Any good marketing strategy needs to find its prospects where they’re at and devise the best possible approach for reaching them there. Mobile marketing for lawyers is no different.
In a lot of fields—personal injury being a prominent example—prospects may be calling right at the moment they’ve been in an accident and are seeking legal counsel. Or maybe they’re at a youth sporting event, talking to another parent about a legal issue and are prompted to get out their phone and see who they might talk to.
Whatever the reason, your law office needs to be aware that mobile marketing is a unique entity unto itself. Here are some tips that lawyers can utilize for their firms.
Responsive website design
When you design your website, make sure the theme is responsive—that is, it will custom-fit itself to the device the user is on. In our mobile-friendly era, most themes will be. If, by chance, yours is not, that’s a pretty good sign you need a new website with a new developer.
As part of your website basics, you also need to ensure that it loads quickly. Site speed is important in all circumstances to all users, but that importance is heightened when you’re on your phone.
Think of your own browsing patterns when you use a mobile device. Aren’t you a little more impatient than you might be when sitting at your desk? So is everyone else. Run speed tests and do whatever is necessary to have your site slimmed down and moving fast.
Content
Your written content needs to be even tighter than normal. Long paragraphs aren’t good for the web under certain circumstances and they’re a major no-no for mobile. Remember, even a normal-sized paragraph will seem very long to a user on a cellphone. Cut up the paragraphs and don’t worry about whether your breakpoints are natural.
Even better than the written word though, at least for mobile, is using videos and images. Incorporate these into your social media strategy.
Studies show that 85 percent of Facebook users watch their video without any sound. They’re likely at work or in other social situations where volume would be inappropriate. There are tools you can use to have the text of what’s being said scroll across the video, further enhancing your mobile marketing strategy.
Another idea is to use vertical video, where a user doesn’t have to turn their phone horizontally to get the best possible viewing angle.
Paid search campaigns
Google Ads offers you the option of specifically targeting mobile users. If this is something you try, it will be worth your time to create a separate landing page exclusively for the ad campaign. It’s okay to use a duplicate of a current website landing page, so long as you mark it “no index no follow,” indicating to search engines that this is not duplicate content.
Using a separate landing page allows you to structure it in a way that’s pleasing to mobile users. For example, do you have a pop-up that invites people to sign up for your firm’s newsletter? If so, that’s a great idea—but likely to annoy someone who responded to your ad. By having an exclusive page for the campaign, you can turn off the pop-up for that particular page.
Law firms looking to increase their mobile presence can also explore Bing advertising. Bing might have a fraction of the market share Google does, but they still have 137 million users and 1/3 of them are using mobile devices.
