Law firms are specialized businesses that typically have trouble when it comes to marketing. This is because they rely on general marketing professionals that might not understand the intricacies of law firms and how they attract new audiences and clients.
As a result, you’ll need to establish a few of your own marketing strategies in order to take advantage of the platforms available to you.
- Establishing Your Online Presence
One of the most important considerations when it comes to law firm marketing is to have a website that is capable of drawing in and informing audiences. Without a website to serve as your sales rep and storefront, it’s going to be difficult to reach your target audience. It’s one of your most valuable marketing assets and a lot of attention needs to be focused on building an effective website.
Here are a few website considerations that will help you establish a solid online presence.
- Creating a mobile-friendly website – A lot of people access the internet exclusively using their mobile devices, so it’s important to try and appeal to these audiences by making a mobile-friendly website. This often involves optimizing your web pages for mobile use (such as removing auto-playing videos and large images) while also streamlining website navigation and making it suitable for touchscreen devices.
- Ensuring your website can be found – Search engine optimization will help ensure that your website can be discovered. There are many aspects to consider when it comes to SEO, such as the keywords you plan to target and the audiences you wish to appeal to. SEO experts can help make your website more visible on search engines, but they’ll need to be at least somewhat experienced with law-related details. It can be expensive to improve your SEO especially if you’re targeting general keywords, but it’s well worth the money if it can land you on the front page of a search result.
- Designing your website to be appealing – A website must be appealing in order to attract customers. It must offer functionality that is relevant to your target audience, it needs to provide an excellent user experience and you need to make it visually appealing as well. All of these factors combined make for great web design and it turns your ordinary website into your always-on sales representative.
- Becoming an authoritative source of information – Search engines and customers alike much prefer it when you become an authoritative source of information. This means that people trust you to provide them with real facts and useful information that can help them with their legal problems. This involves writing a lot of evergreen content and using plenty of facts and figures that help to prove that points that you make. You should also be networking with bloggers and other websites to have your content posted in various places, resulting in better domain authority for your business.
- Optimizing your web pages for speed – Lastly, you need to make sure that your websites actually load quickly. This could be the difference between someone that glances over your website and someone that actually wants your services. It’s worth testing your web pages for speed by loading them on a variety of different devices and connections. Ideally, you’ll want to try your web pages using some kind of mobile connection to ensure that they can be accessed even with poor-quality connections that are unstable or slow.
There are many more considerations when it comes to improving a law firm’s website and making it appeal to its audience. Ultimately, the goal is to create a website that acts as a sales representative. It should be informative, draw lots of people and lead to more information that can lead to someone contact you directly. This means it has to be attractive, well-optimized for search engines and overall loading speeds, and also contain all of the contact details your audience needs to get in touch.
By focusing on these aspects, you’ll have a much easier time converting leads into paying clients who need your services.
- Offline Law Firm Marketing
Although the internet is a dominant force when it comes to law firm marketing, it’s still important to think about offline law firm marketing such as flyers, paper mail and guest speaking at events. The idea is to target potential customers in their everyday lives, but also offer your services to people that might not be as tech-savvy as your regular customers.
Here are a couple of steps to help you establish an effective marketing strategy regardless of what platform you advertise on.
- Establishing a marketing strategy is important regardless of what platform you advertise on. Without a strategy or plan for offline law firm marketing, you’re going to end up wasting a lot of capital and cause your business to fall into a state of irrelevance.
- Designing physical advertising media is important if you’re focusing on offline law firm marketing. This can include brochures that list and describe your services or leaflets that cover some of the services you offer to your clients. There’s a wide variety of physical marketing materials that you can consider using.
- Advertising on billboards can be an option if you have the funds for it and want to establish your business as a reliable law firm in the area. This can be an excellent way to grow your local presence and attract a larger local audience.
- Television and radio advertising is also an option for those that want to appeal to audiences that might not necessarily use computers or the internet.
Offline law firm marketing can be quite a challenge especially if your company has grown used to digital advertising methods. However, it’s still an incredibly important part of your law firm marketing strategy and will help you establish a local presence.
- Fast and Paid Law Firm Marketing
For law firms with a large marketing budget, it’s possible to use paid methods of law firm advertising in order to grow your brand quickly. For instance, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be a fantastic way to grow your business. Other paid forms of law firm marketing can include paid sponsorships with influencers and social media promotions.
Paid forms of advertising can be seen as an aggressive but effective way to grow your brand. While typically a short-term solution for growth, it can attract a large number of customers to your law firm who may become long-term clients. Paid forms of advertising can be targeted at different demographics, allowing you to pinpoint your campaigns. This flexibility allows you to target the services you offer at demographics that are likely to need them.
While paid law firm marketing can be an effective way to grow your brand, it can often lead to inconsistent results. It also needs a lot of investment before it can become an effective form of advertising, as popular search terms and keywords may be more expensive to bid for. Traffic potential also isn’t as strong as organic law firm marketing that uses search engine optimisation and high-quality content as ways to draw in more views.
In short, paid law firm marketing such as PPC can be a good way to grow your business, but it doesn’t provide the same long-term benefits as organic law firm marketing. However, it’s an essential component of law firm marketing especially if you want to overcome your competition and rank higher on specific keywords or local SEO.
- Slow But Organic Law Firm Marketing
Organic forms of law firm marketing, such as search engine optimization, allow you to develop your business’s brand on a much tighter budget. In many cases, creating content for your website or optimizing your existing web pages can be done for free if you have the knowledge, but it can be time-consuming and the gains in terms of traffic can be low.
Organic law firm marketing is all about building momentum and slowly acquiring a larger audience with a higher retention rate and more lead conversion opportunities. The focus is on bringing your customers to you naturally over time instead of paying money for more views, clicks and impressions.
Marketing services will typically offer organic strategies to help your business grow an audience naturally. This may include a thorough audit of your social media accounts to see how they can be optimized to reach a wider audience, and it may also involve trend analysis to see how your content can be pivoted to attract more clients.
Content marketing is one of the most important forms of organic law firm marketing available. Content marketing involves the use of text, video and audio to create meaningful things for your audience. This can include a guide on how to deal with specific legal challenges or a video guide explaining the legal side of certain topics. This content provides value to your potential customers, generates more leads and can be shared on other websites and social media. This helps to boost your credibility as a law firm and also gives you more domain authority.
There’s also the concept of evergreen content which is made to be long-lasting. It provides value to potential leads since the information doesn’t expire. It’s not tied to a specific season and it’s not a commentary on current affairs, meaning it’s going to be relevant for many years to come.
With a mix of content marketing and search engine optimization, organic law firm marketing can be a fantastic way to grow your brand and give you a lot more exposure. While it’s relatively slow to pick up momentum, it’s crucial to use it in conjunction with paid marketing strategies to create a comprehensive law firm marketing plan.
What Are Other Firms Doing?
Law firms are taking full advantage of online platforms such as their website and social media in order to grow their businesses. Here are a few unique ideas that you can try with your own law firm.
Blogging and vlogging are both excellent ways to raise your Google rank. It contributes to your SEO, the content can be linked across social media and you can provide unique insights on legal topics in the news. It’s important to be consistent when it comes to blogging and vlogging so that you can produce a lot of content to help generate leads.
Turning cases into content is a relatively new development where law firms can use past cases to explain certain legal concepts. By turning real cases into content, it enables them to deliver evergreen content that is both informative and educational. This also helps to show your audience that you’re a reputable law firm that produces real results.
Setting up your social media profiles is also incredibly important as clients are likely to search your name and look up your past before considering you. Make sure you cleanse your personal social media profiles and add a touch of professionalism to your LinkedIn and other public profiles.
Focusing on mobile and responsive designs is also an important consideration given that many web users access the internet through their smartphones and tablet devices. This means that websites need to be responsive and accessible using a touchscreen. However, it also needs to work flawlessly on a desktop with a mouse.
Reviews are also becoming an important part of your law firm marketing strategy. More consumers are conducting their own research on services and products before considering it, hence why positive reviews can give you a huge exposure boost. Encouraging users to give you a review if they had a good experience with your law firm can go a long way.
Summary
To conclude, offline and online forms of marketing are both essential to create a comprehensive marketing strategy. However, a lot of emphasis must be placed on online marketing through the use of both paid and organic marketing. Law firms are utilizing many creative ideas to get their brand out on the internet to attract a wider audience, and it’s going to be an essential component to your success as a law firm.