You’ve implemented a social media strategy for your organization. You post daily updates and tweets and you start to see an increase in followers. However, in the world of social media marketing, it can be difficult to objectively measure results if you’re not sure what to look for. We’ve compiled a list of performance indicators to help you measure your brand’s social media presence.
Email marketing is a highly effective and inexpensive method of online marketing to provide direct and personal messages to customers. Emails can be automated, and are easy to measure for analytics insights. The power of email is that subscribers are a super-responsive and highly targeted group of people who have “opted in” to receive your email communications, and are thus more likely to be interested in your product or service. Lawyers can capitalize on email marketing by providing useful information in email newsletters and links to social media networks to continue the conversation. Emails are a great way to develop relationships with customers so that when they are ready for your service, they will respond. In essence, emails are an effective brand building tool.
Rule of thumb for effective email marketing:
Strategy. To get the desired outcome, you must decide what it is you want from the customer and which landing page would be most appropriate for achieving those results.
Write a clear, succinct and compelling subject line.
A well-designed email balances content with enough graphics and white space to capture audiences.
Use strong copy with a primary call to action.
A clean signature goes a long way. Be consistent with all company email signatures across the board, with everyone at your law practice.
Speaking of consistency, logo and branding defines a law firm’s corporate identity. Use high-quality original designs.
To get more interaction and feedback, integrate social media into your email campaigns. You may wish to include a “Like us on Facebook”, “Follow us on Twitter”, or a link to your LinkedIn profile.
If you have questions regarding email marketing for lawyers, Blue Interactive Agency offers full service email marketing with tracking and reporting for optimized results. We design custom email campaigns including all services from strategy to list management for interactive marketing solutions that drive ROI. Contact us to see how we can help market your law practice.
Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website organically when searchers type in targeted keywords on search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. The ultimate goal is to get a website to rank on the first page of search engine results – where customers are most likely to look and find your business.
With more and more people going online to find businesses, it’s important for lawyers to market their law practice through a quality, search engine optimized website. SEO will help people to find your website in order to generate qualified leads and potential clients. The great advantage of SEO is that it can target specific keywords for each type of law practice, such as DUI or divorce attorney, to attract the right type of clients. Even better, long tail keywords such as “Fort Lauderdale personal injury lawyer” can narrow down your law practice to a more unique niche.
SEO results are easy to measure through tools like Google Analytics or metrics software like Omniture. These tools provide valuable data such as how many visits a website receives, how long people are staying on the site, where they are coming from and what keywords they are searching for. These analytics give insight on how to effectively market your website.
Compared to other forms of advertising, SEO is relatively inexpensive but has an enormous potential to increase exposure for a company. Search engine optimization is part of a long term interactive marketing strategy to help business increase their online visibility. In addition to law blogging strategies and social media marketing (see previous posts), Blue Interactive Agency helps law firms to maximize ROI by offering search engine optimization services at competitive rates. Contact us to see how we can help.
As part of the Google for Nonprofits program, the company offers a suite of Apps including Google Sites which allow nonprofit organizations to easily create and share group websites to promote their cause. Nonprofits can create dynamic websites without coding or HTML knowledge, which saves on billing costs. Google Sites are a useful tool for centralizing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, videos and slideshows to keep teams organized.
Google Sites offer dozens of pre-built website templates – all customizable – and easy, single click page creation. New templates for company intranets and project workspaces help nonprofits to build collaborative sites.
A great advantage of Google Sites is that it is securely powered by the web, so users can access pages anywhere from the office or on the road via mobile or tablet technology. “Google Sites has revolutionized the way we communicate with our clients and with our team members. We currently have 15 Active Google Sites. Each of our clients has a dedicated site containing important project related information. As an example, we use lists to capture information about the meetings we setup. Several people can update information on each meeting in real time…we now use Google Sites as our core vehicle for communication. We have sites for HR, Training, Sales, Systems and Project Management,” says Steve Lightstone, president of Corner Office Leads.
Google Grants are part of the Google for Nonprofits program aimed to help nonprofit organizations achieve their goals. Google Grants have helped over 6,000 organizations by promoting their websites via free advertising on Google. Once an applicant is accepted, they receive an online advertising account of up to $10,000 a month to spend on Google Adwords. The ads can be used in a variety of ways, from general outreach to fundraising and recruiting volunteers. Google Grants have proved to be immensely helpful for nonprofits. Using Google’s advertising program, UNICEF’s ecommerce site experienced a 43 percent increase in sales, and children’s charity CoachArt saw a 60 to 70 percent increase in volunteers. To take part in Google Grants, complete the all-in-one application form at Google for Nonprofits.
Qualified nonprofits spend their monthly issued allowance by opening a Google Grants Adwords account to create and monitor text ads. By creating relevant ads and choosing the best keywords, nonprofits can draw increased traffic to their websites. Google insists on these basic rules:
You must have a website, and your ads must link to a page on your website.
The keywords you target must be relevant to your programs and services.
Your website cannot display revenue generating ads, such as Google AdSense or affiliate advertising links, while participating in Google Grants.
The on-going, active management of your advertising campaign is your organization’s responsibility once your account is active.
Note that grantees remain in the Google Grants program so long as their account is active and they adhere to guidelines, so it is important to continue monitoring and making the most of the online advertising benefit. A trick to making the most of the $10,000 per month advertising budget is to set the maximum bid to $1 per keyword and the daily budget to the maximum $330. To reach your target audience, choose specific ad text and keywords. You can use the Google Adwords keyword tool to generate suggestions. Go after long tail keywords that have less competition. Track your performance on your AdWords account to see how many clicks, donations, newsletter signups, and volunteer registrations you’ve attained. It is important to monitor performance regularly so you can remove or edit poorly performing keywords.
SXSW Interactive wrapped up this week to make way for the music portion of the festival in Austin, and the conference continues to garner much online chatter over the social media sphere. Twitter was the overwhelming leader in social at SXSW, driving 93% of the conversation, while Facebook and blogs contributed 3% each. A majority of social media comments came from people from California, New York, and Texas (19%, 18%, and 17%, respectively). There were nearly 860,000 tweets about events, speakers, and announcements that occurred during SXSWi. Major happenings include Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann announcing the rollout of the website’s new profile pages this week, as well as an iPad app and a public API on the way. The controversial Homeless Hotspots program is still trending over social media networks.
Each year thousands of digital creatives attend the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, eagerly anticipating new technologies and mobile apps to be introduced. In 2007, Twitter was the breakout social media app that presented real time micro-blogging to the world. Location-based social media platforms like Foursquare and Gowalla were all the rage in 2009 and 2010. Last year, SXSW Interactive introduced group messaging apps Fast Society, Beluga, and GroupMe which allow for group texting, photo sharing, and location sharing. So the million dollar question is; what are the biggest trends for 2012?