A Better Question: Why Wouldn’t You Need Digital Marketing?
Are you literally the only legal professional within a hundred miles of any other populated center? No? Well, you need digital marketing then. That’s your litmus test, and that’s the short answer to the first question. To the second question, given smartphones, laptops, smartcars, and other Internet of Things (IoT) technology, it’s hard to see why you’d avoid digital options.
Think about it: do you use the phone book anymore? Do you still pay for a newspaper? Maybe you do—do your potential clientele? Say you’re an attorney specializing in family law. That tends to include things like custody battles and domestic disputes that may even come to violence. Many associated clients need legal help whether or not they can really afford it.
Are these people paying for newspaper subscriptions? Well, possibly—in 2021, it’s going to depend a lot on how old a person is. Millennials and Generation Z don’t tend to use older aspects of modern infrastructure. Millennials are buying property now. They’ve got jobs and families. They’re in their mid-thirties, and Facebook is their newspaper and phonebook.
These people complete a Google search to go to the post office. When is the last time you saw a young person without a smartphone mounted on the center of their dashboard as they drove? Certainly, there are outliers; but as a legal professional, you’re not focused on potential cases from potential clients who you may never work with.
Some Data To Consider
A study was recently done that pointed out two exceptionally pertinent things to this discussion. On the one hand, for the last few years, statistics have shown that more people access the internet through mobile devices than they do through traditional desktop portals—smartphones, tablets, etc. get more web traffic than desktop computers.
Meanwhile, since the extensive panic and power maneuvering of 2020, more than 20% of all employees in the United States now work remotely; the number is actually closer to 25%, and expected to grow. This is coupled with a notable decline in film and television viewing. People binge Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney+, and all the rest. They don’t buy cable.
Even in that sphere, though, there is a broad trend in modern American society which is pulling people away from traditional entertainment. Because of associated messaging in such films, people don’t want to hear or see it anymore. Look at Hollywood’s losses from 2020 into 2021. Do you know what they’re calling the MCU, the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
The term its most ardent previous fans use is now “Em She Yew”. They’re making a pun on the “C”, and indicating a feminine aspect taking over Marvel’s film output. Politics aside, Disney has made a massive marketing and content creation blunder.
The Old Guard Of Media Is Up For Retirement
So film franchises, television shows, and other previous bastions of traditional media have gone by the wayside, and unless media conglomerates initiate a reversal toward overall neutrality, that will likely remain the case. People are using their own fringe searches online to find content with which they resonate. They’re using YouTube, they’re even using secondary social media.
So as an attorney, unless you’re the only lawyer within a hundred miles, you’ve got to have some sort of presence across a broad swathe of social media outlets. The best way to do this is through SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Essentially, you develop content that matches queries users enter into search engines. Your content conforms to them via algorithm.
If this sounds complex, it is, and you’ll benefit as a legal practice from exploring solutions such as this Dagmar Marketing attorney guide. There are keywords to consider, there are geographical locations that need to be factored in, the structure of your output must match algorithmic programming, there’s a visual element pictorially and in terms of video, and more.
HTML tagging is important, and content production needs to be relatively continuous. Additionally, guest-blogging is important. See, when you get enough content online, that results in a sort of digital “footprint” associated with your legal firm. The best way to do that is digital marketing across social media channels, blogs, entertainment channels, and more.
A Pragmatic Approach To Modern Marketing
Certainly, there’s a place for the advertisements of old, but what is necessary in modernity is a shift of marketing budgets toward digital avenues. It’s probably not wise to totally curtail all billboards and local public access commercials. However, they shouldn’t get the lion’s share of your budget anymore.
Digital marketing gets right in the pockets of the future clients with whom you’ll work. It more organically follows their movement through modern society. Also, it tends to be more cost-effective. So if you’re an attorney and you’re not exploring digital marketing opportunities for your legal business, at minimum, it’s worthwhile to see what’s out there.
