Your law firm’s website has Google Analytics set up and humming efficiently and you’re fascinated by the treasure trove of information you can glean about how people interact with the site. You see the content that interests people and that’s gratifying. But you seem something else that’s disturbing—the same people that love your content drop off the website from there, never to be heard from again. It’s a common challenge and it points to a need to strengthen your digital marketing funnel.
The digital marketing funnel is named such because it defines how the website “funnels” people to the goal. We’ll assume you’ve probably bought products on Amazon. You may have followed a funnel of the home page to the search box to the product page to the checkout page and finally to order confirmation. In this case, the order confirmation is the page that was the end-game of the funnel.
Most law firm websites don’t have anything nearly that complex, mainly because a sale is not being consummated on the site. Your end game is probably more basic—get people to fill out a “Contact Us” form or call the office. That’s a simple 3 step funnel (initial page of content, “Contact Us” page, submission confirmation).
The first thing to do is to make sure your intentions are clear. Are you inviting people to contact you? If your “Contact Us” link is hidden away in a top-bar menu, don’t expect any results. It needs to jump out at people and it needs to be within the content they’re reading. You may also want to implement chatbots to engage users directly.
Once your Call-To-Action is clear, then it’s time to take a broader view of your users. The odds are very good that they were simply looking for the free information your content provided—unlike an e-commerce retailer where they went specifically to purchase something. Your challenge is to keep these users on the website and then continue engaging them after they leave.
Consider trying these tactics:
- Add “Related Articles” to the bottom of the page. Most content management systems (CMS) have a tool that does this automatically.
- Manually find articles that are similar to the one they are reading and showcase them right in the middle of the content landing page. Even better, put them together into a free download where they can be obtained for only the price of an email address.
- Use cookies to track your visitors and reconnect with them through a Pay-Per-Click campaign. You can instruct Analytics to track the IP addresses of everyone who visited multiple pages on your website. That “Audience List” can then be implemented into a paid advertising campaign and you can reconnect with these people at a more affordable ad spend rate.
You’re playing a long game when it comes to concrete conversions on a law firm website. Get users to engage with your content and find ways to track them—whether it’s directly through an email address or indirectly through cookies. If you follow these tips, you will have strengthened your digital marketing funnel.
