Everything About Twitter Viral Marketing

If your law firm doesn't have a Twitter presence yet, you need one: statistics show that the percentage of online adults who use Twitter every day has doubled for each of the last two years.  Twitter users aren't just typical web users—they tend to use mobile phones (especially smartphones) more often, and they are often linked to a large number of social media networks and websites.  This guide will teach you how to use Twitter viral marketing to maximize the return on investment you get from having a Twitter account.

What Not to Do: Everything About Our Company in 140 Characters!

When law firms first start out on Twitter, they often try to use the kinds of marketing tactics that worked before.  However, Twitter's 140 character limit makes it hard to express the same kinds of ideas that might have seemed fairly easy to talk about on other social media sites.

No matter how tempting it is, you should never try to start a Twitter viral marketing campaign based on information-heavy tweets with a lot of abbreviations.  You may think that you're packing in as much content as possible, but when people see your tweets, they won't think about sharing—they'll just skim over them and skip right to something that's written more clearly and concisely.

Try This Instead: Make the Message Fit the Medium

Don't fight with the 140 character limit in your Twitter viral marketing—make it part of your strategy.  Studies show that people are most likely to retweet posts that are 100 characters long or less.  Avoid using any kind of abbreviations in your Twitter post.  These can take longer to read and are more likely to be skimmed over.

What Not to Do: Flooding the Stream

If a little bit of Twitter viral marketing makes a little positive change for your firm's website and bottom line, a lot should do even more, right?  Not so fast!  When people see too many tweets from a single person or company, they tend to disengage rather than becoming more interested.  Too much of a good thing will make your law firm seem like spammers, rather than helpful professionals.

If you're feeling like you have to send a huge number of tweets to get your message across, consider whether the message you're trying to send is really well designed for Twitter viral marketing.  You may want to use other venues to try to communicate more long-form thoughts, with just a very quick headline and link to the content as a tweet instead.

Try This Instead: Posting in a Steady Trickle

Tweets a few times a day will be much better received by your followers, and won't result in people no longer following you due to concerns about being spammed.  Try to make sure that you're tweeting at many different times of day, rather than consistently posting your tweets at specific times.  People have wildly different Twitter habits, and in order to get the most out of your Twitter viral marketing, you'll want to make sure people are seeing your posts in the stream no matter when they go online.

What Not to Do: Our Corporate Logo in Chief

If you've looked around at your competitors' Twitter accounts, some of them may have a corporate logo as their icon.  Think about it: does that really make you feel like a person is running the account, or like it's being run as an advertisement?  People don't want to be blatantly advertised to on Twitter, and having your company's logo instead of a real person sends a clear message: this is a corporate account designed to feed a corporate bottom line.

Try This Instead: Human Voices for Your Company

More successful Twitter viral marketing can be done when a Twitter account is authored by one person, with a unique point of view.  You should be transparent about who is running your firm's Twitter account, and make that person someone with enough enthusiasm, insight, and intelligence that they can develop great content consistently.  This may be a professional Twitter viral marketing guru hired by your firm, or it may be someone already on your staff.

Don't have someone substitute for your usual Twitter contributor unless they say they're doing so.  Transparency is absolutely necessary for successful Twitter viral marketing.  If you're seen as a company that likes to hide things or that lies about its web presence, your reputation will suffer.  Having a legal secretary post under a lawyer's name may seem like a cost savings, but it's likely to reflect badly on your firm if it gets found out.

What Not to Do: Hog the Spotlight

No one likes a Twitter user who just exists to broadcast his or her thoughts without responding to other people's.  If your idea of Twitter viral marketing just involves making tweets and getting followers, you haven't really done your homework about what the platform is typically used for.  One of the most common mistakes companies make when trying to advertise on Twitter is trying to make it into a bullhorn, rather than a round table for discussion.

Try This Instead: Share Your Light With Others

Getting the most out of Twitter viral marketing means getting involved in conversations, even the ones that aren't directly about your firm.  Try answering other people's questions, re-tweeting the things other people have said, or even talking about another law firm (especially if the law firm isn't in competition with you directly due to geography or having different specialties).

Showing people that you care about more than just talking about yourself makes your law firm look like a better internet citizen.  You'll maximize the return on your Twitter viral marketing when people don't just expect it to look like a rundown of your corporate slogans or a record of your successes in court.  Name-dropping other firms can be useful in the future when they decide to use the same technique to drop your firm's name in their tweets.  This kind of reciprocity is common in Twitter viral marketing, and you should build goodwill with other firms in your area and beyond to encourage it.

According to Alexa.com, Youtube has now become the fourth most popular website in the entire world.  With over 70 percent of web viewers using Youtube at least occasionally, advertising on Youtube has now become a great way for attorneys to get their names heard by the people most likely to give them a call.  In this brief guide, you'll find out why Youtube advertising is still being underutilized by attorneys, and how to create the best Youtube advertisements possible for your firm.

Advertising on Youtube: The Best Tool You're Not Using

Studies show that videos are one of the best tools that you can use for your marketing strategies.  Youtube advertising can put your ad in front of the right people at the right time.  Advertising on Youtube has been made very easy since Google bought the website, and you can now use the Google AdWords interface to help you distribute Youtube advertisements.

When you use Youtube advertising, you're up to three times more likely to get conversions.  Why?  Several reasons.  First of all, it's been proven that consumers like video ads like Youtube advertisements better than text ads.  Youtube advertising lets you put yourself front and center, showing clients how you interact and what kind of personality you have.

Second, when you start advertising with Youtube, it's easy to target exactly the type of clients that your law firm is best at talking to.  You can run dozens of different targeted ad campaigns if you wish, so that your Youtube advertising is seen by all of the different groups you're trying to attract.

Different Types of Youtube Advertisements

If you're not sure that you want to start producing actual video Youtube advertisements right away, you can also have text advertisements displayed in searches or while people are browsing for videos.  Text Youtube advertising also appears underneath videos and before the comments.  In addition to being easier to set up, text ads are also substantially cheaper on a per-click basis than other types of advertising on Youtube.

If you already have someone in your office who can design print ads, you can create display Youtube advertisements that will be broadcast before someone watches their video.  These display ads are a nice way to dip your toes into the water of advertising on Youtube without feeling the need to dive in right away.

Of course, some of the best advertising on Youtube is in video form.  You can create thirty second Youtube advertisements that will appear before the other videos your desired clients are watching.  This type of Youtube advertising is harder to produce—you should always make sure you're using professionally produced video, not something you've made yourself—but can definitely be worth it.

Depending on what kind of Youtube advertisements you're producing, you can choose to either pay for your ad per thousand impressions, or per click.

Targeting With Youtube Advertisements

Internet advertising has been great for smaller law firms with low budgets, because it is substantially less expensive to advertise when you can target your potential clients.  The days of using television ads and billboards to reach huge audiences (most of whom have absolutely no need for the services you're offering) are gone for many small firms.  Instead, today's solo practitioners and small firms like to use advertising on Youtube, Facebook, and Google to find most of their new business.

When you target your Youtube advertisements, you can base your targeting on keywords just like you would with Google AdWords.  You can also limit your advertising budget, and make sure that your advertising on Youtube is only seen by people who are in particular demographic categories or geographic regions.

It's a good idea to test your targeting by doing split tests.  Keep track of all of your different campaigns and who they see the best results with.  By building targeting data over a long period of time, you'll slowly improve your ability to target the right customers without wasting money on people who are unlikely to convert.

Mistakes to Avoid When Advertising on Youtube

If your Youtube advertisements will take site visitors to another Youtube video, make sure that video has relevant information and isn't just advertising.  If someone follows a piece of advertising on Youtube only to find even more Youtube advertising, they're not going to be happy and you'll have wasted money on their click.

Trying to be clever in your Youtube advertising may work, but it can also backfire.  If your ads are too cleverly written, they may seem confusing or difficult to interpret for clients.  Instead, if you have a text-based ad, try using your text to ask a question that a potential client may have, so that they'll click for the answer.

Ad fatigue sets in quickly for internet ads, so if you're leaving up the same Youtube advertisements for a long time, you're probably wasting money.  Consider changing the content of your advertising on Youtube at least once a week, and possibly twice a week.  Youtube advertising will work better for you if it's constantly updated and fresh.

The Future of Youtube Advertising

More and more Youtube viewers today are accessing the website from their mobile phone's internet browser or by using a mobile app.  This increase in mobile traffic suggests that no matter what kind of Youtube advertisements you're placing, you should make sure that you're directing web traffic to a mobile friendly website.

Mobile advertising on Youtube is a booming industry.  Because it's so much easier to call attorneys after finding their website using a smartphone, law firms that have used mobile advertising campaigns have seen drastic upswings in their conversion ratios.  While a mobile advertising click may cost you more, it's a click that is more likely to make you money in the long run.

Youtube advertising, as bandwidth becomes cheaper, will probably start to require better resolution video and images.  That may not be an issue for your firm right now, but you should consider either obtaining this kind of video equipment or hiring a company that has professional video recording and editing equipment.  You don't want to come off like an amateur in your Youtube advertisements.

A June 2012 survey showed that the average American with an internet connection is now spending 29 hours a week using the internet.  That's almost as much time as people spend working at full-time jobs!  Because usage of the internet has doubled in just the last couple of years, it's now more important than ever to develop an internet niche marketing plan that puts your firm ahead of your competition.  Keep reading to find 6 tips for helping you make money from your new niche marketing campaign.

#1: Know Your Audience

A huge number of Americans, both young and old and from all backgrounds, use internet services every day.  However, that doesn't mean that every audience uses the internet in the same way.  You'll need to know how your chosen audience interacts with the internet—which websites they use, which ones they stay away from.

For example, let's say that you are trying hard to impress with your new internet niche marketing campaign that advertises help after a truck accident.  While internet forums for accident victims and Facebook might be a great idea for this niche marketing campaign, you might not have an easy time advertising with LinkedIn.  Conversely, if your new niche is defending people from criminal tax allegations, you'll probably have much better luck using LinkedIn for your internet niche marketing than any other social media website.

#2: Know Your Competition and Industry

Internet niche marketing puts you in a position where it's possible to advertise to exactly the right people—if you know where to look.  Let's say your firm has developed a profitable niche suing manufacturers of faulty valves for sewage treatment equipment.  To develop successful internet niche marketing, you may want to start offline—by going to a trade show for wastewater plant operators.

At trade shows and other networking events, you can find out where the people in the industry you want to market to are hanging out online.  Often, people who are in certain job sectors have internet forums completely dedicated to talking about issues arising from their jobs.  These forums are a prime place for you to place your advertising.

You should also make sure that you identify your main competitors and take a look at what they're doing with their internet niche marketing.  It's not usually a good idea to do exactly the same thing as your competition (unless you know you can outspend them and have a much better campaign), but competitors can give you ideas for new places to put your ads that you hadn't yet thought of.

#3: Seek Continuous Feedback

One of the biggest advantages of internet niche marketing is that it lends itself very easily to generating a great deal of feedback.  If you're not getting the results that you want, try asking your niche market what you're doing wrong.  Focus groups made up of the type of people you're trying to solicit as clients will be able to give you some great tips on making your advertising more relevant to their lives.

Facebook and Twitter give you a great way to tell instantly what's working and what isn't in your internet niche marketing campaign.  After making several different Facebook posts or tweets with different content, you'll be able to see which ones got the most attention, were shared most often, and so on.  This makes it easier to decide where to focus your internet niche marketing in the future, and may even allow you to narrow your niche even more.

#4: Keep Your Niche As Narrow as Possible

Keeping a narrow niche is important because it's much easier to get your eyes in front of the right customers when you're marketing to a very small segment of the total audience.  “Long tail” keywords tend to be significantly cheaper per click when using Google AdWords or any other keyword based pay per click advertising platform.  This means that you can not only make sure that you're advertising to the right people, you also won't be overpaying for the privilege.

Even if you think you're already operating in some kind of legal niche market, consider whether you may be able to develop a more narrow niche for your internet niche marketing.  Many larger law firms have begun to use internet niche marketing, even if they have many practice areas, just by advertising to dozens or even hundreds of different niches.

#5: Optimize Your Web Presence

If you're using internet niche marketing for more than one niche, which can be a good idea, you'll want to make sure your website is designed for this kind of advertising.  Every different niche will need a completely different landing page, or even a whole new website designed around the concerns and questions of people seeking help with that particular legal problem.

Many websites for law firms use technical sounding words and jargon rather than explaining the law in terms that clients can understand.  You'll have better luck with your internet niche marketing if you keep the copy on your website understandable even for someone who lacks a lot of experience with the law or hiring lawyers.

#6: Get Help With Software

If you can't figure out how to find a niche market on your own, there are programs that can help you find the niche market you're looking for.  This software can be very helpful, almost like a computer assisted brainstorming session.  You may also want to look into using software to help you manage your bids and advertising budget, as well as programs that can analyze the effectiveness of each ad campaign.

Using software to help you identify your best internet niche marketing opportunities isn't cheating.  It's a great way to get the edge you need to out-market your competition.  Keeping an eye on new software packages and offerings from major players like Google can help you identify the newest internet niche marketing trends and how to take advantage of them.

Advertising with Facebook is one of the hottest trends in law firm marketing today. Less than ten percent of firms were doing any Facebook advertising whatsoever just 3 years ago (not even having a firm page!). Today, over half of lawyers have a Facebook presence and more are starting to use Facebook advertising every day. Keep reading to find out six different answers to the question “why advertise on Facebook?” that will make you think.

Why Advertise on Facebook, Reason #1: Everybody's Doing It

For many lawyers, advertising with Facebook might have been a waste of money as recently as just a few years ago. The number of Facebook users has been soaring every year since the website began, and only now is it popular enough for it to become an advertising method for marketing to a wide range of demographics.

Today, it's not just college students who are using Facebook. With nearly a billion users looking at Facebook ads worldwide, Facebook advertising is now a way to reach out not only to young people, but to anyone looking to reconnect with old friends or talk to family members and colleagues.

In other words, the answer to the question “why advertise on Facebook?” has changed significantly for most law firms. Almost every forecaster sees Facebook advertising as likely to maintain its relevance for many years to come. As long as advertising with Facebook puts you in front of the biggest B2C audience in the world, you'll want to keep working with it.

Why Advertise on Facebook, Reason #2: Why Facebook Beats Google AdWords

Maybe you already have a pay per click strategy on Google that seems to work. If so, you may be wondering—why advertise on Facebook instead of just continuing with business as usual on Google?

Business owners who are used to doing most of their web advertising with pay per click Google AdWords are often excited by the precision targeting abilities that Facebook advertising has. When you start advertising with Facebook, you don't need to think about what kinds of keywords your target market is looking for—all you have to know is who your target market is.

If you know, for example, that most of your clients come from your zip code and the six zip codes that surround it, you can narrow your focus so that your Facebook advertising is only displayed to people who live in those zip codes. You can also segment your advertising with Facebook by gender, age, and location.

Why Advertise on Facebook, Reason #3: Your Advertising Generates Extra Buzz

When you start running direct ads with another advertising service, like Google AdWords, it's pretty unlikely that anyone is going to show their friends your ad. But with Facebook advertising, this kind of thing happens all the time. Advertising with Facebook gives you the ability to have your ads seen not only by their initial viewers, but also by the people those viewers are connected with.

If your Facebook advertising starts generating “likes” and comments, its visibility will increase substantially. After you have been advertising with Facebook for some time, you'll be able to figure out which ads work best for generating the kind of buzz that your law firm needs in this competitive economic climate.

Why Advertise on Facebook, Reason #4: Mobile Advertising Results

When you do Facebook advertising today, you have more options than ever. Because mobile traffic to Facebook doesn't look at sidebar ads, you can now start advertising with Facebook directly to mobile customers with organic-looking “sponsored stories.”

Why advertise on Facebook Mobile? When you pay for a sponsored story, your advertising with Facebook will get click through rates that are more than ten times better than rates for browser ads. What's more, when you design your landing pages to be conversion friendly, you can take people from Facebook advertising to consulting over the phone in just seconds.

Why Advertise on Facebook, Reason #5: Easy Results Tracking

Not all Facebook advertising works. Why advertise on Facebook if you're not keeping track of the results that you're getting? As soon as you start advertising with Facebook, you need to start testing your ads and applying what you've learned.

The great part about Facebook advertising is that Facebook has simplified results tracking and is great at showing you the information you need to know. Not only can you easily track your key performance indicators when you start advertising with Facebook, you can also ask Facebook to do a lot of the work for you.

Facebook advertising even allows you to decide what your objective is, and can automate a great deal of your bidding if you don't want to outsource but don't have the time to babysit clicks and bids all day long. While this may not be the most cost effective method of advertising with Facebook, it takes a lot of the guesswork out and lets you get back to practicing law.

Why Advertise on Facebook, Reason #6: Beating Your Competition

Let's face it: most consumers only have room to “like” one or two law firms at most. That means that the best way to make sure your firm is liked better than your competitor is simple: get there first. Start advertising with Facebook sooner than your competition does, and you'll be the only game in town. If you delay your Facebook advertising campaign, your competitors will get to those potential clients first.

If your competition is already advertising with Facebook, you have a tougher road ahead of you but it's not impossible. Try to identify the weaknesses in your competitor's marketing strategy. Remember that just having a Facebook page isn't enough to really be strong marketing: is your competition doing all they can do in terms of creating new content, using polls, and asking open ended questions to fans and friends?

If not, there's still room for you to do something different. Different is what the internet notices, and you're better off trying to pick up where your competition left off than going head to head with similar marketing efforts.

While the social media world has never been bigger—and has never been a better place to market your business—it can be difficult to keep track of everything that's being said about your law firm in the social media sphere.  If you're worried about what people are saying about you, or if you just want to make sure that your customer service is going the extra mile, you need to start monitoring social media traffic to check out your firm's reputation in real time.  This guide will start you on the right path to monitoring social media effectively and efficiently.

#1: Designate Someone At Your Firm

Often, law firms start by planning to monitor social media and other online communications for mentions of their firm, but these plans never really come to fruition.  Why?  Because no one's specifically designated as the person who will monitor social media communications.  Everyone at your law firm may be wearing so many hats that it's easy for an additional responsibility to slip past and end up simply falling by the wayside.

Instead of just letting social media monitoring be done by whoever has a bit of free time, make sure that you're designating a member of your marketing team (or, if you're a smaller firm, one of your staff members) to keep an eye on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking websites.  Having one person designated as your expert, rather than keeping the responsibility rotating among several people, will ensure that you end up with a staff expert on reputation management in the social media world.  Make sure that your social media monitoring guru isn't an intern or a temp—the person monitoring will develop significant understanding and knowledge over time, and you're losing out on serious opportunities by having that person leave every few months.

#2: Know Social Media Platforms

You wouldn't try to monitor court filings without understanding the legal language behind them, and in the same way, it's impossible to successfully monitor social networking traffic if you're not educated about what social networks do and how they work.  Your designated staff person for monitoring social media should have a better than average understanding of the subtleties of different social media platforms.

If you don't already have a staff member who has this understanding and don't want to (or can't afford to) hire another marketing person to handle your social media strategy, you may want to either hire a consulting firm that specializes in social media monitoring or have one of your existing staff members study up on social networking and social media topics.

#3: Use Third-Party Software To Save Time

While many businesses start their foray into social media monitoring by doing Google searches for their company name or searching for Twitter hashtags having to do with their firm, this is far from the most efficient way to find out what clients and others are saying about you online.  Today, dozens of third-party applications have been developed to help you keep an eye on social media and your brand's reputation on major social networking websites.

The social media dashboard that you choose should include several features.  First of all, all social media dashboards allow you to check several different social networks at the same time, but you'll want to make sure that whatever software you choose is capable of monitoring the networks where you know most of the conversation is occurring about your company.  Second, you'll want to choose a dashboard with an interface that works well and seems intuitive to you.  You'll also want to make sure that the software you choose is from a reputable vendor without extensive security issues.

#4: Take Time To Understand Complaints and Issues

If you're doing social media monitoring, the worst thing that you can do is dismiss complaints and negative reviews when you see them.  The second worst thing you can do is to act defensive and like your firm can never do anything wrong.  This kind of behavior will only lead to peeved potential clients and a tarnished overall reputation.  Some complaints won't be fair—but others will be, and you will always do a better job monitoring and maintaining your online reputation when you're honest with yourself about where you could be doing better.

#5: Don't Add Fuel to the Fire

When people make a complaint or review your firm in a negative light, it's important not to immediately attack the critic.  It's also critical for you to avoid the kinds of actions that generate what is known as the “Streisand effect,” in which trying to shut down discussion has the exact opposite effect.  Trying to shut down your online critics or silence them will often just lead to them becoming more vitriolic and getting more people on their side because of your perceived censorship.  Unless a comment is actually defamatory, don't try to cajole people into taking down a negative review.

#6: Don't Hover Too Much

If you're checking your social media reputation constantly, it can get tempting to reply to nearly everything you see written about you.  Just the same, think about how you'd feel about a company that seemed to butt in every time people wanted to say anything about it, good or bad.  Odds are that you'd find it a little bit obnoxious—and potential clients might, too.  Sometimes it's better to listen than to talk, and you can often do better by only responding when it's really necessary.

#7: Monitor Social Media Channels Frequently

It's not enough just to check what people are saying about you every couple of weeks or once a month.  The internet lets information spread faster than ever before in human history, and a week or two can be an eternity in internet time, especially if a rumor has begun to spiral out of control.  Keep an eye on your social media mentions on a daily or near daily basis, so that you have the best chance of stopping negative stories before they go viral, while also being able to respond quickly and politely to complaints and negative publicity.

One of the hardest things to get used to about the internet is how fast things can change.  What might have been helpful as a strategy for law firm marketing several years ago can now be counterproductive.  An unfortunate side effect of these fast changes is that many attorneys who were quite well equipped to handle the web of 2008 are deeply mired in bad habits now that it's 2013, with 2014 on the way soon.  In this guide, we'll explore seven habits of highly ineffective legal marketers—and how you can make yourself more marketable by breaking them.

#1: Hovering In Social Media Discussions

One of the biggest social media debacles in recent memory happened to a Phoenix bakery called Amy's.  After a disastrous showing on a television show, Amy's social media pages were bombarded by internet commenters eager to get their jollies by kicking a company when it was down.  The smart thing to do would have been to shut down comments for a short time, until the publicity had died down, and then moderate comments heavily that seemed to come from unhelpful internet “trolls.”  However, Amy's didn't make the smart decision.

Instead, they hovered over discussions, making rude and often profane comments even to people who had made relatively innocuous statements.  Obviously, Amy's is an extreme example, but it goes to show that you can definitely talk too much to dissatisfied customers online.  You won't look good to others when you hover over discussions, whether they're positive or negative.  While it's good to step in and correct misconceptions if they're major, there's no need to stop people from discussing your law firm by taking over every conversation somebody starts about it.

#2: Inconsistent Blog Updates

If you're looking for a fast way to lose followers and make sure that no one reads your blog, just update it incredibly inconsistently—a few posts here, followed by months of silence, followed by a post apologizing for the months of silence and then another few weeks of silence after that ought to do it.  This kind of posting frequency commonly happens when someone starts a blog with a good idea, but hasn't thought through what kinds of topics might sustain that blog through the next several months.

You should maintain several blog posts in reserve so that you can trickle them out at a steady pace, instead of just waiting for inspiration to hit.  Make sure that you're reading other people's blogs, which can often give you the germ of an idea for an entry of your own.

#3: Intrusive Video and Audio

It's one of the most annoying things on the internet: you're looking for something, minding your own business, and when you open up a website—BAM!—you're accosted with a music file playing loudly, or a video of someone introducing themselves to you or asking if they can help you.  You want to help your clients, not give them heart attacks.  Leave the intrusive audio and video to other law firms, whose websites will get closed fast.  No one wants to take the time to look for a mute button, when it's just so easy to open a different website instead.

#4: Negative Responses to Criticism

Even if you're not as bad as Amy's, one of the biggest wrong moves you may be making is to respond negatively to criticism—for instance, by shrugging it off or thinking that a person who wrote a bad review is just crazy.

This may be the easiest habit on this list to fall into.  It's easy to believe that when people make harsh critiques, they're just being needlessly cruel, and it's possible that this could be the case sometimes.  However, all too often, criticisms are legitimate and ignored by places of business that could have fixed a problem and instead choose to bury their head in the sand.  Be the kind of law firm that recognizes when it has messed up, not the kind that ignores client relations issues until your reputation is thoroughly tarnished.

#5: Fear of New Websites

Just because a website generated great returns for you a few years ago doesn't mean that your strategy is still working.  You should periodically make sure to check whether you're now wasting money on advertising with websites that aren't generating any returns for your business.  Don't be afraid to look at new trends and advertising on websites and social networks that were opened recently.  Often, getting in on the ground floor can be a relatively inexpensive way to enhance your marketing reach.  Not everything will pan out, but by making sure that you're diversifying your advertising presence, you'll find some new places for your marketing roots to take hold.

#6: Adopting Every New Trend

While it's important not to be afraid of the new, it's just as important not to waste your time chasing after a dozen different marketing strategies for a dozen different new trendy sites.  Stake your claim, make your choices, and don't try to be on every social network because there's simply no way that you have time to do all of them justice.  Pick three or four main places for your social media presence to be felt, and stick to those places—larger firms can go with more, but for small firms and solos, four is about the limit before you'll start having to outsource your content, which presents problems of its own.

#7: Outsourcing Ideas and Content

Some attorneys got into the habit of having other companies write content for their law firm during the age of keyword SEO.  While search engine optimization still exists today, it's now more based in building quality backlinks and having content that is useful to real human readers.  Those kinds of tasks are best accomplished by marketing personnel at your law firm, not by people who are working on dozens of different accounts.  In house marketing allows you to be more flexible and responsive to client needs and discussions.

So you're getting a large number of hits on your website, but even though people seem to be arriving, they're not staying for long enough to do what you want them to do: sign up for a consultation or a phone call.  If you're looking for better conversion rates—and in today's competitive legal services market, you're in good company—you need this guide.  Keep reading to find out how you can turn your website from one that just brings people in for a moment to one that gets you new business and a better bottom line.

#1: Start With Great Targeting

While one of the reasons for a low conversion rate can be a website that just doesn't pop, another reason may be that you're actually targeting too wide of an audience range with your advertising and marketing.  A number of people may be visiting your website who really aren't able to be serviced by your firm.  For example, if your law firm is in a city that shares a name with cities in several different states, you should make sure that you're excluding any searchers using keywords relating to those other states from seeing your targeted advertisements.

Reducing the number of people you show your website to, while making sure that the right people are being targeted, can actually lead to a significant climb in your overall new business numbers in addition to your conversion rates.

#2: Do A/B Testing—One Size Doesn't Fit All

If you're really serious about increasing your conversion rates and you have several ideas about how you might accomplish this, don't settle for just using one idea—instead, test them side by side.  Modern analytics tools allow you more freedom than ever to compare two different marketing techniques and see for yourself which one works best.

If you're not doing A/B testing, then really you're just making educated guesses about your marketing strategy—and those guesses can easily backfire.  Thorough, single variable testing (in which you change one element at a time, so that you can more easily pinpoint what works and what doesn't) is the fastest and best way to improve your marketing strategy over the long term.

#3: Consider Niche Sites and Microsites

One of the best ways to ensure that you're only getting the kinds of site visitors whose needs you can meet is to split your site up.  In addition to having a main law firm website that shows all of your practice areas, you can also create niche sites with descriptive, long titles that direct exactly the kinds of clients you want to the site. 

Microsites can have places for clients to go back to your main website, but they should contain enough information that a client could feel comfortable calling for a consultation just because of reading the microsite's content.  Don't make your microsite feel so uncomfortably small that people still have more questions than answers.

#4: Use Professionally Produced Video

If you're considering adding video to your website, beware the curse of amateur production values.  While a professionally produced, well done video can make conversions more likely, an amateurish video with harsh sound and low resolution will sink you just as quickly.

Any time you use video on your website, you should hire a production company that will take care of the technical details for you, and you may want to consider hiring an agency to help you write the scripts for your videos.  Without an experienced scriptwriter helping you to work on your video scripts, they may seem undirected or like they take too long for the amount of information given.

#5: Keep Your Website Updated

Many attorneys don't realize that their website will be higher in search rankings and will draw more people in when it's updated frequently.  Today, Google and Bing searches take your website's most recent updates into account when deciding whether to rank your site higher or lower than other websites with a similar reputation.

This is an easy way to get ahead of your competition, who may not yet be in the habit of frequent updates.  Try to make sure that your site is being updated once a week—twice a month at least.  Have planned updates, so that you're not caught without inspiration and with nothing to post.

#6: Have a Great Mobile Site

One of the fastest ways to lose potential clients and raise your bounce rate is to have a website that breaks when people try to look at it with an Android or iOS device.  A good mobile website that allows access to your full site (which should still look good on a smartphone) while putting the most commonly used site functions at a smartphone user's fingertips is critical to increasing your conversion rates.

Studies have shown that clients who are already looking on their mobile phone are more likely than those looking on their desktop or laptop PCs to call an attorney right away.  Make sure your phone number is clearly listed on your website in text, not an image, which will allow people to click the number in order to call you.

You should also make sure that your mobile site doesn't require a great deal of downloaded data.  When a website takes a long time to load, people will tend to click away and visit a different site.  By making a fast-loading, streamlined website, you'll give yourself the best chance of pulling in clients through a mobile website.

#7: Know Who Your Client Base Is

If you're planning to do marketing with good conversion rates, you need to know who's most likely to convert from your website.  That means doing good market research to determine who your most likely clients are and which clients are most likely to find you through your website.  By knowing who your ideal client is, you give yourself a better base profile to start your targeted marketing and ads.