Martindale-Hubbell TV ads for lawyers.com : Will they work?
Wow! Watching the election results this evening I caught a commercial for Martindale-Hubbell’s lawyers.com. Traditional lawyer talking with screen shots of the lawyers.com website.
No question such ads will draw traffic to the website. It will put a lot of wind in the sails of LexisNexis Martindale’s salespeople calling on lawyers to retain their listings in Martindale-Hubbell, a requirement to be listed in lawyers.com, Martindale’s consumer and small business law website. Also puts FindLaw in a difficult position as there’s no way FindLaw is going to be running ads on its revenues which are far less than Martindale’s.
Something strikes me as odd about the ads though. It would be like Google advertising for people to come to their online directory to do searches so Google could earn more money from ads.
Martindale is selling ads at lawyers.com in the form of directory listings and banner ads on directory pages. Martindale is now buying ads so they can get lawyers to buy ads.
Martindale may have already proven buying ads to sell ads is not a formula for success. Martindale used to do big buys at Google for lawyers.com so that when people searched for a lawyer a large lawyers.com link would display above the organic search results. Martindale appears to have abandoned that ad campaign.
Martindale may be better served by getting its directory of all lawyers indexed in Google, lawyer by lawyer, and do so with a search engine optimization wallop that only Martindale could bring. Lawyers would be lined up to pay Martindale for a listing then. But Martindale, as best as any one can tell, does not allow Google to index all the lawyer bio’s and firm profiles that Martindale has.
Martindale has a huge asset. Its lawyer directory is the best in the industry when combining the number of lawyers and detailed biographical information on those lawyers.
At the same time, far more people go to Google for search than lawyers.com. Google perfects its search regularly to better provide what people are looking for, lawyers included. Lawyers.com is an outmoded directory using limited search fields as opposed to a full text search.
Rather than compete with Google (we’ve seen a lot of losers) why not leverage your asset in conjunction with Google’s strength? Wouldn’t Martindale be better off using the latest technology to get their lawyers’ profiles fully indexed at Google? Wouldn’t that be a win/win for Martindale and its lawyer customers?
What say you guys at Martindale?