By: Bryn Hughes, Marketing & Communications Manager, LexisNexis® Martindale-Hubbell®
Even in this online age, the adage that ‘people buy from people’ remains true in the professional services sector. Clients still tend to base their buying decisions on the expertise and reputation of individual experts and the chemistry of the relationship.
Our recent research
into the buying decisions of in-house counsel supports this proposition. In 2012, we surveyed views of 219 senior in-house counsel at large companies across Western Europe, about why they hired - and fired - their external law firms. Whilst the research was undertaken within Western Europe, the patterns of responses remain consistent with research that we’ve conducted in other world regions. Common ‘magic ingredients’ of existing relationships relate to human factors such as dedication and chemistry, alongside expertise, quality of ability/competence and cost/fees. Proficiency in business and legal skills alone are only part of the picture. At the selection stage, understanding the client’s business needs is at the top of the list. Speedy response times, client service and communication skills and expertise and reputation of the individual lawyer are regarded as the next group of favoured attributes.
For law firm marketers, the key takeaway from this research is clear: care must be taken about how biographies are written. How potential clients react to these profiles is likely to influence whether, or not, your firm’s lawyers are instructed. This formed the basis for a discussion at a workshop session at a recent Professional Services Marketing Group (PSMG) Conference.
Visibility
One of the most basic challenges for any professional services marketer is to ensure that the content of their fee-earners’ biographies are visible to potential clients who are searching online. First and foremost, this can be achieved by ensuring that content is written in a way to target specific keywords or phrases and optimise these for search. Simultaneously however, the challenge is to also write in a style that will appeal to and engage a human reader.
Of course, some fee-earners may be sceptical about the extent to which clients use internet-based research tools to search for professional services advisors. However, a quick reference to Google AdWords or Google Trends should help to easily indicate just how much traffic and potential new enquiries work they are potentially missing out on, if their content about the firm and its lawyers do not enjoy a high level of visibility online. Google Trends provides useful directional data for marketers to help quantify how many people carry out Google-based searches for specific keywords or keyphrases and can be refined by date range, geography and industry sector.
Understanding which content is most popular on your own website (or identifying areas in which you wish to develop) is part of the ongoing process to target specific keywords/phrases to help increase visibility in searches and generate more inbound traffic and enquiries. In some incidences, a lawyer’s own reputation may be enough to generate this visibility by optimising pages against their own name. Other optimisation strategies to improve visibility include: firm brand name and thought leadership by area of practice, lawyer name, or a combination of geography/area of practice.
Besides ensuring that lawyer biographies on their own website are optimised for search, law firm marketers should also consider adding content about their firm and lawyers on other external websites that are also optimised for search. These can provide further SEO benefits and help to target a wider audience online, beyond the reach of their own website or blog. These include social media platforms such as LinkedIn or Facebook or other online destinations such as martindale.com®. Often, firms use one or more of these different tactics to help maximise their visibility online.
Credibility
Whatever online or offline research methods are initially used by in-house counsel to find a new, law firm, they then move to evaluate the credibility of their shortlisted candidates and assess their expertise and experience. At this stage of the hiring process, the SEO aspect of a lawyer’s profile becomes less relevant – instead content needs to engage the human reader and prove credibility to influence the hiring decision.
Our research into buying decisions of in-house counsel provides useful guidance about the type of content that will help to attract the attention of potential clients looking to validate and select advisors. The most important factor – by no means a surprise – is understanding the client’s business needs, objectives and culture. It seems clear that well-written profiles should draw attention to industry-specific expertise alongside technical knowledge, through a number of different ways. A summary of past matters is an obvious key ingredient, because it provides a useful insight into the recent workload and current client base that may match potential buyers’ needs. Links to other content (on their own website or elsewhere), such as industry-specific blogs, thought leadership articles/papers, YouTube videos or speaking engagements, can also help to add further weight and help position an individual as a trusted advisor.
Incidentally, writing profiles in the first person is an interesting approach that was raised during the PSMG workshop discussion. When implemented successfully, it can be an effective means to help communicate the personalities of individual lawyers/accountants (and a possible market differentiator), making it less of a ‘laundry list’ of facts about their professional life that do not always make the most inspiring read!
Reputation
The final criterion that potential clients look for in a well-written biography is evidence that the lawyer has a solid reputation in the wider market – beyond what they say about themselves. There are numerous services available to help independently affirm the reputation of individual practitioners, which can either be integrated into biography content or used on a standalone basis. At Martindale-Hubbell, our law firm customers utilise our secure, online Client Review Ratings system as one way of achieving this. They can invite their clients to rate them against four key selection criteria (on a scale of 1 – 5) which is used to calculate an overall rating score (out of 5). Similarly, other tactics discussed at the workshop included industry awards/recognition, outputs from the firm’s own client-feedback programme, annual research by Chambers or Legal 500, or endorsements on social media platforms such as LinkedIn.
Wherever sources are used to independently prove reputation in the wider market, the aim of these endorsements is the same: to give a potential client the confidence to validate and hire a particular lawyer, safe in the knowledge that they will fit seamlessly into their team and will not damage their own credibility.
1 “The Selection and Retention of Law Firms in Western Europe: Exploring selection criteria and the retention of preferred law firms amongst Western European In-House Counsel”, LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell in association with the Global Legal Post, April 2012.