Did you know a whopping 70% of people turn to online research before hiring a lawyer? 🤯 That’s more than half of your potential clients!
But with so many options – SEO, PPC, social media, blogging – crafting a winning law firm marketing strategy can feel overwhelming.
This comprehensive guide is your roadmap to not only designing a powerful marketing plan but also optimizing it for long-term success. We’ll break down essential marketing terms, highlight the undeniable benefits of a strong online presence, and share proven strategies to attract and convert more clients.
Let’s unlock your law firm’s marketing potential and reach those eager clients searching for your expertise! 🚀
11 Steps to Help Your Firm Stand Out From The Crowd
Building a marketing plan for a law firm is about developing strategies and best practices that grow the business over the long term. The process is often iterative, requiring frequent analysis and adjustments. But, if you start off on the right foot, a brilliant marketing strategy will be easy to adjust and maintain.
1. Set S.M.A.R.T. Goals for Your Law Firm Marketing Plan
The S.M.A.R.T. acronym stands for:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic
- Timely
Using the S.M.A.R.T method, you can create goals for your law firm marketing plan. Using this method, you will have actionable objectives on a specific schedule. Your S.M.A.R.T. will act as the roadmap for the rest of your marketing strategy design, and you can continue to use them on an ongoing basis.
Examples of beneficial S.M.A.R.T. goals include:
- Determining a marketing budget by the end of the month
- Creating a blogging schedule, such as posting once a month for the first year.
- Improve your firm’s search engine ranking by three positions for specific keywords before next May.
The S.M.A.R.T. methodology is highly adaptable, and you can work almost any goal into a S.M.A.R.T goal. The important thing is to be specific and realistic, ensure you can measure your performance, and assign an end date to the goals.
2. Target the Right Audience for The Types of Cases You Want to Sign
It might seem like the best idea is to try to reach as large an audience as possible with your law firm marketing. Still, the reality is that intelligent advertisers know that focusing their efforts on the demographics with the highest potential is the right way to do things.
What groups you target with your marketing is something that your firm will need to decide for itself.
But keep in mind the 80/20 rule. Chances are that 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your best cases or clients. Don’t you want more of them?
To find the right audience, study your previous and current clientele to see trends you can leverage. Other valuable sources of information for this step can include industry contacts, other lawyers, independent online research, paid marketing consultants, and referral sources.
Once you know what demographics you want to reach, you will have a better idea of what types of marketing will be worth investing in. Understanding your audience can also guide what kind of content you develop, such as emails, blog topics, and video scripts for social media posts.
3. Create a Marketing Budget and Stick to It.
Requiring a marketing budget might seem obvious, but many firms make the mistake of not creating one. Your marketing plan will depend on how you want to market your firm and how much those methods cost. It’s essential to define specific goals and investments.
How much you can afford to spend on marketing will depend on your firm’s overall revenue and how large of a cash flow you have available for advertising. It would be best if you also considered other factors, including your firm’s current position in the market.
Is the law firm a start-up, or is it well-established? Do you have a committed clientele, or are you going to need to focus heavily on finding new clients? What is the local market like regarding your competition? Are you the only lawyer practicing your particular kind of law in the area, or is the market saturated?
Questions like these will influence how much marketing your firm requires and present additional potential costs you need to consider.
And once you have a budget established for marketing your law firm, you must ensure you stick to it. Exceeding your marketing budget might help pull in a few extra clients, but if your expenses exceed your revenue, you will be worse off despite all your efforts.
4. Craft a Client-Focused Website That Converts Visitors into Clients
Your website is your law firm’s digital storefront, and first impressions matter. Forget the cookie-cutter templates and generic designs. Instead, create a website that speaks directly to your ideal client persona (ICP).
Here’s how:
- Understand your ICP: Who are your ideal clients? What are their pain points, needs, and goals? Tailor your website’s messaging and design to resonate with them.
- Prioritize user experience: Make your website easy to navigate, mobile-friendly, and visually appealing. Ensure your contact information is easily accessible.
- Showcase your expertise: Highlight your firm’s unique strengths and areas of practice. Share client testimonials, case studies, and awards to build credibility.
- Offer valuable content: Create informative blog posts, articles, or FAQs that address your ICP’s questions and concerns. This establishes you as a thought leader and builds trust.
- Optimize for search engines (SEO): Use relevant keywords and phrases throughout your website to improve your visibility in search results and attract organic traffic.
By investing in a client-focused website, you’re not just creating a digital presence – you’re building a powerful tool for attracting and converting your ideal clients.
5. Choose a Catchy Domain Name
Your domain name is one of the most important things about your website. As such, it should be easy to remember and represent your law firm’s name clearly and cleanly.
Once you have a name in mind, you must register the domain with a registrar with a chosen top-level domain like .com or .org. .law
6. Write for Your Dream Clients: Elevate Your Law Firm’s Website Copy
Your website is more than just an online brochure—it’s your firm’s digital handshake with potential clients. But are you speaking their language?
To attract your ideal cases and establish your firm as an authority, your website copy needs to resonate with your Ideal Client Persona (ICP). Here’s how to make it happen:
- Know your audience: What are their biggest concerns? What language do they use to describe their problems? Tailor your messaging to speak directly to their needs.
- Showcase your expertise: Don’t hold back! Share your knowledge generously. Offer free resources, in-depth articles, and case studies that demonstrate your unique value.
- Be authentic and approachable: Let your firm’s personality shine through. Use clear, concise language that’s both professional and relatable.
- Strategically incorporate keywords: Weave in relevant keywords naturally to boost your SEO and attract organic traffic from your target audience.
- Make every word count: Craft compelling headlines, captivating calls-to-action, and informative body text that guides visitors towards becoming clients.
Remember, your website is your 24/7 salesperson. Invest in high-quality copy that speaks directly to your dream clients, and watch your caseload grow. Don’t be afraid to give away your expertise – it’s the best way to establish trust and attract the right kind of clients to your firm.
7. Focus on SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is critical if you want potential new clients to find your law firm’s website online through search engines. Utilize the best SEO practices for law firms to ensure your firm isn’t missing out on potential customers.
With intelligent SEO techniques, a law firm can pull its site up the search engine rankings, which is essential since SEO studies have found that the number one spot on a Google search page gets almost 34% of all the organic traffic. In comparison, any place lower than eleven gets less than 1%.
Many components contribute to SEO. This list is not comprehensive, but here are a few SEO techniques that will yield fantastic results:
- Develop an SEO strategy that can serve as a customized roadmap of tangible goals to develop better organic traffic for your law firm.
- Conduct research and develop a list of impactful keywords.
- Include your priority keywords in your site’s URLs.
- Search engines index your content, so develop high-quality copy with strong keywords and good internal links.
- Google has begun to use Core Values to assess the ranking of sites. These include a website’s mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, Safe-browsing security protocol, and limited intrusive interstitials (ex. popup ads).
SEO can be a full-time job on its own, which is why many marketing law firms hire a professional SEO service. If your firm is limited in speed and expertise, consider consulting with a world-class SEO service.
7. Increase Brand Awareness & Traffic via Social Media
Social media is one of the most effective means of reaching potential new clients who may otherwise never come in contact with your law firm. Even better, many social media platforms are free to use.
With sites like Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok and more, a law firm can spread a wide net. Each site allows a firm to cross-link profiles, share content, develop unique content for each platform, and of course, link back to the firm’s home website.
All of the most popular social media platforms function differently. Some are entirely free, while others have options for premium paid profiles with great benefits. It’s also worth your time to research the different platforms to learn what demographics they attract and how the platforms’ audience might overlap with the demographics of the clients you want to find.
8. Develop Your Marketing Across Multiple Free Platforms
Speaking of utilizing other websites and forms of social media to attract new clients, every law firm should take advantage of sites that may already have a profile of your business that you can claim and then refine for free.
Sites such as Yelp, Yellow Pages, Avvo, and your local state’s chapter of the ABA are all places clients visit when they need to find an attorney. Don’t lose out on a free opportunity to drive traffic to your law firm’s website by not having a well-developed profile on each of these third-party sites.
9. Enhance Client Trust With Online Reviews
According to statistics in a recent National Law Review article, 72% of consumers trust online reviews, and 90% of consumers make their buying decisions based on what those reviews say.
A law firm might be able to weather a few less-than-stellar client reviews, but too many bad reviews will quickly have a detrimental impact on finding new clients.
It would be best if you standardized the practice of asking your clients to provide a review of your firm’s service performance after every case. This idea is doubly true if you know a client is happy with the turnout of their case, as you don’t want to lose out on any positive remarks about your firm.
Additionally, you might think it would be worthwhile to address negative reviews online. However, the ABA recommends you avoid this practice as it potentially violates their guidance on ethics and professional responsibility.
10. Grow Your Network of Legal Professionals
Reaching out directly to new clients isn’t the only way to market yourself or your law firm. Building a network of firms, attorneys, and other legal professionals is a phenomenal way to develop your brand.
Organize meetings with other attorneys or firms and discuss what benefits you might gain from sharing the work of marketing. Designing a conversion strategy that takes advantage of a vast network of attorneys can lead to more referrals between firms.
This is especially effective if you develop a network of firms and lawyers practicing a wider variety of specializations. It’s a simple way to improve your marketing with minimal time or money investments.
11. Analyze Your Marketing and Reassess
Even the best marketing strategy needs to be analyzed and potentially adjusted from time to time. It’s vital to analyze and adapt if you are slowly building your marketing strategy through an iterative process over weeks, months, or years.
To analyze the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, collect whatever data you can, including search engine analytics, ad conversion rates, changes in your clientele, year-end revenue for the firm, etc. It’s also good to analyze marketing costs, including PPC ads, domain hosting fees, and more.
It is also essential to receive feedback from old and new clients alike. Learn how clients find you so that you can determine what marketing practices yield the best ROI for the law firm.
Here is a short list of some of the most critical times to reassess your firm’s marketing strategy:
- You haven’t changed your marketing strategy in several years.
- Your firm is offering new services or has moved to a new location.
- You recently updated the firm’s website.
- You see consistently declining conversions.
Critical Strategies for Law Firm Marketing
Utilizing the 11 actionable steps outlined in our step-by-step guide will get any size law firm to a place where they are seeing increased online traffic and better returns on their marketing.
However, it is essential not to get overly focused on the details to the exclusion of foundational strategies that hold true regardless of how you are marketing the law firm.
Here are four critical strategies that a law firm can use to inform all of its decisions as it designs an effective marketing plan.
Have a Client-Forward Approach
Modern consumers have a certain expectation of near-constant and almost instantaneous feedback. For any business, including law firms, every action it performs must have a customer-centric approach.
Innovative marketing and high-quality content play a huge role in how customers interact with a law firm. Rather than focusing on facts and figures such as success rates, prices, or other quantitative data, present your firm and attorneys as legal experts who understand what potential clients are dealing with.
Build relationships and trust first and demonstrate that the firm is there for its customers at every step of the process.
This guiding principle can inform many parts of your marketing strategy, from the wording used in ads to the UX design of the law firm’s website. Using a customer-centric approach, a firm will retain more customers and attract more potential clients.
Choose Where to Focus Your Energy Wisely
Marketing can be a full-time job. With online ads, social media posting, email campaigns, blogging, and many more advertising efforts proven to be effective, many law firms chose to hire an experienced marketing agency to handle their advertising.
However, if your law firm chooses to handle its own marketing, you will need to select a few marketing strategies on which to focus your time and energy.
Here are a few suggestions on how to focus your firm’s resources:
- Choose one or two social media platforms to grow your firm’s presence instead of trying to use every new social media platform that’s trending.
- Choose a sustainable blog post schedule, such as one article per week or two articles per month. The focus should be on quality rather than quantity.
- Design your PPC ads with specific, high-value locations and keywords for a better ROI.
Every law firm’s situation will be unique, but the important thing is to design a marketing strategy that is consistent, manageable, and adds value to your law firm’s brand.
Seek Out Subject Knowledge Experts
As we’ve mentioned, marketing can be a full-time job and doing it yourself can be limiting. Suppose you think your marketing goals are outside of your scope of abilities. In that case, hiring law firm marketing consultants specializing in attracting potential new clients can be a fantastic idea.
Suppose you aren’t looking for full-service digital marketing firms law-based. In that case, there are still plenty of specialists, such as SEO experts, web designers, content writers, and social media managers, that can help you develop the best marketing possible.
Analytics Are the Key to Success
We live in the age of the algorithm, and just as law is about facts and reasoning, so is digital marketing. Utilizing data analytics can help lawyers optimize their marketing by targeting specific demographics and monitoring their existing marketing’s effectiveness.
Data analytics lets you track your web pages, social media responses, keyword rankings, and more.
A law firm can also use data analysis to study the legal industry or even a specific area of law to find out what potential clients are responding to.
Your firm can also use data analytics to learn more from internal data, such as billing and time investments. You might even find patterns within your existing client base that can provide insights valuable for finding new clients.
In Conclusion
The best kind of law firm marketing plan is one that exists. Try starting with a simple marketing strategy that utilizes only a few easily implemented actions that can be reliably monitored and scaled as your experience level improves.
For even more guidance, leave a comment below or get a quote from us for a customized digital marketing plan to meet your marketing goals.
