Have you ever thought about creating a video to enhance your legal website design? Have you dismissed online videos as cheesy or obnoxious? It’s time to reconsider this element of your website and the impact it can have. According to a comScore report, 76 million U.S. Internet users viewed online videos in May 2011, producing an average of 15.9 hours per viewer. The entire online U.S. audience engaged in more than 5.6 billion viewing sessions during the month.  Online videos are here to stay and people enjoy them. Here are a few reasons that we encourage our legal clients to create attorney & law firm videos for their site:

1) A Personable Greeting: The search for an attorney can be an intimidating one for those not well versed in the legal industry. Greeting website visitors with a warm welcome allows potential clients to “meet” you before they meet you. It will give a personal feel to your site and very well be a deciding factor in why a client chooses your practice.

2) Efficiency:  Internet users are lazy. They do not want to sift through a lot of text to find what they want. A video allows you to deliver your essential messages immediately and in a shorter time than it will take readers to find these messages in your website content. Today, everyone thinks that thinks on the internet should be quick and easy. It’s your job, or the job of your legal web design company, to make sure your site gives the user quick, informative information.

3) Increases Time on Site: Multimedia on sites is proven to increase the time users spend there and thus increasing quality of visit and likelihood they will use your services. Furthermore, while there is no concrete evidence to prove it, it is the consensus of SEO experts that time spend on a site, at least when a visitor first arrives, can have an effect on your rankings.

4) Search Engine Optimization: Videos are an effective tool for SEO.  A YouTube video can often rank on the first page of Google searches for the appropriate keywords, thus driving traffic to your content and website.

For more information on law firm video production, and how to create one for your website, click here.

In this turbulent economic era, companies are now being challenged to adjust to unstable market conditions in order to stay profitable. Those that do, adopt new best practices to remain profitable. It used to hold true that word of mouth alone could generate a healthy level of prospective clients but with purse strings being held tight launching a legal website design and marketing campaign can make all the difference. The question then becomes how to identify the amount a company should dedicate to marketing. One thing that still does hold true – you must spend money to make money.

What is the industry standard for marketing budgets?

While suggested legal internet marketing budgets vary significantly from one industry to the next, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) suggests a marketing budget between 2% and 10% of gross revenue. However, budgets for larger retail and corporate lawfirms can exceed 20%. But with a range of between 2% and 20%, where should a medium size practice be?

How much should I spend?

There are a few questions to consider when identifying a marketing budget for your business. Start with a 5% marketing budget with consideration that marketing is an essential ingredient for increasing profitability and sustaining growth.

4 crucial questions to ask yourself when setting your budget:

1) Do you receive the majority of your clients through referrals?

If so and you don’t foresee any future disruption in the current level of referrals, then you may want to consider staying around 5%. However, you should consider that if you do receive most of your clients through word-of-mouth, the value of developing new word-of-mouth networks can be very high.  If on average, one client turns into five then there is significant value in getting that one client. Consider launching a marketing campaign to attack new clients, in networks.

2) What are your high-profit services that have additional room to grow?

If you offer multiple services with varying profit margins, consider reducing your focus on low profit margin services and increasing your marketing budget to attract more sales on those with higher margins of profit. This could be a great time to consider internet based marketing. Your online marketing campaign could focus solely on your high-profit margin services, thus making it very easy to track the final success of the campaign.

3) Are you losing market share to another firm in your area? 

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.  Find out what they’re doing — they may be diversifying their marketing budgets into avenues that you didn’t even know existed (paid Google PPC campaigns, newsletters, social media campaigns, etc). If you are losing out, introducing new methods or increasing your old, proven efforts can win back your market share.

4) Are your current marketing efforts producing a positive ROI? 

If so, it’s a no-brainer. So long as you can handle the work load, max out your budget! Identify which of your marketing campaigns have been successful. Define why these campaigns have been successful in order to make sound decisions as to where to dedicate an increase in budget. Internet marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing and also offers the highest ability for precise ROI tracking. If you aren’t already leveraging the internet and you’re currently seeing a positive ROI in your marketing efforts, you should strongly consider expanding to the internet, which is known to produce a higher ROI than most marketing channels.

Last week, Microsoft announced its plans for the new Internet Explorer 10 (IE10), which will be released with Windows 8, slated for release in Q3 of 2012. One of the new key components will be the operating system’s ‘Metro’ browser (design image below), which will be heavily integrated into the system even more so than the traditional desktop browsers that we are all accustomed to.

The real curve-ball thrown by Microsoft is that there will be no plugin support.  A plugin is anything added on top of the browser, and this includes the plugin that allows you to view Flash elements like moving images and video. One of the reasons for this is that Flash and other plugins often use up a lot of battery life, a critical factor in mobile devices and tablets.

Screenshot of the Microsoft's 'Metro' browser, arriving with Windows 8

Where to now?

The next generation of legal web design — and the web as a whole — is in HTML5.  With HTML5, developers are able to create many of the same effects as Flash without using a plugin — it is simply written directly into the code. Microsoft says that they hope to pioneer this trend.

Dean Hachamovitch, who heads up the IE team, said, “The experience that plugins provide today is not a good match with Metro style browsing and the modern HTML5 web.  The mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.”

What does it mean for your website?  

Flash may not be completely dead, yet. Microsoft will also have a desktop version of IE10, similar to what you may be using now, which will support such plugins. However, we have seen in the past 2-3 years that when one browser changes, if it is in fact better, the rest tend to follow suit and model their own in a similar fashion.

In planning for the future, if you want to have any moving elements, video, etc. on your site, make sure your developer is doing it in HTML5 or Javascript, or leave it out for the time being. For a legal website design, Flash and moving images are not often necessary, and often can slow down or lessen the viewing experience.

Updated: 10/6/2011