Internet Marketing for Immigration Practitioners. Presented by: Michael Niren. Immigration Lawyer Network (ILN) Montreal, May 2013

Transcription

1 Internet Marketing for Immigration Practitioners Presented by: Michael Niren (ILN) Montreal, May Bloor Street East, Suite 3500 Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8 Canada Toll-Free: michael@immigrationlawyer.com

2 1 Internet Marketing for Immigration Practitioners Marketing and advertising should be factored into a practitioner s daily routine. It should be part of one s overall business strategy and be seen as an essential tool not only to attract new clients, keep the current ones but also as a way and as an incentive to adhere to compliance standards set out by their Law Societies or regulatory bodies. These days, marketing and the practice of law have blended together as a codependent whole. Good practice is always good marketing. There is nothing like using recognition from a client for a job well done as a tool to promote your practice. We all know how the referral game works. Good marketing also lends itself to good practice. If you know how to promote yourself well, you will invariably generate interest and therefore will open more files. Then, you have a job to do. Don t do it well, and your marketing efforts will soon be short-circuited. Reputation is everything. It can make or break any marketing program. This is why I believe that you really can t have one (marketing and good practice) without the other. Putting it another way, we are and have to be both professionals and business people simultaneously. Internet as a Marketing Tool Having said that, this paper is about a specific form of marketing: Internet marketing. More specifically, it is about creating good websites.

3 Internet marketing in general is nothing new. There are literally hundreds of thousands of businesses in all industries leveraging the Internet in different ways to promote their products and services. Since the early 90s, business have succeeded and failed online. As practitioners, we are no exception. However, as practitioners, we are generally a conservative bunch when it comes to marketing. Perhaps this is because many of us still consider there to be a dichotomy between being professional and being in business. Whatever the reason, we are in an age where if you are not online, you are really nowhere. According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Centre in the United States, 78% of adult Internet users are looking for information on a product or service they are thinking about buying. 71% buy a product. 91% use a search engine to do all this and more. 1 Sure, the bricks and mortar model, face-to-face communication and meetings on the golf course are still relevant but the debate about whether professionals should have a website and market online is long over. Now the discussion turns to how-to rather than whether or not. And the Internet has endless potential for practitioners and especially immigration practitioners. Now I could write endlessly about internet marketing. The subject is as vast as the net itself. And you can access information as easily as I can regarding website development, search engine marketing (SEM), multimedia, affiliate marketing etc. But because this is about Internet marketing for immigration practitioners, I will narrow the scope of this paper to one, crucial aspect of Internet marketing: It s where I think is the 1 Who s Online: internet Users Demographics, online: Pew Research Centre < (Adults)/Online-Activites-Total.aspx>.

4 3 most important place to start, improve and really make an impact on one s practice: your website. So let s get to it. Your Online Office A website is where you start. Consider it as your online office. Whether in real life, you have a home office or a traditional office, you need a place to hang your hat. A website, at minimum, serves this purpose. Like an office, a website will have your name, logo and contact information displayed. Unlike a traditional office, a website can do a whole lot more. It can engage if you want it to. So how do you create your online office? What do I mean by engage? The scope of this paper, to be clear, is not to teach you HTML, Word Press or any programming lessons. Rather, it is to provide you with a general sense of what to do and what works. Note that the online world moves at a fast and furious rate and this means that what is discussed here may be dated sooner rather than later. I am however confident that the Internet has finally come of age to the point where there are some key principles that will pass the test of time regardless of what changes happen. I will try to focus on those. And if you do too, then you should enjoy some online success.

5 What is a good Website? Creating a good website is more than just displaying your essentials such as name, contact information, about us, and other templated information surrounded by cliché images like this: People visiting your site know that you practice law. So do thousands of others who have chosen to display the same image. It is important that your website clearly state what you do in design, imagery and content, but there is nothing like originality to make you stand out above the crowd. What you put online should be not only consumable but should also taste good. Websites should be pleasing to the senses and inspire action. Let s be clear at the outset, the purpose of a good website is to draw your audience s attention, keep their attention and inspire them to act in ways you want. For immigration practitioners this means you want people visiting your site to act in the following ways: pick up the phone and call you, fill out your contact-us form, you directly and in some cases, even pay you online. A good website can do all this for you--much more than a traditional office. Here is what I consider to be the high level 7 Musts for a good website: Easy to Scan Written for people Have multimedia Talk about benefits

6 5 Easy contact information Social proof Call to Action These 7 Musts are not really hard to incorporate if you know what you are doing. Must #1: Easy to Scan A website that is easy to scan means that people do not read online; rather they scan. As consumers of online information, you yourself know this. The best sites are designed to catch the reader s eye and deliver information in bits and bites that are easily digestible. Short paragraphs, good use of headings to break up text, larger, readable font, are all good techniques to make sure that your scanners (not readers) get your message. A good web designer will know all this. What to avoid is having large, dense paragraphs, in small font. The information may be great but it just won t get read. Must #2: Written for People Now this is a tricky one for practitioners. We are trained to write like lawyers. Yes, lawyers are people too but they are not the kind of people your website was designed to attract unless your target market is other law firms or perhaps the government. Even if this is the case, lawyers and other professionals really just want to get the information they need online. Like other people, what they really want is very basic, clearly worded, to-the-point information. We all know how the Immigration Act, court decisions, and operation manuals are written. The level of focus required to understand what is being said is just too intense for online consumption. To be sure, at law school we are all

7 required to take a course in statutory interpretation! This kind of writing just won t fly for a website with a goal to engage. Don t be fooled by the assumption that if you write fancy this will somehow impress your audience. They know you are professionals already. They know that when you are preparing your legal briefs or appearing before a judge in court that you will be speaking and writing in a strange language. When speaking to your prospective client s via online use their language. Now writing for the web is not as easy as it sounds. Just because you may be able to formulate brilliant prose to persuade a judge in favour of your client s position does not mean you can write in ways the layperson can understand. These skills are not necessarily compatible. There are very good writers for hire who specialize in website content writing and who understand how to properly present your message to your target audience. Must #3: Have Multimedia As I mentioned, a good website will properly engage its audience. Engagement is all about drawing people in, getting them confortable and interested in your site and therefore in your law practice. Varied use of multimedia will serve this purpose. With increased bandwidth, never before have there been so many options for multimedia: videos, webinars, imagery, instant-messaging, flash the list goes on. A good website designer will make use of many different platforms in strategic ways throughout your website. Nothing like having great content about one of your services accompanied by a video to reinforce the message.

8 7 Multimedia is something that you will likely have to be involved in even though you may not be technically savvy. This is because the subject of whatever platform you choose will probably be about you, your law firm and your services. This means you or your staff, will likely play a starring roll in the videos for example. A good working relationship with your web designer or multimedia consultant is really important so that your message comes across in an impressive, engaging manner. Must #4: Talk about Benefits This is another hard one for lawyers. We like to talk about ourselves. Many of us think that by prominently displaying our impressive bios all over our websites that this will do the trick to get clients to sign up. True, people are looking for qualified and experienced practitioners. However, what is at the top of your client s mind is really not what law school you attended or that you were asked to be a keynote speaker at a symposium. What they want is information about and solutions to their problems. It s about them folks. Not us. You have to list the benefits your clients will gain if they hire you. So when it comes to promoting yourself online, you should put yourself in the minds of your target audience, think about what problems they face and how you can help. It s really marketing 101 and works for all industries. Sure tell the world who you are, but front and center should be how you can benefit them. If you are unsure about what to say, take an inventory of your caseload and make a list of your top case types. Voila!

9 Must #5: Easy Contact Information This is a no-brainer. If you have an engaging website that gets your online audience excited about yours services, you better have your contact information readily available and prominently displayed. I can t tell you how many websites I have visited where it s next to impossible to find a phone number or an . These sites literally made me work to find about how to contact them. That is just bad practice. There is nothing wrong with having your contact information or a way to contact you on every page of your site. Confining it to just your home page is not recommended, especially if your site is large and complicated. You want to be there the second someone decides to contact you. If someone is on an internal page of your site and your contact info is only on your home page, you are not being there in the way you should. Must #6 : Social Proof The following piece of advice may appear to contradict what I said about listing benefits to clients rather than focusing on self-promotion. A deeper look will reveal the opposite. Social Proof is about credibility. In addition to your list of benefits, you should have displayed (especially on your home page) some form of verification that your law firm is legitimate. The reason is because there is a lot of mistrust online and for good reason. I don t have to go into all the stories about online fraud. In our own industry, we hear about it all to often. So in order to counter-act the immediate scepticism that people bring with them as online baggage, you should have clear proof that you are the real deal. How is this achieved? You can list your associations and memberships. For example, if you are an Ontario-based lawyer, you can display the Law Society of Upper

10 9 Canada logo on your site. This is a start as it gives you that credibility people are looking for. This isn t rocket science as you can see. It s all about having the right information displayed the right way. In my view, sites without social proof are missing the extra punch that really tells people that they are in good hands. Must #7: Call to Action The last but not least must is having a clear call to action. Marketers love this term and for good reason. A call to action is simply a statement that explicitly tells what you want someone to do. They key word here is explicitly. There is no room to be bashful when it comes to calls to action. Every website should have a call to action telling people to call you, to you, or to fill out a contact form. You would be surprised how many sites have all the bells and whistles but do not end their messages with a call to action. Without one, people often are, well, left hanging. And that is the last thing you want. Studies have shown that people will take action if you just spell it out for them even though it is obvious as to what they have to do. I am not sure what the psychology behind this phenomenon is but numbers don t lie. Don t assume that just because you have a phone number, an address or a contact-us form, people will just act on them; you have to literally tell them to do so. Therefore make sure a call to action is always in the mix.

11 The above tips are really what I think form the foundation of a good website. There is so much more that can and has been written about websites, and Internet marketing in general. So I will end with a few other important insights that I think will also help. Bonus Tips 1. Content is King: Make sure you blog and add content to your site on a regular basis. Consider hiring a content writer if you are too busy. 2. Getting found on Google is key. You can have a great website but if you are not found then there is no point. Adding regular content will help but consider hiring a Search Engine Marketer (SEM) to get your site ranked on the search engines. This can be costly and if not done right can get you blacklisted from the search engines. Be very careful about who you choose to hire. 3. Be generous with your information. Tell people not only what you do but also how to do it. In the vast majority of cases, people will not do it themselves anyway but will want to hire a professional that informs. 4. Consider social media. Beyond your website you can become an active participant in Facebook, Linked In, Google + and other social platforms. This will not only help to draw traffic to your website but will enhance your online persona and credibility. 5. Be cognizant of your online reputation. We live in the age of review sites. Do a bad job and the world may know about it. Conversely, if you think you helped a client, no reason not to ask them to post a review on one of the online review sites such as Yelp or on Google.

12 11 6. Always consult with your Law Society Rules of Professional Conduct, or regulatory body for guidance in advertising and marketing restrictions Internet marketing for immigration practitioners is something that will not be going away but will become even more relevant as the online world infiltrates into more and more aspects of our lives. We are at the point where, in most industries, we expect ondemand services online. If you are not there, you are nowhere. Written by: Michael Niren Special thanks to Giovanni Crescenzi for his editing and research assistance