AVALANCHE: The Lawyer Marketing Group

A Special Note to Current Advertisers:

What advertisers cannot measure may be more important than what they can measure. Frequently television advertisers track (measure) the number of new clients their television advertising generates. Tracking can give advertisers reliable data on both the number of new clients generated and on the total revenue generated through advertising.

Unfortunately, though the data are often accurate and reliable, the data are often misleading: advertisers cannot track end-users who, after being interrupted with unwelcome commercials for months or years, are driven to select competitive providers. That is, advertisers can measure what they capture (numbers of new clients or revenue generated), but they cannot measure the number of clients their advertising diverted to competitors. It is not unusual for an advertiser to air commercials that capture X new clients while driving 2X new clients to competitors’ doors. This advertiser measures X and incorrectly concludes “my advertising campaign is successful.”

Other factors to consider before buying television advertising:

Are other law firms advertising on television?

Have law firm advertisers dropped or significantly reduced their television advertising in the past five years?

Can your firm afford a sustained advertising effort?

Can you coordinate your television advertising to coincide with an overhaul of your yellow pages’ advertising?

What coverage will your dollars buy? Are you paying to advertise to viewers who cannot conveniently do business with you? Can you mitigate that?

Can you fee share?

What will your state’s Rules of Professional Conduct allow?

Which programming will produce the greatest ROI? Jerry Springer or the Evening News?

Meaningful Difference in Attitudes about Advertising

Were advertising to be eliminated from print media, circulation would drop precipitously. Print media viewers want their advertising. Yet, numerous studies demonstrate that most viewers would pay more, sometimes substantially more, to have commercial-free television and radio programming. This consumer dislike of advertising in broadcast media poses a real problem for television advertisers.

When advertisers interrupt viewers often enough with their advertising content, the viewers (the advertiser’s prospective customers) get irritated at the advertisers.* People who are irritated at advertisers tend to not become those advertisers' customers. Can advertising effectively generate new customers when it irritates its potential customers? Certainly not in a cost-efficient manner.

*A 2002 survey conducted by Leo J. Shapiro Associates for the Section of Litigation for the American Bar Association revealed that 45 percent of the survey respondents thought lawyers should change the way they advertise. (27 percent thought lawyers should stop advertising altogether).

Can law firm advertisers run television commercials that don't interrupt, and consequently irritate, their potential clients? Is it possible law firms could advertise with commercials that give viewers the content they want and still deliver a compelling and memorable message? What would advertisers have to do?

1. Advertisers would have to give viewers the type of content the viewers want: entertainment.
2. Advertisers would have to keep their commercials fresh, fun, and exciting so viewers would want to watch their commercials. (Advertisers who use a series of different, themed commercials tend to have more success with fewer insertions than advertisers who "saturate" with the same commercial.)
3. Advertisers would have to generate positive associations. (Many commercials generate negative associations. Aggressive, mean representation, a theme common in law firm advertising, is easily interpreted by the consumer as “aggressive, mean lawyers.”)
4. Advertisers would have to give viewers a compelling reason to select their firms in preference to other firms.
5. Advertisers would have to create powerful marketing messages, simple and memorable, so viewers would remember their firms’ names when viewers need legal services. (People do not turn on their televisions when they need legal representation; they ask for referrals or, more often than not, open yellow pages' directories. Successful television campaigns are backed up by yellow pages' ads reflecting content contained in the television commercials.)
6. Advertisers would want to place their commercials so the commercials are seen regularly enough to be remembered, and not so frequently that the commercials become a nuisance. (Entertaining commercials can be aired more frequently because they have less of a nuisance-factor. Entertaining commercials also have a track record of generating greater recall—they don't have to be aired as often as information-based commercials to generate similar response rates.)
7. Advertisers would want to accomplish these things without alienating doctors, judges, juries, and fellow lawyers.
8. Advertisers would have to do all of this without violating their states’ Rules of Professional Conduct.

Mighty big order! Ready to step up to the plate?

Understanding more about Content, Media Selection, and Viewer Expectations

Print Media: Traditionally, print media, though an information-focused media, have a very heavy advertising component. As a general rule, newspapers and magazines format with a 1:1 advertising to information, or “editorial,” mix. (In traditionally-formatted newspapers and magazines, for every column inch of information, there is a column inch of advertising.)

As a result of this content mix, when people read newspapers and magazines, they expect to see advertising. Frequently, people read newspapers for their advertising content. Sales, movie listings, tire pricing, classifieds, and coupons are valuable and integral to the make-up of newspapers. Many travel, health, fashion, and sports magazines are purchased for their advertising content as much, or more, than for their information or entertainment content.

Advertising in print media - be it in newspapers, magazines, or yellow page directories - is often welcome; it is certainly expected. Though no publisher of note has tried it yet, industry experts have long held the position that were the advertising content to be removed from magazines and newspapers, readership would drop precipitously.

Broadcast Media: Contrast the way viewers feel about advertising in print media with the way viewers feel about advertising in broadcast media. When viewers watch television, they are doing so because they want to be entertained or, in the case of news or talk radio, informed. These viewers are decidedly not looking for advertising content.

Viewers see television and radio advertising as intrusive.

How do viewers respond to advertising in broadcast media? They hate it. Oft times, they switch channels, or get up from the sofa to take care of a quick chore. To say the least, viewers avoid advertising in broadcast media. Witness the rapid growth of commercial-free radio programming such as Web radio and XM Radio and the new generation of digital recording devices designed to edit out television advertising (TiVo®).

Marketing with Search Engines

Search engines are huge. They're important. They're useful.

Let's start with what I'm talking about when I say search engines. Search engines are web applications that crawl the web indexing text. Search engines allow users to search the index by keyword, and provide links to matching resources.

Directories are also lists of internet resources, but they are manually entered by a person (rather than the automatically crawled by search engine spiders). Directories also allow users to search an index by keyword.

Because people use directories in the same way as search engines, they are often lumped together as search engines. There is also confusion because Yahoo started out as a directory, but added crawl-based search in 2002.

The business of search engines is fascinating.

The race in the search engine world is going faster and faster, with the giants adding new tools and services left and right.

Google just launched a new cost-per-impression and targeting for Ad Words beta, and a personal search tool in beta - allowing users to keep a detailed history of their past searches. Yahoo launched My Web in beta on Wednesday (4/27), boosting their personal search history service. Google's IPO was the hottest news in technology since the 1990's.

And the usefulness of search engines is mesmerizing.

According to the January, 2005 Search Engine Users study by Pew Internet, 38 million American adults use a search engine every day.

We use search engines to find definitions too modern to be in the dictionary.

We use search engines to find an exact address.

We use search engines to research geography, history, and astrology.

We use search engines to see photos of landscape designers' prior work.

We use search engines to learn all about Britney Spears.

We use search engines to find a lawyer when we have no referral.

People often like to do a little reading about an attorney to establish an image of who the attorney is. We want to see what kind of a relationship we can have with the lawyer before calling with him or her.

This is a good reason to have a website. And a good reason to market with search engines, so people can find your site.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has many parts - advertising (sponsored links and pay-per-click ads), directory submission (paid or unpaid), and search engine optimization (SEO - where your site's copy, design, code, and structure make it easier to get higher results in search engine queries).

Each of these factors of SEM is valuable, but you need to evaluate your business goals to see which are right for you.

Paid advertising is often a good way to jump-start your search engine rankings.

There are a lot of attorneys on the web, and attorney directories have been marketing on the web for a long time, so they hold the highest organic rankings. Findlaw is everywhere.

It takes time to get organic rankings on search engines, and in directories.

While directory administrators are reviewing your submission, and before the web crawlers have found and indexed your site, you might use sponsored links and pay-per-click ads to get your site to be listed on the first two pages.

And since most users don't look at results past the second page on a search engine (iProspect's Search Engine User Attitudes Survey), you really want to be on the first two pages.

If you provide valuable information (and my first recommendation is that you do - include links to resources, for example) you might even get a link or two from an outside site. And those links boost your organic rankings on many search engines.

Submitting to directories can not only allow your site to appear in directory results, but some search engines also use directory listings to determine the rank of their crawled results. Some directories allow you to submit your site to them for a fee, some simply require that you do your research and submit to the proper category.

Within your site, there is a lot you can do to boost your organic ranking. You can optimize your site's copy to utilize competitive keywords for your practice, so crawlers associate those keywords in their index with your site.

You can optimize your sites design, code, and structure, to enable those spiders to crawl through your site quickly and efficiently. Building search engine optimization into your site is becoming standard, but it's best to make sure your web designer is on top of it.

Using search engine marketing, you can help get your site on search engines so people who need you can find you.