Imagine that you’ve invested your money in marketing your law firm. You decide to revamp and launch your website. You pore over the relaunch documents, make sure it looks good. The designs come back, and you choose the one you like, you like this color, don’t like that one, and after 4,000 more edits, the website you love is up. Now imagine that the website doesn’t draw clients and leads like you were promised. What happened? What was the problem? If I told you it was you…would you be mad? “You should not like your law firm’s website!”
Lauren Currin, Lawyers Marketing Associates We had the pleasure of speaking with Lauren Currin last year on the Consultwebs legal marketing podcast, LAWsome, about law firm websites, and that’s when she dropped the above quote on us.
Everyone says they like their law firm’s website, but for the wrong reasons. They should love it because of the results it gets with clients, not based on the reaction it gets from non-clients. I wish the truth was something more palatable, but your love and acceptance is NOT the main ingredient to a successful law firm website. In fact, objective feelings around marketing tend to create more roadblocks than on-ramps. Shareholders don’t need to be concerned if they like or don’t like their website, they need to be convinced it converts leads into clients. Let’s first talk about the Design for Conversion methodology, and then we’ll provide you with tips to improve the conversion rate for your law firm’s website.
Design for conversion
The Design for Conversion methodology is based on four simple marketing mandates.
1) Measure success + understand business goals –
To achieve any meaningful progress with any marketing endeavor, especially a website, there has to be a clear understanding of what the law firm’s business goals are and what achieving those goals looks like. A solid law firm marketing strategy will be a big help here
2) Unwavering UX/UI & site structure standards –
A user searches a main keyword found on your site, finds your firm at the top of Google and clicks through to your website. You now have just a few seconds to grab that user’s attention and keep him or her from clicking back to the search results and moving on to the next site in the list. If your site looks too cluttered (User Experience, or UX) or is too difficult to navigate (User Interface, or UI), users aren’t going to stick around.
It is imperative to have unwavering, and objective, standards when it comes to clean design that functions well and appears user-friendly.
3) Align marketing metrics with performance –
We are all too happy to get lost in the latest dashboard or spreadsheet, while the essential tasks we set out to complete remain unfinished. Traffic, likes, shares, client funnels; these are the metrics that define the effects and progress of marketing on a surface level. Clicks, calls, and client journeys; these are the metrics that connect marketing to your business development efforts. Design for Conversion means we align marketing metrics with performance, not perspectives.
4) Scale-up what works –
Design for Conversion works smarter, not harder, meaning that Consultwebs uses our extensive knowledge and exclusive legal industry experience to envision the conversion goals while designing your law firm’s website.
Since 1999, Consultwebs has worked on thousands of law firm websites, designed thousands of landing pages, and converted well over a million leads into signed cases.
The Design for Conversion methodology is a contributing factor to our client’s success. Our data set of web design templates and formulas that have been empirically proven to convert leads for law firms, spans over two decades.
So while we can always forge forward with the latest web design practices, Design for Conversion keeps us grounded on achieving goals, and results, for our legal marketing clients.
0
