Your referrals aren’t drying up. It could be they just don’t like what they see when they find you online—or maybe they can’t even find you.
Referrals still drive a lot of a law firms’ new business. This vital lead source continues to move online, therefore, when GNGF talks about online reputation management, we often say that we use it to “Protect Your Referrals“. Instead of handing someone your business card or giving them your phone number, many referrals start with a name and immediately move to a web search—most of the time on a mobile device. What does that web search say about your firm?
If you don’t dominate that first page of Google, you could be losing referrals you didn’t even know you had.
As much as we focus on defining your brand and communicating that on your website, at the end of the day, your brand and your reputation are more about what other people feel and say about you than what you say about yourself. In the online world, this has become increasingly complex because word-of-mouth between friends and neighbors has turned into permanent records on review websites, search engines, social media posts, and more. The rate at which your reputation can spread (positively or negatively) online is astounding, especially as mobile devices make it faster and easier for consumers to post or retrieve information about your law firm.
As we’ve said in our book, CLE seminars, and webinars, we have become a society that trusts strangers as much, if not more, than our friends and family. We find ourselves hearing about a cool new product, book, or gadget from a friend or colleague but upon visiting a site like Amazon, change our mind about it based on strangers’ reviews and end up purchasing something else.
If you accept this as a fact, you must first understand what your web presence is saying about your firm, then proactively do something about it. Your goal should be to influence as many of the search results on your law firm’s name as you can. This means your website, social media, review websites, directory listings all need to say what you want them to say about your firm.
At GNGF, we have brought together some proprietary tools along with some customized tools only available to digital agencies to provide a best-in-breed solution for helping you manage your reputation. To help with your reputation we provide easy to use tools and services that allow you to:
- Ensure your online directory listings are consistent across the internet to improve your brand message along with your search ranking
- Alert you about what your customers are saying about your business on review sites.
- Compare your online presence to that of your key competitors
- Help your firm proactively gather reviews from clients, then help manage which reviews go public to review sites and which remain private feedback for your firm.
- Listen in to what people are saying about your firm on key social networks help you to proactively engage with your social media followers
With these tools and our corresponding services where we take a lot of the tedious reputation management work off of your shoulders, your online reputation can protect your referrals and have the right brand message seen by your prospective clients.
