A strong e-newsletter is an essential component of any successful business’ marketing strategy. No matter what field of law you belong to, e-newsletters are a crucial form of communication between your firm and past and prospective clients. With the immense popularity and convenience of smart phones, iPads and other electronic devices, email marketing plays a critical role in maintaining contact with clients. Maintaining a consistent e-newsletter program will prove to be a very important marketing asset for your firm.
This article will explain the importance of e-newsletters in regards to lead generation, keeping in touch with your audience, content distribution, the importance of providing incentives and capturing contact information.
Anyone can create a blog but at the end of the day, the question is whether or not your blog is getting results and generating leads for your law firm. If the answer is no, you may be committing one of the following blogging sins. This article will provide an overview of five common mistakes businesses and law firms make when blogging, including not understanding their target audience, not providing any contact information, inconsistent updating, bad writing and not including multimedia.
1. Not Understanding Your Target Audience — One of the most common blogging mistakes is when a firm doesn’t understand the needs of its audience. The key to successful blogging is focusing every post on what your prospective clients would find most valuable or interesting. Readers are looking for information and news that can directly benefit them. Readers are also looking for personality, and blogs (whether ghost-written or written by the attorney) should be professional, but with a personal voice. Law firms should place an emphasis on creating interesting, helpful and engaging content rather than pure self-promotion.
Email marketing, such as newsletters and email blasts, is one of the most powerful and cost-effective marketing tools for small to mid-sized businesses and law firms. It provides a good segue to convert leads into clients, and emails can be completely customized to strengthen your reputation. Here are six ways to maximize your email marketing success:
1. Experiment to Create a Schedule
In order to find out what days and times are best for your firm to send out emails, try out a few different schedules. Certain times of the year may be best depending on your field of law (Thanksgiving or other heavily-traveled days for a traffic law firm, for example), and holiday emails are appropriate from any firm. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are also said to be the best days of the week to send out emails. Use your personal experience to experiment and see what works best for you!
Search engine optimization (SEO) is absolutely critical to modern marketing. With millions of new Web pages flooding the Internet every day, search engines are forced to sift through the clutter and develop a ranking system to prioritize websites. In the most basic sense, SEO is everything that helps your business get ranked higher and receive optimal exposure from these search engines. This is so important because your position on organic search engine results correlates with the number of leads generated by your website. For those who are new to SEO, this article will explain the most important factors that affect these rankings.
1. Content — Compelling content is perhaps the most important and influential factor of search engine optimization. Every Web page you create should contain unique content and keywords that are fresh and relevant to your area of law. Strong content is quickly picked up by the major search engines and pushed to the top of the search results. When writing your Web copy, see if you’ve answered the needs of your clients. What kind of content are they looking for? Depending on your area of law, you may offer guidebooks, downloads, a FAQ section, multimedia and other pages that are of value to your audience. It’s also important to ask yourself (even if your content meets the needs of your audience): What makes your website stand out from those of similar organizations? The more valuable and unique your website, the more traffic it will receive.
In 2008, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research conducted a study, which established that fast-growing small businesses are adopting social media at a faster rate than larger corporations. This may largely be due to the fact that for small businesses, such as law firms, social media and blogs can be a useful communications channel, allowing them to directly engage in a conversation with their clients and obtain feedback. Beginning with this issue, PR4Lawyers will be writing a series of articles that provide in-depth information and tips that can help you understand and utilize social media and blogs effectively for your law firm. If you have read or at least heard of blogs but don’t exactly understand how they can help promote your business or how they may fit into your overall marketing and communication plan, read on for our first article on blogs.
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