To remain competitive in an ever-changing digital world your legal placement firm needs an online marketing strategy that’s equally fluid and impactful. Unfortunately, far too many legal recruiters miss out on leads because of the same common online marketing drawbacks and digital marketing mistakes that they’ve been making for years.
As a legal recruiter knowing how to avoid digital marketing mistakes gives you an advantage when prospecting for new clients or cultivating relationships with existing ones. To ensure your recruiting firm’s continued success in today’s fast-paced Internet Age here are some of the more costly digital marketing pitfalls to avoid.
Being Clueless About Your Target Audience
One of the biggest mistakes made by businesses across all industries is targeting the wrong online audience. In order to reach more people far too many companies use a blanket targeting approach and then get frustrated when those audience members don’t respond to their campaigns.
Still other businesses think they know who their target audience is, only to find out later that they are clueless about targeting the right people.
When you have no tracking or monitoring capabilities in place, reaching the right audience with the right message at the right time is like searching for a needle in a cyber haystack. In general, defining who your target audience is, and then developing effective online marketing strategies to specifically reach those audience members, takes time, research and testing to make it work.
Not Setting Realistic, Measurable Goals
Much like offline recruiting quotas in the past, you need to set attainable, quantifiable digital marketing goals and then track your campaign’s success. Without using metrics and analytics you will have no way of knowing if your campaign is resonating with the right audience or if your goals are being met within a specified period-of-time.
Setting unrealistic recruiting goals will discourage your entire team because they’ll be nearly impossible to achieve no matter how creative and spot-on your digital marketing strategies are.
One of the best ways to set attainable goals and measure your campaign’s return on investment (ROI) is by using a tool like Google Analytics to establish and then track key performance indicators (KPIs).
Lack of SEO
Another major online marketing faux pau that many businesses commit is neglecting their search engine optimization (SEO) a fancy term for increasing your visibility to search engines like Google so that you are more likely to be presented as a top result on searches for relevant keywords. If your firm hasn’t yet incorporated SEO into its digital marketing strategy those audience members that you’re trying to reach will have a difficult time finding your website. As the traffic on your site slows down your recruiting agency’s leads could eventually dry up.
Building a strong SEO presence takes time, patience, planning and plenty of skill. Once a potential client lands on your website they should be greeted by pages filled with timely, informative and relevant content that keeps them engaged. To hold a visitor’s interest your site also needs to be responsive and mobile device friendly, easy to navigate and accessible for all.
Ignoring the “Social” Aspects of Social Media
Far too many businesses treat social media as an online bulletin board for posting company news and promotions. But the true strength of social media lies in its potential to build a community of followers that you can then keep engaged by sharing fresh and relevant content.
Avoiding social media marketing altogether is another trap that many companies fall into, usually because they don’t have a dedicated social media manager. And if your audience lives on social media and you’re not even on it, you’re missing out on a key component of an effective digital marketing strategy.
Using Clickbait Headlines
To improve customer engagement rates some companies, and even digital marketers turn to catchy and oftentimes misleading clickbait headlines. In digital marketing parlance clickbait is any content that puts a clever spin on words so that they will appear more appealing to a broader audience, even though those words seldom hold any true value.
In many cases clickbait headlines and content are used to lure unsuspecting audience members to a landing page or website. However, when working with cautious legal professionals clickbait headlines are one of those digital marketing pitfalls that you should avoid because they can quickly damage your firm’s online reputation and credibility.
Poor Customer Support
Digital marketing expert Stacey Kehoe once said this about following up with prospects: “A failure to nurture prospects is the number one reason digital marketing campaigns fail.”
If interested prospects have any questions or comments for you, they may try to reach out via email. Promptly responding to those emails is essential for engaging with interested parties, converting viable leads and cultivating long-term relationships, even if it means having a dedicated resource within your organization to handle email marketing responsibilities.
Another example of good customer support is personalizing your communications for every client or potential client that you work with. For example, sending an online birthday greeting or law school graduation card can help you cultivate more meaningful relationships without depleting your marketing budget.
Failing to follow up on leads at all is another online marketing drawback that many companies, including legal placement firms, oftentimes make. Some legal recruiters focus so much time on generating new leads that they forget that any existing leads might just need a little nudge to convert them into actual clients.
Make Digital Marketing a Staple in Your Online Strategy
When you’re a legal recruiter who’s competing in the Digital Age, developing and managing an effective digital marketing strategy can be overwhelming at times. But not doing so can lower your client engagement and conversion rates, which ultimately prevents you from achieving your recruiting goals and boosting your bottom line.
At the Legal Recruiter Directory, we offer results-driven digital marketing solutions designed specifically to address the online branding needs of legal recruiters. The LRD also helps legal recruiters place talented active or passive lawyers with prestigious law firms and corporations so that all parties win and makes it easy for employers to connect with a legal headhunter in a metro where they need assistance with placement of an attorney.
