What is push and pull marketing for law firms?

Why SEO for lawyers trounces push advertising for ROI.

Summary

• Push marketing broadcasts messages to mostly undifferentiated audiences through traditional advertising such as on television, radio, outdoor ads (e.g., billboards) and in print media.
• Pull marketing relies on inbound communications by creating digital content that draws more targeted audiences already searching for specific information online.
• Push marketing performs at its best when it promotes commonly used goods and services such as cars, clothing, smart phones, and family attractions.
• Pull marketing is a far more cost-efficient method for law firms because it’s dramatically more targeted to prospective clients in need of legal services.
• For the typical cost of a one billboard for six months, most law firms could hire professional legal writers to generate website content that will generate new client leads for years to come.

The best place to hide your advertising dollars

They’re everywhere. And I mean everywhere.

Drive nearly any American interstate highway or through any major U.S. city and you’ll navigate through oceans of lawyer billboards. The vast majority promote the services of personal injury lawyers.

On a recent business trip to Philadelphia, I saw three consecutive billboards along Interstate 76, all bought by a local PI law firm. The billboards were so close together that the firm’s name was as prominent as the city skyline.

There’s a way more cost-effective way to land clients, especially for smaller and solo-practice law firms outside the PI sphere.

Push versus pull marketing for law firms

Billboards belong to a class of marketing called advertising. The definition of advertising is the use of paid promotions or announcements attempting to persuade a target audience to take action.

Advertising is an example of push marketing, defined as outbound messages that the target audience may or not find interesting and useful. By design, billboards are visible to every driver and passenger traveling along highways and mass transit.

Such universal visibility can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. For goods or services most people consume – e.g., cars, family attractions, clothing – billboards can be cost efficient.

But for professional services such as accounting, architecture, and legal and medical practices, outdoor advertising (which includes billboards, bus boards, and ads at mass transit stations) is highly cost inefficient.

When math is not your legal advertising friend

It’s easy to calculate the value of advertising. It takes only simple arithmetic – what percentage of people who see or hear advertising actually need the promoted services or products?

Bear with me. We’ve got some numbers to work through on billboard advertising.

In mid to large cities, anywhere from 20,000 to 200,000 vehicles drive pass billboards on major thoroughfares. In most cases, divide that by half because billboards typically face drivers and passengers traveling in one direction.

Hence, drivers and passengers in from 10,000 to 100,000 vehicles may be exposed to a billboard’s message daily. What percentage of their drivers and passengers see the billboard?

One study determined that only about 10% to 20% of all glances at billboards were for three-quarters of a second or longer. That knocks the numbers down to 1,000 to 20,000 passersby daily seeing a billboard long enough to absorb its message, though possibly not long enough to jot down or memorize a phone number to call or website to peruse.

Of that number, what percentage have recently suffered personal injury and have not already found a lawyer to represent them? Hard to estimate.

It’s a crowded legal marketplace out there

Motor vehicle accidents are the largest single cause of PI cases, accounting for about half, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The federal government further reports about 1.7 million car crashes annually result in fatalities or injuries. That represents about one-half of one percent of the U.S. population.

Thus, adding all causes of PI cases – car accidents (52%), medical malpractice (15%), product liability (15%), and other causes (5%) – no more than about 1% of the population generates actual personal injury cases annually.

That number is calculated on the broad assumption that all 1.7 million car crashes will produce an average of one PI case each – a likely high estimate but a workable one nonetheless. If so, double that number to arrive at an estimate of total PI cases of 3 million to 3.5 million annually, about 1 percent of the general population.

If you’re an attorney in a metro area of, say, 2 million residents, that means no more than about 20,000 dwellers account for PI cases each year, give or take.

Big number, right? Yeah, but consider the competition. Clio, the legal software provider, estimates that more than 135,000 attorneys practice personal injury law – about one in ten lawyers.

Through a proportional calculation, a law firm in a city of 2 million has a shot at a little more than 100 PI cases each year. Meanwhile, somewhere around 700 to 800 PI attorneys work in that urban area.

How much should law firms pay for billboards?

Next comes the cost of acquiring one of those cases. According to one survey, the monthly expense of physical billboards (as opposed to digital) ranges from about $1,000 on a lesser traveled street in Indianapolis to nearly $11,000 alongside a Los Angeles freeway. A digital billboard in LA can run as much as $175,000 annually.

Conventional thinking among non-marketer lawyers is that one good case can pay for a year of billboards. That’s akin to saying one good poker hand can pay for a luxury vacation in Las Vegas.

Yeah, if Lady Luck blesses you once. But when will she bless you again? Ever? If you keep betting against the house, you’ll likely lose far more often than win.

Other push marketing options for attorneys

Unable to afford outdoor ads, many law firms typically pay $700 to $1,000 a month or more to be listed on a lawyer directory published by Avvo, FindLaw, Thompson, Justia and others. These are digital versions of attorney billboards crowding big city freeways – only more crowded.

At most, hundreds of bucks per month gets a single banner on a website with your photo, office phone number and link to your website. Meanwhile, in a major city, another 200 to 300 of your competitors in the same law specialization will also be listed.

One advantage of directory ads is that leads are usually trackable. You know exactly how many phone calls and emails you get from the ads.

Smaller firms and soloists often opt instead for print ads in neighborhood newspapers. For the same $700 to $1,000 per month, a firm can run quarter-page ads in a handful of weeklies.

Disadvantage of print advertising: New-client leads are mostly un-trackable because the prospect frequently doesn’t remember correctly or at all where she found your office number or email address.

The best place to hide your advertising dollars

Then there’s digital search ads on Google or Bing. These appear labeled as “Sponsored” at the top of search-engine results. The advertiser pays only when someone clicks on an ad to go to the advertiser’s website – hence the name pay-per-click advertising.

Digital search ads are trackable, but they can be pricey, running hundreds of dollars per click for PI cases. Also, the best performing ads require both compelling messages in the ads, plus relevant, comprehensive, and comprehensible landing pages on the advertiser’s website.

This brings us to SEO.

Reasons for attorneys to love SEO for law firms

In contrast to push marketing, pull marketing attracts potential clients already looking for legal help. You don’t have broadcast to the masses that you’re one of the best family law or medical malpractice or intellectual property lawyers around. Push marketing gives you a chance to prove it.

Internet search engines are the force behind pull marketing. Internet searchers know what they’re looking for online because they use specific search phrases in Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo searches.

The more specific, the better. Examples of specific search phrases:

• • • • • Portland corporate governance attorney for small businesses
        • San Antonio testamentary trust lawyer
        • ley de asilo de los Estados Unidos para inmigrantes venezolanas (“United States asylum law for Venezuelan immigrants”)

These are called “long-tail search terms.” The searcher is a highly qualified prospective law-firm client in the hunt for detailed information about his or her legal situation.

For a law firm to rank in the first ten search results for long-term phrases, it must do two things:

1. Conduct on-page SEO, which gives clues to search engines as to the topic of information on a website page.
2. Produce relevant, comprehensive, comprehensible and original content on that same website page.

Four SEO guidelines for legal marketing

The second component of SEO for law firms is far more difficult. First, relevance on the internet is similar to relevance in law. Focus is critical. Each web page should cover one narrow topic and one topic only.

A common rookie mistake is covering too many topics on one web page. For instance, “business law” is too diverse to gain a high search ranking. A wiser approach would be to develop separate web pages on contract law, employment law, secured transactions, and so on.

Second, a high-ranking web page must be understandable by the target audience. Eliminate the legal jargon and explain complex legal concepts that everyone from a high school dropout to a Ph.D. in neurosciences can understand with ease.

For example, the difference between actual cause and proximate cause in negligence cases is intuitive to the veteran tort practitioner. But try explaining it in a way that your middle-school child at home can understand it.

Third, short website articles don’t help much. Think of web pages on legal topics as entries in a digital encyclopedia.

Length is sometimes a matter of debate and is dependent on variables. Some SEO specialists say 700 to 800 words can be adequate, while others say 2,500 words is optimal.

Lately Google has addressed this issue vaguely by saying only to “[f]ocus on bringing unique vale to the web overall.”

Regardless, keep in mind that the web is a skimming medium. Website visitors are willing to skim an article quickly in order to find a specific slice of information therein.

As an analogy, no one goes into a grocery store to buy everything in stock. Rather, they will happily peruse many aisles in search of the exact ingredients essential that that night’s dinner.

Fourth, no copying and pasting. Search engines may punish websites containing content lifted from other websites by lowering those websites’ rankings. Whatever you do, don’t break this rule.

The takeaway: Go digital, go pull marketing

For the typical cost of a one billboard for six months, most law firms could hire professional legal writers to generate the first phase of effective website content that will generate new client leads for years to come.

Because specialist legal writers cost less per hour than attorneys and are almost always more skilled at content marketing, a law firm is better served focusing on billable work than generating web copy – with a few exceptions, of course.

Mind you, staying atop search engine rankings requires regularly updating and optimizing existing content and adding new content. With more than 1 billion websites on the internet, competition for search rankings is fierce. Staying ahead of the pack takes an ongoing effort.

Nonetheless, launching a content marketing program incurs a significant upfront cost but then tapers with time. Conversely, as months and years pass, a law firm’s website builds what’s called search engine authority and solidifies its place on the internet.