Patrick's blog

The Importance of Legal Digital Marketing

Patrick — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 14:45:02 +0000

The Importance of Legal Digital Marketing

If you’re an attorney, choosing where to advertise your firm can be difficult. Twenty years ago, if an attorney wanted to place an ad, there were four basic channels to choose from: TV, radio, newspapers, or street ads like billboards and park benches. Today, the internet has disrupted these four traditional channels of marketing. With so many people using the internet to find services, legal digital marketing has become more important than ever.

According to Pew research, in 2016 only two-in-ten adults in the U.S. consume their news from print newspapers. Would it be a good choice then, for an attorney, to invest in print advertisements? What percentage of those readers would notice the ad? Of those who noticed the ad, what percentage would care? For a law firm’s marketing strategy to succeed, it needs a strong legal digital marketing plan.

Precision Legal Digital Marketing Targeting

Legal digital marketing provides precise targeting, meaning your ads will only be shown to those who would find them relevant. Traditional marketing usually cannot provide precision. When an advertiser buys ad time during a football game, her ad is seen by all of those who are watching. Of those viewers, how many of them are looking for legal assistance in the field you practice? Probably a small percentage. Half of those viewers may even not be in your firm’s city. For lawyers, traditional advertising is often inefficient.

Digital advertisers can avoid this problem. They can target where their ads are displayed based on the target audience they wish to advertise. For instance, if you ran a personal injury firm in Dallas, you could bid on a text ad for the keyword “Texas personal injury attorney.” You will know that whoever clicks on your ad will be looking for legal assistance in your field.

When comparing the text ad (which can cost less than $4 per click depending on which position you want to rank for on Google, Yahoo, or Bing) to the TV ad, we can expect the digital advertiser to spend their advertising budget a lot more efficiently.

Top Legal Digital Marketing Channels

Today, attorneys who want to advertise their website online have a few legal digital marketing options to choose from, depending on their resources and their budget:

Social Media: It is important for nearly every business to have a social media account. According to Pew research, in 2016 79% of Americans reported having a Facebook account. Attorneys can leverage social media to create a strong and professional brand for their business. Social media accounts for businesses are free. If you have the budget, you can choose to buy paid social media ads, which target potential claimants based on their browsing habits.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC): Most search engines make money by offering pay-per-click advertising services. Businesses with a moderate marketing budget can design text ads for their websites (which are shown on the top and bottom of search engine result pages). These text ads are designed for specific search queries and can be set to target certain cities and zip codes, meaning you could choose to only display your ad to potential claimants in your firm’s city.
Organic Search: If you are a lawyer, you should want your website to rank highly on search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. A large website, with hundreds of pages of high-quality content, and a diverse array of other websites linking back to it, should rank highly on search engine results pages. Growing a website, however, is labor intensive and very difficult.

Legal Digital Marketing Tips

For success with legal digital marketing, you should first consider your target audience. Without considering what the best way to target your audience is, you may be spending your legal digital marketing budget poorly. If you are targeting a younger audience, then you may want to consider utilizing social media and paid ads on them.

You should also outline goals for your legal digital marketing. Are you trying to get more traffic to your site? Consider investing in search engine optimization (SEO), working on your organic presence to get more traffic to your website. Is your goal to generate more legal leads? Try paid search or optimizing your website for conversions. By establishing your goals, you can make sure firm is utilizing the correct digital marketing tactics.

Legal Digital Marketing Costs

If you are an attorney, you may not have the time, the money, or the expertise to craft a well-made digital marketing plan. Small or mid-range firms also may not have the budget to hire a legal digital marketing specialist. Paid advertisements can be profitable, but may not be effective if you don’t know the best practices when writing a well-made ad, and monitoring/adjusting the campaign over time. Building an organic following for a website or on social media is inexpensive, but time and labor intensive. A small firm may not have the time or the energy to increase organic traffic to its website from scratch. A lead generation company, like eGenerationMarketing, may be useful when trying to find low-cost, high-quality legal case leads for your firm. Instead of toiling away at your own marketing channels, you can instead pay only for the contact information of claimants looking for legal help in your area.

To discuss our lead availability and pricing in your area, give eGenerationMarketing a call at 617.800.0089. We look forward to speaking with you soon!

Patrick Mon, 04/25/2022 - 10:45

Should My Firm Test Automated Bidding?

Patrick — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 18:17:06 +0000

Should My Firm Test Automated Bidding?

If you are already advertising your law firm on Google Ads and hope to spend your advertising budget more efficiently, consider testing automated bidding. Google Ads offers a plethora of automated bidding options for advertisers. Automated bidding does exactly as it sounds—it automates your bidding with the hope that machine learning automation will be more efficient than a human advertiser at campaign optimization.

Legal advertisers who switch their campaigns to an automated bidding strategy hand their bidding reins over to Google’s machine learning algorithm and that algorithm will adjust their bids in real time, based on whether or not it thinks a specific query will advance the marketing goals of the firm.

Types of Bidding Strategies

There are several types of automated bidding strategies (Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, Maximize Clicks, Target Search Page Location, Target Outranking Share, Target CPA, and Enhanced CPC). The automated bidding strategies used most often by legal marketers are Target CPA (tCPA) and Enhanced CPC (eCPC).

tCPA: CPA stands for “Cost-Per-Acquisition.” In the legal world, an “acquisition” would be a case lead (most often a contact us form or a phone call). Target CPA means you set a desired cost per acquisition, give 100% of your bidding control to Google’s machine learning algorithm, and then the algorithm tries to generate conversions as close to that desired CPA as possible.

For instance, if your CPA goal was $20.00 per lead, a tCPA bidding strategy would try to get you as many leads as possible for around $20.00 apiece. Google can’t guarantee this price, so oftentimes advertisers see their actual CPA either rise above or dip below their target. Overall, this bidding strategy forgoes almost all human control of one’s keywords.

eCPC: CPC stands for “Cost-Per-Click,”—or the maximum amount Google can charge you for a click of one of your ads. When starting new campaigns, most advertisers choose “manual CPC” bidding strategy where one sets a maximum bid for the keywords he or she targets. eCPC is similar to manual CPC except Google’s machine learning has the ability to step in and raise a bid beyond the maximum CPC if it feels a certain search query will lead to a conversion.

Likewise, the machine learning algorithm can also choose to lower the maximum CPC bid if it feels a certain search query is ineffective. Google can’t guarantee that your average bid will be at or below the maximum that you set, though the machine learning attempts to keep average CPC below that maximum. This bidding strategy gives some control to Google, while allowing the advertiser to be able to adjust individual keyword bids up or down.

When Should I Test Automated Bidding?

Automated bidding is not the best strategy for every advertiser to use. If you search “Google Ads Automated Bidding” you’ll probably find a myriad of varied and sometimes inflammatory articles arguing in favor or against automated bidding. Like all advertising strategies, automated bidding may be worth testing depending on your marketing mix, advertising goals, and tolerance for risk. You should only test automated bidding if your law firm has conversion tracking enabled, at least one hundred monthly conversions per campaign, limited seasonality, CPA as the top KPI, and a large(ish) budget.

Conversion Tracking: In order to enable automated bidding strategies, you need to have conversion tracking enabled. “Conversion tracking” is a snippet of code placed on a website that “fires” whenever there is a successful conversion. Google uses conversion tracking in its machine learning algorithm when adjusting bids.

If your law firm relies on a lot of phone calls to generate conversions, phone call conversion tracking, in addition to regular conversion tracking, is critical. Phone call conversion tracking is an additional snippet of code on a website that tracks when a user calls a phone number on a landing page. That call will then be rerouted by Google and a “conversion” will “fire” when the phone call surpasses a certain amount of time set by the advertiser (IE a conversion will “fire” if the call lasts longer than 90 seconds). You should already be tracking conversions, but more importantly, you are required to track conversions if you wish to use an automated bidding strategy.

At Least 100 Monthly Conversions Per Campaign: Next, if you wish to test automated bidding, you need to have a history of conversions already. Google recommends that, before switching a campaign to automated bidding, you should be generating at least 15 monthly conversions within that campaign. The machine learning algorithm relies on your campaign’s history to make bidding decisions, so the more monthly conversions a campaign has means the better the automated bidding machine learning will be.

Though Google recommends at least 15 monthly conversions per campaign in order to utilize automated bidding, most advertisers recommend having a minimum of 100 monthly conversions per campaign before enabling a test. If your firm generates fewer than 100 conversions per month per campaign, you should steer clear of automated bidding.

Limited Seasonality: Seasonality, and the changes that align with seasonality, will disrupt automated bidding. Automated bidding relies on a consistent campaign history to make bidding decisions. If you have a history of advertising interruptions on holidays, or see significantly greater (or fewer) conversions some months compared to others, the algorithm may not be able to plan for that. If you project sharp changes to your campaign’s performance, it may not be worth it to test automated bidding. On the other hand, if you see pretty consistent conversions regardless of the time of year, automated bidding may be worthwhile.

CPA as the Most Important KPI: KPI stands for “key performance indicator.” It is the metric you use to determine the effectiveness of your advertising. CPA is a common KPI that law firms use to judge the effectiveness of their advertising. If you are trying to maintain a certain CPA, automated bidding may be worth a test.

There are other KPIs that automated bidding doesn’t take into account. If you are a Social Security disability attorney, for instance, the age of the clients signed through advertising is important. If you are generating hundreds of leads at a good CPA, but a majority of those leads come from people age 70+, automated bidding wouldn’t be able to adjust away from that age. If you’re a personal injury or workers’ compensation attorney, automated bidding strategies will not be able to adjust bids whether or not the case falls outside the statute of limitations. You should keep in mind all your KPIs when determining whether or not to test automated bidding.

A Large(ish) Budget: The last factor you should consider before testing an automated bidding strategy is your budget. Machine learning requires an uninterrupted steam of advertising. If you find that your campaigns are consistently limited by budget, an automated bidding strategy may not be worth testing.

Why Should I Test Automated Bidding?

At this point, you may be wondering “Why should I even test automated bidding?” It seems as though there are a lot of factors that make automated bidding ineffective. Automated bidding isn’t useful for every advertiser, but if you have conversion tracking enabled, at least 100 monthly conversions per campaign, limited seasonality, CPA as the top KPI, and a large(ish) budget, there are potential benefits to testing an automated bidding strategy.

At the heart of automated bidding is the assumption that machine learning can outperform human optimization. In addition, automated bidding strategies adjust bidding in real-time, meaning you’ll only pay the big bucks for searches that have a high potential to convert. With automated bidding, you give up control of your campaigns in exchange for (hopefully) more efficient advertising. It is also important to note that automated bidding relieves the advertiser from having to manually adjust bids. That could mean you have more opportunity to connect with clients, work on a case, or just relax. Automated bidding isn’t a “set it and forget it” strategy, but it does let the machine learning do some additional advertising legwork.

Consider High Quality Lead Generation

Testing automated bidding involves a considerable amount of risk. If you are an inexperienced legal advertiser, creating and managing a Google Ads account may seem too risky of an investment. If that is the case for your firm, or if you are simply looking to supplement your current marketing mix with an additional channel, consider purchasing legal case leads from eGenerationMarketing. We are committed to providing your firm with high quality, exclusive legal case leads for a low price.

We currently offer Social Security disability, personal injury, workers’ comp, and employment law case leads nationwide. If you’d like to learn more about our lead pricing and availability, give us a call today at 617.800.0089.

Patrick Thu, 11/15/2018 - 13:17

It's Alive!—Your Google Ads Campaign's First Week

Patrick — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 13:13:36 +0000

It's Alive!—Your Google Ads Campaign's First Week

If you want to grow your law firm, there is no better place to start than search engine marketing (SEM). Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing offer ad platforms to get your law firm at the top of search engine results pages (SERP). Many attorneys and legal marketers find creating a new ad campaign daunting. You might have a limited budget, or are worried about making mistakes because of inexperience.

Don’t worry—even the most seasoned digital marketers need time to optimize new SEM campaigns. Below is a brief guide detailing some best practices and daily optimization tasks you should do during your campaign’s first week and beyond.

Before You Start

Before you get started there are some things you should know about this guide. First off, it assumes you already have a Google Ads campaign, complete with keywords, ad groups, and conversion tracking set up and ready to launch. If you don’t have that made, that’s okay, just know that this guide does not include information on campaign creation and structure and it assumes you have some familiarity with the basics of advertising on Google. Lastly, this guide assumes you are targeting a broad area with a lot of potential clients. If your campaign only targets a limited geographic area such as a city or a few counties, then it will probably take more time for your campaign to start generating enough traffic to make informed optimization decisions.

The Most Important Thing to Keep In Mind

It is important to understand that, during its first few weeks, your campaign will (probably) not be profitable. Creating a new Google Ads campaign is sort of like carving a marble sculpture. When making a new sculpture, a sculptor must first start with a block of unworked marble. The block is large, square, and rough. Through careful attention to detail, the sculptor chips away all the excess stone and smooths out the rough edges until an elegant sculpture is produced. Likewise, when making a new campaign, the digital marketer will start out with an overpriced and underperforming campaign. It is her job to chip away all the irrelevant keywords, unrelated search terms, and inefficient ads until all that remains a profitable and optimized Google Ads campaign.

Your First Week

During your campaign’s first week, you must check its performance daily. The first week is the most critical, expensive, and time-sensitive point in a campaign’s life. Usually during this time, the campaign eats through its budget quickly, so the more vigilant you are at nipping inefficiencies in the bud, the quicker your campaign will become profitable. It may also be useful to schedule campaigns only during weekdays to start, unless you are willing to check performance over the weekend.

In order to wrangle your new campaign into profitability, you should be performing SAP tasks every day during your first week. SAP stands for:

Set Maximum CPC High and Adjust Daily,
Add Negatives Often, and
Pause Underperforming keywords.

SAP—Daily Optimization Tasks

Set Maximum CPC High, and Adjust Daily: When setting a max CPC for your keywords, it’s better to start high. If you already have existing campaigns for reference, look at your top performing keywords. You should set all your keywords’ starting maximum cost per click (max CPC) equal to the max CPCs of your other campaigns’ top performing keywords. If you don’t have any existing campaigns for reference, just set your starting max CPC equal to your break-even CPA divided by ten (this means at a 10% conversion rate, you will break even). Your campaign will be expensive to start, but setting bids high is recommended for two reasons.

The first reason you should initially set bids high is because you will get traffic quickly, and will be able to make optimization decisions faster. Though your budget will be spent quickly, you will know which keywords perform well and which perform poorly and can pause them quickly. The second reason you should set initial max CPCs high is a little more contentious, and you may find some disagreement depending on which digital marketer you ask. You should set your keywords’ max CPC high because they will have higher quality scores (QS).

You may be thinking “QS isn’t affected by bid.” That is true, but QS is affected by historical performance. If your bid is too low to start it means your ads will appear lower on the SERP. Poor ad position means fewer clicks per view, fewer clicks per view means a low click through rate (CTR), a low CTR means a low QS, and a low QS means expensive traffic. Even though it might seem like a frugal idea to bid low, and raise bids on high performance keywords, a low QS can hurt you in the long run. As your keywords generate traffic, you can lower max CPCs quickly (sometimes within the first day or two) and start to lower your costs.

Add Negatives Often: One of the most important things to do during your first week (and beyond) is to add negative keywords at least once a day. It takes some time to build a robust negative keyword list, so it is important to check your new campaign’s search terms report often for irrelevant traffic. During your first week, it is good to check your search terms report at the beginning and end of each day. Keeping an eye on this early on can save you hundreds as your campaign picks up steam. Lastly, don’t be afraid to add phrase match negatives if appropriate.

Pause Irrelevant Keywords: During your first week, you should be pausing irrelevant keywords frequently. There are several red flags that might indicate a keyword is irrelevant. The first red flag is very high spend/clicks without conversions. Some marketers recommend waiting until the keyword has spent at least three times its target CPA before pausing, others wait until the keyword has at least three-hundred clicks before pausing. For the legal industry, those strategies may be a little extreme since keywords are expensive. For instance, if you waited for three-hundred clicks on a $10.00 keyword, you’d be spending $3,000.00 before waiting to pause. Spending that much is probably not worth the risk.

The second red flag is extremely low CTR. An extremely low CTR is a good indicator whether people find your ad irrelevant to the keyword searched. If you feel your ads clearly represent the services your firm provides, then an extremely low CTR may indicate the keyword just isn’t the right fit and can be paused. It is important to note that below average is not the same as extremely low. If you have an average CTR of 3%, then a keyword with a 2% CTR should not raise any red flags. However, if the keyword has a CTR of <1%, it may be valuable to investigate further.

The last red flag is irrelevant search terms. If you have a keyword that you are on the fence about pausing, it is recommended to look and see what search terms triggered that keyword. If you find that the majority of the search terms are irrelevant to your law firm, it is probably a good idea to pause that keyword.

You should use your best judgment when determining which keywords to pause. If you pause too quickly you may lose out on valuable keywords, and if you pause too slowly you may waste your marketing budget on irrelevant traffic. The decision to pause keywords centers on how much of your budget you are willing to risk for future cases.

If you have a very tight budget, it may be a good idea to pause keywords quickly, whereas if you have a loose budget you may want to wait and see if a keyword will generate a conversion before pausing. Lastly, it’s important to recognize that the red flags listed intersect. By itself, a red flag may not indicate the keyword should be paused, but several red flags should worry you a little more. For instance, a keyword with high spend and irrelevant search terms should still probably be paused even if it has a high CTR, since it brings irrelevant traffic to your website. Likewise, a measly thirty-click keyword should still probably be paused if it has an extremely low CTR and irrelevant search terms.

Beyond Your First Week

Beyond the first week, you should still be checking your campaign frequently. During week two, you may still want to check the campaign every day. Eventually, you will get to the point where you make very few changes, if any, to your new campaign. Once you hit that point, you can start checking the campaign every other day, then every three days, etc. You can even schedule your campaign to run during the weekend if interested. After a few weeks (or even a few months depending on how widely you are targeting) you should see your campaign’s performance stabilize and maintain profitability.

High Quality Case Leads

Creating a profitable Google Ads campaign involves significant risk. If you do not have the time, the budget, or the expertise to start and optimize a campaign, consider purchasing legal case leads from eGenerationMarketing. We are committed to providing your firm with high quality, exclusive legal case leads for a low price.

We currently offer Social Security disability, personal injury, workers’ comp, and FDCPA case leads nationwide. If you’d like to learn more about our lead pricing and availability, give us a call today at 617.800.0089.

Patrick Fri, 08/24/2018 - 09:13

One Thing Every Law Firm Should Include in Their Marketing Plan

Patrick — Thu, 31 May 2018 14:43:57 +0000

One Thing Every Law Firm Should Include in Their Marketing Plan

Whether you run a solo practice or a national firm, every law office needs a solid marketing plan. A marketing plan is a detailed blueprint or portfolio of marketing strategies which a law firm plans on using over the course of a year. Though marketing plans vary from law firm to law firm, there is one marketing strategy that every firm should utilize: digital marketing.

Why Every Attorney Should Use Digital Marketing

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, digital advertising revenue has outspent TV revenue every year since 2016, making it the industry leader in advertising. Unlike TV—and other traditional forms of advertising—digital marketing is scalable which means it can be profitable regardless of your firm’s size and budget. What’s even better is that digital marketing can be targeted towards users who have an interest in your area of law and are actively seeking legal help—something traditional forms of advertising cannot always do.

What Digital Marketing Strategies Should My Firm Use?

Depending on your time, budget, and goals, some marketing strategies are better than others. Below are three legal digital marketing strategies commonly utilized by lawyers:

Search Engine Optimization: Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the suite of tactics marketers use to rank highly on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. There are many factors that search engines use to rank webpages, but four major factors include: the quality of content on a website, how frequently content is uploaded, links to your firm’s website from other domains, and the relevancy of your firm’s website content to what is being searched. Increasing the number of published articles on a firm’s legal blog is a common strategy lawyers use to increase unpaid web traffic. Search engine optimization is free, but requires lots of time, energy, and expertise to become successful.
Paid Search and Display: Search engines like Google and Bing offer paid advertising on their search engine results pages (SERPs). These platforms give law firms the ability to craft text-based advertisements for SERPs. The factors that influence where on the SERP an ad appears include: search query, ad relevancy to a user’s search, your firm’s website speed, your ad’s relevancy to the user’s search, and how much you bid. Beyond paid search, advertisers like Google also represent a vast network of websites with which they sell image-based ad space. Law firms can create image-based ads, which are placed on different websites and apps within this network. All of these advertisements, text or image-based, are targeted and scalable, which means they can be profitable whether your monthly advertising budget is one-hundred dollars or one-hundred-thousand dollars.
Social Media: There are two main ways to market your firm on social media: paid and unpaid. Paid social media, similar to paid display, enables advertisers to purchase digital ad-space on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. These paid advertisements are targeted through location, demographic information, and interests. Unpaid social, like search engine optimization, requires promoting high-quality and relevant content and building a large user base over time.

Picking the best suite of digital marketing strategies depends on your firm’s marketing budget and goals. Generally, image-based advertisements are better suited to brand awareness goals, while SEO and paid search strategies are better for lead generation. All of these strategies take time, some take money, and all have their merits. Regardless of a firm’s size or area of law, digital marketing should be included on every firm’s marketing plan.

If you do not have the time or the expertise to manage an internal digital marketing campaign, consider purchasing high-quality legal case leads from eGenerationMarketing. We currently offer Social Security disability, workers’ compensation, personal injury, and employment law case leads. Our leads are 100% exclusive and we have no long-term contracts. Call 617.800.0089 to discuss our lead availability.

Patrick Thu, 05/31/2018 - 10:43

Stick The Landing—Writing and Testing Landing Pages For Your Firm

Patrick — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 14:19:35 +0000

Stick The Landing—Writing and Testing Landing Pages For Your Firm

Congratulations, you’ve started a great online marketing campaign! You’ve picked a great keyword, set a great bid, written a great ad, and gotten a great click. Now you just need to stick the landing with a great landing page.

A landing page is what users will see when they click on one of your paid ads on Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Your landing page is the last obstacle between securing that new client or losing them.

It’s important for your firm to have top-performing landing pages in order maximize your return on ad spend. Here are some tips for writing and testing great landing pages.

Structure

Writing for the web is very different than legal writing. For instance, your paragraphs need to be short and easy to read. A landing page isn’t an essay, it’s a flier. Potential clients want only the meat of the message, presented clearly. For example, which would you rather read:

1.) Text that looks like this?

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Cras semper auctor neque vitae. Mattis pellentesque id nibh tortor id aliquet lectus. Elementum curabitur vitae nunc sed. Tortor consequat id porta nibh venenatis cras sed felis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur. Odio eu feugiat pretium nibh ipsum consequat nisl vel. Ut etiam sit amet nisl purus in mollis nunc. Enim blandit volutpat maecenas volutpat. Feugiat pretium nibh ipsum consequat nisl vel pretium lectus quam."

2.) Or text that looks like this?

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Cras semper auctor neque vitae.

Mattis pellentesque id nibh tortor id aliquet lectus. Elementum curabitur vitae nunc sed.

Tortor consequat id porta nibh venenatis cras sed felis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur. Odio eu feugiat pretium nibh ipsum consequat nisl vel.

Ut etiam sit amet nisl purus in mollis nunc. Enim blandit volutpat maecenas volutpat. Feugiat pretium nibh ipsum consequat nisl vel pretium lectus quam”

Users almost always pick the second option. Both have the exact same text, but when copy is structured in one big block, it can be intimidating to readers—especially when read on a screen.

Breaking up your paragraphs encourages potential clients to read your content. As a loose rule of thumb, a paragraph on a landing page should only contain one to three sentences.

Using bullets and numbered lists is also encouraged. Lastly, bolding important text can be a great way to highlight the key points of your message.

Content

Did you know that 50% of Americans read at an eighth-grade level? That means if you include language in your landing pages which an eighth grader wouldn’t understand, then half your potential customers will be excluded from your message.

When writing landing pages, it is important to keep the complexity of your language simple so that you engage the widest audience possible.

This doesn’t mean your writing can’t be neat, concise, or professional. You only need a fourth-grade education to read The Old Man and The Sea. Your landing page should be very clear and easy to read while still resonating with users and highlighting the benefits of working with your firm.

Test, Test, Test

We know a good landing page should have short, concise paragraphs and clean, easy-to-understand writing, but what next? How many words should you have? Should you try to include very general language to attract as many claimants as you can, or use very specific language to generate higher-quality cases? Should you include images? Should you bullet paragraphs or leave them be?

The best part about marketing is that there are no hard and fast answers to these types of questions. There may be “best practices,” but depending on your area of law and your client base, some strategies will work better than others.

Because there are no rules, you have the freedom to try anything. When trying new strategies, it is important to test your changes and find the top performing landing page for your firm.

The best way to test landing pages is by using “A/B Testing,” or testing a key change in a landing page by running the original page and the changed page at the same time and seeing which performs better.

The key metric to track is the conversion rate, which is the number of clients signed divided by the number of visits to your landing page. A landing page which has 2 visits and has generated 1 new client has a conversion rate of 50%.

A/B Testing Example

Let’s say you want to test two different headlines and see which performs better. You create two landing pages that are identical except the headline. Headline A says, “Welcome,” and headline B says, “A Law Firm You Can Trust.”

After running the two different headlines on identical ads for two weeks, you find headline A generated 3 clients from 46 visits and headline B generated 15 clients from 98 visits.

Doing some quick math, you find headline A generated a client roughly 7% of the time, while headline B generated a client roughly 15% of the time. Based on the results of this test, you should now run all your ads using headline B.

If you want to get even more accurate results you, can put your data into an A/B test calculator like one found at conversioner.com. These calculators estimate the certainty your new landing page will help or harm your conversion rate. You should shoot for ninety-five percent certainty to be confident your changes will affect the conversion rate.

Exclusive Legal Case Leads

If you don’t have the time or the expertise to run and monitor digital marketing campaigns, consider investing in a lead generation service. eGenerationMarketing is committed to providing your firm with high quality, exclusive legal case leads for a low price.

Sources:

www.conversioner.com/ab-test-calculator
www.contently.com/strategist/2015/01/28/this-surprising-reading-level-analysis-will-change-the-way-you-write
www.loremipsumgenerator.com

Patrick Thu, 02/15/2018 - 09:19

Three Books Every Lawyer Should Read

Patrick — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 17:58:03 +0000

Three Books Every Lawyer Should Read

The holiday season is a great time to stay indoors and crack open a new book. Literature allows us to learn about new perspectives. As a lawyer, literature provides a way to learn new information about your own field. There is a whole canon of literature devoted to justice and its role in a diverse society. Here are a few classic novels which every lawyer should read.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, during the heart of the Civil Rights movement. It is a coming-of-age story about Scout, a young girl living in Maycomb County Alabama during the Great Depression. Her father, Atticus Finch, is an attorney who is defending an innocent African American man in court. Scout must come to terms with the shortcomings and the nobility of those in her community, and the role an intolerant culture plays within the justice system.

Every lawyer should read this book because it illustrates a difficult, but important part of American history and American identity. It seeks to acknowledge the intolerance of time while offering hope for the future. Atticus Finch is a wise man who seeks justice in an unjust world. He teaches Scout that she should seek to see people from their perspectives and to see the goodness in all people. Scout is taught by her father to respect even the people who stand against her goals. A lawyer can to look to Atticus Finch as an example of a just and dedicated member of the court.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Crime and Punishment is a 19th-century novel published by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It details the story of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, an incredibly poor, ex-university student living in St. Petersburg who murders a pawnbroker and her sister. Tormented by guilt, Raskolnikov eventually confesses to the police and is sentenced to seven years of hard labor in Siberia.

Every lawyer should read Crime and Punishment because it seeks to understand the concept of guilt and remorse and how it affects a criminal’s psyche. At first, Raskolnikov feels justified in murdering a greedy, unscrupulous pawnbroker, but after he commits the crime he feels only guilt. Raskolnikov humanizes the criminal. Crime and Punishment wrestles with remorse, and forgiveness, and morality within the justice system. In the end, Raskolnikov uses his time in Siberia as a way to reflect on and to do penance for his crime. A lawyer can look to Raskolnikov to understand how rehabilitation and justice intertwine.

True Grit by Charles Portis

True Grit is the story of Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old girl, who is seeking to bring to justice her father’s killer, Tom Chaney. Mattie Ross enlists the help of Rooster Cogburn, an unkempt and alcoholic US Marshall, and later Mr. LaBoeuf, an arrogant and incompetent Texas Ranger. The three travel across the Choctaw Nation, searching for Chaney. Chaney captures Mattie and tries to kill her, but Cogburn and LaBoeuf save her before she is harmed. In the end, Mattie is bitten by a venomous snake and loses her arm, but survives the journey.

Every lawyer should read True Grit because it is an entertaining adventure story with an exciting plot and sympathetic characters. It teaches a lot about grief and the role it plays in the victim. Mattie Ross must wrestle with the grief and anger that she feels after her father’s death. The loss of her arm is a physical manifestation of the mental toll that the grieving process had on Mattie. Cogburn and LaBoeuf transform from somewhat unlikeable and petty men to heroes. Although True Grit handles justice a little more simplistically (Tom Chaney commits murder so he deserves to hang), it is an entertaining, and a straightforward character-driven story about grief and companionship set in the American West. It is a short, easy book, with a simple message, which any lawyer would enjoy reading.

If you are looking for a new book to read this winter, To Kill a Mockingbird, Crime and Punishment, and True Grit are all wonderful choices. Each of them offers a different perspective on the concept of justice. As a lawyer these books provide an entertaining way to learn a little more about the legal field.

Patrick Thu, 12/08/2016 - 12:58