Blogs.
Blogs have emerged into the mainstream of legal marketing tactics over the last five years and their influence continues to grow. A 2010 report – “Digital Marketing 2010″ from leading US professional-services marketing firm Greenfield Belser and The Brand Research Company, notes that in a recent study “Finding and Choosing Professional Service Providers on the Web”, 78% of the executive decision-makers surveyed reported that they go online to search for legal, accounting and consulting professionals, and 75% report reading blogs.
Some reasons that blogs have so quickly become entrenched in the legal world:
- Blogs are particularly well-suited to showcasing niche expertise in an industry or practice area;
- The notion of professionally-oriented writing is an organic fit for many lawyers, and is a natural extension of traditional business development activities into the digital realm, as opposed to more “sales”- oriented forms of marketing with which many lawyers are uncomfortable;
- Blogs can be easily updated directly by the lawyer-authors rather than requiring extensive web programming knowledge;
- Blogs provide a forum for interactivity, reader feedback and discussion that make them more engaging and compelling than most standard static law firm websites;
- Blogs enable a more personal tone or “voice” from the author(s) to emerge than is normally the case with a firm website;
- Blogs enable sophisticated purchasers of legal services to quickly obtain a deeper and more accurate sense of the lawyer or firm;
- Top blogs are updated regularly, and therefore tend to be more topical than firm websites and give readers reason to return (or subscribe) on an ongoing basis;
- Blogs tend to perform extremely well on search engines;
- Blogs are relatively fast and inexpensive to implement compared to other forms of legal marketing.
Skunkworks is proud to have developed blogs for several noted Canadian legal bloggers. Our blogs are powered by a leading open-source software platform, with design templates built in-house by our veteran web design team. We also provide blog clients with initial user-training and our own beginner’s user manual, and our team is available for ongoing support as required.
