Fishman Marketing. » SEO

FDCC’s Visibility and Online-Marketing Initiative

Ross Fishman — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 14:12:41 +0000

FDCC’s Visibility and Online-Marketing Initiative

Building the brand for an association of the nation’s top defense lawyers.

The Federation of Defense & Corporate Counsel asked Fishman Marketing to develop a marketing and differentiation campaign to enhance the visibility and name recognition of the FDCC within the business and insurance communities.

Fishman Marketing’s dedicated team of strategists, designers, PR professionals, web developers, and SEO and social-media experts, developed and implemented a tightly integrated marketing strategy for the FDCC and the community it serves.

Download the whitepaper.

Virgin litigators are the most experienced.

Ross Fishman — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 04:06:28 +0000

Virgin litigators are the most experienced.

Look, it’s not like Vancouver lawyer Mark Virgin didn’t know his last name is Virgin (imagine what his middle school years were like…). Today, he’s a dynamic lawyer, helping stand up for the weak against the powerful. And he built an outstanding litigation boutique to help.

For marketing purposes, when confronted with an obvious issue or obstacle, you can either pretend you don’t notice, or turn it into a positive. And Mark Virgin, an exceptionally creative and practical litigator, agreed that it was time to leverage his most potentially powerful market asset – his name.

And by acknowledging the obvious and having the confidence to market with a wink, the firm reinforced both its expertise and culture. If you have a strong or memorable name, it’s worth exploring to determine whether there’s a marketing message to develop.

The goal was to build big buzz around the firm’s unique name, develop significant visibility and awareness within the local legal community, then tone it down to ensure receptivity within the broader community. We planned an aggressive, creative launch timed with a national Canadian legal conference with a trade show booth with Virgin-themed mugs as giveaways. The Virgin booth was the talk of the entire conference; the firm received countless positive comments about the campaign. Further, the firm distributed hundreds of Virgin mugs and was asked to send Virgin mugs across Canada.

The entire campaign is online at:

www.fishmanmarketing.com/projects/stevensvirgin/

“Ross and his team did a fantastic job developing our new website and ad campaign. Ross and Co. met our tight deadlines all while providing exceptional service and delivering an excellent product. Thanks again, you rock!”

Megan Hamilton, Director of Operations

CAMPAIGN OF THE WEEK: A “Small but Mighty” firm.

Lawrence Johnson — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 16:49:36 +0000

CAMPAIGN OF THE WEEK:

A “Small but Mighty” firm.

We recently wrote about Hawley Troxell, Idaho’s largest law firm, and the split-image campaign that showed that not only were they big, they were also fast and flexible. All true.

But how can smaller firms market themselves?
What if you’re not the biggest firm? Or not big at all? What can small firms or boutiques use as their strategy, differentiator, or message? How can they compete against the large firms?

There can be a taint associated with smaller size, a perception that the larger firm is invariably the better firm. In America, bigger is better. The large firms have long been reputed to be more skilled, with the smarter lawyers. They paid more, had more specialties, and recruited from the top law schools. If you’re the biggest firm, use that trait to your advantage.

Over time, for many legitimate reasons (e.g. lifestyle, autonomy, conflicts, culture), high-quality smaller firms evolved. They were smaller by choice. They offered an alternative for companies that didn’t want or need to hire a costly large firm.

The problem many small firms have isn’t the quality of their skills, but the quality of their marketing.
With fewer dollars to spend, they often get sub-standard marketing that conveyed a low-quality message. That’s a huge mistake. As I always say, “If you’re the smaller firm, you have less margin for error. You have more to prove, you have to do all the little things well, particularly in your marketing.”

An ugly website won’t hurt Cravath.
It won’t harm their reputation or prevent their lawyers from getting hired. They’re Cravath - their skills aren’t in question. But when you’re the smaller or less-well-known firm, you have to look at least as good as the big firms. Frankly, I think you need to look better.

This leads us to another of our favorite campaigns, Novack and Macey’s “Small but Mighty.” A small, high-end litigation boutique, they’re a big-firm spin-off that has chosen to stay small. But they successfully beat up on many big firms in court, when they’re not genially co-counseling clients with them.

Many small firms are insecure.
We’ve often heard small-firm clients insist “Don’t say we’re small!” As though if we didn’t admit it, no one would notice. You’re SMALL! Don’t be embarrassed by it, OWN it. Leverage the positive attributes — lean staffing, smaller teams, increased efficiency, more partner involvement, lower hourly rates — there are lots of good messages in a small size.

Novack and Macey likes being small.
They were completely confident in the high quality of their skills. Led by two of Chicago’s top trial lawyers, Stephen Novack and Eric Macey, they had chosen to be small, it was their foundational strategy and business model. We selected “Small but Mighty” (yeah, they got the double entendre, get over it…) as the tag line, and illustrated it with things from nature that were disproportionately powerful for their size. Nature’s crazy – we identified a lot of other cool examples.

The first one’s above, a Tepin pepper. It’s tiny, the size of a pea, but it’s possibly the world’s hottest pepper. It’s a nice metaphor for Novack and Macey’s trial lawyers. Small, but extremely powerful. When we were hired to develop the branding campaign, they had just finished a brand-new website with a different company, so we simply redesigned the existing home page to add this campaign (above).

In an ideal world we’d have developed a new website around the new campaign. But realistically, it wasn’t worth starting over; this was a simple and cost-effective solution.

With a strong campaign, we worked with their terrific Marketing Partner, Monte Mann, to develop a variety of additional tools, including, e.g. buying wild Tepin peppers from Mexico and private-labeling them, sending out 2500 packets to the firm’s contacts, with a spicy salsa recipe and all the necessary “Don’t touch your eyes!” haz-mat warnings. A fun and effective giveaway, many years later these are still sitting on executive credenzas all over Chicago.

For the launch party, a brave partner and marketing committee member, John Shonkweiler, agreed to EAT one of the hot peppers, to help generate a front-page story in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin:

With this theme, we identified plenty of other visuals, which we explored throughout the campaign. I’ll detail them later, stay tuned. And if your firm is ready for an integrated marketing campaign, website, or social media/SEO, give us a call! moc.gnitekramnamhsifnull@ssor or 1.847.432.3546.

ABA Journal’s article re Eye-Tracking technology

Lawrence Johnson — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 16:49:04 +0000

ABA Journal’s article re Eye-Tracking technology

We wrote a few posts regarding the innovative new eye-tracking technology we used to test various Vedder Price marketing campaigns before developing the website for its London office and renowned Global Transportation Finance practice.

In case you missed it, there’s a terrific article in the April, 2012 ABA Journal by its long-time, must-read assistant managing editor, Jill Schachner Chanen, discussing our strategic-marketing project for Vedder Price and the launch of its London office.

It’s entitled, “On Track: Law Firm Marketer Makes the Most of Eye-Map Technology” and does a great job of summarizing the project and value of the technology.

Here’s an excerpt:

“When law firm marketer Ross Fishman began working with Vedder Price on a campaign to publicize the firm’s new London office, and specifically its global transportation financing practice, the possibilities seemed endless.

“Fishman and the firm eventually settled on a choice of two images for the firm’s new website. One was eye-catching with a large beefeater hat dominating the design. The other subordinated graphics to text. For the firm, both concepts (which were to be used on a new homepage for the London office and in marketing materials) did the trick. The question was which one did it better.

“The question wasn’t new for Fishman. He’s been relying on his 20-plus years of experience in the industry and intuition as a onetime commercial litigator to answer the question. But this time Fishman decided to use eye-map technology to support his thoughts.

“The technology, which tracks where a user’s eyes focus first and linger thelongest, is revealing for anyone in marketing. Those in the business take the resulting data as proof of what consumers process when looking at ads, packages, logos and other marketing materials, says Fishman of Highland Park, Ill.

“Until now, getting that data has been cost-prohibitive for all but the largest of Fortune 500 companies, Fishman says. But recent technological innovations have brought the technology to the home computer user via webcam, he says.

“For example when it shows you a website, your eyes look here and there and the technology measures your eye movement to the tenth of a second,” Fishman says. “It knows exactly what caught your attention first, where your eyes move next and how long you lingered on a spot.”

“The data is supplemented through answers to questions like those asked in focus groups.

“Dean Gerber, chair of Vedder Price’s global transportation finance practice group, says he and others in the firm thought the eye tracking would confirm their choice of the more text-heavy image, and it did. “We had a very complex international audience, and we hoped to use one of these campaigns as the platform for our group’s 2012 marketing initiatives,” he says.

“Fishman says the technology can teach a valuable lesson for anyone ready to launch a new marketing campaign. “Websites and print ads are very different. People go to your website because they are trying to get information,” he says.

“People are not browsing law firm websites because they find them fascinating. We are not Britney Spears. We don’t have fan bases where people are fascinated by every move we make. We have to balance conveying our information with keeping [potential clients’] interest.”

The second graphic is the online version – note that it allows for greater flexibility and additional graphics.

And a big shout-out to Above the Law’s 4/5/12 Non-Sequiturs as well:
“* A fascinating look at how we access the web. [Ross's Law Marketing Blog]“

“Client Service. It’s Our Thing.” website

Lawrence Johnson — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 16:48:20 +0000

“Client Service. It’s Our Thing.” website

ThompsonMcMullan is an interesting Richmond, VA firm, and we’ve been looking for an opportunity to work with Amy Smith, among our favorite marketers, and one of LMA’s most-loyal leaders and volunteers.

We know how clients value high-quality service.
Clients have complained for decades that their lawyers don’t return their calls quickly enough, or stay in sufficiently close contact. Timeliness, responsiveness, communication, caring — it’s focusing on these service-related practices that cement a relationship and build long-term client loyalty.

If your firm excels at one or more of these service attributes, then broadcast it to the marketplace.

Become the alternative.
Show that when they’re dissatisfied with the service of their current provider, they should move to your firm. And make sure that your marketing is strong enough to be both noticed and remembered.

So back to ThompsonMcMullan. Obviously highly skilled, they also happen to be an incredibly service-oriented firm. They have fewer layers, smaller dedicated client teams, and more top-level partner involvement. At TM, it’s not about the money, or increasing leverage and billing rates simply to maximize profitability. I really like these guys.

Led by Managing Director Chris Malone, ThompsonMcMullan lawyers pride themselves on their personal commitment to their clients — this is the way law used to be practiced, when the client truly came first. I think Atticus Finch would have been happy practicing law here.

Therefore, we developed a campaign that spoke to the unique lengths they go to serve their clients, including print ads and a small firm brochure. The headline “We do whatever it takes.” speaks to their commitment. And the “Client service. It’s our thing.” tagline casually but memorably reinforces their message.

They didn’t want to get locked into a developer’s proprietary software, so we built an open-source WordPress website to support it.

The exaggerated visuals show the lengths their lawyers go to help clients — working in a swamp, forest, or tent; or jumping out of a plane.

We tested the home page design using Eye-Tracking technology.

We saw that visitors were reading our message, which was important, but the ”We do whatever it takes” headline didn’t grab quite as much attention as we’d wanted, so we bumped up the point size.

More visuals:

Looking for a new website, updated marketing campaign, or cutting-edge social media? Call Fishman Marketing!

+1.847.432.3546 or moc.gnitekramnamhsifnull@ssor.

120 Powerful Law Marketing Case Studies.

Ross Fishman — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 22:15:30 +0000

120 Powerful Law Marketing Case Studies.

At Fishman Marketing, we’ve been pretty proud of our work over the years. We’ve represented hundreds of firms in integrated, multi-faceted marketing campaigns — powerful differentiation programs that helped firms of all shapes and sizes dominate their chosen practice, industry, or geographic markets.

Websites, micro-sites, print and electronic advertising campaigns, SEO and social media, public relations — soup to nuts.

Click here to take a look — see if something relates to your firm’s particular situation. You can sort the results 20 different ways, e.g.:

tool (e.g. website, advertisement),
type of project (branding, recruiting, new-office),
culture/style (e.g. edgy),
type of firm or practice (litigation, boutique, international),
industry (oil and gas, forestry, pest control)
and many more.

All of them come with some background information to put them into context.

Browse around, see if any get your creative juices flowing. And if you want to discuss them in greater detail (no secrets, obviously), give us a call, any time.

“I have a LinkedIn. But I don’t know where it is.”

Lawrence Johnson — Thu, 24 May 2012 19:50:39 +0000

“I have a LinkedIn. But I don’t know where it is.”

- Actual quote from a law firm senior partner.

I heard this last week, and I hear variations of it all the time.

Lawyers are struggling with social media; they’re always asking me about it, how it works, and whether lawyers need it.

The bulk of the recent queries seem to involve LinkedIn. There’s a lot of conversation in the market about this, but not a lot of real information. People who don’t understand it proclaim that they don’t need it.

When Social Media was just gaining steam, there were a variety of marketing consultants who were suggesting that everyone needed a LinkedIn profile. Many suggested to the in-house marketers that it was easier to just set up the profiles for them, instead of teaching everyone how to do it themselves.

Unfortunately, this yielded the predictable result – a lot of empty profiles with no information. Some may argue that it’s better to have an empty profile than no profile at all. This might be a subject of legitimate debate, but I think that in a 21st-century economy, you can’t completely ignore technology.

And if you’re going to ignore it, I think it’s better to look like you’re (1) too busy to need it than rather than (2) too ineffectual to use it correctly.

Yes, it’s a significant time commitment to do it very well, and at this moment, most general lawyers shouldn’t rely on it to develop business – although some should (more on that some other time).

But here’s something everyone should do. Go to LinkedIn.com. In the box, search for your name. See what shows up. Act like a prospect who is looking for more info about you. Click on your name. What shows up? Are you proud of it? (Searching “ross fishman” shows six results, and I’m the only one with a photo.)Does it showcase you as a high-quality professional? Or do you have an empty shell with “1 connection.” That is, “1 [pathetic] connection.” That’s the free one you get for doing basically nothing.

Filling out a basic profile is something you can do over lunch. At bare minimum paste your biography into the narrative section. Include your photo and contact information. You want to make it easy for prospects to find you, so help them.

Send some invitations to increase the number of your connections. Join a couple groups, click on the Members tab, see who you know, then invite them too. It’s an easy way to find lots of people you know who are already on LinkedIn.

It’s not that hard; ask your marketing department for help.

If you don’t have a marketing department, or don’t want to ask them, call me directly and I’ll walk you through it – it’d be my way of saying “thanks for reading.”

Timing the high jump.* How many “hits” should a website get?

Ross Fishman — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 06:44:00 +0000

Timing the high jump.* How many “hits” should a website get?

We often get asked “how many hits” or “how many visitors” a law firm’s website should get.

Unfortunately, those are the wrong questions.

Law firms like to compare their results against industry practices, and evaluate the return on their website or search-engine-marketing efforts with metrics you can measure like traffic, inbound links, rankings, indexed pages, page rank, etc.

Although those seem logical, none of these is very helpful when seeking to assess the real value or performance of a firm’s website or SEO efforts.

As 21-century law firm marketers, we’d like to focus on more … nuanced benchmarks.

As we tell our clients, the objective should not be the number of “hits” or “views” or “visitors,” but:

(1) the quality of your visitors, and
(2) their propensity to convert into paying clients.

Remember, your online-marketing efforts should be aimed directly toward generating qualified leads and converting them into clients, i.e. increasing revenue.

Here are a few questions we put to our clients when undertaking an SEO assignment:

1. Who, where, and how big is your target audience?

2. How long does your typical attorney/client relationship last?

For example, a divorce lawyer may have a client for a few months, where a trust and estates attorney should have the client for decades. How many clients do you need to support your business?

3. Where on your site do you want the traffic to land?

(This applies to all your digital platforms, i.e. blogs, social pages, microsites.) Remember that if it’s developed correctly and optimized with a lot of useful information on the interior pages, 60% of your traffic can flow directly to the interior pages of your site, and by-pass the home page altogether.

Note – you want this to happen; it shows that you have a lot of specific and useful content deeper inside your website that people who are searching for that information can find.

If Google only cares about your home page, you are losing a lot of potentially valuable leads.

Most law firms are so obsessed with their home pages they neglect to optimize the content of the interior pages, which is a huge mistake.

4. How much traffic is acceptable?

This is relative: for instance, if you want to draw traffic to your aircraft-finance practice group, you may be quite pleased with a small number of visitors — if they represent a significant portion of the universe of potential clients. So the number of hits remains relative to your objectives.

However, firms that focus on e.g. personal injury typically expect and require a larger number. In these situations they should ascertain the number of searches being conducted on Google for the primary PI keywords. We would multiply that number roughly by four to give us a sense of the universe of digital traffic that you can draw from.

5. What is your conversion rate once visitors get to your site?

If you do not engage your visitors, entice them to dig deeper into your site or connect with you, unfortunately you will never have “enough” traffic…

A final comment that comes from the experience we gleaned in the last decade while working with both B2C and B2B clients as well as our law firm clients: Leaders in digital-marketing are not focusing on the amount of “hits,” but on how to engage.

While we understand that you still need to be found (which requires effective SEO structures and strategies), before you can “connect,” asking yourself the right question should get you where you want to be, faster and with better financial results.

That is the only metric that matters.

* “Timing the high jump” is the expression my old friend Bill Flannery uses when discussing how law firms tend to measure the wrong things.

Want to prove SEO works? The Brazil Results are in!

Ross Fishman — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 19:27:00 +0000

Want to prove SEO works? The Brazil Results are in!

Just two months before heading to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for the Lawyers Associated Worldwide (LAW) annual conference we discussed with the host firm, Lacaz Martins et al. their interest in using the internet to seek referrals from US law firms.

Our initial investigation showed that they didn’t exist on the first ten pages of any geographic-, industry-, practice-, or sub-specialty-specific Google search we conducted. Great firm, no real internet presence.

Just 45 days before the conference, we undertook an aggressive search-engine optimization (SEO) campaign (discussed here) to elevate their US Google rankings before the LAW conference.

We had extremely limited content to work with, because their materials were almost entirely in Portuguese. Regardless, they have particular tax expertise and great people, and we were confident that we could show some real results. In the brief time available, we didn’t seek to optimize their website (which would have been our preference), so we opted to create a series of blogs, and use link-building, and other SEO tools

So? How’d it go? They think it went pretty darned well, obtaining a variety of number-one and other high-level organic Google search rankings for their preferred search terms, including searches relating to general, geographic, and practice-specific terms, as well as high-value sub-specialty queries. More specifically:A general search for “legal services sao paulo” yielded two of the top three links, above 3 million other results (after “Places”):

The Lacaz Martins firm has a particular expertise and leadership in tax law but hadn’t shown up in any Google searches relating to this practice.

Afterwards, a new practice-specific search for “sao paulo tax law” resulted in the top two rankings of over 20 million results:

Next, we selected a more narrowly specialized tax area, where they wanted to showcase their legitimate thought leadership. “Transfer pricing” is an important substantive topic today in Brazil, and searches for “transfer pricing in a recession in brazil” currently shows them as the top two results as well (above pwc.com, kpmg.com — and 679,000 others):

We even did well for the general search for “Brazilian law firm,” which yielded a page-one result for our own blog: Of course, with the aggressive competition for all of these terms from other firms and organizations, if these rankings are not proactively maintained, they’ll decline quickly.

The next step, of course, is converting highly placed search results into hard leads, and the leads into paying clients. We were recently speaking with a small international firm that generates nearly one million Euros per year in new business alone just from these types of SEO efforts.

But that’s a discussion for another day, and another blog post.

“Law” is more interesting than “Love” – Google’s Ngram Viewer

Ross Fishman — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 03:03:00 +0000

“Law” is more interesting than “Love” – Google’s Ngram Viewer

Another astonishing free tool just launched by Google Labs is the Ngram Viewer. which enables users to “visualize how language and literature have changed over time, by searching… more than 500 billion words from 5.2 million books in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish” (ReadWriteWeb.com)

It’s being touted as a valuable tool to compare macro trends since 1500 A.D., graphing how words and phrases have been used over selected years. So, for example, I conducted a search for usage of the words “Law” and “Love” since 1500, below. “Love” was intermittently all the rage between ~1575-1675, judging from all the spikes. Then, general interest in Love flattened out around 1700, andLove was overtaken by Law around 1750 where it has remained.

Or here’s a search for law, lawyer, attorneys, law firm, computer, love, woman, and war. To prove the concept, in the line graph below, you can see how dramatically use of the term “war” spiked around the dates of the two World Wars.

Further, I’m not sure what it means, but beyond “Love” (see above), “Law” (blue) also generates higher numbers than “Woman” (light green). Words like “lawyer,” “attorneys,” and “law firm” are barely measurable by comparison. In the lower-right corner you can see how “computer” (purple) starts to gain usage around 1960.

Comparing four professions since 1800 below, “lawyer” (blue) has significantly higher usage than “accountant” (red), which never generates much interest. “Lawyer” held a slim lead over “nurse” (yellow) from 1800 until around 1920, then gets overtaken around 1930, and never recovers. ”Doctor” (green) has always held a sizable lead over all of these professions.

However, starting in the late 1800s, “Teacher” (light blue) gained a vast and insurmountable lead over all of them, including “Doctor” (green). I wonder why “Teacher” spiked to this degree starting in the late 1920; the history buffs probably have an answer:

Here’s how that same search looks when conducted over a 500-year span. There’s a curious blue “Law” spike just before 1650, which may relate to”The Habeas Corpus Act 1640.”

Here’s the same 200-year search on 11 different professions, including accountant, architect, banker, dentist, doctor, engineer, fireman, lawyer (blue), mechanic, nurse, and policeman. ”Doctor” (red) holds a strong lead over Law and other professions. . .

. . . until you add in “Teacher,” which then towers over the rest starting around 1870:

They may not get paid what they’re worth, but apparently there’s still a lot of interest in Teachers.