, and even sometimes in fancy flourishes like water features and aquariums. In other words, they gave importance to the in-person user experience.

For the foreseeable future, most of your chances to make a good impression on prospective clients will come through your website.

Annoying Design Features Are a Deal Breaker

In 2021, even though people might have time to make sourdough bread from scratch, no one has time for glitchy websites. If your website loads too slowly, if images don’t display, or if it does not format properly on tablets and mobile devices, visitors will not stick around, even if your site is the first organic search result. Likewise, drop down menus that disappear without warning or do not allow users to scroll all the way down to the item they want will also try visitors’ patience. If your site doesn’t meet these minimum standards of user friendliness, prospective clients will move on even before they get a chance to read your authoritative content.

Looks Aren’t Everything, But …

The good news is that getting a drop-dead gorgeous homepage for your law firm costs a lot less than making your physical office space look that good. Even if the content pages have a rather plain design, it is worthwhile to invest in the first image that visitors see when they navigate to your site through a Google search. As an experiment, click on your competitors’ websites and only look at what you see “above the fold,” in other words the content that appears when you first arrive at the site, before you click or scroll. Focus on making the “above the fold” portion of your website look better than theirs.

The Role of Content

A devastatingly beautiful homepage makes a good first impression, but by itself, it is not enough to persuade prospective clients to contact you. To achieve that, you must show your knowledge and communicate it clearly. Your website should contain content that directly addresses visitors’ questions about your practice area. Ideally, that content should include videos of varying lengths, as well as a regularly updated blog.

Now About That Blog

Even if your website is a knockout beauty and eminently easy to navigate, it will quickly slight farther down the list of Google search results unless you regularly update your blog. Choose the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to keep your blog up to date with engaging, fact-checked content that casual readers and prospective clients alike will want to read.

Effective Video Marketing on a Pandemic Budget

Most law firms have reduced their marketing budgets during the COVID-19 pandemic, so it might sound counterintuitive to invest in video content marketing. Isn’t video content marketing just for law firms with big budgets? Don’t videos produced on a small budget look tacky and unprofessional, like those shouty TV commercials for local businesses that used to run during your youth?

If you make a low-budget video, won’t it just send the message that the service you can offer your clients is Clerks compared to the Barry Lyndon they could get from your local big-budget law firm? Not if you play your cards right. Your video content does not need to be a cinematic masterpiece to be effective. A few inexpensively produced videos of varying length can be a major asset to your comprehensive legal content writing strategy.

Watching YouTube Doesn’t Cost a Penny

A great way to get ideas about how you want your law firm marketing videos to be is to find examples of what you don’t want. Luckily for you, YouTube abounds with ham-fisted, uninformative, and just plain ugly videos created as part of the content marketing strategies of small law firms. Watching them could become your pandemic hobby while everyone else is binge-watching the Punky Brewster reboot, but even if you can only tolerate an hour or two of poorly thought out, poorly made video content, which will give you plenty of ideas about how you don’t want your videos to be, which in turn will reveal to you what you do want. What important questions do those other videos not address? Who do they wrongly assume that their audience is? As the Cat in the Hat said in the cartoon adaptation from the 1960s, the way to find the missing something is to find out where it’s not.

The Best Video Content Communicates Its Message With or Without Sound

Are you nervous about making video content because you hate the way your voice sounds, but you don’t have the budget to hire voice actors? Never fear! Many of the people who watch your video will not listen to it. The best law firm marketing videos are informative as silent slideshows and even more informative once you turn on the sound.

Webinars: Let Your Audience Speak for Itself

Arguably the worst thing about marketing content is that everyone talks, but no one listens. You can spend infinite resources trying to guess what your target audience wants to hear and then say it, but it would be much more effective if you could just listen. Webinars are a great opportunity to do that, especially if they adopt an “ask me anything” format. A single, one-hour webinar can provide you with a wealth of information about what your real audience cares about and wants to know. This experience, in turn, can provide you with months’ worth of blog post topics.

And Speaking of Blog Posts

Paying for video marketing content might be a gamble, but regularly updating the blog on your website is a tried-and-true law firm marketing strategy. Choose the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to provide informative, engaging content

to keep visitors clicking on your law firm’s website.

The Best Legal Content Isn’t All About You

In the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde said that a bore is someone who deprives you of your solitude without providing you with companionship. In the ninth century, Abu Uthman al-Jahiz said that a book is the best companion because it is so easy to shut it when it starts to try your patience. We have probably all had moments when we wished we could hit the mute button on a person in our company, but when it comes to television commercials and YouTube ads, pressing “mute” or “skip” is most people’s default reaction.

There is something inherently annoying and offensive about promotional content; most of the party guests you wished you could mute were probably bragging about their accomplishments. It follows that marketing content is most effective when it isn’t shamelessly self-promotional. In the case of legal blog content, the best approach might be to avoid trumpeting about your personal brand and to engage with your target audience on their own terms.

Amplify the Voices You Want Your Audience to Hear

A recent article on the Content Marketing Institute identified this year’s most effective Super Bowl ads, and each of the chosen winners put the focus on the audience and the larger community instead of saying “me me me.” Cathy McPhillips chose her favorite as Hidden Hollow, a blog published by Ben Cooper, a musician who performs under the stage name Radical Face. Cooper uses Hidden Hollow simply to share and discuss the work of other artists. The blog effectively engages the audience by being collaborative instead of competitive.

On your law firm’s blog, you can follow this approach by sharing articles by your colleagues in the legal profession. The fact that you are willing to collaborate with your “rivals” and promote them will only increase your credibility with your audience.

Let a Member of Your Audience Be the Star

Super Bowl audiences voted Toyota’s ad as their favorite; the commercial did not show a single automobile. Instead, it focused on Paralympic swimmer Jessica Long. You can create the same effect on your blog by writing posts that focus e

ither on actual clients of yours (if they are willing to let you write a post about them) or else about news stories about people who have dealt with a problem that your post addresses.

For example, if you are a business law attorney, you can write about small business owners in your community. If you are a personal injury lawyer, you can write about people living with permanent injuries resulting from accidents. You have many other choices in a law firm blog besides just writing about why you are the best lawyer or summarizing the laws relevant to your practice area.

The Best Marketing Content Doesn’t Sound Like an Advertisement

Your blog is a great way to show prospective clients your credibility and approachability, and there are many ways to do this. Choose the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to deliver professionally written blog content that makes a good impression about your law firm without being shamelessly promotional.