You might have the greatest law firm with the best lawyers in the world, but if you don’t market your business, clients won’t discover you. This is why the average law firm spends 6.7% of its gross revenue on marketing.
Of course, marketing success doesn’t just depend on how much you spend. It also depends on how you spend it and the strategy and tactics you use.
To help you get it right the first time, I’ve shared the most successful law firm marketing tips below.
The 12 Best Law Marketing Strategies
Here are some of the best digital marketing strategies you can use to generate a steady stream of clients.
Formulate a law firm marketing strategy
To market your law firm successfully, you need to develop a strategy based on data from your audience, competitors, and previous marketing attempts.
Some lawyers and marketers intuitively understand what their audience and their market needs, and can generate phenomenal results without exhaustive research.
But things can become a problem when the team expands and the new marketing hire isn’t as familiar with the reasons why campaigns are working and how to get the data they need to make good decisions.
37% of companies report they waste their marketing spend because of poor marketing/media data quality.
Avoid being among this group; create a strategy anyone on your marketing team can use.
To create this marketing strategy, you need to begin with extensive research. This will uncover crucial insights that can improve your marketing ROI.
First, use Google Analytics, your social media platforms, and third-party tools to get quantitative data about your site, your social media accounts, and your competitors’ activities.
Next, conduct qualitative analysis with surveys and interviews to learn more details. You should interview current customers and potential customers to gather this data. You can also do internal research by interviewing people on your customer service and sales teams. They’ll have a better understanding of your target audience.
Finally, you can use this information to create market maps, empathy maps, and persona(s).
Your market map should contain data that is essential for marketing methods such as online advertising. Your team can refer to it to see where your audience is located, how much they earn, and which social networks they frequent.
The empathy map will help you understand the emotions your audience goes through daily. You’ll know what their day looks like, what are their pain points and what you can do to alleviate them.
The persona is the document where you assemble all the information from surveys, interviews, market maps, and empathy maps. It’ll help you picture your audience better. Some businesses even give their persona a name and photo as it makes it appear more real. Here’s an example from Wix.
Depending on your target audience, you should either create one persona or several.
You can create your offline and online marketing campaign around this data. In it, you need to detail your goals, the time frame, and the steps and marketing channels you plan to use. Make sure you write about every step here and share information on how you’ll track it.
It’s important to set benchmarks and track every effort you put in. This way, you’ll know what marketing efforts worked and what didn’t. You and your team can use these metrics to make more informed and effective marketing decisions.
Make sure you set goals and time frames after reading legal industry benchmarks. If you don’t, you might choose unrealistic goals and set yourself up for disappointment even before you begin.
You can find these benchmarks in reports and surveys from organizations and publications such as the American Bar Association and Law.com. Important benchmarks include average conversion rate, return on ad spend (ROAS), ROI, and customer churn rate.
Invest in custom law firm website design
According to a Google Legal Services study, 74% of consumers visit a law firm’s website to take action.
Your website is your marketing headquarters, where you send most of your traffic. No algorithms can influence this asset. It is entirely under your control and will help you make a strong first impression if designed properly.
Your website needs to have six basic pages: homepage, about us, services, testimonials, blog, and contact us.
The homepage is the page most people will land on. You should optimize it for first-time visits as over 80% of visits to a website are new visits.
On the homepage, state the type of law firm you are and the prospective clients you want to work with and add a testimonial or two.
For some ideas, check out the Dansker & Aspromonte Associates’ website. This is what a homepage should look like.
You can see that they are an injury law firm as soon as you visit it. The information is above the fold. It also added its phone number and a “Contact Us” call to action that takes you directly to the contact page.
The mentions of some of their biggest verdicts boost social proof. If you scroll down, you can see many more important details.
On the about us page, write about the employees at your firm and their experience. You don’t have to list every person. The partners’ names and the people clients are most likely to work with will do.
The services page should include a list of all the services you offer. On the testimonials page, you can add testimonials from happy clients who match your target market.
On the contact us page, you should list the best way to contact you. This can be through email or contact form, or both. Dansker & Aspromonte Associates has an excellent contact us page, too.
You’ll find the address, hours, phone number, directions, and a contact form here. In the beginning, you can develop a basic website and gradually assess user experience to create a better version. Pay as much attention to the messaging and writing as you do to the design.
You should also take advantage of listing sites such as Yelp, as many people look for lawyers and other service providers on these sites. A listing with reviews from past clients can help a lot. There are also some legal directories like FindLaw where you might want to list your law practice.
Don’t list your law firm in every directory. You mainly want to get on authoritative sites your target audience frequents. Pay attention to aggressive sales reps overselling their listing sites and try to avoid scams. If the results promised are too good to be true, proceed carefully.
A free listing site you should take advantage of is Google My Business. This will get your business listed in Google search itself. Clients can view details about your services and read and write reviews.
Bolster your website with several landing pages
Your website is a good place to send people to learn about your businesses and the services you offer. But regular pages aren’t the best way to convert visitors to leads and sales.
Page elements such as the menu bar, links, and tags can distract people and prevent them from converting. To get the most conversions, use distraction-free landing pages.
These pages shouldn’t contain a menu or link that takes people away from the landing page.
You can promote the sales pages on your services page. Whenever you mention a service, you can link to a sales page where potential clients can learn more about each service. Here’s a good example of a landing page from RecoverWell.
You’ll notice that there are no distracting links. All the calls to action focus on getting you to book the free consultation.
You can also send traffic through search engines and ads. I’ll go into more details about these two techniques later in the article. I recommend you create different versions of the landing page for different promotion sources. This will help you gather better data on what marketing methods and channels work best.
Create case studies around verdicts to show you’re the real deal
It’s harder to sell expensive services as the risk to the customer is higher. Many people are hesitant to commit to a company they do not know. So, successful companies create case studies to show that they’ve helped clients get outstanding results. They’re very persuasive and can significantly boost conversions.
You should do something similar if you want to attract clients and lower resistance by creating case studies around verdicts and settlements. As over 60% of people aren’t very enthusiastic about suing.
Many people feel it isn’t necessary or don’t want to go through the hassle.
Also 91% of people with $100,000 households agree that lawyers are expensive.
If you create a detailed case study around your client’s situation before they hired you and how much they made after working with you or how it improved their life, it can help you attract good clients. It’ll display the value you bring.
Make sure you create case studies around the type of client you want to attract. Also, include a video recording from your client praising you in the case study, as a video can be more credible than written text to a potential client. They can see the person complimenting you instead of reading a quote and pondering if it’s real.
Here’s an example of a case study from Simmons Hanley Conroy.
It goes into detail about the favorable verdict and gets people to book a free consultation.
Here’s another case study from Tona Law. It’s not as slick-looking as the above one, but it includes all the necessary details and a video testimonial.
Your aim should be to get people to read a case study and then on a call or a face-to-face session where they can hire you.
Offer live chat support
Not everyone will schedule a call immediately after visiting your sales pages. Some of them will be busy and will prefer quicker answers before contacting you. To answer these questions, you can place a live chat widget on all pages on your website. It offers a private atmosphere for clients to provide sensitive information they don’t want others to hear.
If people have questions, they can type them, and your support team can respond. Your support team can also use this to qualify clients and schedule calls with only those who will be ideal for your services. This will save you time, increase your conversion rate, and lower acquisition costs.
Live chat tools also have bots that can automate specific answers, allowing your customer support team to focus on more complex questions. Here’s an example of live chat support on the Munley Law Website, which lets prospects know a person is online and ready to answer their questions.
Incorporate Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
86% of people prefer to use Google to research lawyers online.
It’s critical to get your website on search engines if you want to attract high-quality clients. But you don’t want to just appear anywhere on search engines; you need to be among the top three results at least as they get over 75% of clicks.
Number one would be ideal, of course!
Getting your site to rank is complicated as there are dozens of ranking factors. You can learn all about them in this law firm SEO guide.
Keywords and backlinks influence SEO rankings the most.
Keywords are words people search online while looking for a law firm. You need to consider your audience persona and figure out the keywords they’re using when looking for your services. You can find these keywords with a tool like Ahrefs. It’ll show the organic search volume and click-through rate.
Look for buyer-intent keywords that people search while looking for lawyers; these people are more likely to hire you. An example of a buyer intent keyword is “personal injury lawyer.”
You know that people who search for this keyword want to hire a lawyer to help with a personal injury case. The keyword has an average CPC (cost per click) of $110, a search volume of 40,000, and 27,000 searches result in clicks. These are all good signs.
You might also want to get more specific and look for keywords such as “best personal injury lawyer” or local SEO keywords such as “personal injury lawyer New York.”
After you find the keywords, you should optimize your landing pages’ content with them. The keyword should make up at least 0.5% of the text content. For example, if the page is 1,000 words long, the phrase should appear at least five times.
It should appear in key areas like the title, subheads, and metadata. Also, sprinkle secondary keywords throughout the page. They should appear one or two times at least. Secondary keywords are keywords with lower search volumes than the primary keyword, but collectively they can drive more traffic.
When you create quality content with keywords weaved in naturally, it signals to Google that your page is a good match for that search phrase. But content alone won’t help you rank. Another factor that Google looks for is authority. Google determines this by the number of backlinks pointing to your entire website and that specific page.
This is why you should build backlinks to get the page to rank. But not just any backlinks; you want links from relevant sites with high authority, as Google considers these factors too.
Check out the top results for “personal injury lawyers.” You’ll find that most have several backlinks.
But some sites with fewer backlinks rank better than those with more because of the overall authority of the sites and their backlink quality.
To learn about how to find and build the right backlinks, check out our law firm link-building guide.
Implement content marketing
One of the best ways to drive traffic to your website and build trust is content marketing.
Quality content that answers your prospects’ questions will display your expertise. Use the data from your research and search engine tools to create content on topics with good search volume.
You can also do some social research to see what content gets shared on social media.
While writing blog posts, make sure they’re at least 2,000 words long as longer posts attract more backlinks.
You should promote these posts through social media and outreach to generate backlinks. It’ll be easier to build links to a blog post than to a landing page as people prefer linking to free useful content.
People won’t automatically hire you after reading your blog posts. You need to place conversion elements on your website. The live chat widget will help, but you should also place opt-in forms that ask people to sign up for your email list. You will learn more about this in a bit.
Get active on social media
A stellar social media presence is imperative to your law firm’s success in 2021. This is why 93% of legal professionals surveyed use social media, and 85% weave it into their marketing strategy.
It’s a medium where you can share content, build trust, and persuade clients to hire you.
People now have accounts on multiple social media channels. But you don’t have to build a presence on all of them. Instead, pick the networks your target audience is most active on and build a presence. You can start with a couple at the beginning. After you figure out a social media marketing strategy that works and generates clients, you can repeat the process on other social networks to scale results.
The most used networks are LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. You should start with these.
For some ideas, check out the Freshfields’ Twitter account.
US SPACs spent more on overseas targets in Q1 2021 than in the previous 20 years combined. For the inside track on #SPACs and other key transactional trends, read our latest Q1 M&A monitor: https://t.co/G79Vt2uo2W pic.twitter.com/zTGep93FRQ
— Freshfields (@Freshfields) April 1, 2021
It knows how to combine social media with content to engage its audience.
Grow an email list
As I mentioned earlier, you should aim to convert visitors to email subscribers. This is because email marketing is the most effective marketing method, according to marketers.
Email lists and newsletters give your audience a personal atmosphere to discuss intimate details about their case and see if you’re the right lawyer.
So, do your best to convert website traffic, social media followers, and live chat users into email subscribers.
The easiest way to do this is by creating a lead magnet. A lead magnet is a gift such as an ebook, webinar, or white paper that you give away to potential customers in exchange for their email addresses. It incentivizes sign-ups.
You can promote it through opt-in forms on blog posts and gating it behind a landing page, and asking people to sign up.
Once they’re on your email list, you can serve more content like blog posts, newsletters, and case studies, get them to email you back, and schedule a call.
Use video marketing
86% of businesses use video marketing as a marketing tool.
Here are the different types of video content you should make.
Live video: By live video, I refer to social media live videos on networks like YouTube and Facebook and webinars. People love live content as it is a one-time event where they can interact back.
Online courses: I’m sure your social media feed is bombarded by ads for courses. But I’m not referring to these paid online courses here. I am talking about free courses that educate your potential clients.
Social media videos: Get active on video networks such as IGTV and YouTube and share quality content. TikTok might also be a good idea. It can seem like a social network for kids. However, there are some lawyers like Attorney Tom who are building a presence and killing it.
It’s an excellent place to attract younger clients. Also, a lot of older people are now joining the network as it’s “cool.” Your audience pool should get larger here.
Take advantage of referrals
The best form of marketing is still word of mouth. When people want a lawyer, they’ll turn to relatives, friends, and colleagues. This is why you should do your best to keep your current clients as happy as possible and get them to refer you to others. Make it a habit to send them newsletters and mailing cards.
You could also offer a referral fee or benefits to anyone who refers you. By benefits, I mean a discount on the next case. You could also provide a discount to the friend or relative that hires you.
Supplement organic efforts with PPC
All the methods I’ve mentioned help grow your business organically. But the problem with solely relying on organic marketing is that it can take a while to see results. If you don’t want to wait that long, you should supplement your organic methods with ads.
The ROI from ads will be lower than organic methods, but you can still be profitable. To generate the best ROAS (return on ad spend), you must combine organic efforts with ads.
One technique that works well is retargeting website visitors, blog readers, and email subscribers with ads that promote case studies. People can sign up for a call on the case study page.
But make sure you conduct the ad math to see how much it costs to acquire a customer and how much profit you make from it. You can use industry benchmarks like this one to do this before you even start.
Once people sign up for your calls, you can create “lookalike audiences” on ad platforms and run ads that target similar people. They’ll be more likely to convert.
Paid search on Google is another ad placement you should try.
These will help you generate customers while waiting for your site to rank for keywords.
Implement your legal marketing plan and acquire clients
There are scores of techniques you can use to promote your law firm and get new clients. These are the top ones. You don’t have to use all of them immediately. I recommend that you start with a handful and then implement the rest.
The best one to start with is designing a website and adding case studies, blogging, live chat, and social media. SEO will take a few months to work. But you can take advantage of keyword ads to rank for your target phrases in the meantime.
Once SEO kicks in you can switch to advertising techniques such as retargeting. These will cost less and also achieve higher conversion rates as you’ll target people who previously visited your website.
To rank for your target keywords ASAP and reduce your ad spend, you can take advantage of our link-building toolkit. Our link-building toolkit can help with your SEO ranking efforts and let you scale back on your paid advertising.
