Effective Online Marketing and how to make it work for your law firm in 2016. Presentation by Megan Hargroder and Stacey Burke for the Women Trial Lawyer's Caucus Leadership Summit in Boca Raton, 2016.

1. Effective Online Marketing
and how to make it work for
YOU in 2016
Presented by: Stacey Burke and Megan Hargroder

2. Stacey Burke
● Licensed Texas lawyer since 2001
● Select Speaking Engagements and Publications:
○ Legal Technology
■ Needles Case Management Software
■ MyCase Case Management Software
○ Legal Industry Professional Associations:
■ American Association for Justice
■ Asian American Bar Association
■ Houston Bar Association
■ Houston Trial Lawyers Association
■ Kentucky Justice Association
■ Law Firm Marketing Mastery
■ State Bar of Texas (multiple sections)
■ Texas Bar Today
■ Texas Women Rainmakers CLE
■ Trial Magazine
■ University of Texas Law School CLE
○ Public Relations and Marketing Professional Associations:
■ American Marketing Association
■ Houston Social Media Breakfast
■ Public Relations Society of America

3. Megan Hargroder
Helping lawyers attract clients online since 2011
● Founder and CEO of Conversations, LLC.
● Works exclusively with lawyers in solo or small
firms boosting their business through social
media, SEO and specialized web development for
the legal industry.
● Host live and online workshops on using social
media to improve your SEO rankings, drive traffic
to your website, and acquire new client leads
● Speaking Engagements:
○ CLE Seminars hosted by the Louisiana Bar
Association
○ Small Firm Bootcamp hosted by Paperless
Chase.
@heyitsmegan
conversations.be

4. Leadership: Inward-Facing and Outward-Facing
1. Inward-Facing: Adding marketing skills to your repertoire makes you an
indispensable and invaluable part of any law firm. Your increased value will
help you get in front of the firm’s leadership more regularly and allow you to
move up in the ranks often quicker than litigation prowess.
2. Outward-Facing: Personal branding is yours, so build your personal brand
up while you are with a firm and then have valuable digital assets to take with
you should you need to leave.

5. Online Marketing Goals for 2016:
● Control your online reputation
● Engage with, and create new customers
● Increase your reach/impact
● Encourage word-of-mouth advertising

6. Controlling your online reputation:
Bad news: you can’t avoid having
your firm appear on review sites like
Yelp and Google+
Good news: you CAN take control
of your firm’s online reputation by
claiming and monitoring these types of
profiles.

7. The best kept secret
of online marketing:
Listing optimization
(i.e. claiming and optimizing your online listing profiles)
= the quickest, easiest, most impactful way to take control
of your online reputation, boost website traffic, and generate
new leads.

8. Key Benefits of Claiming Your Online Listings:
● Reputation monitoring, management and control
● Accuracy assurance & compliance
● Increases SEO (ability to be found online by your target audience)
● Brings in new leads!
Text WEBTIPS to 33444 for Megan’s free step by step guide

9. Social Media & Your Firm
● Creating a Strategy & Protocol
● Management Tools
● Effective Use & Best Practices
● Tracking Your Results

10. Social Media Strategy & Protocol
MANAGEMENT OPTIONS:
● Internal
● Outsourcing
● A mix of both
* Regardless of the path you choose, you must create a social media policy in
accordance with ethics standards (and go over it with ALL managers, internal or
otherwise)

11. Management Tips and Tools:
● Stay Consistent
● Plan first, write/create second, post/schedule third
● Use a management “hub” like Sprout Social, Hootsuite or Rignite
● Pay attention to your analytics (like best post times, most engaging
content, etc)
● Adjust strategy according to data

12. The Golden Rule of Social Media Content:
Post content that is clear, compelling, useful and in
accordance with your state bar’s ethics rules and advertising
guidelines.
OR DON’T POST ANYTHING AT ALL.

13. Clear, compelling messaging
● Is it relevant?
● Is it interesting?
● Does it encourage engagement?

14. Is it relevant?
GOOD:
BAD: “You hear what Kanye said about Taylor in Famous!?
#taytay #lifeofpablo #immaletyoufinish”
.

15. Is it interesting?
Don’t be this guy.
If you don’t find your
content compelling,
chances are, no one else
will either.

16. Does it encourage engagement?
BAD LEAD IN: “Here is an article on..”
BETTER LEAD IN: “Not sure where to find authoritative
information about divorce laws in your state? Click here:”

17. Pay Attention to those who are already
getting it right:

18. GOOD: @TheMommaEsq

19. GOOD: @LegallyRenee

20. GOOD: @StaceyEBurke

21. RISKY: @Verskette

22. Social Media Advertising:

23. Ethical Considerations and Best Practices:

24. Upholding state attorney advertising
guidelines is critical in online marketing:
What you post potentially constitutes lawyer advertising (so to be safe, assume it always does).
Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct regarding information about legal services (lawyer
advertising) Rule 7.02 Communications Concerning a Lawyer’s Services [also ABA Model Rule 7.1]:
(a) A lawyer shall not make or sponsor a false or misleading communication
about the qualifications or the services of any lawyer or firm.
A communication is false or misleading if it: (1) contains a material misrepresentation of fact or law, or omits
a fact necessary to make the statement considered as a whole not materially misleading.
If you can’t do it in real life - you can’t do it online either. A lawyer must also avoid communications that (1)
solicit or even appear to, (2) disclose confidential or privileged information, and (3) engage with parties
already represented by counsel.

25. Ethics: critical to maintain for online lawyers
You can inadvertently create an attorney-client relationship, and not just in the
state where YOU practice - also where the recipient receives your message.
Fiduciary Relationship: A legal or ethical service relationship of trust where
one party (the fiduciary) is in a superior position of power, and that party has
a duty of care and/or a duty of loyalty to the other (non-fiduciary).
What that means for your social media marketing: Your digital presence
is still you, so whoever manages it and/or speaks on your behalf needs to be
aware of not only your state’s attorney advertising and ethics rules, but also
be careful not to create a fiduciary relationship.
Beware of providing legal advice online that may form an attorney-client
relationship.

26. The good news
Social media, email marketing, CRM software, and other technology and
digital marketing use can help your firm maintain real-time compliance with
ABA Model Rule 1.4 regarding Communications (a) a lawyer shall (1)
promptly inform the client … (2) reasonably consult with the client … (3) keep
the client reasonably informed…
According to the most recent ABA Legal Technology Survey Report, 85% of
law firms have a website and 76% of law firms now maintain an online
presence compared to only 55% in 2012. 24% of lawyers report that they’ve
been retained by a client because of their efforts. Social media and digital
marketing allow your former clients and referral sources to send you new
business

27. Building organic SEO is vital to successful search
marketing
SEO DEFINED: SEO is the process of affecting the visibility of a website
or a web page in a search engine's unpaid results—often referred to as
"natural," "organic," or "earned" results.
ON-SITE SEO: Have good content that is linkable, use title tags, have a
healthy URL structure, use image alt tags, give good metadata, use H1
and h2, maintain good keyword density (above 3%), and more.
OFF-SITE SEO: Use social networking and bookmarking, share your
blog posts, submit your sites to search engines, link-building, claim and
build out directory listings, publish digital press releases, and more.

28. Analytics and Monitoring Impact
For site visits, your best friend should be Google Analytics:
● Here you can track metrics including, but not limited to:
○ Time spent on site, pages visited, where traffic came from, where
it went, site visits, etc.
This data can give you some very valuable insight:
● Example - if people are hitting your home page and bouncing off
immediately, the page may be taking too long to load, or it’s not
grabbing their attention.
● Or - if you don’t have any traffic coming from
Facebook/Twitter/Google+, you may need to bolster your self-
promotion efforts on your social channels.

29. Social Media Analytics
Meanwhile social analytics, offered directly from Facebook/Twitter/Google+, allow
you to see:
● What posts were viewed most, which ones were shared/clicked on, etc.
You have to watch for these things. If your content isn’t performing, you need to
change your strategy! You can try
● Changing post times, narrowing or broadening your focus on your niche, changing the
way you write link posts, adding memes that relate to your niche, posting less (or more)
about your brand

30. Some email marketing stats:
● 50 million people will check email at least 5 times today
● Email reaches 93% of internet users
● Response rates to email are 10x greater than direct mail
● Adults account for at least 87% of all U.S. email users
● There are at least 216.6 million U.S. email users
● Two out of three people in the U.S. use email
● Use an ESP for its greater deliverability and “white list”
status.
○ Sending mass emails from a personal account is a
no-no, you’ll most likely go right into someone’s
spam folder and they’ll never see it. Also…
As you can see, emails are an INCREDIBLY effective method of
reaching your followers, so make sure you use it!

31. Facebook.com/MarketingLawyers
@StaceyEBurke
www.SlideShare.net/StaceyBurke
http://bit.ly/SEBPCnews

32. www.Conversations.Be
@HeyConversation
@HeyItsMegan
ConversationsSocialMedia
● Text WEBTIPS to 33444 for all presentation materials & guides!

33. questions?