What are the four quadrants in The Digital 100?
When we analyse the top law firms’ digital marketing strategies, they fall into four quadrants: those who are performing well at both web and social (Digital Nirvana); those who aren’t doing either well (Digital Hell); the social creatures and the Kevin Costners.
What is Digital Nirvana?
Those who are doing well get The Digital 100 and are often interested as they’d like to continue to do better. They already understand that digital is bringing them business and wouldn’t consider standing still on it for a moment. They may have even, whisper it, failed a few times, tried out some things that didn’t play out well. They are more likely too, shout it, to have had some stunning results. In our view, those firms in this quadrant are probably pulling away as opposed to simply leading.
What is Digital Hell?
Those in the lower-left quadrant need the most help with neither digital nor social performing well. A great starting point is knowing where you are at the moment and what your immediate steps are: we can help with that.
What are Social Creatures?
Social Creatures are those who have great social media tactics (and maybe even strategies): they are bringing in the crowd. One of the firms near the top of social does exactly this and then loses over 95% of the audience on the first landing page within just a few seconds. That’s not a great experience for anyone and it needs avoiding as it leaves a poor taste in the mouth of the visitor who is then less likely to come to your site the second time. When that feeling accumulates, then Google ends up punishing your rankings as it can see how quickly people leave your site and look for alternative content instead. In short, being a social creature may look great on the stats front, but it doesn’t produce the right outcome.
What are Kevin Costners?
Then there’s the Kevin Costners, so-called because of the movie Field of Dreams. If you build it they will come,” says the voice in the movie, compelling our Kevin to build a baseball field on his farm. For our purposes, the Kevin Costners are just as poorly placed as Social Creatures: they create great websites and great content and then almost no one visits them. Imagine going to hours and hours of effort to create amazing content and then not sharing it when your audiences are hanging out: it’s marketing without purpose. Often this happens where a ‘no risk’ approach to marketing has been taken.
The problem is that, even in the legal sector, without risk, there’s no reward. It’s worth remembering that Costner finally understood why he’d had to build the field in the first place. But he had to be open to taking a risk in order to get his heart’s desire. Taking calculated risks on social media is all that’s needed to bring in the right audiences time and again. Then your website will do the rest.
Next steps
The good news is that if your firm is a Kevin Costner or a Social Creature, there are some easy steps that you can take to move towards the upper right quadrant: digital nirvana.
Want to know which quadrant you’re in? We can either have a coffee to discuss what some of those simple steps are or you maybe you’d prefer to purchase your firm’s dashboard?
