Berbay's Blog: Marketing for law firms, engineers, CPAs, architects and other professional services

We’ve all seen them: Those square barcodes that have been popping up everywhere from cereal boxes to business cards. Many of us, however, don’t know what the strange-looking images are—much less how we might want to use them in our marketing.

The barcodes, called QR (Quick Response) codes, work something like the barcodes found in supermarkets or other stores: When scanned, they provide information. A QR code can support up to nine different types of data including, contact info, URL link, calendar event, geographic location, etc.

In order to read the code, you will need to “scan” it by taking a photo with a smartphone camera (Keep in mind, you have to download an application to read the codes). Once read by a smartphone, QR codes direct potential clients to a “landing page” on the internet, where they will be able to access what they were sent for, whether it is information about trends in your practice area, event details, contact information, etc.

If you’re thinking about incorporating QR codes into your marketing efforts, there are a few points to consider:

• First, what will you provide using the code? A video about a recent court decision that impacts your clients? Contact information?  A discount?  How will your offer improve your potential clients’ lives? You need to provide something of value to keep them engaged.
• You should deploy a “call to action” with your QR code—just a few words near the code to entice people to scan it. For example, “Scan this code for a free gift,” yields a higher scan rate than, “Scan this code.”
• Think about design and usability. Color, for instance, makes a code look more approachable than the traditional black and white. A common mistake when it comes to QR codes is to direct people to your regular website. Aside from the fact that many websites don’t load very well on cell phones, your standard website doesn’t provide any added value to a potential client. He or she could have easily accessed your website without the code.
• Once you have your QR code marketing campaign in place, it is important to track the results. The most meaningful way to do this is to track not only the number of scans, but how much time visitors spent on the landing page. If the landing page is your Facebook page or Twitter account, you should record how many new fans/followers you received during your QR code campaign.

QR codes are here to stay, and will only be popping up in more places as time goes on. You can quickly and easily generate a code using sites such as Kaywa, Qurify and Delivr. QR code marketing can be quite successful—if, before embarking, you give thought to the factors involved in developing a high-quality campaign.

One of the most important aspects of any professional’s website is the biography page, which is the section that is often looked at the most. What we’re seeing is the morphing of each firm professional from having a “cookie-cutter” biography page to a biography microsite—a miniature website, which much like their larger counterparts, can have multiple pages. For instance, within a biography, along with facts like education and experience, there might be navigation tabs for published articles, awards, or case studies, which then make the biography more of a standalone website within the firm’s umbrella site.

People forget that often site visitors no longer enter a website via the home page. For example, when they run a search, they enter the site from wherever that search leads, meaning they might be coming to the website via a practice area or a biography page. The latter is particularly significant because research shows that clients hire the professional as opposed to the firm, and each lawyer is selling him/herself. Therefore, you want to think in terms of creating your own website within the larger firm’s context; it’s no longer about just having a one-page biography. Instead, it’s about creating a microsite that provides page visitors with a deeper amount of information and expanded content. This transformation of the one-size-fits-all biography page into more of a personalized landing page is one reason microsites are becoming more common.

Another reason for this transformation is that no two lawyers want to be limited to marketing the same way. Whether there are 20 or 2,000 lawyers in a firm, each has a different background and is selling something different. There are also those lawyers who have a much better understanding of marketing and how to sell themselves, and you want to be able to work with those variables. Microsites provide individual attorneys the ability to use their landing page as a personal business development tool and control the amount of marketing they do while still incorporating the firm’s overall culture.

Ultimately, microsites are designed with the intent to convert a site visitor into a lead. If developed and maintained well, microsites can greatly benefit professionals and their firms.

Berbay recently blogged about how to take a professional photo, offering quick tips on how to dress, groom and pose to help you achieve a quality shot. Those are good pieces of advice to consider before taking a professional photo, but there are also many things to consider during the photo session. These factors are frequently overlooked, but can make a big difference in the outcome of your photographs.

• Clothing – Right before posing for a photo, make sure that all ties and suit jackets are straight, and that dresses or pants are not wrinkled.  Even if you wear the type of clothing Berbay recommended in our previous post, a crooked tie or wrinkled pants can cancel out the positive effect.  Too, when it comes to group shots, discuss everyone’s clothing beforehand so that you harmonize appropriately.

• Positioning – How are you sitting or standing? Where are your hands? Positioning is a key element of a professional photo. This is especially true in group shots: If everyone’s hands or legs are placed differently, the picture will appear uncoordinated.  A professional photographer can help you arrange everyone so that they look natural.

• Hair – Knowing that you would be taking a professional photo, you probably spent more time than usual grooming your hair. But that was this morning. The camera easily picks up small flaws, so it’s important to take one last look at your hair just before the shoot begins and double-check that stray hairs aren’t sticking up, covering your face, etc. The photographer can clean up hair in the editing process, but you want to have your hair as close to picture-perfect as possible.

• Background – What’s behind you? Of course, you’re the focus of the picture, but your background affects your appearance. If you decide to use a solid color for your backdrop, you should choose a color that won’t wash out your skin tone and should also match or coordinate with the color of your outfit. If you opt for a backdrop that’s not a solid color, like a library or a staircase, check for distracting objects. For example, if you’ll be photographed in front of a bookcase, see that all the bookshelves are full; if they’re not, it skews the picture and draws the eye away from the focus – you. Also, you may love the colorful abstract picture in your conference room, but if it’s in your picture, it will capture the attention in the photo. Finally, as a rule of thumb, don’t use windows or mirrors as backgrounds because they cause glare.

• The Macro Perspective – To determine if a shot will be a quality photo, take a full step or two back and look at it as a whole. Also, look through the camera lens.  Oftentimes, when you’re looking too closely at the details, you miss something obvious. That’s why we recommend you step back and get the “macro perspective” on a shot to see if anything is missing or needs to be changed.

Remember these important factors during your photo shoot (and prepare thoroughly beforehand) and you’ll come out of the experience with high-quality professional photos that positively represent you.

In a typical Google move, the company has redesigned and upgraded its popular place-reviews site, Google Places. By doing so, it has altered some content that will greatly affect a rated firm’s SEO. Specifically, Google Places will no longer be drawing reviews from other mass-review sites from around the web like Yelp or Merchant Circle.

Google Places allows web-users to both post and read reviews of businesses when they search for that place in Google Maps. Google’s presence on the company review landscape has enticed many savvy, SEO-oriented businesses to take an active role in shaping their Place page.

Previously, Places pulled reviews and rankings from sites around the web, allowing, for example, a Yelp review to appear as a review on Google. Now, however, evaluations of businesses must be posted directly to the Places page to appear as a review.

By eliminating reviews from third party sources, Google retains greater control over reviews posted on Places, clearly spurred on by the belief that it has enough of a presence to stop piggy-backing on already established sites.

With this new awareness, your business should add Google Places to your roster of sites that help promote your services. In addition to monitoring reviews, you should request clients to post feedback directly on your Place page, rather than simply on sites like Yelp.

Although Google Places is relatively new to the scene, its influence cannot be overlooked, as Google has proven time and time again with its many other popular applications.

Have you ever gone to a diner that had a 15-page menu? Do you remember perusing the many menu options–corned beef, matzah-ball soup, steak and eggs, 15 different salads, etcetera—and thinking to yourself, “This is too much choice”?

The sheer number of options overwhelms. To choose any one dish, you must reject the 1,500 other dishes competing for your attention. This problem—which sociologist Barry Schwartz termed “the paradox of choice”—is remarkably universal. It could even be harming your professional-services marketing strategy—or at least making it much harder than it needs to be.

At its essence, the paradox of choice suggests that adding too many choices to your plate leads to decreased satisfaction and even decreased efficacy.

Whether you market legal, accounting or financial services, when you move into the online-marketing space, be prepared to be inundated with “paradox of choice”-like dilemmas. Consider, for instance, the myriad tactics you can use to market online these days:

• Employing social media like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
• Search-engine optimizing (SEO) a website or series of sites to generate traffic from search engines like Google
• Setting up pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to create leads
• Developing an affiliate marketing strategy
• Building a nuanced inbound-link campaign
• Posting information about your services in relevant online forums
• Networking with the leading bloggers in your niche to generate traffic and referrals

The list could go on and on! What’s more, the number of choices will only increase in coming years as new tools arrive on the scene.

The size of this menu of options creates an equally sizable risk: It makes it easy for people to hop from tactic to tactic. If your PPC campaign doesn’t deliver results, you can simply switch to Twittering, or vice versa. You can waste a ton of time learning and re-learning tactics without making headway. And even if you do succeed, the 20 zillion other tactics you haven’t tried yet will tempt you away. The whole enterprise can leave you feeling exhausted, overwhelmed and ultimately dissatisfied.

So what’s the solution to the “paradox of choice”? One piece is to prioritize some tactics and stick with those. What are your top two tactics right now? Focus on those. Get them up and running—then add another.

To effectively use a host of online marketing tactics you cannot wake up one day and just start utilizing all those tools; you woke up one day and focus on one tactic. Once you refine it, move on to the next.

It’s not just “slow and steady wins the race”—everyone knows that trope. It’s the harder-to-grasp, but ultimately much more productive, wisdom of “less is more.” Reduce your tactics. Limit your choices. Go on what Timothy Ferriss called a “low-information diet.” You might be surprised by the cool ways your business—and even your worldview—expands and deepens.