DUI Internet Strategy Newsletter – 2.16.10

The easiest way to determine whether you are on the right track is to measure what you have done.

Everything on the Internet is measurable and easily tracked. If you aren't tracking, what you don't know is probably hurting you.

If you aren't measuring results in an objective way over time, your strategy decisions are just guesses. As the internet gets more crowded, the probability of guesses being rewarded decreases.

If you have a complex web presence consisting of more than one directory or property and you "track" leads by asking people where they found you, then you are probably missing the nuances that can transform your campaigns into an efficient science.

I will address the methods of tracking your online marketing in a future issue. For now, just ask yourself, "Am I flying blind?" If you are, then you need some tools that will open your eyes to a whole new world.

Do you like to look at advertisements?

I bet you consciously or subconsciously skip over elements of a web-page that you know, or suspect, are advertisements.

When you search for something not law-related, you know you have thousands to millions of choices, all served up in a fraction of a second by the search engines.

When a website doesn't seem to have what you want at first glance, usability studies have shown that most people hit the back button and try another page. People who search for DUI-specific information know what they want. Their attention span for anything else is minimal.

If you don't give them what they want immediately, they will leave your site and decide that you are not a viable choice to defend them.

A single, slow loading flash element on your home page can cause your bounce-rate (visitors who leave without clicking on any internal links) to skyrocket.

Like using the phrase "may it please the court," or "your honor" to begin every other sentence a lawyer utters in court, webmasters pick up many inefficiencies, ticks, and bad habits by looking at other DUI lawyer websites. These things help make you invisible because they make you look like everybody else (to human viewers and to search engines).

If you rely on word of mouth, phone books, billboards, mailers, radio or television, you are hemorrhaging market-share, or about to. And if your internet strategy is an electronic version of a phone book ad or TV commercial, then you are likely to watch helplessly as web-savvy firms snatch up good potential clients.

The problem with old-media advertising (print and broadcast) is that it's not targeted, and it's highly inefficient. By contrast, most people only visit a website when they are looking for what the site offers.

Most marketers who provide services to law firms realize that old-media is dying. The problem with the transition to efficient Internet marketing is that too many old-media people are clamoring for your business and they don't have a clue what they are doing. If you port your old strategy to the Internet, your might as well just stick with the phone book.

If you got an MBA in marketing seven years ago, nearly everything you learned in school is now obsolete. And if you use the formula you did online seven years ago, don't blame the dump-truck firms and the unknowns that are moving in on your market-share.

I've been both a witness and a participant in the evolution of law practice marketing for DUI attorneys for the last decade, and I have  walked over 10 years in your shoes. I have waited for days on end with scared clients for jury verdicts. I watched some clients walk out of the courthouse free. I stood helplessly as others were escorted out in handcuffs.  I crossed lying cops, and stood between clients and hostile judges. When I was in trial, nothing else in the world was real. Nothing else mattered.

To be a great lawyer, there should be nothing else on your mind. And if you delegate the single most important external element of your law firm's future, the management of your marketing, you'd better be damn sure that you pick the right person or company to delegate to.

You must know with certainty that those who decide your marketing strategy consider your law firm's best interest, not the preservation of their account or job, as their sacred mission, and that they represent no other competing law firm for the geographic region and practice area you pay them to promote.

How do you know whether your firm's marketing person knows what he or she is doing? There's a simple test:

A monkey can make a good looking website. There are programs that pretty much do it for them. But making a good looking website accomplish what you want for your practice is a whole different ball-game.

A monkey can run a pay-per-click campaign. The tools to do so are easy to understand and access, and take a couple of hours to master. So why would you pay a middle man to manage, and mark up, clicks that you could buy directly wholesale?

Internet marketing strategy requires thousands of hours to truly understand, and selling your practice and yourself online is different than selling anything else. A web professional with a history of successful dental practice or bicycle shop sites likely has little clue how to make your law practice stand out in a competent and ethical way (and if they were that great at what they were doing before, why aren't they still doing it?). Hiring a marketer with a print or broadcast media background who lacks years of law-related internet marketing experience is like hiring a podiatrist to pull your tooth.

Old media marketing was stagnant. Once the new phone book came out, there was nothing you could do to adjust for an entire year. You couldn't effectively test over the short term, and you couldn't use multiple contingent decision paths without gambling the future of your practice.

On the other hand, the Internet allows you to think several moves ahead. It allows you to adapt very quickly, and often requires you to make changes immediately (sometimes overnight). The days of Internet tricks are done, and sites that employ or have remnants of old-school "black hat" tactics (a topic of a future newsletter) are sitting on a time-bomb. Search engines rely on human customers, and to thrive they need to constantly figure out ways to filter out the static and make the results that are most useful to human users appear first.

The term "Web 2.0" is misused a lot, as in "hire me, I'll make you a Web 2.0 site." By definition, Web 2.0 refers to the period from 2004 to present. In 2004, blogging programs turned the capability of the average website from a static collection of files (pages) to a dynamic and interactive community forum. The prob­­­lem with the term Web 2.0 is that very little of what worked in 2004 still works in 2010.

Is your website working as well today as it did in 2004? If so, then you are probably doing something right.

But if you don't take the time to become an expert or invest in an established expert to get or keep you ahead, time will either erode what you have, or you will never have a chance to get started (it takes many months to establish a new website, and perhaps longer to realize that a new strategy on a new site is not working).

Most lawyers' marketing is grossly under-performing. Internet strategy is not rocket-science, but it's no longer so simplistic that you should assume that anybody who solicits your business will be competent.

If you are losing market share to lesser attorneys, it's time to look at yourself (or whoever is in charge of your marketing strategy).

You have a right to be proud of your skills and accomplishments. I know I am proud of myself for all of the efforts I gave my clients over the years, even those who never really appreciated what I did for them.

Your ego can make you a target for unethical marketers.

Nearly every person who cold-calls you trying to sell you marketing knows that you are a lawyer. As such, they depend on your ego to get in the way of your better judgment. Lawyers are more likely than most to pretend that they understand a completely meaningless and made-up term than admit that they are ignorant when speaking with somebody they view as less intelligent or of lesser status than them. Most web people know that nearly every lawyer considers what they do to be "beneath" them. Let's face it, as lawyers we are less likely to admit that we are ignorant or wrong, which makes us less likely to openly challenge an assertion that we don't understand when it is delivered with authority.

That's why lawyers can be talked into using a "SEO" or web promotion company that also promotes their competitors. That's why they pay a jacked-up fee for the conflict of interest. Put words like "premier," "top" or "elite" on it, and marketers who sell conflict of interest packages depend on you to ignore your intelligence and best-interest. And in that moment of weakness, they make you commit to long-term contracts with buyouts for your own website.

Your ego can get in the way of your potential client's ego, and when it does, you lose.

Here's the thing. Your practice isn't about you. Your client's don't care who you are. They don't care who you saved, where you lectured, what seminars you attended, or whether you are NHTSA qualified.

They take your endorsements from former clients and other lawyers with a grain of salt because they can't be verified. Most former DUI clients don't want to be called by other defendants asking about you. An endorsement from an out of state attorney means very little to most consumers, and in-state endorsements can "steal" your business if called to verify their endorsement of you.

For a recommendation or endorsement to be effective, it must tell a story about the endorser, not about you. It must make the endorser credible, and therefore trusted in what he or she says about you. And most importantly, it must be verifiable.

For your clients and potential clients, if it's not about them and their case, they really don't care about you. In fact, your current clients would much rather have you in the office working on their case than going on a CLE cruise. Some secretly resent that you go fishing, or to a movie, or take any time off from working on their case because their future is on the line and time is of the essence (a message they get from nearly all DUI marketing).

In my law practice, I used to get a bump in my new client retention rate after I heard DUI defense legends speak at CLE events. After careful testing, I discovered that whether the potential clients who came following these seminars knew I attended the seminar or not didn't matter. What mattered was that I knew, I was inspired, and my energy and fighting spirits were rejuvenated. Potential clients could sense the fresh energy that I would bring to their case.

This information helped me better shape the messages that I delivered to my clients online. It's not about me. It's not about who I know. It's first, second and always about the client.

You know you are a good lawyer and that you care about each client and each case. So why do dump-truck firms gain so much traction? One reason is certainly that the dump-truck firms are unscrupulous, and invest vast amounts of money to increase their market share (and as a by-product decrease your market share).

Another potential reason could be that many of the dump-truck firms are really good at speaking with potential clients. To relate to the average client, you must remove your professor's coat, and you've got to listen more than you talk. This is true in person, and it is also true on your website.

Sure, it's important to give as much legal and technical information as possible for the search engines and for the "researcher" potential client, but you need to give it a way that a non-legally-trained person can understand, relate to, and appreciate.

A "ten simple steps" article beats the pants off "an analysis of the elements" article every day of the week. A "how to beat the breath test" article kills a piece on the "five prong Daubert analysis and the interplay of Rule 702 in forensic alcohol testimony."

A web-video that starts with "Thank you for that introduction. It's always a pleasure to speak to such a fine group of colleagues about the latest developments in DUI law," will put your potential clients to sleep, whereas a video that starts with "Your case is scary, but I'm going to show you how you can make the most of your bad situation and come out ahead," will put potential clients on the edge of their seats.

Some YouTube videos make lawyers look bad, and are severe liabilities. The messages that many lawyers think they are delivering is different than the messages their potential clients are seeing. Those that say nothing of substance very nicely (in videos) are far more likely to convert leads than those who give a brilliant discourse on the fallacies of infrared spectroscopy or gas chromatography in a lawyer-like tone.

What's most important is what lives between the written lines or spoken words. That's where your potential clients fill in the blanks with their own voice.

To be effective your web copy must:

1. Be optimized to drive targeted traffic to itself (unless you are at peace with a never-ending pay per click bidding war); and
2. Be legally and factually accurate without making any claims that violate consumer protection or legal ethics rules; and
3. Speak to the potential client on his or her terms and in his or her language and voice.

Some of the planned topics include:

• Why having 5 or more websites can hurt you.
• How to build your electronic credibility and reputation.
• Marketing utopia: Getting closer to a purely efficient model of law practice advertising.
• Scale back to scale up, polish your gold and toss out your turds.
• The pyramid of internet strategy for DUI lawyers.
• Why social media is like oxygen, and you can't live on oxygen alone.