Google’s FREE Primer App Puts Many Pricey Legal Marketers To Shame.

I’m not sure how I missed it, but at the end of 2015, Google formally launched Primer , a free, sleek app that delivers bite-sized marketing lessons to help companies of all sizes build their businesses. Since then, Google has continued to update the app with new tutorials for small businesses developed by national experts .

Primer covers a vast menu of topics ranging from practical – such as understanding analytics or measuring engagements – to more strategic issues such as identifying a target audience or figuring out the best approach to selling products and services. Most of the content is interactive, with mini quizzes that ask users to identify the most effective web design or domain name and then explaining the correct answers.
Because Primer is focused largely at small businesses that may not have in-house marketing departments or the money to spend on consultants, it’s also a great tool for solo and small law firms that suffer the same constraints. Moreover, because each Primer module is under five minutes and available on an app, busy solos and smalls can easily go through a couple of lessons on their lunch hour, between meetings or while on hold on the phone or waiting on line. Although Primer doesn’t contain any discussion of legal ethics – which is one of the most important aspects of marketing for lawyers – the tutorials that I reviewed endorse a professional approach that steers users clear of the spammy, sales-y and smarmy.

Sadly, Primer’s FREE (can’t emphasize that enough) content and well-designed user interface exceeds quality of a large majority of pricey legal marketing programs – which are often replete with low-quality video lessons, questionable advertising advice (such as encouraging lawyers to bombard every social media channel with ghost-written articles or news culled by administrative staff or robots) and high-pressure sales tactics to scare solos and smalls into buying even more products that they can’t afford. (If you’re interested in learning off-list what separates the wheat from the chaff when it comes to legal marketing programs, drop me an email)

I’m not suggesting that Google Primer can or should replace all legal marketers. Even after following all of the Primer’s lessons, solos and smalls may still need assistance in implementation. But Primer can “prime the pump” so to speak by educating solos and smalls on what effective marketing is — but also what it is not by exposing through example the shams that many legal marketing programs really are. That alone makes Google Primer worth a look.