Answer this question in one sentence in 30 seconds or less: What is the purpose of your law firm website?
If your answer had anything to do with profit, slap yourself in the face. Twice. Your law firm website is not about profit (at least not directly). That may be your goal. Your law firm website can and should contribute to that goal. But making money is not the right goal for a law firm website.
So what is the right answer? Simply this: To convince a defined audience that you can solve their problem and do it better than your competitors.
The communicated ability to meet your clients’ needs better than your competitors is your law firm’s client value proposition. It is why your clients are willing to give you money. If you get this right, everything else (including the money) will fall into place.
Let me put it another way: If you want to make more money with your law firm website, focus on the value that you deliver to your clients instead of the economic benefit you receive from your clients.
Your website should show your clients that you really do understand their needs. Your site visitors aren’t searching for self-laudatory statements or general practice descriptions that read just like every other bland attorney website. Most of them don’t care where you went to school and aren’t equipped to evaluate your drafting skills. They just want to know that you understand and can solve their problems.
Don’t be like so many attorneys who launch their website or blog, slap together a few generic practice area descriptions, then whine about how internet marketing didn’t work for them. Such drivel may have worked in the past, but it doesn’t work today’s market and it will not work in the future. The internet has fundamentally changed marketing. The shift from the old-guard form of marketing by interruption is quickly being replaced by the inbound paradigm.
The most successful companies are those that do the best job of solving their customer’s problems. Build your law firm around this, and build your law firm website around communicating this.
About Jack Falconberg
Nice post. Sometimes “different” is a good start. What I mean is, if other law firms (competition) are saying the exact same thing, saying something a little different can have positive results. Clients don’t know how to filter through it if everything sounds the same.