Do you want your law firm to generate more leads than ever before? This complete law firm marketing guide will help you accomplish just that.
With over 1.3 million active lawyers in the US, saying the legal market is saturated would be an understatement. With a 14 percent increase in the last decade, it’s easy to see why most law firms are looking for better ways to attract new clients and capture their target market.
Law firm marketing has changed drastically in the past few years and given that 96 percent of the target market search for lawyers online, marketing strategies need to change as well.
So, what marketing strategies do you need to use to stand out and expand your client base? In this definitive law firm marketing guide, we’ll take you through the most effective strategies that successful companies use. It’s a step-by-step that will help you reach your law firm objectives, which is acquiring more high-quality clients and grow your practice to greater heights.
Your Law Firm Website Should Be a 24 Hour Sales Representative
Turning your website into a client producing machine is by far one of the best law firm marketing strategies you should be utilizing right now. Your business website is arguably the best marketing asset you have right now.
Almost everyone turns to the internet when they need to search for something or get more information about it. Everything should start and end with your law firm website.
If you’re going to take any piece of advice from this article, let it be that you need to have a professionally designed website. The design, user-experience, and functionality must be on par with the highest authority websites your potential clients visit, without leaving any buts, and, or ifs. There are several things you need to accomplish this goal.
A High Converting Landing Page
Your website homepage is the initial point of contact for all potential clients. The most important aspect to consider is how user-friendly it is.
It takes only seconds for customers to form an opinion about your law firm based on your website, and you need to capitalize on that. Your goal is not to only get their attention, but also to retain it.
The most important aspects of your landing page include a visible brand logo, easy navigation, social proof, a very strong and visible call-to-action, and great content. The page should be clean, to the point, and organized.
Fast Loading Times
The human attention span has decreased to incredible levels. It’s still unbelievable that half the population expects websites to load within the first 3 seconds, failure to which they hit the ‘back’ button and search head over to the competitor websites. In a saturated market where competitors are always on the lookout to take such customers, this is a mistake you can’t afford to make.
The thing is, page speed and performance affect ranking because Google determines authoritativeness, credibility, and relevancy based on how customers interact and react to a website. Metrics like organic traffic, bounce rate, CTR, exit pages, and repeat traffic of your website will all play a role in how high you rank. Your attorney marketing strategy should include all these.
You need to ensure that your pages load fast, and you have high performance. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to test your website speeds and see how much improvement you need to make.
Mobile Optimization
We cannot overemphasize how mobile optimization is important right now. This is one of the most essential aspects of a successful law firm marketing strategy because more half 52 percent of all searches happen on mobile devices.
Have you come across a website that’s not mobile responsive? Frustrating, isn’t it? You have to zoom in, deal with small unclickable buttons, small text that’s too hard to read, and a plethora of other things you just can’t understand.
About 81 percent of the US population uses smartphones, and 57 percent of them would not recommend a website that’s not mobile-friendly. This is exactly what your customers will feel when they find your website unoptimized, and you can be sure they won’t be coming back.
Optimize your website for mobile users. Period.
Visual Appeal
Potential clients form an opinion on a law firm website within the first few seconds. About 75 percent of these people will decide the credibility of your law firm based on your website design.
You need to tailor the visual aspect of your website to psychologically encourage authority, trust, and friendliness. The colors, images, text, shapes, and everything else should be in harmony in an appealing and attractive way.
Invest in SEO for Lawyers and Content Marketing
SEO or search engine optimization is an essential part of your law firm marketing strategy and one you should not underestimate. We’re living in the digital age now, and you need to come up top. Top of the search engine results that is.
There’s a joke that goes around that if you want to hide a dead body, you should do it on page two of Google. It’s popular because the first page is where all the action takes place, and page two rarely gets any of it, leave alone page three and anything after that. On page one is where your law firm needs to be, and you can achieve this in several ways.
Start by adding a schema for attorneys, optimizing your landing pages for specific relevant keywords, and adding relevant keywords and markups in titles, heading tags, and images. You should also optimize your images and give them keyword-rich descriptions, use off-site local SEO, and great content marketing.
Invest in High-Quality Content for Your Law Firm
Given that the average person spends about 6 hours a day online, more and more people prefer to learn more about law firms through online articles compared to advertisements.
Additionally, did you know that you can increase your ranking high on search engines by adding a blog section to your website?
People want to hire professionals they can trust, and you need authority to garner that trust. Your clients are looking for people they believe will solve their problems for them. Being authoritative sends that message.
What you need to fight to provide is value to what your potential clients are looking for. You need a dominating content strategy, provide valuable and comprehensive blogs, and gain authority through guest posting.
Build Credibility and Social Proof for a Better Online Visibility
Referrals are the most valuable form of marketing, and reviews are extremely important to customers. About half of your potential customers will ask for referrals from their friends, family members, and other lawyers. They will also conduct their own research online to verify whether those referrals are credible enough.
They do this to get a clear understanding of the lawyers’ legal process, see what other clients have to say about them, see their experience and credentials, and know what kind of cases they handle. The best course of action here is to collect your best client reviews and referrals.
Of course, this can only happen if you deliver impeccable services and get happy clients.
Ask them to leave reviews and testimonials for you, and most people are always happy to do so. Beyond this, showcase your affiliations and awards so you can instill credibility and boost your SEO in the process.
If your law firm happens to be a part of charity partnerships, the local chamber of commerce, legal directories, and other affiliations, post them on your dedicated reviews page.
Use Social Media to Your Advantage
At this point, you have already determined your target market and empathy mapping. This means you have an idea of what social media platforms they are likely to use most.
It’s a given that most people have signed up to most of the social media platforms available, but you can’t target everyone, right? The thing is, you shouldn’t just use social media just because everyone is using but to your advantage,
The law firm marketing strategy here is to upload quality content with backlinks to your website. This is the one place you can interact and engage your audience.
Get into discussions regarding your profession, and show your authority on the matter. Answer questions they may have adequately and make them feel that they can trust you.
Then leave a call-to-paction they can follow, leading to your landing page or contact information. As a professional law firm, what social media platform should you be using?
It’s possible for you to acquire high-quality clients from one of the largest platforms, which is Facebook. With over 2.6 billion active users per month, you’re bound to find numerous people needing your services. All you have to do is be strategic about how you reach them, or how easy you make it for them to reach you.
LinkedIn and YouTube
You also need to be on LinkedIn to connect with industry professionals that will possibly refer clients to you. YouTube is essential because most users prefer to watch instead of reading blocks of text. Even short videos of you or partners discussing different topics or answering the most common questions will do wonders for your law firm marketing results.
Other Great Platforms
Twitter is just as great, and so is Quora, Reddit, and Instagram. Use these platforms to look for users looking for help or asking legal questions and offer to get them out of their predicaments. Your main aim here is to come off as a subject matter expert, and you’ll get referrals, create connections, and build lasting relationships.
Facebook and Instagram Ads
The best part is that you can use Facebook and Instagram ads, and you will have a great opportunity to build trust. You can achieve this by creating social proof while engaging with your target market. When you manage to demonstrate your expertise and successful track record, you’ll become an industry thought leader.
Maximize Your Law Firm Marketing Budget
There are so many marketing strategies you can use, which include email marketing, Google AdSense or PPC, local SEO, among others. No! Having a professional website is not enough.
Email marketing is a cost-effective and efficient attorney marketing strategy. You should implement it to increase referral traffic, ignite brand loyalty, convert warm leads, and continue providing value. Whenever you have valuable information or a story you would like to share with your clients, email marketing is very effective. There’s no limit to how many people you can email.
You need to have your real estate on Google My Business and pay-per-click advertising. Google Ads are incredible and can provide you with instant results and higher organic ranking. The thing is, law-related keywords for Google Ads are quite expensive, and the best way to go about this is by using long-tail keywords.
Your SEO, local SEO, and PPC law marketing strategies need to coincide with each other to maximize results. Beyond that, you must keep your Google My Business page consistent and updated at all times. When was the last time you updated your images?
You need to showcase happy clients, your team of attorneys, and maybe photos of your office. You should also take advantage of online directories to leverage your presence online. The idea here is to get backlinks to your website, and the more directories you appear in, the higher your SERP ranking.
All this probably sounds like a lot of work, which it is, and you can always gain the power of online marketing and get direct leads. You can learn more about getting more legal leads and see whether it’s something you’d like for your attorney marketing strategy.
Optimize With Analytics
One of the most important attorney marketing strategies is measuring and tracking everything. To have an effective marketing strategy, you need to calculate your ROI. Track all your marketing campaigns to know which ones are working on, which ones have room for improvement, and which ones to abandon.
Look for key performance indicators instead of just metrics, which include revenue, leads, the number of new clients, return on your marketing investment, and cost-per-lead. Google Analytics is an indispensable tool in this regard.
Law Firm Marketing: Finding Effective Attorney Marketing Strategies
Acquiring new clients is getting harder by the day, but the trick here is to find a system that turns desperate searches into eager clients. These are some of the best law firm marketing strategies you can utilize, and if you do it right, you’re bound to see returns.
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