By Legal Futures’ Associate Allianz Legal Protection [1]
In part one; we looked at the web, content writing, imagery and user experience. In the sequel, we’ve tackled how you can increase brand awareness through social media, SEO and paid-digital.
Social media
Each time you post a blog, article or news story on your website; it gives you a great opportunity to create social content. In the legal sector, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are the most appropriate channels to help target new customers, stay connected with existing customers and drive conversations in the industry. Always start with your objectives on social media. What do you want out of your activity? Once you’ve identified your objectives, work backwards to identify the best way to achieve these outcomes.
The point of social media for businesses is to interact in a personable way, so injecting personality while maintaining a professional tone is a good place to start in building your presence. It’s important to monitor the social channels you use, as they can be used by customers to make a complaint. In this case, your complaints process will still need to be followed. As with your website, maintaining a consistent brand throughout your social platforms will make them more credible. This also extends to the regularity and quality of the content you post.
SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most important digital marketing techniques of today. And for good reason – on average, Google processes over 40,000 searches every second[1]. Someone may search for ‘personal injury lawyer London’, and this will return 23,200,000 results. Good SEO is all about getting your website to the top of those results for as many relevant words and phrases as you can. Getting the top is actually free too, so it comes as no surprise that SEO is immensely competitive. Here are some useful hints and tips to optimise your SEO:
- Cleanse your website to remove old or out of date content and information
- Posting relevant content often will increase credibility with Google’s algorithm and boost ranking
- Ensure there are no typos or grammatical errors
- Avoid any form of repetition (except for essential clarity or navigation), even in the back-end of your website
- The meta data should be filled in to keep your website tidy and should contain key words your business wants to be found for in Google
- Your website must be accessible – if you’re unsure check with your web developer
- Signposting on your website should be clear, with no unnecessary repetition
- Content should be relevant to your audience with key terms and phrases used
- If you take someone else’s content (with their permission of course), ensure they are sourced and ask your web developer to add a canonical tag to avoid being penalised by the search engines
- Posting quality social content
- It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Building your SEO ranking takes significant time and effort, but it’s worth it.
Paid-digital
Digital marketing can be a useful way to tactically spend the marketing budget. Pay per click (PPC) puts your website to the top of search engines like Google. The cost per click for personal injury enquiries is around £24 and for clinical negligence, it’s around £30[2]. While this can help increase traffic to your website and improve conversion rates, being on the advertisement section of the page can be off putting for some potential customers.
Another way of utilising paid-digital advertising is through social media. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook all have options where you can promote your social content. It’s a great way to target a specific audience within set parameters, such as age demographic and geographical location. With this, you can add a set amount to the pot and once it runs out, that’s it.
We’re here to help
Allianz Legal Protection offers marketing consultancy across all areas, from digital to events to communications. If you’d like to know more then please contact your account manager.
[1] http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/ [2]
[2] IRN Research (2018)