Integrity Marketing

Refresher on Social Media for Estate Planning Practices

We get it–your estate planning law practice has you so busy, there’s no way you can possibly add another task. But what if we told you that a robust social media platform would dramatically boost your law firm’s website visibility and could increase the number of potential prospects who are seeking help in estate planning and Elder Law? Social is no longer an outlier or a passing fad. The numbers tell the tale: Twitter has 317 million monthly visitors, Instagram, 700 million, Facebook has 1.9 billion, and LinkedIn has 500 million.

If your social media campaign captures a fraction of these users, that makes it time well spent.

Here’s a summer refresher on social media for your law firm:

YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest have grown fast and furious. They are all about visuals. If you have a professionally produced lawyer video, you know that people are looking at videos and making a connection. The video overcomes the fear of the unknown that keeps prospects from making an appointment. You are suddenly a real person, who speaks directly to them through the video, especially if there is more than one video on your website and if one of those videos features your journey to becoming an estate planning attorney. Don’t have a video? Call James at 877-352-2021 ext.  80.

Social media works best when it’s a two-way street. If you allow people to comment on your blogs and posts, you’ll need to either monitor the comments or delegate the task to someone who can speak in your voice. Most platforms have an option to permit comments, block comments or allow comments after review. If you decide to allow comments, be prepared to provide feedback.

Saying thank you to a positive review or a comment on a post is important. Give your client a “Like” in return and a response. Responding to negative review or comment is just as important. Ignoring a negative review is considered abdicating your responsibility as a citizen of the web.

How to handle a negative review? With grace and dignity. Taking action and responding in a courteous manner is the best defense. Apologize for any problem that they may have, and ask to set up an offline meeting to address their concerns. Responding in a timely manner helps. Don’t ignore the comments.

Best practices: Do you know where your social media logins are? Keep a list, and share it with your office manager or in-house marketing coordinator. Also, if your IMS blog posts are set to auto populate social posts and your log in changes, don’t forget to tell your IMS account manager so we can keep your social running smoothly! You can do this with a support ticket.

Plan Now for Fall Law Firm Marketing

October may be the last thing on your mind right now, but right now is the best time to plan for your fall law firm marketing activities. This is a great time to map out a social media schedule, get ready for a full plate of community events and revisit the activities you mean to do every year that typically fall by the wayside. Here’s a checklist to help you focus:

Social media campaigns work better with more strategic planning. Start with August, when you can address both back to school for kids and grandchildren and freshman college students who need a health care proxy. September will be too late for these themes. Always work far in advance so you don’t miss trends. You can always add a post.

Professional groups you keep meaning to join or get active with. So you’ve been a member of the local bar association for years, but never went to a single committee meeting. Go online, check the group’s calendar, and add meetings to your calendar now. You can’t network with people you don’t know.

Community organizations with a high profile. Notice how some organizations have a far higher profile than others? Their activities always seem to get more coverage than similar charities. If you are not already involved (or overextended) with non-profit groups, summer is a great time to connect. Call a board member—make sure they are someone you want to meet anyway—and ask if you can talk with them about the organization.

Punch up the news section of your website. Haven’t updated your blog or news and events section of your website since May? Visitors to your site will wonder what kind of practice would permit such a public part of their website to languish. Check out the latest Blog Support emails from IMS, or take a few minutes and surf the web for articles that are relevant to seniors and members of your target market. There’s certainly no lack of news in the estate planning area.

Always wanted to write for publication, but never did? Take advantage of a little free time now to come up with ideas for articles that you could write, for the local bar association newsletter or a local business publication. Think about what you see in your practice—check your E2-CRM to see what kind of problems your clients face. Are you seeing a lot of issues about transferring the family home to a second generation? Or maybe your clients are grappling with selecting executors because they don’t think their kids will do a good job of handling their estate? Look for trends, in legal topics or family issues, to get the creative juices flowing.

Summer Slow Down? Ramp Up Your Marketing

Do you feel like you are the only person working and the rest of the world is either hiking in a national park or exploring the Italian countryside? You’re not–it just feels that way. But for many estate planning offices, summer is a little bit slower. If you’ve got some extra time on your hands, we have some suggestions to help you embrace this season and prepare for what’s coming next.

Get your social calendar set for the rest of the year. Social media never sleeps, but if your office is dozing, this is the ideal time to build out a calendar that will take you through to the end of the year. Use holidays as starting points, and fill in the rest with relevant information. Don’t worry about getting too far ahead—you can always pivot to add new content.

Update your CRM and reach out to people you haven’t heard from in a while. In a perfect world, this is something you do on a quarterly basis, but if you haven’t reviewed your E2-CRM since, well, since you started using it, a slow season is the time for a thorough review.

What are your competitors doing? Visit their websites and social media pages. Keep in mind that just because they are doing something does not mean its working. Only they know. But this is a good time to have a look and see if there’s anything you’re missing, like videos.

Going on vacation soon? Don’t forget to change your message on your phone and set an auto responder to reflect your availability and the date of your return. Include contact information for team members who will monitor your phone messages and emails.

When should your office call you, even during your vacation? The days of being completely unavailable are a luxury most of us just don’t have. But your team needs to be able to make a decision of what kind of issue requires a phone call to you, and what can wait for your return. Make sure those boundaries are clear. You deserve some time off, and your performance improves when you are well-rested.

Law Firm Digital Marketing Do-It-Yourself: Not Always a Great Notion

So you’ve mastered LinkedIn and you’re on Facebook every morning, checking in before you start your work day. You’re thinking, hey I can do my own digital marketing. Yes, you can, but should you? There are pros and cons to DIY digital marketing for the estate planning and Elder Law attorney, and before you travel down this path, let’s consider how wise it is for you and your practice.

No one understands my practice like me. That’s true—to some extent. No one sits at your side of the desk and sees the work flow, cash flow and employee performance, for better or worse, than you do. But your practice is not unlike many other estate planning law firms. IMS account executives work with estate planning law firms across the country, and have done so for many years. We know the challenges that this practice area faces, whether your office is three people or thirty or sixty. We may even have insights about problems that you haven’t even faced yet, based on the stage of your practice.

No one understands my clients and prospects like me. We beg to differ there. This is what IMS does, every day, all day long: help estate planning attorneys like you reach clients and prospects to bring them past the obstacles of time, money and fear and into your office to tackle their estate planning. We have spent decades on this, and we bring a mastery of digital marketing to your practice. So, that’s not a reason to do digital yourself.

I kind of understand the whole SEO thing. Here’s where non-digital marketing professionals get themselves into trouble, sometimes serious trouble. We’ve seen programmers who understand what to put in source code and decide they are ready to become SEO experts—before getting black-hatted out of the game completely, along with their short term clients. We say short term because once you’ve been banned by Google for black hat SEO, you don’t go back for more! SEO has become an extremely technical and complex area of digital marketing. It’s not for do-it-yourselfers. Not if you want to stay on the right path and achieve real results.

Practicing law and profitability. This one is so obvious but we’ve seen enough instances of it being ignored so we have to mention it. Your time is better spent practicing law and taking outstanding care of your clients than dabbling in digital marketing. IMS clients are a smart group of entrepreneurial attorneys. They understand the value and importance of marketing, which is why they work with us. However, they are also really good attorneys who understand that practicing law is their bread and butter.

We’re always up for a conversation. If you’ve got questions or suggestions about digital marketing, we’d love to hear from you. Call James at 877-352-2021 ext. 80 or submit a support ticket. We’re all ears!

Mid-Year Check Up on Law Firm Digital Marketing

If your estate planning and Elder Law firm is like most, you have added social media campaigns to complement your website and other marketing efforts. You add a post to LinkedIn when you speak at a conference, published an article or are mentioned in the local newspaper. You use Twitter to share news items that you think your clients needs to know about. You post judiciously on Facebook, knowing that a wider audience of friends, family, colleagues and their connections, requires a careful balance of professional and personal news.

Summer, and this week in particular, when so many people are on vacation, is an ideal time to examine how all of your social media efforts are working with your website.

Ask your IMS account manager for a one-on-one marketing review. Submit a support ticket and let’s get a closer look at your social media campaigns and see how they are working on their own and as part of your overall marketing efforts. Do they align with your website? Are they sending a clear message to your constituents, or are they speaking with another voice, sending a mixed message?

No strategic plan for social? Free styling may work great on the dance floor but not on social media. Consider how much time it takes to generate posts every week. That’s not time you want to squander. Define your goals – increasing the number of views or likes, boosting traffic to your law firm website, or getting a series of specific messages out on social media—or all three? Once you have done an analysis of how your social media campaigns are performing, compare that with your firm’s strategic goals.

Email campaigns and social media. Digital marketing works best when it all works together. If you are using the E2-CRM, your IMS account manager will be able to get a complete view of what each digital platform is contributing to your overall marketing.

Don’t forget your website. We have more than a few clients who are so jazzed about their social media that they have to be reminded every now and again that their websites are the foundation of their digital marketing. Set up an appointment with your account manager to spend some time on the analytics of your website. Is it generating conversions? Are people visiting a few pages and then picking up the phone? Let’s find out what’s been working in the last six months and if necessary, tweak the site to enhance its performance.

Add Fireworks to Law Firm Marketing Budgets for a Bigger Bang

Marketing budgets vary by sector, and nowhere is that difference more evident than in law firm vs. consumer packaged goods marketing budgets. One survey showed that consumer packaged goods devote 24% of their total company budget on marketing. That number includes national companies who spend millions on television, print ads and promotions. By comparison, law firms spend about 2-4% of gross revenues on marketing.

Law firms don’t necessarily need to spend nearly a quarter of their revenue on marketing, but the difference in spending is a dramatic one, and is worth a closer look. Product companies think of their marketing as an integral part of doing business. In the face of massive competition, the on-going battle for shelf space in retail brick and mortar stores and top-of-mind consumer awareness, they have no choice.

Competition among law firms and online legal services and the rise of legal marketing has transformed the legal services sector. It is no longer sufficient to be a highly skilled and caring practitioner, just as being the tastiest sirloin alone does not sell a steak. You know what’s coming next: the sizzle.

Does your budget have room for sizzle? Digital marketing means that legal marketers can do more with limited resources, but there comes a point where budget size has a negative impact on results. Try running a law firm without billing software. It can be done, but the cost in time and staff resources becomes a losing proposition.

Where are law firms spending their marketing budgets?

• Website development and maintenance
• Marketing software—E2-CRM, CLIP^SM
• Social media—your time, staff time or outside agency
• Creative—branding, graphic design
• Digital advertising—AdWords, Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns
• SEO—Search Engine Optimization
• Print advertising
• Public relations
• Special events
• Promotional imprinted items
• Collateral materials (brochures, client materials binders/folders)
• Stationary, labels, business cards

When conducting a mid-year review of the law firm’s financial performance, look at the budget for marketing in relation to the firm’s six month revenues. It won’t be 24%, but if it’s too low, perhaps it’s time to consider what opportunities are being missed. Go back three or four years and be sure to compare apples to apples. Is there a connection between your marketing spend and the firm’s performance? What events occurred that spurred more income for the firm?

Strike a Balance on Social Media: Professional Can Also be Personal

You know the phrase—we do business with people we know, like and trust. For many estate planning and Elder Law firms, social media seems like it could be the silver bullet that makes everything happen. When it doesn’t happen, it’s easy to let the whole thing go. That’s a mistake. Social media does take time and tweaking to find your voice and learn what types of posts work and which fall flat. You may need some outside help, or you may need to have a team member dedicate a certain amount of their time to the task on a regular basis. But just stopping altogether is a mistake.

Another mistake is limiting your social marketing to one or two platforms. You’re probably already on LinkedIn (we certainly hope so), and maybe you are thinking about Facebook. But Pinterest or Instagram for estate planning and Elder Law attorneys? Yes.

Pinterest is all about creativity, and if you are a creative type, there’s a place for you on Pinterest. You know the magic that happens when you and a new client discover a shared passion about a hobby or community organization. Pinterest is a platform to share ideas in images and videos. Users create “boards” that work like bulletin boards (hence the name) and you pin images to your boards. You can also share pins from other people’s boards. If you unwind with woodworking after a long day in the office, you could create a board featuring your projects, tools, and shared pins from fellow woodworkers. In January 2017, more than 150 million people were on Pinterest.

Instagram is about the visual, and you may have more content than you think. If you speak at a conference and take a photo with the event organizer, that’s a photo for Instagram. So is a special event that you hold at your office, a community group that your team supports, etc. If you can take a photo of it that speaks to your law firm’s values and commitment, it’s Instagram-worthy. Most recent statistics on Instagram: 700 million users. They do skew younger, but chances are your target market is skewing younger too.

For Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, your blog and anywhere else you might engage with social media, remember that these are all opportunities to build thought leadership. Keep in mind the different milieus that these social platforms offer and tailor your posts accordingly. Finally, remember why you are posting: to provide more people with an opportunity to get to know you. That occurs when what you post is informative and helpful to your readers, wherever they are finding you.

What Does a Healthy Law Firm Social Media Campaign Look Like?

A strong social media campaign for an estate planning and Elder Law practice looks very different than one for an online bookseller. But some elements should be the same. Social media, including blogs, Facebook pages, LinkedIn conversations, Tweets (on Twitter) and videos need to be current. They also need to be geared to your visitors, who should represent your ideal client. Still not dipping your toes into the social media pool? Maybe these tips will help:

Use what you’ve already got. If your firm has published articles in consumer media or been quoted by media, use that for social media content. A quote in a newspaper becomes a springboard to a blog post.

Have you published a few articles? Congratulations, you’ve got a library! One firm went through their archives, digital and otherwise, and came up with more than twenty bylined articles on various topics. All of those articles equals one great big content bonus. Social posts on each of the articles can be used to link to the articles. Your email newsletter can introduce the topics and link to the articles also.

Original thinkers add original content. Google will penalize a website for duplicate content, but users will penalize social media sites for showing the same-old story. Most of the estate planning attorneys that we know are also skilled writers and, probably because of the type of law they practice, keen observers of the human condition. They are able to take a news story or a deadline or a seasonal holiday and tweak it so that the story becomes personal for their targeted client and/or their target market.

Be responsive—that’s what social means! If someone posts about a problem they are having, do respond on the page, but not with a direct answer to their problem. You’re not practicing law online. Instead, acknowledge their issue, and ask them to send you a private message (if you are on Facebook) or invite them to call the office to speak with you. If you get a compliment, don’t forget to say thank you.

Have a strategic plan. You would never “wing it” in court. Don’t wing it and expect to win big in social media. Create a plan, six months or a year in advance. It’s easier to write a blog post when the topics are set in a calendar, and if news events demand a pivot, you can always push the calendar back.

Should You Try Paid Social Media for Your Estate Planning Law Firm?

In a word, maybe. For some estate planning and Elder Law firms, just dipping a toe into the social media ocean is more than the firm can culturally manage. The idea of paying for social media makes some attorneys distinctly uncomfortable. Our experience has always been that discomfort is a direct result of not having enough data to make an informed decision. If you’re open to the idea of paid social media, and if your firm is comfortable with an active digital marketing strategy, there are a lot of reasons to give it a try.

AdWords gives your practice a higher level of online visibility. AdWords is Google’s very own advertising system. In the world of PPC—Pay Per Click—an AdWords campaign is a well-established and well-regarded digital marketing tool. AdWords lets you create an ad based on keywords that are specific to your geographic local and practice areas. You can be extremely targeted, and you also control your monthly budget. You decide in advance how much you want to spend per click, and once your campaign hits that number, it is automatically turned off.

AdWords also allows you to turn campaigns on and off easily, so that if you are going to be away on vacation, for instance, and you don’t want a lot going on while you are away, just pause the campaign or modify the display time to minimize ads.

Paid social is faster than organic SEO, but you need both. It takes time for a new site to find its digital feet while paid campaigns go live once they are created and approved. For PPC to succeed, you’ll need an optimized website with strong quality scores (how Google measures your quality and relevance of your content), which has an impact on your cost per click (CPC). It’s another way that Google reinforces it’s very clear message: your site has to be relevant and the user experience has to be positive.

What if I get into a bidding war? Certain areas of the law are very competitive. Medical malpractice, personal injury and matrimonial practices have been using PPC for a long time, and the costs per click can be very high. Estate planning and Elder Law are relatively new entries to the PPC world, so costs are more manageable. You won’t get into a bidding war. You tell Google AdWords what your limit is per click, and Google provides guidance on the bid amount based on your budget.

Do consumers know the difference? As marketers, we see the difference immediately. The little word “Ad” that appears to the left of a Google Ad makes it very clear that the ads are different than organic search. But most consumers don’t seem to notice–otherwise we don’t think Google AdWords would be as powerful as it is.

If you’d like to learn more about AdWords, submit a support ticket and we’ll be happy to speak with you about how PPC could help your practice grow.

Absence Doesn’t Make the Heart Grow Fonder in Social Media Marketing

Think of estate planning law firm marketing like dating, and many best practices become very clear, for better or worse. Consider the concept that not being available somehow makes you more tantalizing. You didn’t like it then, and trust us, your prospects don’t like it now. When you drop off of the social radar, you run the risk of losing a prospect, often just as they have started to engage with you.

Absence also doesn’t help you when someone is looking at your website and wondering why you haven’t posted any news items since 1985. You might think it’s a good sign that you are too busy. They think you’re not paying attention to one of your most important marketing tools. And if you can be careless about that, what does that say for other important matters, like their estate plan?

Too time crunched to stay current? Today you can automate practically everything. Here’s how:

Prepare and schedule blog posts in advance. Set this task for the same day every week and review the blogs that IMS sends you. Tweak them a little or a lot, and get them scheduled. If you do this on a regular basis, it will become a matter of routine. Don’t have time? Delegate the task. But don’t skip it.

Respond to social media posts, with care. The nature of social media is a two way street, not a dead end. If someone takes the time to respond or like a post, don’t leave them hanging. Be mindful that what you post will be read by any visitors. Say “Thanks for the compliment, we are so proud of our team,” or something similarly simple and straight-forward.

If it’s more appropriate, tell the person you will respond to them offline. Post a simple message: “Not everything should be on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn. Will respond offline,” and then either pick up the phone or send an email.

What if someone posts a negative comment? Respond quickly.

Acknowledge the complaint, the same way you would in a conversation: I understand that you are unhappy with what happened in our office the other day.

Apologize: I am so sorry that you had this unpleasant experience.

Give them your personal attention. We take great pride in how our staff treats clients, and this was completely unacceptable. I would appreciate an opportunity to speak with you –please call me (give a number and direct your staff to make sure the call is handled with kid gloves). Have an offline conversation and a meeting if necessary that fixes the problem and builds trust.

Follow up. Make sure they are now satisfied with you and your practice and, when all the ruffled feathers are smoothed and with their permission, post a short note that the problem has been resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Underscore how important client care is to the practice and to you personally. Remember, social media is personal!