The lawyer profiles section of your firm’s website should be thought of as your catalogue, your shop window, the place to set out your wares.
Open your web statistic package and look to see how many of your hits are recorded to lawyer profile pages. I’d put money on it being a significant proportion; not surprising then that research shows around 90% of legal service buyers will visit the profile pages of individuals prior to engaging the firm in new matters.
Lawyer profiles have a huge impact on closing deals and wise firms spend a great deal of time crafting, and monitoring their effectiveness. In this article we look at the key features of good lawyer profiles and suggest some ways to ensure you are getting the most from them.
The following diagram shows a typical lawyer profile page.
Settling on an ideal word count for the profile can be difficult given the myriad achievements of individuals at different stages in their legal careers. You should agree on a word count though in order to appear consistent and we’d recommend you aim for around 200 - 300 words plus an introductory paragraph of around 75 words.
Many readers will only read the the introductory paragraph, which should act as a summary of the entire profile. Make sure it is strong enough to stand alone and style it accordingly. A common approach is bold type set around 20% larger that the body.
The question of whether to included such personal details as hobbies and interests is often raised and the answer depend of what type of firm you work at. At some firms it is very much about individual lawyers, and at others it is the firm that seals the deal. Only add personal detail if your firm trades on the personality of individuals and even then make sure your profiles focus on professional experience. Personal details should add a dash colour not dominate the profile. If you include it, personal detail should amount to no more that 20% of the total word count.
Profiles can be more efficiently produced if you provide a template. Keep profiles consistent from lawyer to lawyer, there is nothing more annoying that browsing several potential contacts and finding each person has placed the information you need in a different area of the page. A good way to collect the information is by online form. The most elegant solution is to have such as form built into your intranet or content management system, but you could just as easily create one using an online survey service like Survey Monkey.
Basic contact information is perhaps the most important information on the page. Any marketer worth their salary will tell you about the importance of calls-to-action and for law firms the email link on your lawyer profile is as close as you are likely to get to a ‘Buy Now’ button.
How you handle email enquiries is important and worth giving thought to. The simplest way to let prospects email individual lawyers is to display email addresses directly on the page. You can use a simple HTML tag to turn email addresses in to links that will launch the visitor’s email programme, insert the address, and add a subject of your choice. This allows you to easily identify website enquiries when they arrive:
<a href="mailto:s.logo@logopartners.co.uk?subject=Web Enquiry"> Click to Email Suzanne </a>
Unfortunately, spammers often crawl the web looking for email addresses displayed in this way, so we need to take defensive measures either using Javascript to hide the email address or by employing contact forms.
Although contact forms can be useful from the firms point-of-view, to prevent spam and enable enquiries to be routed appropriately, they can be irritating for the sender. Aim to have your contact forms behave as much like email as possible, with fields for to, from, subject, and body. You may wish to add one additional field, perhaps for routing enquires, but don’t be tempted to add any more - making contact should never be a challenge.
The final consideration in the contact details section is the use of micro-formats and vCards. These give readers the option to automatically download contact details to their address book, and on modern smart-phones let them dial a phone number by clicking on it. Micro-formats take little effort to produce, and bring enhanced functionality that visitors will appreciate.
Selling professional services is difficult because prospective clients can’t easily try before they buy. Thought leadership in the form of articles, case studies, talks, and presentations give prospects a taste of your thinking and enables them to imagine what your firm might be like to work with. This type of content should occupy the majority of the page and might consist of published articles, white papers, research report, presentations and videos.
While all kinds of thought-leadership content is important, material published by third-parties carries additional weight because it validates your claims of expertise. Put this content first and clearly show where it was published.
Individual lawyers will excel in producing different types of content. The thoughtful technician will likely produce heavy-weight opinion pieces that dive deep into their area of expertise, while the charismatic networker is more likely to deliver an entertaining overview of a difficult subject by video. Your lawyer profiles ought to be able to effectively accommodate many different types of content allowing individuals to play to their strengths while at the same time painting a coherent picture of the firm as a whole.
Knowing what to do with visitors who show an interest in your firm but who don’t currently have a need for your services is one of the biggest challenges in online marketing. One way the lawyer profiles section of your site can help you meet this challenge is by capitalising the idea of ‘friending’, ‘following’ or ‘connecting’ popularised by modern social media services like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Experience shows that dripping useful relevant content over time is a good way to cement a decision to act when the right time does come around. Firms can take advantage this new willingness to connect at an individual level by providing tools that allow visitors to subscribe to updates posted by individual lawyers. Such tools could be as complex as turning your site into a full-blown social network, or as simple as providing an email alert whenever new content is posted.
One of the major benefits digital marketing has over tradition media is the extent to which it can be measured. Allowing visitors to subscribe to content produced by individuals enables us to measure the effectiveness of each lawyer’s contribution effectively. That way we can reward high performance, respond to market demands, and quickly develop best practice.
Some firms feel that integrating or linking to external profiles and social media are is just about jumping on the latest trends. That may be so at some firms but intelligent firms see it differently. These sites reach a massive audience and some of the people will be potential clients. Making a effort to reach customers on their own terms can help to build trust and foster a sense of community. We would never force participation upon lawyers as a blanket policy, but you should give those who do wish to take part the opportunity to link to their external profiles.
The lawyer profiles section is one of the most important on your site and a good portion of development resources should be dedicated to it. It is also one of the most difficult to organise because the successful execution relies on the cooperation of almost everyone in the firm. Start collecting information as early in the design process as possible, and remember to show visuals if you are trying to sell a new concept. People often have a hard time imaging what the finished article will look like without seeing something.
Start the design process by deciding what content you want to include. Design sketch layouts and then produce a style guide and questionnaire for lawyers to complete. Collect the responses and edit them into house style. In the meantime the design can be finalised before content is uploaded. Lawyers are often, quite naturally, concerned over what is written about them on the firm’s website, so some kind of formal approval process is a good final step.