Law firms should focus on educating their audience

It’s a funny thing change. We think of it as dramatic but invariably it tends to happen without us realising.

Ten+ years ago noone knew of Google, YouTube, Facebook et al.

Did that change happen overnight? Did we wake up one morning and go “Oh my God I must search for…”

We just took it for granted. It just happened. We all made decisions about those services. Some of us were at the cutting edge of discovery. Some of us relied on our peers and some of us think it is tosh and ignore it completely. We all became educated to possibilities. All of us have made choices.

For consumers (you and me) we had to be told or informed about these facilities. None of us woke up and said “I need to publish video online so simply must build a platform etc” We became educated about what was and was not possible.

We chose to be educated and absorbed the information because what we were being told was, (and is), useful to us. We will stop listening to the ‘teacher’ when it ceases to be useful.

We also came to realise that most of the ‘not possible’ might be available in the future because those clever geeks would recognise a need and find a solution to match it. In fact the really really clever ones created a solution for a need we didn’t even know we had.

This has happened throughout history. It is just a bit supercharged now as our information channels have got ultra fast.

All the time we are refining and tailoring. All the time we are deciding about this application or that one. Just take Twitter. A whole variety of applications to read a very basic concept. Different apps that try to make the experience even richer, pushing to make it more engaging, more intuitive and more relevant.

The point being that we are in (relative) control, we are educated, we make the choices within the confines of what is on offer. We can disengage, re-engage with the same provider or find another one, all in a couple of clicks. We have power.

The provider (law firm) increasingly has less power, is more and more disenfranchised in the ‘choice’ process. They have to educate us more as to why we should use them as opposed to someone else. If they get their education message wrong then that provider could become toast.

Specifically for law firms I would suggest that you need to look at the tools that are available to you and think about how you can deploy them and educate your market to use them.

Whether you like it or not, or even believe it or not web delivery is going to play a big part in legal services delivery for the same reasons that it does in other industries. These are; inform, capture, engagement and efficiency. Making sure that deep, rich and relevant data is sent to relevant places.

Inform seems the one that you may be doing now through your websites, but are you? Informing is easy. Informing by messages that consumers choose to listen, say with language and presentation, now there’s a skill. The ‘language’ of a lawyer is not necessarily the same ‘language’ of a consumer or potential buyer of your services.

Go stake your claim because there is only so much land to grab. If you don’t grab it, someone else will.