Law firm website redesigns can be a challenge, here are a few tips to make your task easier.
In this four part guide we at Web explore some of the challenges facing a Law firm website redesign. We will help you with online strategy, emotional engagement, simple usability testing and how to measure your success with Google Analytics.
Part 2 of 4 Engaging audiences
Now we have our audiences defined, what they want to do on your website identified and the content they need to complete their tasks identified. What do we need to consider next?
Emotionally Engage your Customers
We are all trying to solve how we emotionally engage new audiences online. Technology has taken away any relationship between the person buying and the person selling. We are speaking about robots to robots, computers to computers as opposed to people to people. We see this as an endemic problem when it comes to marketing online.
There seems to be a current trend of websites presenting themselves in a very generic way and most fail to build any kind of relationship or trust. We have a problem in the way we present ourselves online, it’s a little cold, perfunctory and doesn’t really resonate with us as humans.
Our approach has been to obfuscate our customers rather than tell them who we really are and we have effectively disconnected the buyer from the seller. We have removed person to person relationships and have become nebulas when presenting ourselves online.
We know from research users tell us; “Show me the content but let me decide” in other words don’t try and sell me stuff. Yet it seems most organisations don’t understand the importance of engagement and insist on pushing sales pitches down the throats of their website audiences.
The successful brands who engage their customers understand they want to interact with them in different ways – which has never been easy thanks to technology.
When brands are able to build strong emotional connections they are able to increase consumer loyalty and charge premium prices according to research from Forrester and Google. One of the most effective ways in building emotional connections with customers is to prove that they are dealing with an actual person and not just a nameless, faceless organisation.
Videos increase engagement and rankings
A recent study, from aimClear, states that videos in universal search results have a 41% higher click-through rate than plain-text results.
We all know that the search engines use social signals as a factor in their overall ranking algorithm, and as the role of social signals becomes increasingly important, so will the role of online video in your overall search and social strategy. According to a Forrester research study, having a good online video marketing strategy can increase your likelihood of achieving first page Google rankings by up to 53 times.
How do we emotionally engage people online?
To better understand the world that live in, we like to tell real stories and in the most part it’s been through a variety of social platforms. During last couple of years all social media platforms have recognised the massive increase in user engagement with video – to this end we have seen live streaming on Facebook and new video channels on Instagram.
Imagine you were to tell a video story about your organisation but let your audiences navigate and choose a route through related video content. You curate the content but let them decide what they look at and how the story might end for them.
Videos are shared
Search engines are designed to bring searchers relevant results to their queries and inbound links help the search engines determine the data’s relevancy. When viewers find your video to be valuable content, they are likely to share it, thus facilitating the linking-fest.
Next is Part 3: Usability testing and "Think aloud usability testing"