Legal Marketing Blog

Evolution of Your Web Audience

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

Like any good marketing, your attorney website needs to address the needs, desires, interests and abilities of your target audience, if you want them to take action and convert into leads.  Not everyone using the web at a given time is a legitimate prospective legal client. 

However, the vast majority of visitors to your legal website likely are.

To improve your website’s ability to convert visitors into leads, the first step is knowing your target audience more intimately.  The following is a brief overview of evolution of legal website users.

Early Adopters

Early in the legal web marketing evolution, (early 2000), target Internet users were much more voyeuristic, unsophisticated/inexperienced in their search strategies, limited in the number, types and frequency of websites they visited.  “Surfing” was truly an accurate description of how users managed the Internet. 

At this time, what appeared to be most effective for this audience was websites that acted more like online advertisements, or web brochures.  These sites focused largely on “Wowing” the visitor and impressing them with attention-getting, high-impact graphics.  Lead generating focused mainly on emails, as most of these visitors were scanning, shopping, inquiring with a great interest in remaining annonomous.

Evolving Web Audience

At this stage (approx. 2005), legal online consumers had become more familiar with the Web, started to use the search engines more frequently (hence Google today), and became much more open to the Internet for more information. 

Online consumers grew in their appetite for more focused information and developed a belief that they can now research their potential case before contacting an attorney, and even use the Internet (as opposed to Yellow Pages) to help find the right firm.  At this stage, the most effective websites simply offered more substantive content and was much more informational than previous websites.  These were websites that also dominated the top search engine listings.  Firms began to invest substantive marketing dollars into more high quality content and SEO, as the Internet audience continued to grow at an exponential pace.

Maturing Audience

Today’s Internet audience has become much more savvy and experienced using the Web technology.  Their expectations of their website experiences are very different, and they use the Internet for a much more wider variety of uses, needs, goals and entertainment.  The Web has become more than just an information source; its become their connection to their friends, their colleagues/coworkers, their entertainment, their World!

They are “destination-focused,” impatient, and have muchy higher expectations when they get to your attorney website.  They not only want information; they want an experience, to get to know you, a relationship.  And they want everything . . . Now!  

Thus, they are more willing to engage Website businesses directly.  It is important to focus your calls-to-action on telephone calls.  Not only will you generate more leads, your office is much more trained and effective at converting those types of leads.  

Your legal website has to do a lot more today than just get visibility.  It needs to convert.  By focusing more on your visitors’ expectations and user experience,  you will develop a much more effective website and actually develop a website that will also better leverage the search engines.

Think about your end users and you will be on your way to more Web marketing success.

-Bill

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