Turn Your Legal Website Into a Profit Machine

You spend thousands of TV advertising dollars every month to drive people to your website. But what happens when they get there? Do you even know? Here are some questions to consider:

  • Do they leave too soon, leaving your law firm with a missed opportunity?
  • Does your website’s look and feel match that of your TV ad campaign, creating cohesion and establishing instant brand integrity?
  • Is there compelling content to keep visitors engaged and interested in learning more about your attorneys and legal work?
  • Can users easily navigate your site and find written and video content that completes the story you started to tell on TV?

If you don’t know, there’s no better time to start making sure your TV and online efforts match up. Don’t neglect the TV’s small-screen sister if you want to see real ROI in 2015.

How to get your legal website up to speed:

It’s not uncommon for law firms, and most advertisers, to spend big for a big splash on TV but skimp on an online presence that ultimately pays off that first impression. A smarter strategy is to start making the messages on both platforms work hand in hand. For many legal firms that may require building a better website or enhancing the existing online “user experience.”

If you like your current website design and it pays off the brand image you’ve presented through your TV advertising, then focus first on content. (If not, get your TV and Web visuals in sync ASAP.) These days content comes in many forms, but the most competitive companies are producing it regularly, creating timely, informative assets on their websites weekly, if not daily.

Here are three quick ways to get your website up to speed with your TV efforts and ensure that once you’ve sent people to your website they stay there—at least long enough to prompt a call or an email, and ideally convert to a case.

Leverage video content: You’ve already got great TV creative (or perhaps are about to produce a new spot), why not leverage that asset on your website, especially given that two years from now video is expected to account for nearly 70% of all consumer Internet traffic, according to Cisco. Talk to your agency about repurposing a portion of your TV commercial with interactive or shareable elements appropriate for Web viewing, and start to build a bank of short videos that introduce your firm, position your attorneys as knowledgeable leaders and ultimately help you rise above competitors in your space.

Create a content strategy: One big push to update website content to match your impact on TV isn’t sustainable. A creative burst will likely die out, along with your online leads, if you don’t have a long-term strategy for Web content. That starts with assessing the existing tone of your website copy and overhauling it if it’s outdated or doesn’t complement how you’ve positioned your firm on TV. What follows is even more critical:

  1. Create a content calendar for distributing content regularly on a blog, news section or video storehouse, for example.
  2. Depending on the size of your law firm, consider hiring or designating a content manager, or outsourcing production to your ad agency or a content marketing expert.
  3. Each month monitor how your new content is performing via Google Analytics and other data measures your agency can recommend.

Track & compare marketing efforts: Keeping abreast of statistics such as what pages people are visiting on your website, where they stay, what they read the longest and what content they share most will build the intelligence you need to tweak and hone content in the future. The second part of gauging performance, and therefore better understanding how your audiences digest content, is comparing the success of your TV campaigns alongside your Internet marketing efforts. By measuring TV and online video against each other, you will start to see how the two work in concert and will be able adjust your cross-media mix in a way that makes sense for your advertising budget.

So as you start to evaluate your television advertising this year and strive for constant improvement, think big picture—yet outside the big screen. If your website doesn’t measure up to and pay off your TV campaign, it’s time to spend some quality time online.