People Hate Lawyers - And Other Lawyer Marketing Challenges
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by Brandon Cornett
If you are a lawyer looking for marketing advice, and the headline of this article caught your attention, then you should keep reading. This article raises some serious questions (and even provides a few answers) about lawyer marketing in the modern world.
Challenges to Lawyer Marketing
Let's start off by talking about the primary challenge to lawyer marketing, hinted at through the catchy title above. Consumer trust is an obstacle that all marketers must address, but it's a bigger obstacle for those in certain industries. Law is one of those industries.
Many people have a negative impression of lawyers. This type of generalization may not be fair, but that doesn't change the fact that it exists. For example, can you think of any other profession that is the butt of more jokes and one-liners than lawyers? I can't either.
The point of this article is not to attack law as a profession. On the contrary, I'm on the side of hardworking legal professionals because they are my clients! The point of this article is to face the honest facts regarding the general public's opinion of lawyers.
Sure, there are good and bad lawyers — just like any other profession. Sure, there are plenty of honorable lawyers working for noble causes, often pro bono. But this does not change the fact that many people have a negative connotation in their minds regarding lawyers.
How It Affects Your Marketing Program
I'm going to let lawyers off the hook here and say that the general public also distrusts corporations. In the post-Enron world of corporate lies, who can blame us for thinking corporations are heartless greed machines? So it's not just lawyers who face marketing challenges based on consumer perception — it's businesses in general.
But how does all of this affect your lawyer-marketing program? Well, for one thing, it means you'll have to work harder to earn people's trust. If you get a new client from a referral, this will be less of an issue (since the referring person has validated you somewhat). But when somebody happens across your website while researching the legal services you provide, you will face a trust "deficit" right from the start.
Your website visitors will ask themselves: "Who is this person? Is he or she qualified? Trustworthy? Approachable? What reason do I have to call this lawyer over the others I've encountered online?"
The more information you can give people about yourself — and the more you can encourage their trust — the easier time they will have answering these critical questions.
In other words, by inspiring some degree of trust among your prospective clients, you have a greater chance of turning them into actual clients.
So how do you do this? How do you encourage strangers to trust you, especially when they find you online? Here are some tips:
- Include plenty of testimonials on your law firm website. If you have helped people in the past, don't be afraid to ask them for testimonials. Make testimonials more believable by including the past client's full name and photo, whenever possible.
- Start a blog and publish information to it on a regular basis. Use your blog as an education tool. Try to initiate an online conversation through the blog, using the reader-commenting features that are built into the blog.
- Personalize your website. In knowledge-based industries like law, a first impression is critical. Don't dilute this by "hiding" behind your website and using generic pronouns like "we" and "us." Step up and own your website. Put your photo on the site, along with your bio, your professional experience, etc.
- Create an interactive FAQ section, a bulletin board or a forum. These days, you can install such programs onto a website in only a few hours. But think of how much it will set you apart from your competitors, having a place on the website where people can post questions for you to answer!
These are just a few of the ways you can encourage trust from your audience. The more freely you share information with people, the more likely they will be to trust you. Make it the goal of your law firm website or blog to turn strangers into clients by evoking trust.