HOW TO MARKET MORE EFFECTIVELY ON YOUR WEBSITE

Jan C. Gabrielson

The purpose of your site

Your site will serve two main purposes. It will make it easy for people to find you, and it will give people who are considering hiring you a way to check you out. In the old days, that research was done by dragging those back-breaking volumes of the Martindale Hubbell directory off the library shelf. The usefulness of those volumes was limited, because potential clients did not own them. Now, a client who is referred to you will almost reflexively search you on Google. The search should lead to your website.

Content

Your prospect, on examining your site, should quickly find the information that will turn that prospect into a client. What information should you include?

- Your contact information (Caution: email addresses might be harvested by spammers)
- Your photo
- Your basic biography - undergraduate education, law school, honors, special skills
- A complete but concise summary of your experience in your field of practice
- Your publications, including the name of the publication and the date
- Associations in which you are active, especially offices you have held

What should you not include?

- Memberships and nothing more, eg ABA, your local bar association. These dilute the effect of the organizations in which you are active and to a sophisticated viewer might look like you are desperate for something to include.
- Political organizations - unless you are targeting others of your party
- Religious organizations - unless you are targeting others of your religion

Some believe that a website should give some value, such as legal information, to the casual visitor. Others think the risks outweigh the benefits. It might be safer to include some reliable links, such as to courts, your legislature, Congress, law schools -- with the usual disclaimers, of course.

If your site includes press releases for your firm, put them in a separate category. Press releases about the firm are inherently self-congratulatory and can lessen the impressiveness of other items in a list, such as publications. In other words, do not post a list entitled "Publications and Press Releases."

Consider whether anything on your site will have to be changed as it goes out of date. Take into account the money and labor it will take to maintain the site. If you put post time-sensitive material on your site, you must keep the site up to date. Do not, for example, post on your site a flyer for a seminar your firm is giving and leave it on the site for weeks after the event is over. If you don't want to have to update your site, include only information that is less likely to change over time.

Don't bog down trying to design the ultimate site. Designers sometimes try too hard. Too much back and forth over a nuance of design wastes time and money and delays getting your site up and running. Web designers, like all other graphics people, might overestimate your need or desire for elaborate graphics. A basic, well-designed site that is not too flamboyant is your goal.

Internal obstacles to updating your firm's site

Once the site is operating, the people in charge in some firms are tired of dealing with it and don't like to revisit features and information that may have to be changed. But when new people are hired, or you are elected president of something important, or publish a new article, that information should go on the site as soon as possible. If going through channels is not getting the job done, ask the name of the person who physically maintains the site. Ask if you may contact that person directly to make the changes you need to your page. If the answer is no or is equivocal, you're a lawyer; it's time to cross-examine. Who in the firm is authorized to contact our web service? Who does that person report to? Or talk to your marketing director if you have one.

MARKETING OUTSIDE THE SKINNER BOX

Jan C. Gabrielson

Remember your Introduction to Psychology class in college? That's where we learned about operant conditioning. B. F. Skinner invented a device that is now known as the Skinner Box. The box is equipped with a bar (not that kind of bar). When the bar is pressed, a piece of food falls down a chute into the box. A rat in a Skinner Box quickly learns that if it presses a bar, food appears in the chute. Each time it presses the bar and food appears, researchers say the behavior of pressing the bar is reinforced. If researchers tweak the mechanism so that the food stops falling when the bar is pressed, the learned behavior is extinguished and the rat stops pressing the bar. What does this mean for marketing?

The things we do to market a law practice may pay off right away, but more often we don't see results for months or even years. If we were rats, the absence of immediate reinforcement would cause us to discontinue our marketing activities if a day or two went by without landing a new client as a direct result of our marketing efforts.

But we aren't rats; we're human. We are able to look ahead and appreciate that the contacts we make now, the relationships we build over time pay off over time. Like rats, we like it better if we make a call, go to a meeting, do a mailing and new clients come in immediately as a result. And we can get discouraged if they don't. But we have to operate on a higher level than rats in a Skinner Box. If two years of building our relationship with a promising prospect finally pays off, that success must reinforce our past and future marketing efforts.

Bottom line: enjoy your successes, keep up your marketing even when you don't see an immediate payoff. Meeting people and earning their trust takes time. Your efforts will pay off eventually.