3 Marketing Mistakes to Dump This Year

‘Tis the season for getting out of unhappy relationships, even if they have lasted a long time. As every family law attorney knows, more people file for divorce on the first Monday in January than on any other day of the year, but those relationships fell apart long before then, and the couple probably made the decision to divorce sometime around this time of year.

It might also be time to break up with your law firm marketing strategy. Some techniques, such as frequently updating your blog with well-written legal blog content, are built to last, but other strategies are probably holding you back. Here are three law firm marketing approaches to swipe left on this fall.

The Ghost: Ignoring Your Existing Clients

No one likes to be ghosted after feeling a connection with someone. When you fail to contact a former client after resolving their case, you are doing just that. According to Spotlight Branding, 83 percent of law firm clients are satisfied enough with their attorneys’ work that they would recommend the attorney to a friend or colleague who needed similar services, but only 29 percent actually make the referrals. You can increase your percentage of word of mouth referrals simply by reminding your previous clients that you exist. The message that it sends when your former clients receive an email or card from you during the holidays is not, “I hope you get another work injury” or “I hope you get another divorce.” It is “I hope you refer me to someone else that I can help.”

The Tech Bro: Focusing Too Much on SEO

It is exhilarating to be able to explain seemingly abstract phenomena through numerical data. It is truly impressive that artificial intelligence has improved to the point that search engines can guess what we want based on our search queries as well as they can. Despite that, when you focus too much on SEO and its latest algorithms, you lose sight of the big picture. This fall, it’s time to dump the marketing strategy that focuses only on following the latest fads to stay at the top of the organic search results. These strategies lose sight of the human side of your marketing efforts, where numbers alone cannot explain your effectiveness. This year, don’t worry just about how much to engage with your target audience and focus on quality instead of quantity.

The Egomaniac: Conflating Your Personal Image with Your Brand Image

The goal of your marketing efforts is not to make people think you are awesome. You are not a social media influencer. Your personality is not what makes you a good lawyer, or at least, it is not the only thing. Your marketing content should be focused on clients and how you could help them, not on how interesting you are.

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Are Mainstream Marketing Tactics Too Shady for Law Firms?

Your professors in law school probably told you all their favorite lawyer stereotype jokes. The jokes hinged on lawyers being greedy and using deceptive rhetoric to achieve their ends. Today it is obvious that those jokes date from the era before online advertising and social media. Misinformation, false advertising, and wanton materialism and self-aggrandizement are the new normal. No matter where you navigate on the Internet, you find pages and pop-ups inviting you to click to agree to things you don’t have time to read. The malicious rumors even on websites ostensibly designed for commercial or educational purposes is enough to make anyone want to disconnect from the Internet.

The line between the personal and professional has become blurry, so unprofessionalism rules the day. Staying true to professional ethics while remaining competitive in online marketing is a challenge in many industries, but this is especially true in law. Despite what the old jokes say, we went into the legal profession because we believe in a moral code. Unfortunately, so many practices that violate the Rules of Professional Conduct for Attorneys are just normal in the world of digital marketing. Therefore, you should not trust just any marketing form to create your legal blog content; you need writers with in-depth knowledge of the legal profession.

Keyword Advertising with Your Competitors’ Business Names

For years, SEO experts have been encouraging businesses to try to rank highly for their competitors’ business names. People most often do this by inserting the competitor’s business name in places where it is obvious to search engines but invisible, or at least not very noticeable, to human visitors to the site. This may violate the Rules of Professional Conduct for Attorneys, though, on the grounds that it is misrepresentation of one’s law practice. Micah Buchdahl of Law Practice Today cites a case in New Jersey in which a law firm, let’s call it Alpha Attorneys, bought a paid advertisement that displayed above the organic search results and linked to the Alpha Attorneys site. The problem is that the listing did not say “Ad: Alpha Attorneys.” Instead, it used a competitor’s name, so if you clicked on the “Ad: Bloggins and Associates” result, it took you to the Alpha Attorneys site. The judge sided with the plaintiffs, whom we are calling Bloggins and Associates.

The Gray Web of Online Reviews

Like it or not, clients can post reviews of your law firm online. Responding appropriately to negative views can boost your online reputation. (The best response is to acknowledge the reviews, own up to your mistakes, and, where applicable, to tell your side of the story in a truthful and respectful manner.) It goes without saying that posting fake reviews is a violation of professional ethics, whether by paying for positive reviews of your law firm or writing negative reviews of your competitors’ law firms.

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Law Firm Marketing 90 Days at a Time

This month, millions of Americans have made the resolution to quit eating carbs. Only a small fraction of them will be able to stick to that resolution all the way to 2022. A greater number of them will be able to make it 90 days. The ones most likely to succeed in keeping their resolutions are the ones who set their goals with a shorter time limit. For example, maybe they resolved to give up carbs until their son’s birthday at the end of March; at that time, they might enjoy the dinner rolls and the birthday cake, then go back to their low carb diet, they might decide to allow themselves to eat carbs until Tax Day, or they might decide that the birthday cake doesn’t tempt them at all.

The point is that it is easier to stick to a 90-day plan than a yearlong one. This is as true of marketing goals for your law firm as it is for personal New Year’s resolutions. Best of all, it allows you to assess business trends as they change. In 2021, expecting your plans to stay the same for the whole year is foolish. If you decide to try out three months of professionally written blog content for your law firm’s website, the best legal blog writers you can choose are the ones at Law Blog Writers.

90-Day Marketing Strategies for the First Quarter of 2021

Now that the COVID-19 vaccines have arrived, we might be able to gather with our families in person this coming Thanksgiving. The high school graduating class of 2021 might even be able to receive their diplomas from the school principal as they walk across the stage. For the next few months, though, we are still in pandemic mode. Therefore, you should make your marketing plan for the first quarter of 2021 on the assumption that your practice will be as socially distanced as it is now. In many parts of the country, that means that all your meetings with clients and all your court appearances are virtual.

Still, it’s a great time to try something new. Here are some ideas for new quarter’s resolutions for your law firm’s blog:

· If your law firm doesn’t already have a blog (podcast, YouTube channel, Twitter account, etc.), start one and see how much it helps business.

· Write a blog post a day for 90 days. If you publish them one a week, this means you will have almost two years’ worth of blog content by the end of March.

· Better yet, write and publish a blog post each day in the first quarter, and see with your own eyes how updating your blog with maximum frequency affects your bottom line.

Try Professionally Written Blog Content for a Quarter

Even if 2020 gave you coal in your stocking, the best you can give your law firm in 2021 is a blog that boosts your organic SEO rankings and enhances your reputation. The legal blog content writers at Law Blog Writers provide custom-written blog content that will make blogging a marketing strategy you stick with year after year.