“The key to our marketing success is combining traditional efforts with online marketing.” Providing good content to their network is a big part of that marketing effort.
Blogging is one of the best ways to drive long-term traffic to your website. That is why Top Floor Legal’s integration of their blog along with their other marketing efforts is so crucial for law firms looking to understand how to use their blog to build their transactional business law firm.
“Top Floor Legal is a business corporate law firm, operating in NY, TX and CA. We started 5 years ago in San Diego, CA. We got to how we are today by representing small and medium sized businesses.
We provide general counsel services on a monthly-fee arrangement. The main objective and purpose of the monthly fee is to speed up the cost for the clients, so that monthly fee covers everything related to employment issues, intellectual property, and any contracts I can review.”
[Editor’s note: Top Floor Legal is in the process of switching their name to Pasha Law. Most of their content is on Pasha Law and some still resides on Top Floor Legal.]
The Challenge
Pasha Law is looking to increase their sales through blogging, but their low conversion rate is holding them back.
“I think conversion may be a problem… I haven’t really focused on that yet, but I think our biggest problem is that we have all these visitors and they aren’t converting.
To me I don’t know if we have enough visitors to start. Maybe we do have enough. Again my focus hasn’t been on traffic generation as we get started. This is something we can focus on more in the future.”
The Actions
Here’s how Pasha Law has handled the challenge of converting leads so far.
1. Integrating Offline and Online Marketing
“We have a network of attorneys who are 5 or 6 deep right now. What has been most successful for us are referrals, contracts, and working that network.
“However, what has been the biggest key to our marketing success is combining those traditional efforts with online marketing. We have been producing a lot of content, especially in the last 6 months. Providing good content to our current network has put us in the front of people’s minds when they have a legal business need.
“For example if we work with a CPA, which is a great source for us, they will pay attention to our content that we produce 3-4 times a week. They’ll forward it on to their clients. They’re more likely to keep us in mind when they have something.
“We developed a few secondary resources. We do get organic leads from the website. I don’t have a particular background in marketing, but I’m kind of a tech geek so I pay attention to the website’s performance.”
Instead of solely looking at how the blog could be used solely for organic leads, Pasha Law saw the need for using the blog to encourage potential referral partners to connect with them. The blog builds the relationship for additional business, due to an increase in referral engagement through their content.
2. Creating a blog for traffic and conversions
“All of our new blogging content is on Pasha Law. We started publishing content on Top Floor Legal blog. In reality, we are going to transfer everything to PashaLaw.com, because that site is giving me a huge amount of traffic. Probably 85 to 90 % of the traffic is organic. We’re getting 2,500 unique visitors a month on organic traffic alone.”
Blogging definitely takes time, but 2,500 uniques per month from blogging for only 6 months is great. The results will keep compounding, as long as PashaLaw delivers great content.
3. Using A Podcast For Engaging with Network
“The blog has been more effective than the podcast. However, I think that’s partly because the podcast is only a few months old now, and I think that podcast has done better in regards to our current network.”
Again, the key here for Pasha Law is integrating their online marketing efforts with their offline efforts. Podcasting is not something you traditionally see law firms doing. However, Pasha Law sees this as a great way to engage current referral partners. The message here is powerful. Do not always focus on future connections, spend time building your current relationships as well.
4. Converting the Traffic
While Pasha Law’s blog is still growing, they are getting some great early results. Most of the traffic now comes from organic SEO and referral traffic. They are still working on the conversion rate.
“Conversions are a different story. Most of the traffic is from California, Texas, and New York, but then there’s about another 60% of that that’s out of our jurisdiction. They’re much less likely to contact us. On top of that the nature of the articles is such that site visitors may just be looking for a quick answer.”
Right now Pasha Law is receiving about 5 solid leads per month from their online marketing. They consider a lead someone who is “either sending in the contact form or calling. We have someone who takes calls, and does the intake and scheduling appointments.
To manage the leads coming in, “we have management software that keeps track of our new contacts, and also makes sure that we know the history of all the contacts. It is primarily project-management software, but also CRM geared towards law firms. It’s proprietary software that was built for our firm a few years ago. It is a bit dated, but works great.”
The Results
“From blogging we get at least 5 solid leads a month just from organic traffic to our posts.”
While 5 leads out of 2,500 monthly visitors might sound low, remember it is the quality of those who convert that you need to focus your time and energy.
3 Steps to Pasha Law’s Success
1. Targeting Articles to Your Target Market.
“Our biggest success, as far as online articles go, has been how we help our readers with two common problems that many small and medium sized businesses make.
“The first and worst mistake is classification of employees. They’re either classifying them as independent contractors when they are really employees, or defining them as exempt when they’re not.
“The consequences of these classification errors are large, so we drafted a blog post about a year or so ago on employees versus contractors, exempt versus non-exempt employees, and that article gets quite a bit of traffic.
“Second, we have an article about “bad yelp reviews” and how to deal with them from a legal perspective. Answering their questions on how to deal with Yelp from a legal perspective is important. The answer is not solely use of reputation management tactics.”
Part of the reason you want to blog on a consistent basis is to discover which articles pull in the most traffic. What you will find is that after a while about 10-20 articles pull in roughly 50% or more of your traffic. However, it takes time for those posts to be found on Google, and also start generating the traffic you want for your business. The continual content allows you the opportunity to test different ideas that your prospects are interested in learning more about. Do not assume you know which topic they want.
2. Maximizing Your Successes by Leveraging Your Content.
“We got so much traffic that we decided to write an ebook titled “Mis-Classifying Your Workforce.”
Once you have traffic coming in, you need to analyze what readers want to know about most. For Pasha Law, they focused on work force classifications, because of strong interest on the topic.
3. Having a Call to Action.
What Pasha Law did next was brilliant. They turned their highest content driver into a longer ebook that visitors could get by giving their email address. “Mis-Classifying Your Workforce” Is one of the items we use to obtain email subscriptions.”
This works great for two reasons: First, Pasha Law now has a lead-capture system to build their list. Blogging might not always drive direct leads ready to sign up as clients. However, blogging can be a great source of leads to capture. This way, potential clients who are not ready for your services can stay on your list. Sending them relevant content will keep them in loop, so you become the logical choice when they are ready.
Second, by using content the majority of visitors check out, you now increase the likelihood of signups. The call to action for your list is relevant to your content. Matching content to your practice and call to action to your content will increase generation of relevant leads.
Final Recommendations
“We produce 3 unique articles per week, and they’re pretty darn good. They’re short and sweet. But before you get to this point, you will probably begin with one post a week.
“I believe our recent success is due to us being consistent.” Consistency is everything with a blog. Blog once a week or more over 6 months to see how you are doing. Do not blog once, and say it does not work. Constantly look to create dynamic content that interests your prospects. Then have a call to action that matches their needs.
