Lawyers face the same challenges any business does. To be able to get new business they should market their services, i.e., advertise. And lawyers deal with the same marketing and advertising challenge every business does - how to beat the competition. Plus lawyers have to believe that any Internet or non-Internet marketing or advertising they do may well produce little or no results for the amount of time and money they spend -- whatever some other marketing or advertising advisor may tell the contrary.
Before the Internet the key non-Internet marketing option or advertising selection for any lawyer was to advertise in the yellow pages. To this day the print yellow pages contain plenty of colorful, one page display ads that feature lawyers offering their services, and lawyers pay a whole lot for these ads. How effective these ads are is anyone's guess -- it's hard for your colored, one page display ad to stick out when you yourself have 20 other lawyers doing the exact same thing! The yellow pages companies, however, continue to promote their marketing and advertising philosophy that "bigger is definitely better" and "everything we sell is an opportunity," so that they often present a lawyer with a non-Internet marketing and advertising solution that costs plenty but often produces little.
This type of thinking, along with the use of print yellow pages generally, moved the way of the dinosaur at an extremely accelerated pace. The yellow pages in publications form had their heyday for many decades, but the population now visits the Internet for the data they seek, so most print directories are collecting dust. A lawyer who advertises in the print yellow pages may well get calls, but they'll most be from vendors using the yellow pages as a cheap supply of leads.
The major paid search providers (pay per click search engines) tend to supply lawyers Internet marketing and advertising solutions in a manner like the way the yellow pages do making use of their print directories. "Bigger is definitely better," so as opposed to realistically discuss with a lawyer a pay per click Internet marketing and advertising campaign that produces financial sense and produces a decent ROI, the pay per click providers will tell the lawyer to choose as many top listing keywords (the most expensive) as their budget will permit and bid as high as they can. The lawyer may go broke in the process, but at least they'll get exposure! Many lawyers get into pay per click as a quick way to have leads but quickly exit per month later after spending plenty of cash for Internet marketing and advertising results that produce nothing but expense.
While pay per click Internet marketing and advertising may be the running favorite of Internet marketing advertisers worldwide, pay per click advertising for a lawyer is generally an exceptionally expensive proposition for what they get. How much a lawyer is prepared to "pay for a lead" assumes an entire new meaning with pay per click. The fee per click for many lawyer related keywords, e.g., "personal injury lawyer," "criminal defense lawyer," can range between $5.00 to $70.00 per click with regards to the market, and when the typical lawyer's conversion rate (the amount of clicks it requires to generate a lead) of one to two percent is factored in, the lawyer can find themselves paying well over $500.00 to $7,000.00 per lead, and a lead is not a client.
The main problem lawyers face when they work with pay per click (and this translates into poor conversion rates) is that (1) they spend very little time creating their pay per click ads and (2) the ads direct traffic to the lawyer's website. Any Internet marketing professional who knows something about pay per click knows there is a constant send pay per click traffic to a website. Instead you create special pages, i.e., "landing pages" for pay per click traffic to be directed to. The landing pages perform the task of convincing traffic to accomplish what the lawyer requires, that is normally to get hold of the lawyer via e-mail or by phone.
Legal Internet directories and portals provide the lawyer a possible Internet marketing and advertising option because of their popularity and enhanced Internet visibility. How effective a listing in a legal Internet directory or portal may be for a lawyer in terms of marketing, advertising and Internet exposure will depend upon this attributes of the legal Internet directory or portal in question. Everything being equal, legal Internet directories or portals that charge a fee to be listed included make more sense being an Internet marketing and advertising choice than similar sites offering listings for free. The lawyer must be particularly careful, however, when they consider advertising in legal Internet directories and portals that "look" like they give you a lot -- and a price to go with it -- but for whatever reasons simply do not produce enough leads for the amount of Internet marketing and advertising money the lawyer must spend. Rechtsanwalt Wels
Many legal Internet directories and portals exist which have a quite strong Internet presence, and they're excellent resource centers for lawyers, but this doesn't automatically make sure they are good places to advertise. With Internet legal portals especially it's not how many lawyers the portal attracts but how lots of people the Internet legal portal attracts that are trying to find legal services. Folks have paid thousands of dollars for advertising in Internet legal portals which have produced nothing in the way of Internet marketing and advertising results. A really wise idea for any lawyer who considers advertising in an Internet legal portal is to have some very accurate user demographics on what sort of specific traffic the Internet legal portal is actually attracting.
What is a lawyer supposed to accomplish? Everywhere the lawyer looks, if the marketing and advertising media is Internet or non-Internet, considerable financial risk is involved, and a guarantee that the lawyer will get good, solid results for the amount of money they spend is frequently hard to achieve.
Ultimately the simplest way for a lawyer to go with Internet marketing and advertising - the way that may ultimately have them the very best longterm results for the money they spend -- is to concentrate on getting their website to rank full of organic search results. When all things are thought, people on the Internet who search for goods and services mainly search for websites to locate their answers. They could check out legal Internet directories and portals, and should they don't find what they want they might turn to cover per click listings as a last resource (only about 30% to 40% of users work with pay per click) but ultimately people who search the Internet are searching for websites that provide them with the answers they seek.
If a lawyer is searching for an Internet marketing and advertising solution that doesn't require being the main pay per click crowd, the lawyer might want to explore pay per call programs. Pay per call is much like pay per click, nevertheless the lawyer doesn't pay for a phone unless they receive one. And the expenses for pay per call are normally substantially less that what the lawyer will pay for a click in several cases. A good lawyer might even wish to consider getting involved with several pay per call providers with the proven fact that involving the providers the lawyer will receive enough leads in the aggregate to produce involvement with these programs worth it.
Most of the Internet marketing and advertising solutions that a lawyer chooses to check into must certanly be tried on an incident by case basis. Nothing at all may be assumed. A pay per click advertising campaign that works quite well for the lawyer with one search provider might fail miserably with another.
One very last thing that a lawyer should be aware of in regards to the Internet and a web site presence is that appearances really do count. Many people have already been on the Internet for 10 years and have correspondingly seen websites of all types and styles. People are used to seeing professionally designed websites. The lawyer's website should be too.
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