Online or internet marketing basically refers to the marketing of a service or a product through the internet on websites. Law firms are more and more realizing the popularity and therefore potential of the internet to market their legal services. People don’t use phone books to search for services anymore but instead turn to the internet to find what it is they need. When they’re looking for an attorney to represent them in a legal case, they go online and do a search in Google most of the time. Marketing online is similar to regular marketing, but has some unique elements.
Internet marketing, just like traditional marketing, can be done in many ways. It used to be that businesses advertised their products and services by way of the radio or television and print media like banners and billboards. Now, however, marketing can mean using blogs, social media, paid online ads, search engines and email. A major difference in the old and new form of marketing is that the energy and resources you put towards a method such as search engine marketing will last as long as the website does. In the past, if you paid for an ad on a billboard, you paid for your ad to appear for a certain amount of time. Now, online marketing can be considered one of the greatest returns on investment particularly for this reason.
Internet marketing, although it lasts as long as your website does, takes constant work. It is a full time job to keep your site and places that have back-links to your site constantly updated, but this stream of regularly updated content will keep your law firm website highly listed, preventing its visibility from decreasing.
There’s several reasons that web marketing is as good as or even superior to traditional marketing techniques. A serious benefit of web marketing is the ability to target the right consumers. When you look at most traditional marketing–print, television, and radio–it is fairly difficult to know whether your ad will be going towards someone who is looking for legal services. In all likelihood, most of your viewers and listeners aren’t looking for legal services at all. You’re hoping that if they hear the ad enough times, when they do look for legal services, they’ll come to you first. However, your ad serves as an unwelcome interruption in their program, because you’re taking time away from the music, show or game that they’re enjoying. More likely than not they’ll have negative emotional attachments to your brand because your ads have been intrusive on their time.
Internet marketing involves many specialists such as web designers, computer programmers, website content writers, marketers, and sales specialists. Effective online marketing means combining the technical with the creative. The more popular the internet gets, and its influence continues to increase every single day, the more important internet marketing is going to be as the future of marketing lies online.