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We’ve got some interesting pieces to discuss for February’s legal marketing roundup. Below, you will find a brief analysis of some law marketing stories that caught our eye over the last month:

•  “4 Online Strategies to Help Your Law Firm Stand Out from the Crowd”

Stephen Fairley of The Rainmaker Blog tells you how to distinguish yourself from other law firm websites in this piece. He recommends being as specific as possible about your practice- meaning, focus on what you specialize in so that the right clients can find you. His next suggestion is to offer an incentive as a call to action on your website, which will entice potential clients to visit your office in person. Another important bit of advice is to make sure you have different landing pages for each practice area of your law firm. This way, you can target the right clients and they’ll know you specialize in the area they need. Lastly, Stephen says you should have a blog that is uniquely customized for your audience. He comments: “Having a blog that talks to clients ‘one-on-one’ through insightful writing on subjects that matter to them in terms they can understand will make you stand out and help you start a dialog with prospects.”

• “The Power of User Comments for Your Law Firm”

This casestudies.com blog post by Barry B gives an overview of why user comments online can have a greater influence on your firm than you may think. Not only is it useful as a tool to get potential customers to contact your firm after reading good reviews, it’s also seen as solid user-generated content by search engines like Google™. This can add real value for your law firm’s website. Barry states: “Comments from readers are essentially social signals, something that major search engine providers Google and Bing have admitted applying to their secretive ranking algorithms.”

As I shared a couple of months ago in my post on our 2012 study, we recently commissioned another solo and small practice survey on marketing.  The survey reveals some telling information about how lawyers are using different marketing channels, why they do or don’t plan on using others, and what this all means for their overall success. Survey results are based on responses from 260 solo and small practice lawyers in the United States, and it measures their efforts and effectiveness of various marketing activities. All the respondents to the survey were from firms with five or less lawyers. Below, we present the most important stats and conclusions from the Yodle Law 2013 Solo and Small Practice Survey.

• Almost half of the lawyers surveyed (44%) cited their websites as their most used channel for marketing their practice.
•  Social media usage for solo and small law firms was fairly low in 2012, with only 23% of respondents leveraging this tool. However, 39% of lawyers who have never used social media to promote their practice intend to start doing so in 2013. Even though lawyers plan on ramping up their social media efforts this year, they should keep in mind that it may not lead to more clients if that’s their goal. In fact, although social media is continuously evolving, it has proven to be a poor acquisition tool. IDG Research/Reuters found that even though 95% of consumers use at least one form of social media, only 20% of Facebook users have purchased a product or service as a result of advertising or comments on Facebook.
• The number of lawyers that leveraged pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) in 2012 was even less than social media. Only five percent utilized PPC while 14% used SEO. However, lawyers indicate that they’re planning to increase their investment in both PPC and SEO in 2013. 16% of lawyers who did not leverage PPC plan to use it in 2013 and 33% of lawyers who didn’t utilize SEO expect to in 2013. Although the percentage of lawyers who currently use SEO and PPC may seem low, it’s important to note that those attorneys who are leveraging these tools reported being “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with ROI, compared to other marketing tools (“Top 2 Box” includes “satisfied” and “very satisfied”).

Welcome to the January legal marketing roundup! In case you missed it, here’s an update on some of the more interesting legal marketing news from the last month:

• “Monitoring your Online Reputation in 2013”
  In this recent piece in Web Marketing Today, Micah Buchdahl gives lawyer-specific, step by step advice on how you should monitor your firm’s online presence and why it’s important. As he says, “We live in an age where the online search result is the new brochure or biography—people are less interested in what you have to say about yourself than what others are saying about you.”

• “4 Steps to Attract Qualified Prospects to Your Website”
  Have you identified your ideal target market? In this post on the Rainmaker Blog, Stephen Fairley explains why this is crucial in order to ensure that you are attracting the most qualified prospects to your website. Read the article to find out what other steps Fairley recommends to draw the right attention.

In this latest installment of our monthly series, here’s a summary of the more interesting legal marketing content you may have missed in December:

• “If your law firm does not provide a proper online experience on a smartphone… then you are likely losing business right now”.  On Web Marketing Today, Micah Buchdahl provides a great overview on the market’s shift towards mobile and what that means for legal marketing.

• Check out “Law Firm Marketing Rules for 2013: Out With the Old, In With the New.”  Larry Bodine on Law Marketing Blog outlines some key changes in the legal marketing space (primarily that as competition increases, so too should your approach to marketing).  This is a terrific and concise article that gets to the important points that all attorneys should consider when adjusting 2013 marketing plans.

We’re currently commissioning our 2013 Yodle Law Solo and Small Practice Survey. I’m excited to see the results, which will provide us with some fresh perspectives on how lawyers view their marketing. However, before we look to the future, I thought that it would be interesting to do a retrospective and review what we discovered in our 2012 Solo & Small Practice Survey. The survey, conducted in March 2012 with over 300 solo and “small law practices” (defined as having less than 5 attorneys) across the country, produced a number of interesting results. Here are some of the more noteworthy findings:

1. Solo and small practices spend a relatively small amount of money on marketing.

• 63% of small practices spend under $200 per month; 90% spend less than $1,000 per month