The Benefits of Your Law Firm Having a Website
Every law firm has the desire to attract new clients and keep the old ones. Attorneys and law firms use marketing to do this. It can be done using more traditional methods like commercial, bus stop advertisement, billboard, yellow page ad, or radio ad. However, more legal practices are using marketing tactics that fit in with the technology available in the 21st century.
This isn’t to say that the more traditional methods don’t work. You don’t have to have one or the other. You can harness the power of the internet while still running your yellow pages or billboard advertisement. But, it’s important to keep in mind that pretty much any business should have a website.
A website gives a professional image to your company. More and more people are using the internet to find and contact local business for the services they need. Your first impression to a majority of your new customers will be your website. This is why having a professionally designed website for your law firm is so important. Having an amateur website would be like meeting your clients wearing your pajamas – it just doesn’t make you look like you care about what you do.
A website helps new customers find you. If you haven’t heard the term Search Engine Optimization or SEO before – essentially this refers to optimizing your website to have better listings on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) of popular search engines. Since more and more people are finding businesses through online search, optimizing your website or search engine marketing has turned into the the new yellow page ad.
A website gives your law firm a “home base” on the internet. We are hearing the term “social networking” more and more. If you aren’t familiar with it – social networking is using sites like twitter and Facebook to interact with your current and future clients. Almost every social networking site allows you to post a link to your website. This is how you get people to learn more about your firm. They can only learn so much from your social networking page since that isn’t really the place to make a sales pitch. The idea is to get them to click on the link to your website that is listed on your social networking page so that they can learn more about your business (and hopefully become a client). You can even interact with clients on your law firm’s website by integrating a blog into it.
A website gives attorney’s a way to make running their business easier. Extra features that you can incorporate into your website can give customers self service an allow you to save time. Feature like the ability to schedule appointments, look up frequently asked questions, get directions to your office, and submit documents a head of time all make running your firm easier.
A website is a way to extend your business card. You can only put so much information on your law firm’s business card. But, as long as you have included the address to your website on your business card, you can give all the information you want to your prospects. The same idea goes for commercials, yellow page ads, billboards, bus stop ads. Pretty much every other advertising medium puts some sort of limit on how much information about your business you can put out (this is caused by time or space restrictions). However, as long as you have a website you can point people back to you will be able to give them all the information that need about what your business can do for them.
Although you may think that a website is not needed for your law firm right now, have you considered what it could do for your law firm? One of the best things about advertising using a website is that it is easier to grab data about your marketing efforts then more traditional methods, this means you can try using a website to market your law firm, measure how well it worked, and then decide if it’s something you want to keep doing for a relatively low cost. Although managing your legal practices online identity may be a daunting task, I assure you there are plenty of people around that are looking to help and the reward is usually worth the hard work.