Integrity Marketing

Periscopes, Vines, YouTube and the Estate Planning Law Practice

You know about YouTube (owned by Google), and maybe you know about Vines (owned by Twitter), a very short form video sharing service where the videos are all of six seconds long. If you don’t, you can watch a YouTube video about Vines. Ironic, we know.

Now there’s Periscope, the latest entry in the swiftly-changing world of social video.

This video mobile app is a live streaming video service that Twitter bought in February. Periscope brings social sharing, live discussion and feedback to mobile broadcast, and then after 24 hours, whoosh, it’s gone from the Periscope servers. Users can save broadcasts to mobile devices and then publish and share them online like any other video.

But we’d rather you did not. 

Lawyer videos, particularly those for estate planning practices, need to reflect the professionalism of your firm. The same goofy qualities that can make your cat videos so adorable to friends and family on YouTube, Facebook, Vines and Periscope will not endear you to clients and prospects.

We encourage our clients to take the time to travel to our studios and develop professionally produced and edited lawyer videos that reflect their knowledge and, most importantly, their personalities. This is an investment in your practice.

Think of a movie that gripped your attention and your emotions, made you want to see what happened and gave you something to think about. Your lawyer video can and should do that very same thing.

Want to know more? Visit this page, complete the form and James will be in touch to schedule a meeting to learn more about your practice and how we can share your story, your message and your professionalism with your market on video.  

Before the Dog Days of Summer are Gone: Top Three Marketing To Do’s

We love summer, and there’s nothing like the last week of August, when it seems summer can’t get any more, well, summery! Maybe your office is experiencing a little bit of a lull, as families are away on vacation, parents are busy taking college students back to campus, or grandparents are helping grandchildren with back to school preparations.

Late August is a perfect time for a few tasks that you may not get to during your busy season:

1 – Any unfinished business? Now is a good time to clear your desk – start by contacting prospects who didn’t make it into the office in the last few months. When your schedule is packed, even with an integrated CRM and a crackerjack staff, you likely have a few outstanding items - calls that need to be returned, appointments that did not get scheduled. Now is the time to tie up all those loose ends. You don’t have an integrated CRM? Call us – we can help make that happen before you get too busy with end of year matters.

2 – How’s your marketing program going? This is a great time to look back at the last six months and see if your processes are working smoothly. First question: did you have your website updated to responsive design? Do you have time to run some training sessions for your staff on how they are handling phone calls and intake processes? Did you mean to schedule an appointment for lawyer videos, but never got around to it? Take a look at the big picture and consider what is working, what could be better and what is not performing.

3 – Depending on your practice, this may be a good time to ask for referrals. Do this tactfully, as part of an overall conversation that first establishes that they are happy with your services and if there’s anyone they know who might benefit from the same level of quality service.

Take advantage of this last pause before the busy fall and holiday seasons arrive – they will be here before you know it!

Avoiding Duplicate Content Issues

What is duplicate content?
Clients often wonder about the concept of "duplicate content" and how Google may penalize a site for this black-hat SEO tactic. Google views duplicate content as an issue when a webmaster attempts to game their SEO system by filling a web page with repetitive words in an effort to get that page ranked higher in search engine results. The most egregious efforts being pages that say something like "Atlanta Estate Planning, Atlanta Estate Planning, Atlanta Estate Planning, Atlanta Estate Planning, Atlanta Estate Planning," and so on to websites or blog posts that have the same closing paragraph or tag line on EVERY post, to sites that merely reproduce someone else's website in an effort to hijack their traffic.

What about blog posts for Essential Attorneys™?
In Google terms, your blogs do not have a "duplicate content" issue. Consider news wires that distribute the same news story across 100s or even 1,000s of news outlets online. Duplicate content is not an issue – it's called syndication. Avoid adding a standard closing paragraph to every blog post, which over time may penalize your domain authority/rank.

Edit your blog posts to make them unique.
Essential Attorneys™ receiving weekly blog support are encouraged take a moment to change things up a bit within your own blog posts. We suggest adding your own anecdotal comments, to spice things up with your own insights and experiences, and to write your own blog posts from time to time. The blog posts from IMS are sample posts. You are free to use them as-is, as a springboard idea to write your own, make small or major edits.

The more of your own personality you can add to the blogs, the better connection you will make with your readers.

How can you learn more?
We recommend the following resources:

• http://www.advancedwebranking.com/blog/content-strategy-in-2015/
• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

What does IMS do to keep Essential Attorney™ websites safe from duplicate content?
We run your website through Google Webmaster Tools and a third-party auditor to check the site for health issues, to include checking for duplicate content within your domain.

Did You Ever Walk Into the Middle of the Movie?

If you’ve ever walked in late to a movie, or joined a conversation when someone was half-way through a story, you know what it’s like to try to put the pieces together. Sometimes you can glean enough insight from the conversation or movie dialogue to catch up – but sometimes you just can’t.

That’s a challenge that faces estate planning attorneys on a regular basis.

When a potential client calls you, they are usually at a pain point in their life – they realize they need to begin planning for an ailing spouse’s care, or a family event has led them to need to revise an estate plan. They’ve lived with this story, maybe for many years, and they know the inner details and the facts that led to their current state.

You’ve just walked into the middle of the movie, and you need to catch up.

Some of your clients wish that you and your staff could read their minds. They want to know that you are immediately able to discern the challenges that they are facing and have the answers. Most of the time, you do. But sometimes there are no easy answers, or the details are in such a fog of emotions that the path to a resolution is simply not fast or easy.

We promise not to practice law. But we do know a lot about your clients.

When clients reach out to you to solve a problem, what they need is one clear and consistent message from you, your staff, your website and your social media. They want to know that you care. That means when they call the office, they are treated with kindness, dignity and respect.

Your staff needs to know that they may be very fragile and will deeply appreciate kindness. If a receptionist or answering service puts them on hold, they may hang up. If your website is more concerned with your credentials than demonstrating how you help clients, they may go to another estate planning attorney’s website. If they visit your social media pages and see something that does not warm their spirit or convey your human side, you might lose them.

Your clients are coming to you when they are in need. They need your legal skills, but they also need you as a caring professional. Your goal is to enter their conversation, even though you are coming in at the middle (or in some cases, towards the end) and relate to them on a personal and a professional level. The problems you solve are personal, with a legal solution.

In marketing terms, it’s figuring out where they are in their customer journey, and what messaging strategy they need.

But it’s also a person-to-person conversation – catching up in the middle of their movie, and connecting your skills to their needs.

It's Tuesday - Do you know where your clients are?

How does a brand relate to a client in a meaningful way? Yes, they lean on the data – but just as importantly, they ACT on it.

A study released by IBM reports a massive perception gap between how well businesses think they are marketing and the actual customer experience. While 90 percent of marketers agree that personalizing the customer experience is critical to their success, a whopping 80 percent of consumers stated that the average brand doesn’t understand them as individuals.

Ironic, given that today’s consumer shares so much data with businesses. It seems that brands - aka businesses - consistently fail to deliver their part of the relationship.

Or, as a columnist at Forbes put it, “An abundance of data and analytics on customer behavior and actions is a nice-to-have, but even more important is to act on it – providing a personalized experience when it is most relevant to the customer.”

In other words, are you connecting with prospects and clients in a way that is meaningful to them, is personalized and includes a two-way conversation, including follow up that suits the different stages in the conversation?

Here’s a great video of young people discussing brand experiences. Swap out the phrase “brand experience” for customer service and you will have a clearer picture of what we mean...

 

When millennials go to a website to shop, they appreciate the fact that they can return to the site and will find their previous searches. When they have a Twitter conversation one week with a company, they appreciate a follow up contact the next week. They expect that the companies are gathering their information and using it. This is not seen as intrusive or problematic. In fact, if the information is not used and not acted on, they wonder if the business knows what they are doing.

You may not think that millennial consumer behavior matters, but think again. They are now in their middle thirties, raising families and starting to take care of their parents. And their parents have adopted social media and are interacting with companies and brands in these new ways.

Here’s an example: a woman calls your office with a question about a will for her father, who is near 85 and having some health problems. If you have a top notch support staff, they have gathered her name, his name and a good telephone number, maybe even an email address. If you were not able to take the call in the morning, you call back before the end of the day.

Your conversation starts with “I understand that you are concerned about your father?”

You have the data – phone number, basic idea of the scenario. The action required is a phone call, made in a timely manner, with the right message.

Data combined with action equals a new client who appreciates your getting it right! 

Dissecting Your Website – Why is that there? Part 6: Social Media

Is your estate planning or elder law firm social? If you are an Essential Attorney^TM, then your answer better be yes! Part of the Essential Solution includes help setting up and formatting several different social media pages as well as training in how to use them. But to really take your marketing system to the next level, we also integrate those social media channels with your website. 

We talk a lot about the importance of social media around here. If you are still doubtful of the impact that social media can have in your marketing, check out this post that account manager Dana wrote, debunking some of the most common social media myths or this post by CEO Jennifer explaining some of the stats behind social media use in marketing.

Now that we know that social media is a great tool, how to we tie it in to the rest of your marketing, mainly the website? The way in which we integrate social media into your website depends on your unique firm, the goals we set together for your marketing, and your target audience.

For example, IMS President Kyle Krull has found that he is more successful asking for reviews and recommendations on sites such as Avvo or Martindale-Hubbell rather than on Facebook or Google+. Therefore, while he is still active on social media platforms, they aren’t as prominent in the website design.

On the other hand, an attorney or firm that has a slightly younger target audience or has goals to increase the overall exposure of their firm and increase social connections and reviews would do well to have social media more prominent in their site design. We could do this by using a larger Twitter feed, displaying a separate blog feed, and displaying the social media icons in several places or on every page of the site.

Social media is usually included in the design on the lower half of the home page design. While it is an important part of your marketing, it isn’t as important as a call to action item or the navigation. Avoid distracting your viewers from something that important whenever possible! It does make a great lower-level action item though – a way for viewers to connect with you either after they have converted and filled out a form or found the contact information they were looking for.

Next week: Next week we’ll be talking about “other stuff” on your homepage. These custom sections could include downloadable resources, testimonials, an attorney spotlight, or many other options. What options are available and why might you want to take advantage of them? If you want to catch up on other installments in this series, check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, or Part 5. 

Can you roll with the changes?

The Wall Street Journal reports that major retailers are making a huge cut in the number of newspaper circulars distributed this summer. The giant of all retailers, Wal-Mart, printed half as many circulars in June this year as it did for June last year. That’s a big change.

What does this matter to an estate planning law practice?

We want to get you thinking about changes in marketing.

Shifting gears in long-standing practices is one the hardest things for small professional offices, large corporations and individuals. Change management is studied in business school and implemented by well-trained project managers in corporations. We all know people who refuse to change their behavior, in the face of overwhelming evidence that what they are doing is simply not working or not helping their lives move forward.

And yes, it’s something we run into every now and then.

 But here’s the thing: change is inevitable. Change almost always brings improvement. So if your office has been relying on one kind of marketing for years, and its okay, but it’s not great, maybe things have changed that have impacted what was once a more productive process.  And maybe you need to think about what needs to change to make your practice better.

Start with the data.  For instance, look at your website’s analytics.

How do your analytic numbers align with your appointment book?            

Is your website mobile friendly?

Are you using videos to engage your target market on a more personal level?

What is the frequency of your blogging or social media posts?

Has it been more than four years since your website was updated?

Want to make a change to your practice but aren’t sure where to start? Give us a call – we can walk you through the process, find the weak spots, and help you make the changes – so your practice can keep on rolling!

Six Steps to Social Media Success

By now, I hope every attorney understands the importance of social media – from its impact on search engine optimization (SEO), to how it impacts your online credibility and authority, to the way it can help nurture relationships with prospective clients, helping them achieve that level of comfort they need to reach out to you for help.

How can you be successful on social media? My first recommendation is a bit like the Hippocratic Oath: Do no harm. Whatever else you do, be careful not to ruin your professional reputation (or get cross-wise with your State Bar) by posting foolishly on social media. If you will just remember to be personable, yet professional, you’re halfway there. Avoid being overly religious, political, or snarky. Social media is not the place to air your grievances, no matter how tempting. Also, be careful how you post or “like” on others’ controversial comments, remembering that everything you do online is visible to someone!

My mother used to say that if you did not want to see it published on the front page of the New York Times, then don’t write it, say it, or do it. That’s a pretty good rule of thumb for social media, too.

Oh, and don’t sell. Don’t clutter your feed with solicitations for a free initial consultation, or sales pitches for your latest workshop. Be social. You wouldn’t walk into a party and start inviting everyone to come to your office to discuss their legal needs … don’t do it on social media, either.

So, you’re going to carefully avoid committing social media hara-kiri, right? Now, here are six steps to social media success.

Ready?

1 – Ask questions. People love to give opinions, and just posing a question can engage them. (See above!). How do you want to be remembered? Is your will up to date?

2 – Don’t be afraid to use humor, as long as it is kind and positive in nature. If you have a favorite joke that always gets a laugh from clients, consider posting it.

3 – Make this a personal conversation. We do business with people we know, like and trust. This is never truer than when clients open up to you to share their family history. They will appreciate your willingness to be a person as well as a professional.

4 – Inspirational quotes are there for the sharing. Show your social media visitors that you have a thoughtful side – again, this is about sharing your best, personal self.

5 – Re-use, recycle, re-purpose. There are many things that change in estate planning, but many things stay the same. If you had a social media post five years ago that spoke to the importance of planning ahead, chances are it is still relevant. On the other hand, that post about health insurance from pre-ACA days? Leave that in the past.

6 – Become your own content curator*. Think about the news outlets that your clients read, and share that information through social media. Start by sharing your thoughts about what the article means to you or how it could affect estate or business planning, followed with a link to the article. This tells clients that you are always looking out for them, thinking of what they are interested in, and that you are a good source of information, which adds up to authority and credibility.

*Note that if you’re an Essential Attorney, you’ve got a head start toward success. With IMS as your personal Content Curator, you get relevant, news-based blog content delivered to your inbox every Friday morning. All of the research legwork is done for you – just take a few minutes each week to share your own thoughts about the articles and you will have unique, personal content to share on your blog and social media every day. Follow the rest of these steps, and see what a huge impact social media can have to drive more revenue and boost your bottom line!

Dissecting Your Website – Why is that there? Part 5: Welcome Message

Welcome to part 5 of our “Dissecting Your Website” series! This week, we are going to be discussing just that – the welcome message portion of your website. Why is the welcome message there, what does it do? And what are some best practices for writing a welcoming message to your users?

The welcome message usually has the job of giving your website visitors a brief introduction to your firm, making them feel comfortable, and leading them to take some kind of action. The search for an estate planning or elder law attorney can be stressful or overwhelming, especially when time is of the essence. When people come to your website, an effective welcome message will put them at ease right away and take away any uneasiness they may have.

Introduce

In part 3, we talked about using a great tagline in the hero section of your website. The welcome message is a great place to expand upon that tagline a bit and give a few more details about what you do. This doesn’t mean you get to write a book about yourself though! Visitors don’t want to stop and read a huge block of text right away; you’re still trying to pull them further into the site. Bullet points are a good way to provide more details without going into too many specifics.

Comfort

Your welcome message should also put people at ease. Personally, I like when welcome messages take on a more conversational tone; this isn’t an article or whitepaper. You and I are just starting a conversation! You are inviting your viewers in to explore your website further. I also think it’s a great idea to include a professional photo of yourself next to the welcome message. This will give a more personal impression, while still being professional.

Take Action

End your welcome message with some kind of action for your viewers to take. If you talk about your e-Newsletter and what a great resource it is, provide a link to the registration page so that people can take that next step immediately before they get distracted. Or reiterate your main call to action from the hero section, explaining why your visitors should contact you now or request a consultation.

 

When was the last time you.....?

Went to an event and met leaders and volunteers at a local not-for-profit that works to improve your community?

Joined a networking group that put you in touch with quality professionals who are in a position to refer business to you – accountants, other attorneys, financial advisors?

Attended an event that serves the type of people you want to work with – i.e., if you are targeting high net-worth clients, do you have an on-going relationship with a major brokerage office in your area?

Gotten involved with a group that focuses on something you love – whether that means antique cars, deep water fishing, animal rescue or land preservation?

Blocked out ten minutes in your day to make phone calls – yes, phone calls! – to potential referral sources?

Organized a breakfast or dinner meeting of your own that brings together like-minded professionals – and positions you as a source?

Building a successful estate planning practice is like building a chair. The strength and stability of the chair is directly related to the number of legs on the chair. For an estate planning practice to develop and thrive, it needs a strong web presence, engaging social media and person-to-person contacts and connections.