AVALANCHE: The Lawyer Marketing Group

Designing for your Users

In the web world, we refer to people going to a website as "users."

In lawyer marketing terms, your "users" are your potential clients, current clients, and jurors.

Your website should be designed for your target users. If you provide the information they're looking for, they are likely to call you.

People go to your site (either led there by a search engine or your marketing materials) looking for an attorney, or wanting to know more about you and your practice specifically.

People researching you as an attorney might have different levels of experience with computers. They may or may not already know something about the law in your practice area. They may come from various races and religions, and they may span socioeconomic groups.

You know the background of most people who can use your services; you know the clients you are targeting. Use what you know about people to make your website design more effective for them.

People go to your site to find out who you are, what you do, and how you will interact with them.

Design your site to let them get this information quickly and easily by doing the following:

1. Make the navigation easy to use.
   
   • Use language common to your users. "Mea culpa" is basic for lawyers, but is not intrinsic to all automobile drivers.
   • Group like ideas or information together and stay consistent across the site. People like systems - they use them every day: alphabetized files, color-coded traffic signals and street signs.


2. Use images that convey who you are, what you do, and that you know who they are. Images are a great way of reinforcing your experience:
   
   • Photos of you in action in the courtroom, if you are a trial lawyer
   • Photos of you communicating with a couple, if you specialize in mediating amicable divorces
   • Photos of people you represent photos of people working in warehouses, for workers' comp law
   
   Be selective with images and optimize them so they load quickly.


3. Use fonts that are both easy to read and reinforce your image. Comic Sans may not convey much confidentiality in your professionalism.


4. Include your background, your experience, your location, and your phone number. These are standard content that everyone will want to find.


5. For a bonus, give away some free information.
   
   • Give links to support groups for people with brain injuries.
   • Define the types of bankruptcy and what each generally entails.
   
   

If you follow these usability suggestions, your users may become your clients.
:)

Quick Guide to Law Firm Advertising on TV

Selected Excerpts from the Forthcoming Publication The Complete Guide to Marketing for Midsize to Large Firms.

Can television advertising be profitable for my firm?
Do you sometimes wonder: Is television advertising really profitable for law firms? Or, do lawyers buy television advertising to stroke their egos, with profitability being a secondary concern?

Other questions about law firm advertising present themselves: How does the potential return-on-investment for television advertising compare with the potential return for other types of advertising? If television advertising can be profitable for law firms, how can you, as an advertiser, make sure you build and place the best possible advertising content in front of the viewers who are most likely to respond favorably to your message? How can you determine how much advertising to buy, where it should be placed, and how often it should appear?

Profitable Television Advertising

In order to make television advertising a profitable marketing vehicle for your law firm, you need a working understanding of three closely related things:

1. Media
2. Advertising
3. Things that Motivate People to Respond Favorably to Law Firm Advertising

Once you have a working understanding of these media marketing fundamentals, you can select content for your television advertising that influences viewers positively. You will also be able to make profitable return-on-investment media placement decisions.

Because these key elements – media, advertising, and things that motivate people – function in concert, a useful understanding of any of these three elements cannot be gained without understanding the other two. It will serve us well to examine the three key elements in concert.

A Few Notes About Style:

People read newspapers and magazines; people watch television; people listen to radio. Whether reading, watching, or listening, people are assimilating content while they are doing their reading, watching, and listening. These terms, “reading,” “watching,” and “listening,” become burdensome if every time the process of assimilating content is expressed as “people reading newspapers and magazines, people watching television, or people listening to the radio.” In this paper, people assimilating content from any media shall be referred to as “viewers."

“Media” is a plural word, gaining acceptance in popular usage as a singular word. To most ears, “media are” sounds awkward. It is, however, correct.

A Note About Content:
Movies, books, even live theater, are media. However, for the purposes of this paper, information about media that traditionally do not deliver advertising content, such as books and movies, will be excluded.