Law firm reputation management represents a powerful marketing opportunity for lawyers. Whether it’s a scathing one-star rebuke of your staff on Facebook, or a glowing review of your dedication to the practice of law on Yelp, online reviews and ratings of your law firm aren’t just the ramblings of fanatics or trolls anymore. Is it even possible to monitor, control, and guide the digital conversations around your law firm? Yes, it is.
Lawyers and legal marketers can handle their online reputation and find success by 1) understanding the cur-rent ways marketers are handling online rating and re-view platforms, then 2) establishing systems to generate, monitor, filter, and curate client feedback, and finally, 3) engaging in proper PR on behalf of their law firm.
How Are Marketers Handling Online Reviews and Ratings?
Every legal marketer knows word-of-mouth is one of the most important drivers of referrals for a law firm. And it’s been that way forever. What people say about you and your law firm’s reputation to their friends, family, or close connections is free advertising. So how do you keep this potent marketing channel delivering?
Easy: You just do good work, and the clients find you. But…
Given that one Google search for a lawyer within your area of practice in your city will show over 20 million results, the idea of “If you build it, they will come” is just a Field of Dreams.
Now that the Internet, consumer review sites, and social media have replaced word-of-mouth (WOM), referrals are happening online. Lawyers must generate, monitor and leverage mentions of their law firm to tilt the search odds in their favor.
While the vast majority of law firms understand the power of traditional WOM referrals, very few have a system in place to monitor, understand, or handle them, according to the 2018 Online Reputation Management Survey from BrightLocal.
How important is a positive reputation to the success of your businesses?
At a recent Local Business Insights Summit, over 300 marketers from small businesses to enterprise-level companies answered questions about how they are handling their online reputation. Here are the important takeaways. First, every marketer agrees, handling your online reputation is essential.
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While marketers say that handling their online reputation is important, no one has a strategy, staff, or even software in place to help manage it. Monitoring and maintenance of mentions of the brand, generating customer reviews, and training staff on the importance of the process were all cited as top difficulties.
How difficult are the following online reputation tasks?
So, to synthesize the findings above, marketers across industries, including legal, are all keenly aware of how important online reputation management is, but they find it difficult to establish a system. And, more importantly, very few marketers are properly handling their company’s online reputation, meaning there is an evolutionary advantage to the law firm that handles this now.
Establishing Your Online Reputation Management System
As a former marketing director for a personal injury law firm, I can tell you firsthand how transformative it was to get a grip on our online reputation. By enlisting the help of a third-party tool (Bird Eye or Bright Local), I was able to establish a system to generate, monitor, filter, and curate client feedback.
To get a hold of your law firm’s online reputation, I suggest getting these things:
- Software to monitor and notify you of your brand mentions across the web
- A central place to track all reviews and ratings
- A way to mitigate negative reviews and keep them in-house before they go feral
- Training on protocols for eliciting reviews
- Firm guidelines on proper responses
- Reporting on brand sentiment
- Staff to implement, monitor and provide accountability
Proper Public Relations Advice for a Digital World
Your law firm’s reputation, like it or not, is in the hands of the public, so in handling your reviews and ratings, you are now able to act as your own PR agent. And among the many thing’s PR professionals know, is that consistency is the real key to properly handling reputation.
When it comes to your law firm’s reputation online, the single worst thing you can do is nothing.
