Marketing A Law Firm in Las Vegas - The Importance of Marketing

In any kind of sales, competition determines market share of clients. In the legal field, where competition for business is cutting edge, marketing a law firm is exceedingly important. Even in locations where competition for business is minimal, solid marketing strategies can make a difference to a successful practice.

Planning a Marketing Campaign for Law Firms in Las Vegas

Some law firms are involved in general practice, incorporating more than one area of law. Or, practices may be specific. In either case, planning a marketing strategy is key to establishing law firm reputation as well as to promote new clients. One factor that shouldn’t be overlooked is “Word of Mouth”. Often, this is the best type of advertising for marketing a law firm. Part of marketing strategy should include promoting referrals by existing clients. Another facet of legal marketing is image. Most law firms prefer to adapt the image of reliability, professionality and truthworthiness. Prospective clients are attracted to law firms they feel offer “individual” service rather than perfunctory legal consultancy. This is especially true of law firms involved in more than one type of legal discipline.

Getting Marketing Off The Ground

With law firms, advertising directs attention to details of the practice as well as to collective experience and background of firm lawyers. Plan an advertising campaign that will format firm branding far into the future. This may include a broad promotion in newspapers, magazines, legal newsletters and magazines and internet marketing via a law firm website. The website should reflect the intent of the services clearly and in a concise manner. In addition, it’s a good idea to provide information about the firm’s lawyers. The most excellent branding occurs when uniformity is maintained throughout advertising, marketing materials such as letterhead, envelopes, business cards and brochures outlining services. These should bear a professional logo that incorporates law firm image with an eye-catching appeal. Logos are singularly important to any business and is an identifying feature in branding. It should be used in all facets of business promotion. This is especially true whenever new services are to be marketed. Adopting a creatively designed logo project’s the firm’s name for fastest public recognition.

Professional Marketing Consultants

For the sake of expediency, marketing consultants do the work of planning advertising campaigns, arranging for logo design, business cards and letterhead, and assisting with website design and planning. For new law firms, it’s helpful to take advantage of professional Las Vegas marketing consultants. Ideally, a law firm website should be interactive so it will encourage client contact. Create an interactive website to best advantage by making it user friendly, including search engine optimization features. The measure of importance of marketing a law firm should be a business priority.

When you compose an email for marketing purposes, keep these points in mind:

• Create a title for the email that will cause readers to want to open your email. People glance at the first few words of the email title to even decide if they are going to open it or delete it.
• Write interesting headlines. So you’ve gotten the reader to open your email, now give them a reason to read on. Glancing at the headlines should make you want to read the news item.
• Keep main articles concise, interesting and to the point. Get to your point quickly, whether it is an offer of some sort, or any other call to action. People’s attention spans are very short, especially in email.
• Create links back to your website when possible.  Readers will click on the links if they want more information.

There are many places you can source an email list for marketing purposes. Most of the time you must buy a list and the prices and quality of the lists you purchase may vary. A good place to start is by exporting the contacts from your email or address book.  They are most likely current clients, business associates and friends. The first time I exported my address book years ago, I was surprised to end up with a list of over 400 email addresses.  If you would like to purchase a list of email addresses, there are many options available to you. Remember to decide upon a target market for your purchased email list. For example, are you trying to source a list in Las Vegas of Small Business owners on the west side of town or specific to zip codes or is your target a national audience of dog owners let’s say.

Websites you can purchase email marketing lists from:

The process is fairly simple. You need to find an online company, set up an account, pay a monthly fee depending on how big your list is and how many times a month you email your list. They will have instructions on how to import email addresses from your address book or the list you’ve purchased.

What is search engine marketing (SEM)?

Search Engine Optimization is the biggest buzzword right now especially when you talk of promoting yourc company’s website. But did you know that Search Engine Marketing is another important spoke in the business marketing wheel? The first thing you should know is that Search Engine Marketing, SEM is quite different from Search Engine Optimization or SEO. With this being said, you will find a lot of business people treating SEM the same as SEO.

The first thing that differs between SEO and SEM is the perception of Search Engine Marketing. Search Engine Optimization works on the key words and key phrases and content of your website’s pages and how the pages need to be designed keeping Search Engines in mind and how they will rank on a search. Search Engine Marketing on the other hand deals exclusively with how you promote your website with search engines. It could be said that a Search Engine Optimization effort could be a subset of a Search Engine Marketing campaign.

Search Engine Marketing Techniques

Basically, any technique by which the visibility of a website improves with search engines is covered under the umbrella of Search Engine Marketing. Thus, from an aggregate perspective, you could look at techniques like Blogging, Search Engine Submissions, Social Networking, Viral Marketing and other techniques. You could also look at methods like Contextual Advertising and Paid Inclusion being subsets of Search Engine Marketing.

Contextual Advertising

Not many are aware of the complete workings of contextual advertising. Here’s an example to illustrate the concept. Assume you have visited a website A, which is in the Sports niche. When you visit the website, you could see some ads popping up from the site that deals with sports accessories or memorabilia dealers. Basically, you see an ad which is relevant to the context and the content of that particular website. This is how contextual advertising works.

Now, how does the business owner benefit from these ads appearing on their website? Simple, the ad appearing on the webpage would have a revenue basis tied onto it depending on certain actions being performed by the users. For example, a webmaster could get paid if 100 users click on the ad, and so on.

Paid Inclusion and Pay-Per-Click Placement

There are some search engines on the internet that are very popular (google, aol, msn, yahoo), so popular that business owners and webmasters are inclined to invest some money to get into the directory of these resources just so that they have the opportunity to get ranked on the first page as a “sponsored listing” so they can get the traffic and recognition of coming up on the first page of a google search, let’s say. This is where Paid Inclusion or Pay-Per-Click placement comes into play.

A web master or web developer can set up a paid inclusion or pay-per-click campaign to help promote your website (or if you are so technically inclined, you could do it yourself as well). You choose the key words you’d like to rank for, set a budget and run your campaign. The main objective of this is to have some traffic through search engines.

With the above knowledge, you should be in a position to understand that Search Engine Marketing is separate from Search Engine Optimization. One of the best examples of SEM at work would be to see the working of Google AdWords, which best symbolizes Contextual Advertising.

At the end of the day, both the techniques increase the visibility and page rankings of your company’s website within the search engines.

Many companies and businesses in Las Vegas make the mistake of launching a website and thinking that drones of visitors will magically arrive each day. Not true. Just like a business card that sits in your pocket if you don’t hand it out to people, most of the time a website can sit out on the internet and if you don’t market that web site, people may not even know you or your business exists.

Here are some ways you or a professional internet marketing company can help market your business online:

• Launch a Website – if you don’t already have a web site you are WAY behind the curve.  Get one up right away.
• Search Engine Optimization – research keywords and key phrases that people would find your website during a search on a search engine and put those words and phrases into the copy on your website, make those same words links between your website pages and place those same words into your website’s site map.
• Online PR – There are many opportunities for online PR and Press Releases. For more information see my article on Press Releases for Your Las Vegas Business.
• Google’s Free Online Marketing Tools – here’s a list from wikipedia.org. Very helpful and mostly free.
• Pay-Per-Click Campaign – ever wonder what those Sponsored Listings are when you search on google, yahoo, msn or aol? That’s right, they pay. You can set up your own campaign, choose they keywords, set your monthly budget and start coming up right along side your competitors by setting a pay-per-click campaign.
• Email Marketing – Use a company like Constant Contact to set up an email marketing campaign. You can upload your list of contacts, choose a template and write your email newsletter, it’s easy and fun.
• Launch a Blog – Do you have a lot to say about your particular area of expertise or industry (like I do, hee)? Then launch a blog and tell visitors what you’re thinking and let them find out who you are and what your business specializes in.
• Banner Advertising – Consider buying space on a targeted web site that promotes your products and services. Set up a special landing page so you can track the results

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. RSS is a network of web feeds used when publishing blogs – and other online publishers like news feeds – over the internet. These feeds are of great marketing value when they are syndicated out regularly changing or timely blog or web content into the internet automatically. People can subscribe to these feeds and website developers and web masters can pull these feeds as content into their own websites.

How Can You Read an RSS Feed?

RSS Feeds are read by other websites and subscribers by using a RSS Reader, a software that allows you to pull the RSS feeds from websites and display them for you to read and use as content. An RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.

Here are a list of a few popular RSS Readers:

• AmphetaDesk
• NewsGator
• Google Reader
• Bloglines

Things you will need:

• Business Plan – You will need a business plan if you are looking for investors. Your business plan should be well though out and include revenue projections.  The public library is a great place to find books to assist you.
• Marketing Plan – From the business plan should come a Marketing Plan for your new business. The Marketing Plan should includes a lot of key information that will help you lay out the plans for reaching your target marketing.
• Incorporation - You should incorporate your company to be on the up-and-up and you’ll need to to obtain a federal tax ID as well.
• Business Licenses – You will need the appropriate business licenses for the City of Las Vegas and Clark County.
• Insurance – You should have the necessary insurance coverages based on what type of business you are opening.  Contact your insurance agent and they can help.
• Legal Advice – Ideally, you should consult with an attorney to review your Agreements, any claims you are making with your products and services, and to review any copy you write for your website, including privacy information and disclaimers.
• Marketing Materials – Of course you need marketing materials to promote your business – logo, business cards, letterhead, envelopes, a website design, brochures, and PowerPoint presentations and key.
• Website – Not just any web site, you will need a professionally architected and designed web site that a reputable company should help you to strategize and build (see perkolate.com).