subject: Legal Marketing: Is Your Firm's Website Good Enough? [print this page] Are you getting the most out of your firm's website? If not, following are two things you can do to change that.
1. Put Together a Plan: Most firms put up a website because, "That's what you're supposed to do, right?" After all, everybody else has a site, so you get one too. But, do you have a plan for your site, ie, a plan for how it's going to generate leads, the number of leads you want it to generate, how to follow up on those leads, etc.
Your website can do anything you plan for it to do. What are some of things that should be included in your legal marketing plan for your website? One is social media. Why? Read on.
Social Media: For those who are unfamiliar, social media are sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, to name a few of the biggies. It is here to stay and if you haven't integrated them with your website, you're leaving a lot of business to your competitors. Proof? Following are a few stats:
Facebook has 54.5 million monthly unique visitors. . . with a growth rate in the U.S. averaging 3.8% per month over the last year.
LinkedIn has 50 million users worldwide and is growing at roughly one new member per second.
Twitter.com is a top 500 site that reaches over 4.1 million U.S. monthly people.
II. Put up a Subscriber Box: When visitors land on your site, you should do everything you can to capture some contact info so that you can stay in touch with them. One of the easiest ways to do this is to put up a subscriber box to capture their email address.
Via this you can offer a newsletter, free legal advice (eg, short answers to commonly asked questions, etc.), links to informative content on your website, etc.
To get the most from your firm's website, you have to invest in it. And, this all starts with a legal marketing plan.
