Integrity Marketing

When Technology Makes Life Better

The other day, I witnessed an older gentlemen come into a convenient store and ask the guy behind the counter for directions to some location I can’t remember because I was hit with the realization that this used to be a normal thing people would do!

 

To be honest, if you asked me for directions to my house, I couldn’t give them to you because I don’t know the names of any of the roads, what direction to travel, or how long to travel down each road. I would just send you the address and assume your technology can take you there.

 

I never have to ask for directions anywhere. I simply get the address, plug it into my phone, and it takes me there.

 

THAT’S INSANE!

 

Technology has changed and is continuing to transform the world.

 

Do you remember all the hardships of not having GPS or Google Maps? If you never experienced it, can you imagine it?

 

My parents have told me so many stories of them getting lost or stranded somewhere because my dad didn’t know which way to go. My dad on many occasions had to stroll up to a convenient store like that older gentlemen, let go of his pride, and hope the man behind the counter had some sense of direction on where to go. 

Fortunately for me, I do not have one of those stories.  I don't have to worry about getting lost, making a wrong turn, or letting go of my pride! All because of technology. (My pride is forever in Technology's debt)

 

Technology has made my life so much easier, more efficient, less stressful, and given me confidence to travel to places I have never been.

 

At Integrity Marketing Solutions, we wanted to create a similar technology to make it easier, more efficient, less stressful, and would give any attorney the confidence they would need to grow their law firm to places it's never been.

 

Over the course of this past year, we have worked everyday to create a new technological platform and online program that will transform and grow a law practice in just 12 weeks!

 

Here is what we created:

1. A new 12 week online Client Academy that helps coach any practicing attorney on how to become more effective and efficient in the following areas: generating leads, communicating your true value, taking advantage of the latest technology, developing a social strategy, and, most importantly, creating the powerful mindset that the most successful attorneys in the industry have. 
2. A new platform that is easy to use and allows an Attorney access to 40 different blogs a week, advanced SEO optimization, and gives the Attorney more control over his or her site so they never have worry or stress about small changes. 
3. A coaching program that gives an Attorney access to experts in the field of marketing, SEO, content creation, lead generation, and social media so that they can get personal advice or tips to growing their practice and gain the confidence they need to take their practice to places it's never been.

 

Each one of these was created with the simple goal in mind: Help Attorneys create the practice of their dreams as fast and as efficiently as possible.

 

We are so excited for what 2019 has in store and want you to be a part of it!

 

If you want to start growing your practice today, book a call with James or myself today!

 

We’d love to help you grow your law firm to everything you dreamed it could be.

 

Don’t wait. Book today!

 

Chris Root

Enrollment Coach, Integrity Marketing Solutions

P.S. If you are looking for a deeper dive into our new platform, you can check out this video where Jennifer explains in detail the power of the new platform and what it is like to have an entire team of experts working with you!

Beyond Google Rank: Is Your Website Working?

Google Rank is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to evaluating website performance.

One of the most challenging aspects of my job is helping clients make good decisions about their websites. The typical challenging conversation starts something like this:

I had a friend who knows a lot about SEO take a look at my site and they said you guys have got it all messed up! I want you to give them access to the back end so they can fix it for me!

If our conversation starts like this, just know that I have put my phone on temporary mute, banged my head against the desk, rolled my eyes and heaved an exasperated sigh. I want to hang up, but I won’t. I’ll un-mute my phone and ask, in the most pleasant voice I can muster:

What makes you think your SEO is “messed up?”

The story usually starts at a cocktail party where some self-proclaimed expert who once built a website on WordPress was trying to show off. Unfortunately, the details of the criticism have been lost in translation. And no, I am not going to give this total stranger, who lacks any sort of credentials or qualifications, access to destroy all of the hard work we have put in to get your website ranking well on Google search.

Let’s Not Jump the Shark Here

If you’re having questions about how well your website is performing, or whether it needs a facelift, a refresh, or an SEO upgrade, please just give us a call. After all, we are the experts you are actually paying every month to do this work for you.

Before you call, or even during your call, take a look at the FACTS about your website. In this digital age, we no longer have to rely on gut feelings, intuition or even the personal opinion of our friends at cocktail parties. We have these wonderful things called ANALYTICS that tell us a very truthful, accurate and informative story about how well your website is performing.

You Don’t Have to Be Certified in Google Analytics

Your personal account manager here at Integrity Marketing is already certified, so you don’t have to be. But honestly, it does not take a certified analyst to understand the most important metrics about your website. In fact, you can learn a lot from a single, monthly email.

Your E2 CRM and The One Minute Manager

Every month your E2 CRM automatically delivers a performance report directly to your inbox. You don’t even have to log in (or remember passwords, etc.) to read it. And you sure don’t have to get certified in Google Analytics!The email gives you an at-a-glance summary of your website, blog, email marketing and automation activity for the current day, the past week and the past month.

Here are the sections you’ll want to quickly review:

Number of Contacts in Your Marketing Database

Does this number look “right” to you? It should include all of your clients as well as your leads, prospects, and referral sources to whom you market, including everyone who subscribes to your e-newsletter and blog digest.

This number should steadily increase month-over-month. Keep track of it. If it’s not growing, this means you are not adding any new clients or subscribers to your database. It should grow.

Warning Flags. Call Your Account Manager Immediately if:  

• This is a very small number, say only 10 or 15. There may be something seriously wrong with your database.
• This is an extraordinarily large number, something you don’t recognize as legitimate. You may be the victim of a hacker or a SPAM attack.

Website Page Views

While this number is not the same as website visits, it’s an important number to know. Not only would you like to know how many website pages were viewed, but this report will tell you which pages get the most views. This shows you which sections of your website and blog are most popular and the typical customer path through your site.

You’ll also know if your website is averaging 50, 100 or more page views per day. This is a good gauge of how well your website is performing in terms of traffic and engagement.

Conversions and Website Signup Forms Submitted

Here is where the rubber meets the road. How many people submitted website forms (requesting a consultation, a personal contact, a download offer, etc.) or completed one of the other conversion goals established for your website? If you’re getting a steady number of website conversions, then you should be seeing the results in your appointment book. (Remember that this particular summary does not include phone calls generated directly from your website, these conversions are tracked separately.)

If You Have Workflow Automation Set Up

This email also summarizes your automation activity – showing how many times each of your workflows were activated. This gives you an idea of how well your marketing activities are integrated into your practice, how well you follow up on web leads, and the true impact of your online marketing.

Email Marketing Performance

These are your at-a-glance performance statistics for all your email marketing efforts. You’ll see how many emails were sent, how many were read, the click-through rate, exactly what links were clicked on, and how many times.

Who’s Working for You?

The email is also a very nice management tool. It shows which of your staff members logged into your CRM, when, and how often. You can see if all scheduled workflows were successfully completed … or not. Sometimes the primary reason a CRM is not working is … well … no one is using it! You’ll want to know if your staff are making an honest effort to make this work, or just hoping you will forget about it.

But What About Google Rank?

I knew you were going to go there. Google Rank – or how Google ranks your website on the results pages for various searches – is a moving target. Search results are increasingly personalized and influenced by your own online activity. In other words, if you search for yourself on Google, your results will be very different than mine, or your cocktail-party friend’s.

And here’s another hint: Results depend on the search.

That’s right. If your friend searches for estate attorney in upper New York State, and you search for estate attorney in Buffalo NY … you are likely to get somewhat different search results.

And finally: Results depend on location.

If you search for estate attorney from your office in Buffalo, and I search for estate attorney from my office in Colorado Springs we will get very different results, even though we’re both using the same search terms.

So … we send you a monthly average web ranking report, generated by a third-party (not us) that specializes in aggregating your search results on Google and giving you a general idea of how the search engines display your website. We pay for this service on your behalf to ensure you get the most accurate, objective reporting available.

There’s More to That Iceberg than You Can See on Google

Above all, remember this: Your goal is to grow your practice.

Our goal is build a digital marketing engine to do that.

Getting SEO right is one of our specialties – we have a staff full of folks who are certified specialists working hard every day to get your website front-and-center for the searches that matter most to your practice.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We also work hard to make sure people click-through on your listings and actually visit your website … and to keep them engaged when they arrive. We build the path to conversion with nurturing points all along the way – from your social media to your blog and content marketing to email marketing and even automation to ensure your firm has the best possible chance of converting website visitors into delighted new clients.

So the next time one of your friends gives advice about your website, please – thank them nicely, refresh their drink, and give us a call the next day. We actually would love to hear what they had to say. Sometimes friends give great advice and you never know who will have the next great idea! (And if they are really good, let them know we're always open to hiring great minds!)

Is Your Call To Action Being Heard by Estate Planning Clients?

The Call to Action (CTA) for an estate planning law firm is a carefully designed element of your website that can have a big impact on how visitors respond. Too glaring and unprofessional, and you’ll lose them. Too subtle, and they won’t take action. There is an art and a science to incorporating the CTAs, and IMS designers are very good at making this part of your websites a powerhouse.

What works best for an estate planning law firm website? Visitors to your website are already searching for a solution to a problem. In marketing parlance, they have expressed a need. The website’s job is to move them to take the next step: pick up the phone or fill out a form. The CTA keeps them focused and moving through the process.

How often is too often? Users need it to be easy, but not overwhelming. We’ve seen websites where pop-up CTAs show up after being on the website for all of 30 seconds. Not only is that annoying, but it gets in the way of the visitor’s experience of getting more comfortable with the law firm. You’ll want a few on each page—one at the top and one at the bottom are expected—but where they are located in the body of the website will depend on the layout. Some will be graphics—click to call buttons—while others will be content-driven, and a message delivered with kindness: “If you have questions, please call our office to learn how we can help.”

What you say matters, so chose your words carefully. Your IMS team will help with crafting the language that we know works for your target market. Alarmist messages, from “call today or you may permanently lose your rights” are not in our wheelhouse. The focus is on educating your prospect and making them comfortable enough to pick up the phone or fill out a form.

Automatic intake system using CLIP^SM moves the conversation from CTA to an engaged “pre-client.” We use that phrase to describe the person who has engaged with your automated intake system and shared personal information. They are not clients, but have moved past the prospect stage.

Remember that the CTA is not limited to your website. It should be a thoughtful part of your social media, any printed materials and your personal conversations. If having a person become a client is the goal, no matter where the initial contact comes from, you’ll need to ask. Remember the saying: “If you don’t ask, you don’t get!"

How Estate Planning Attorneys Get Comfortable with New Technology

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is already at work in your law firm and in your personal life; it’s in your mobile phone, on your desktop, and activated every time you log on to Amazon or Netflix or use a device like Alexa or Echo. But it’s also a part of your law firm marketing. The E2-CRM from IMS incorporates AI to help you understand your clients individually and as a group so that your marketing can work at peak efficiency.

It’s user-friendly. New systems are not always welcome at law firms, and asking people to incorporate changes to their routines doesn’t always get an enthusiastic response. The first response when people hear the phrase “AI” is to think that it will be too complicated. But you use AI in numerous settings, and are usually not even aware of it. And software engineers, including ours, know that AI is most successful when it is invisible.

Using new technology is the best way to get comfortable with it. You won’t break the E2-CRM, or for that matter, any technology systems. Not easily, anyway. AI is in the legal sector and growing, incorporated into legal research and document management systems as well as marketing systems. Being on the leading edge and being willing to incorporate it into your practice now is better than trying to catch up later on.

Law firm culture is changing. The millennials in your office expect to have access to the technology that helps them to do the best work possible for clients. To attract and retain talented young attorneys and to stay competitive, the law firm needs to stay current.

The data is as important as the software. Never before has the adage “garbage in, garbage out” been more true. One of the features we like about the E2-CRM is that, when set up properly, a fair amount of data auto populates, drawn from online sources. This cuts down on the number of errors that occur when data is entered by hand. That said, you still need to keep your data clean. Your account manager can help you set up systems to make data management part of the practice.

Best practice right now: start using the E2-CRM. If you are not using it at all, or not sure if you are getting the most impact from it, please submit a support ticket and set up an appointment for a one-on-one training session with your Account Manager.

Never Miss an Opportunity: Reinforce Law Firm Messages and Marketing

When you think of marketing materials, your first thought is probably your website, followed by social media posts, e-Newsletters, print ads and direct mail. But there’s a host of marketing tools that you use every single day and probably don’t think of as marketing tools. That means a lot of missed opportunities to communicate key messages and branding. Here’s what you might be missing:

Email signature block. How many emails do you send every single day? Every single one of them is an opportunity to send a message, demonstrating consistency, organizational cohesiveness and branding. Everyone in your office, from the receptionist to the founding partner, should be using a professionally-designed email signature block that includes the firm logo, a symbol (if you use one) and your tagline as well as all contact information. Depending upon your jurisdiction, you may include badges from lawyer rating organizations like Martindale, Super Lawyers and Avvo. If a new employee is still using a personal email address because their email hasn’t been set up yet, take care of that within a week of the employee’s arrival.

Stationery that aligns with digital marketing. Of course you have business cards, letterhead, envelopes and return address labels. But have you looked at them in concert with your digital marketing? If your printed materials are all old-school traditional and your digital marketing is cutting edge, you’ve got a branding war within your own brand! IMS can help—we have very talented graphic designers who can bring your printed materials up to speed so they complement your digital marketing.

Incomplete information creates obstacles. You spent a lot of time making your website shine. Don’t neglect putting your website address on everything, from printed materials to email signature blocks to the small note cards you attach to documents. If your firm uses custom-printed sticky notes or memo pads, the website address should be on them as well. Think of it in the same way you do your telephone number: it should appear everywhere the firm name appears.

Consistency counts. Every office has an eagle-eyed individual who seems to have a gift for spotting typos. Let that person be in charge of making sure that every single instance of the firm’s name and all of the relevant contact information is correct. If you’re not sure, submit a support ticket and we’ll take a look.

How to Really Engage Visitors to Your Law Firm Website

The days of dazzling website visitors with credentials are gone. It’s expected that you excelled in law school, graduated, and are active in your community. What today’s legal services consumer wants to know right now is simple: Can you help me? and Can I trust you? In other words, your website is not about you. It’s about your client, their needs and how you and your firm can help them.

What’s going to engage a prospect is a solution to their problem, from a team they trust.

So how do you get them to pick up the phone, fill out a Contact Us form, or engage with CLIP^SM, our automated intake system?

Remember, IMS works with law firms across the country and we draw on website performance data. We’re not guessing when we advise you on content or design.

Visual elements, including the layout and functional design of the website matters. Clients develop trust when they experience an easy-to-use website. Clicking on an attorney profile and finding a well written description of who you are, with a current photo, puts a visitor at ease. You don’t ask them to go through a maze of links. If drop down menus are used, they drop down for enough time that there is no rush to make a selection. Links open smoothly and bring them to the desired page. Fonts are clean and easy to read on all platforms.

You’ve gone to websites where simple things were hard to find. There’s no room for client frustration on your estate planning and Elder Law website. People will leave. This is too important for them.

About Us remains important, but Success Stories and Testimonials must be emphasized. Visitors to your website want to know that you can help them. They will feel better if they read narratives that reflect their own experiences. You do have to be mindful of privacy concerns when preparing content for a success stories, but you should be able to tweak things enough that the families in the story are not identifiable. Concerns about a loose-cannon relative, an adult child who can’t handle money, or an ex-spouse who is likely to engage in an estate battle are examples of narratives that will engage visitors.

Testimonials are a wonderful thing for prospects to read. We love hearing about happy endings. Someone compliments your services, and prospects think, that could be me. This firm can help me. It’s really that simple.

We build your website with all of these elements in mind. Want to make your current website even better? Call James at 877-352-2021 ext. 80.

How Does Spam Hurt Your Law Firm Website? Let us Count the Ways

Spam can wreak havoc with your law firm, in more ways than you might think. The junk cluttering your email inbox, the time wasted when your IT department has to fix a damage done by spam, the investment in technology necessary to continue to combat spam; that’s just for starters. Think about this: spam poses a real threat to your website’s Google analytics.

And what if spam is not seen as spam by Google, but as black hat SEO?

Fake traffic skews analytics. It can happen pretty quickly, and you may not realize it at first. Your website traffic is growing steady and then, traffic takes off like a rocket. You think, wow, that article I published in the bar journal must have really gotten a lot of interest. But the calls to your office don’t align with the jump in analytics. A closer look reveals that all of the traffic is coming from one website, and it’s not a website you know. It’s spam.

Referral spam is profitable for hackers. Spammers target large numbers of websites to find vulnerable sites. They spam your site to show that their URL is sending many referrals, with the goal of building their own website’s traffic. Often they are paid based on the number of links or referrals they generate.

Spam can overload your computer system and compromise security. It’s hard to imagine that hackers would want to launch a DoS (Denial of Service) attack on a lone law firm, but that’s why so many security systems are in place. A DoS attack makes your website unusable and crushes your firewalls. The goal is to exhaust technical resources. The result is legitimate users can’t get to your site.

Smart hackers lead to smarter systems professionals. At IMS, we are always on the lookout for improved solutions, and that includes website protection. Today there is a new class of captchas—those small boxes at the bottom of forms that require you to type in randomly generated codes are no longer state of the art. We’re not sharing what it is we are using, but with systems that automatically detect spam bots on forms, we prevent spammers from getting near our client’s forms.

At IMS, we build websites to shield our clients from the impact of spam. With the help of trained end users—you and your team—your data and your systems are in good hands! If you have any concerns about spam and your estate planning and Elder Law website, submit a support ticket.

Why IMS Law Firm Websites Use Proprietary Software

You’ve seen the ads for do-it-yourself websites everywhere, from online to broadcast television commercials. Promoted as a great solution for small scale enterprises, including law firms, there’s just one piece of information missing: some of these sites, especially the more popular ones, are frequent targets for hackers. That’s why IMS law firm websites are built using proprietary software programs with a level of security you don’t get with mainstream do-it-yourself websites.

Need a visual? Compare the estate planning documents created by an online website to the estate plan that you create for clients. You know which one you would rather have.

Who wants to hack a system no one uses? Way back when, when Apple computers were not as popular as they are today, word was that Apple computers never got viruses. There simply weren’t enough of them to be of interest to hackers. The same goes for websites that are built using highly popular systems. The more popular the system, the more attractive the websites are to hackers.

Software vulnerabilities Certain website platforms require maintenance on a regular basis to prevent hackers from gaining access. Left unprotected, they are easy targets. Some of these sites use plugins, a piece of software used to add certain functions to the website. These are created by third-party programmers, and not all are created equally. You may chose one that looks great and two weeks later, find your site has been hacked.

Why does someone want to infiltrate your website? To gain access to databases of information stored within your server. Worst case—your website is used to download viruses, malware and ransomware onto your client’s and colleague’s computer systems.

Mega-breaches happen. We don’t want them to happen to our clients. When hackers gain access to massive numbers of websites, like the infamous data breach reported in October 2016 (43 million accounts from one do-it-yourself website company hacked), the entire tech world shudders.

We’re strict about adding content but it’s for client protection. There are a lot of moving parts in IMS websites, including website optimization and SEO. To keep our website performance on track and stay as safe as possible, we do require that you contact us to upload new content or making edits to your website. It protects the website from any malicious code that might be lurking on your system or hitching a ride on files.

How Do Well-Built, Best Practices-Based Law Firm Websites Get Spammy?

Law firms that count on strong SEO performance also rely on the technical back-end of their websites to protect against the efforts of malware, viruses, spyware and other threats. With multiple layers of digital protection in place, well-designed websites can withstand attacks that, in most cases, users are completely unaware of. How do you know your website is shielded? It performs well, Google has not penalized you for being spammy, and people are able to search and find your website.

Isn’t that something you expect? From IMS, yes, but not everyone understands why website protection is part of what we build into IMS sites. Here’s what can happen without the care and technical proficiency built into every IMS website:

Not all SEO practitioners have your best long-term interest in mind. Be wary of the SEO practitioner who promises the moon, delivers, then disappears, just around the same time that Google rankings sink or worse, your site is blocked and can’t be accessed. They have likely employed black hat techniques to give rankings a quick jump, and your site has been deemed spammy by Google.

Keyword stuffing, broken links, poor quality links and a bad user experience. Time is everyone’s most precious commodity. It’s annoying to open a website that you thought had useful information and find it’s nothing but a waste of digital space. Repetitive use of keywords, links that take you to useless pages, and tons of ads creates a bad UX (User Experience). Google agrees, and will rank the website accordingly.

Who is behind that website? Millennials aren’t the only ones who expect complete transparency—Google does also. We hate opening an “About Us” page and finding nothing but corporate speak. A good website includes info about people, even if it only tells us about top leadership. A spammy website has no people, and you won’t find anyone associated with the company on social media.

Sometimes your solution creates a problem. If you do a search and a URL listing contains a message saying “The contents of this website cannot be displayed,” it might not be a safe website. We all know what happens next. You try another browser and it opens fine. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but sometimes you have simply found a work-around to a system that was put into place to protect you.

At IMS, our focus is on estate planning and Elder Law firm sites, not ghost practices that exist to gather clicks. If you have any questions about the health and well-being of your website, call James at 877-352-2021 ext. 80 and we’ll be happy to give your website a check-up!

Phishing, Spam and Ransomware in Your Email In Box

Here’s where the IT department and the rest of the estate planning and Elder Law firm can get into what we like to call “spirited debates.” You realize that you haven’t gotten a response to your emails from a really important client for a week. You ask your paralegal if she’s heard from Mrs. Jones. No, she has not. Then it hits you: Mrs. Jones and a week’s worth of her emails are sitting in the firm’s blocked email senders file. You can almost feel your blood pressure rising, can’t you?

We know you want to say “Let everything in so that this doesn’t happen again.” But that’s dangerous.

Protecting your law firm against email spammers requires a delicate balance between providing the level of protection necessary against spam email and making sure that you get the emails that you need to serve your clients. It should not happen often, but it does happen.

“Phishing” is still around because it still works. Phishing is the use of spam emails that seem to come from a legitimate company, even one that you do business with, but the goal is to get you to provide a credit card number, PIN number or other bit of information that will let the hacker gain access to accounts. It’s easy to cut and paste company logos, and thieves are really good about presentation, so many smart people fall pretty to phishing. One key to look for: misspelling is common, the URL that the email comes from is often a weird version of the bank or other company’s address (i.e., @uspasears.biz, rather than @sears.com) and the request is urgent.

Ransomware attacks are becoming more prevalent. Ransomware is an attack on your system that demands payment, usually in digital currency, or your entire system will be destroyed or published. In some instances, paying the ransom does not help and your data will be deleted. Often access is through phishing email that seems innocuous. But ransomware can also come from clicking on links on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and even instant message chats, including Skype.

Make checking spam filters or blocked emails a daily task. A trusted employee, one with common sense and some digital savvy, should be trained by your IT department on how to review these emails for two purposes: making sure you don’t miss any legitimate emails and allowing the IT department to be more familiar with the emails that need to be allowed.

“White list” important domains and emails. White listing in advance will ensure that emails from these domains and senders will not get caught in spam filters.