Author: Eric Needle

Protect, promote and develop your firm
PracticeDev, our new venture, modernizes how legal practices grow their firm
With a focus on online promotion, we’re seeing trends that should serve as a wake up call for any practice. National companies are surging, at the expense of the future of your law firm. The need for digital marketing has never been greater.
We built PracticeDev because we understand attorneys.
Longbow Strategic Group, Inc., (the Company), has been perfecting the delivery of critical services—internet, IT, and security solutions—since 2003. Longbow is based in Melbourne, Florida.
Longbow runs like a law firm
We meet clients for discovery, determining their needs. From this we provide a proposal, all we think the client needs. The client then chooses what they’d like us to do, and the proposal turns into an agreement. While we can work at project rate, our rate card provides discounts based on how much work we provide. The more work, the lower the rate. Our rate card drives to retainer—intentionally.
We call our firm a boutique, meaning, we’d rather provide a deep array of services to fewer, quality customers. In the marketing business, we realize that to be effective for you, to return value on your investment, we need to know your business. A cursory scan of your firm is not enough to know who you are, what you’re best at, and where you’re most profitable. Working on retainer, we learn who you are.
Much of our work promoting you is content marketing.
Over time, we learn to speak in your voice and target the audience you really need to reach; not doing so is wasteful and less effective.
With attorney clients in Elder Law and Estate Planning, Tax Planning and Retirement Benefits—we work like a financial investment firm. Instead of a hundred new clients this year, we’d rather focus on a few each month. We know we can be much more effective and engaged working with high value clients—operating exactly like most law firms prefer.
PracticeDev is the expression of all our experience working in your field. We’ve taken all we know in how to build effective digital marketing, relevant content marketing and targeted outreach, and packaged it into a streamlined set of offerings that are proven to benefit your practice.
We’ve also leveraged our partners and colleagues to provide tailored IT services, document management, digital security and business continuity—exactly what attorney practices need to thrive.
We look forward to growing with your practice. The name, PracticeDev, perfectly sums up what we do: one source for all your digital needs.
If you’ve struggled to find a web firm, marketing agency, and/or IT company that understands your needs, then we welcome the opportunity to speak with you, at your convenience.
Thank you for your future consideration.
Next Step:
For a 30 minute consult, book a discovery session or contact us today.
August 1, 2019
Digital Marketing for your Legal or Financial Services Practice
We recommend you do one thing to market your firm: Engage in digital marketing.
In a crowded marketplace, when people search for the services you specialize in, they need to find your practice. Without a search-focused marketing plan, you risk never being in the running for potential new clients.
We live in a digital era, and when a Gen X’er or Millennial needs information, they turn to Google, Bing, and other native search engines for the answers. Gone are the days of flipping through yellow pages. Search is not just one method to find your firm, it is the only method.
We cannot stress this enough, that this digital mindset has overtaken all others. As someone who just this year had to research living wills, trusts and managing the financial affairs of my aging parents, I can attest, my short list of attorneys to work with all ranked very high in search. Firms that did not have a digital presence were just not on my radar.
If we want to serve the next generation, we need to meet them where they search—online. That’s why digital is so important for your practice’s future.
Questions I need to know include:
- How do I protect my parents?
- What are their wishes, do they have living wills, and what is a living will?
- When do I need to take control of their affairs and how do I do that?
- What is “power of attorney”?
- How does assisted living function?
- How do I pay for it?
- How do I manage my Dad’s VA benefits?
- or help them manage their bills, finances and taxes?
Some form of these questions are bound to come up weekly, perhaps daily during the operation of your legal or financial practice.
When potential clients search for these questions online, what specific answers do they find? Or more importantly, who do they turn to for a solution?
The million-dollar question then, is this:
Is my firm visible in local search?
We’ll give your first digital marketing exercise, pro bono.
Get found in local search.
1. Go to Google, right now, and
2. Type in, “Elder Law Attorney, near me”
  (or Civil Attorney, or Tax Attorney, whatever your main focus is).
3. View the results.
If you’re not at the top of the list, then we can help you.
If you’re not on the first page at all, then you should call us and schedule a discovery session.
Through search, we want people to find you—and ask your firm for the answers.
As a digital marketing agency, we have a finger on the pulse of trends in marketing, advertising and promotion. We’re seeing that across many industries, big, national companies are dominating online marketing. They’ve discovered how to profitably advertise and use data and analytics to grow their bottom line.
National firms use digital marketing to attack our local markets—and they are winning.
The problem is, for a consultant like you, they are attacking local markets, where your practice lives and breathes.
With the rise of big enterprises like Rocket Lawyer and Legal Zoom, comes new challenges to your future business. They are commoditizing a portion of your business. . They are attacking new business, future business—they are after your leads.
Fig 1. Legal Zoom offers three-tiered pricing on living wills, leading to Attorney Advice
Rocket Lawyer takes another approach, they let you create your own living will for free, and then lead you to the conclusion that you might need more. Theirs is a “content marketing” exercise, meaning they provide great information, meant to draw you in from search.
Fig 2. Rocket Lawyer’s page on Free Living Wills.
Info + Create your own FREE Living Will = You might really need a lawyer.
With millions of dollars behind their digital marketing efforts, they seek to gobble up your first line of inquiry—they’re after your leads. And they are winning.
Sophisticated digital marketing strategies, detailed tracking of data, and access to Google’s enterprise toolset*, gives them a massive advantage.
Does that mean you should retire and shutter your practice? Of course not, but it should be a wake-up call, that you need to make sure you are visible to an online audience. It’s about the future of your practice.
While this seems daunting, marketing your practice isn’t a one-time, massive expense. Rather, it’s an intentional effort, driven by measurable goals that gets your results.
Digital Marketing is Proven
If the 600 lb. gorillas are using digital marketing, then what are you doing to compete? In our exercise above, the firms who were at the top of that Google search list, are also using digital marketing.
Alongside InterActive Legal, our marketing agency provides solutions that build up your online presence.
At PracticeDev, we provide digital strategies that grow your practice, and it all starts with one call, a 15 minute discovery session. Contact us, today.
Reference
* Source: https://www.legalzoom.com/personal/estate-planning/living-will-pricing.html
** Source: https://www.rocketlawyer.com/form/living-will.rl#/
***Google Analytics 360 (formerly Google Analytics Premium) is their enterprise toolset, and costs $150,000 to use, with additional service level plans.
Source: https://www.google.com/analytics/360-suite
Article: http://www.blastam.com/google-analytics-360-standard-comparison
July 24, 2019
Retirement Benefits Planning
The world of Estate Planning is changing, and attorneys and planners alike are looking to realign their practice for a newer audience. Natalie Choate, Estate Planning’s leading expert on retirement benefits planning, asked us to do just that with her groundbreaking eBook, “Life and Death Planning for Retirement Benefits“.
Together with InterActive Legal, we created a site, that promotes this work to a new audience. RetirementBenefitsPlanning.us is a modern platform from which to view this cornerstone publication of estate, tax, and retirement benefits planning.
Updated and in sync with the 8th edition of the book, in 2018, Retirement Benefits Planning is the state of the art for estate planning, featuring frequent updates, full support for mobile devices, increased security, and an array of tools to help you deliver to your clients. Most importantly, the site is easy to navigate and access from your desktop and tablet.
Natalie Choate’s book is a crucial reference manual for the Estate Planning and Tax Planning industries, important to countless professionals in the field. We enabled the material to be presented online, accessed by subscription. This gives reader the ability to search for specific topics and then links to abundant resources and case materials.
Why was this update important?
Retirement Benefits Planning was upgraded from Flash to HTML5, allowing it to operate smoothly and efficiently on mobile devices such as tablets, phones, and Apple Products. Flash has become increasingly unsecure and needs to be replaced as a web technology. This update provides the security and modernity Natalie’s site needed to function in the present day and beyond.
About the Author: Natalie Choate
A renowned author and a pillar in the Estate Planning Community, Natalie Choate and her two books, “Life and Death Planning for Retirement Benefits” and “The QPRT Manual” are leading resources for estate and tax planning.
She has been named “Estate Planner of the Year” by the Boston Estate Planning Council, listed in The Best Lawyers in America, and one of the legendary first ten attorneys to have received the National Association of Estate Planners and Council’s “Distinguished Accredited Estate Planner” designation.
Her comments and writings are regarded across America as the premier source of information for estate planning, tax planning, and retirement benefits.
Life and Death Planning
8th Edition is now available in print and online.
Since it was first published in 1996, Natalie Choate’s “Life and Death Planning for Retirement Benefits” has been the foundational text of Estate Planning. It contains well over 550 pages of drill-down content essential for Estate Planners, Financial Advisors, Investment Planners, Tax Planners, and Attorneys all looking to delve into the mechanics of Retirement Benefits. It is not simply a guide, but a in-depth reference manual of which there are none equal.
Retirement Benefits Planning runs on FlippingBook, an online reader with an interactive table of contents, fully searchable text, and extensive links and backlogs that help you to find that exact court case you needed to reference.
It uses a subscription-based platform, allowing for frequent updates to the content. To stay relevant, simply subscribe and get immediate access to all new changes and updates.
“Longbow’s new redesign has helped Retirement Benefits Planning achieve our vision of a living, breathing foundation for our work, from which estate planners continue to build upon,” Natalie told us.
Since spring of 2017, Longbow has been working side-by-side the Estate Planning world with one major goal in mind; to provide attorneys and their practices with websites that work.
“Thanks to Longbow’s efforts, we are able to keep Retirement Benefits Planning continually up to date—and deliver Natalie’s critical text to the next generation of Estate Planners.” – Matthew Tove, InterActive Legal
Visit the site online at RetirementBenefitsPlanning.us
About Longbow and PracticeDev
Longbow is a digital marketing firm, advertising and PR agency. PracticeDev is our new venture focused on the legal space, building modern websites with responsive design, powerful functionality and security.
We help attorney practices, estate planners and financial advisors to better promote themselves with branding, content and digital marketing. We provide simple, easy-to-manage solutions to help you get ahead of the competition.
Visit us at longbow.net and practicedev.com
What are you doing to promote yourself at events like Heckerling?
Contact Us
January 15, 2019