For every savvy lawyer there are 10 other savvy lawyers who also have good domain names and good web copy.
So the question is: “how do you get a leg up for your services business when there is serious competition in your space for marketing your type of firm online?”
Here are two subtle things you can do to boost your Preference Quotient that will give you a better chance of connecting your professional services to the people and companies that need them or will make referrals to someone else.
The idea behind a brand name is to give people the impression of two things: (1) that this is not your first time to the dance; and (2) that you have created a process around your service.
Let me explain this further.
People naturally are attracted to systems that suggest success. They don’t want to be guinea pigs.
They want to know that you have a plan which you have done before and that you can repeat again for them – even if it has to be customized and personalized for their situation.
Divers have a system they call “plan the dive, dive the plan” which reinforces itself every time they dive.
Airplane pilots have a very cumbersome checklist because one item missed can mean a plane crash.
How to put these two subtle ideas into practice:
Take an ordinary employment handbook you have used for years. Start calling it “The Bulletproof Restaurant Employment Handbook.”
All of a sudden, the boring handbook has become bulletproof and it’s focused on restaurants.
What is one of the employer’s biggest fears with employees? Getting sued by an employee. Often employees can sue just to threaten an employer as a sort of blackmail – especially in employee friendly states like California.
When an employer sees a law firm offering a bulletproof handbook, don’t you think that is going to make a huge impression and shock them out of their trance of wanting to ignore the information about your employee handbook just like they ignore everyone else’s handbook description too?
Put a Trademark symbol ™ after the handbook name to give it that official stamp that says you didn’t just name your process (that protects employers from angry and deceitful employees), you protected your process too.
If you want, you can even make an acronym out of the name of the handbook.
All these little subtleties are building blocks to be used in the game of connecting more intimately with your target audiences and convincing them of your “greatness” and credibility.
Do what you can to create this “flow of trust” wherever you can.
The more the pieces add up into a complete picture that makes some kind of sense (to the lizard and the rest of the brain) – even if there are still some missing puzzle pieces – the more likely it will be that you convert prospects and win their business.
As you continue reading, keep this formula in mind because it’s just another way of saying you should look for ways to use your website to create the appearance of a relationship of trust because this fosters more trusted engagement which leads to more business transactions.
Let’s review a law firm case study as we complete the 5th ingredient of our P6 success formula.
The 5th ingredient says: “Do things that inspire trust” so that you can convince people to PREFER you over alternative choices.
When people reach a web page there is a 3-fold challenge that exists in order to win their trust and keep them from leaving. In the visitor’s mind, there are 3 roadblocks (like a toll-gate) with security guards who are instructed to tell the visitor to leave the site unless 3 needs are satisfied:
If you have a web page and you want your digital branding message to grab your visitor’s attention and bypass the mental (and distrustful) security guards, you must address the following items.
Your Website Needs To Inspire Trust
Let’s discuss a case study that describes a person who works as the head of HR for a candy company that needs an employment law firm for an employee handbook. In this scenario, the URL does not hint to the firm’s specific specialty in food law. Let’s see if this matters.
These last questions are part of what I call the “why choose us” obstacle which is sometimes the toughest test to overcome. Inspiring trust takes on many forms in the digital brand messaging game.
There are many ways to INSPIRE TRUST and most of them are pretty much under the radar but become quite visible in a negative way if you don’t adhere to these rules.
Naturally this Kentucky law firm wants Sally’s mental security guard(that distrusts websites) to go on vacation and let her consume more information she can get by staying on the site. And hopefully this continued engagement leads to her requesting more information (by filling out a lead form and initiating the whole lead nurturing process).
Here are just a few examples of things this Kentucky law firm can do on its website to inspire trust:
If you made it this far, you can almost unbuckle your seat belt to get to your wallet, because this last ingredient is the one that matters most – getting people to pay you for the work you can do on their behalf.
Let’s get to the 6th ingredient of P6 – Attracting People Who Can Pay For Your Services.
A citation is a listing online that includes your business name, address and phone number – also referred to as an NAP. Your citation listings that appear online need to be accurate – even down to the suite number. A typo on a listing on another website where your phone number or name is incorrect can affect your search rankings and/or even direct traffic to your website.
What is our recommended solution? We will check your NAP details on directories where your citations appear. We will search on Google for the following NAP related items:
Another alternative is to search for citations by looking for citation directories. We review the top directories and niche/local directories to validate your listings. Some of the main directories include Google, Yelp, Yellowpages, CitySearch, Superpages, and DexKnows.
We can also claim listings for your business in case they have not been claimed already. This process will ensure that you are given access to edit and update your listings going forward