As you look to expand your law firm’s reach, marketing should be central to your plans. Yet without a plan, marketing can quickly waste both time and money for your firm. To make marketing work for you, you need a plan that utilizes the right strategies for using the various marketing tools available to today’s firms. As you fine-tune your marketing plan for the coming year, keep these strategies in mind.
Determine and Build Your Brand
Before you start marketing, you must have something to market. While your law firm is the ultimate goal for your marketing, it needs to have something that makes it stand out. This is your brand.
Think of your brand as your unique selling point. Is it your large verdicts, your personable approach to legal services, or your particular niche within your legal field? If you are not sure what your unique selling point is, start the process of building your brand by defining your target client. Then, figure out what that target client needs from a lawyer, and build your brand around that.
Remember, every other firm in your area wants their marketing message to be that something along the lines of, “We’re the best, you need to hire us as your lawyer.” Your branding message must be more specific and unique while still getting this point across. Spend some time brainstorming with your team to determine what your hook and overall branding message should be.
Focus on the Right Type of SEO
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a tool you use to position your website high in the search results for those search terms that apply to your firm. So, if you are a personal injury lawyer, you want people in your area to find you when they search for a personal injury lawyer.
Because legal work is highly localized, you need to focus not just on SEO, but specifically on local SEO. Local SEO drives local traffic to our website by telling the search engines you are a valuable resource for local legal clients. The main components of local SEO are:
- Local search keywords around location, such as “personal injury lawyer in Milwaukee”
- Directory listings and social media pages with matching name, address, and phone number
- An effective Google Business page
- Local-focused content on web pages and blogs
If you can implement these elements into your online properties, you can more effectively reach the people in your area who need and want your legal services.
Best ROI Marketing Sources for Law Firms
Identifying the right marketing source—along with the right audience and tools—can make all the difference between a lackluster campaign and one that drives growth for your practice. See which source is right for your law firm.
Pay to Play
Paid search advertising, such as pay-per-click or Google’s local service ads, can be an effective way to draw highly targeted leads to your website. These types of ads charge per click or lead, and if your landing page and pre-screening forms are effective, you can get a high ROI for this type of advertising.
Like SEO, pay-per-click advertising requires keywords. Take the time to research the keywords your target audience might search, and then bid on those. Sometimes, highly popular keywords, like “divorce attorney” may cost quite a bit per click, but you can save if you adjust the keywords to be more local or more practice area specific.
Pay-per-click advertising perfectly complements SEO advertising. It provides a known outcome, with ads you know will show up early in the search results, to work alongside the more organic but less guaranteed SEO results. To make pay-per-click advertising effective, regularly analyze your campaigns and adjust them as you need to for improved results.
Brand Yourself as an Authority
When people need to hire a lawyer, they want to work with one they consider the best and most knowledgeable. However, they don’t want to trust your marketing message alone. They want to see that you have the knowledge they need for an effective case.
Branding yourself as an authority will help create this image. Find ways to share your knowledge online in helpful scenarios, and people will make the connection between you and the legal concern they have. Some ways you can do this include:
- Create an educational legal podcast
- Film reels and YouTube videos that highlight important legal terminology
- Showcase your successful verdicts and cases when appropriate
- Write blog posts and social media posts that educate and inform your potential clients on issues that are important to them
- Answer questions on popular sites like Quora, Reddit, and Facebook community group pages
Get Social
Social media is an impressive tool for relationship building and law firm growth. On social media, you can reach local clients with your marketing message, provide a platform to showcase your authority in your legal area and give your firm a personality. Social media is also free or low cost. While most platforms do have sponsored and paid posts, you can post for free as well and start engaging with your audience quickly.
In addition to helping you showcase your authority as a local expert in your legal field, social media lets you build your personal and professional brand. It shows who you are as a lawyer and who your firm is as a local company.
Through social media, you can start to build a community. Take time to respond to comments and interact with people when they interact with your pages. From that community, you will likely gain some new clients eventually.
Finally, social media provides another tool for clients to find and contact you to get help with their legal concerns. Make sure your contact information matches your website and your other directory listings.
Create Landing Pages That Work
Every marketing item you work on should connect to either your website or a landing page. For landing pages, make the wording persuasive without sounding too marketing-heavy. Test and analyze your landing pages until you find the one that resonates with your audience.
Connect your landing pages to your initial intake forms. This will guide potential clients into your client funnel, increasing the chances of transitioning them into clients under contract.
Utilize Email and Text Marketing Effectively
Once you have client contact information, use email and text marketing to keep your law firm in the forefront of their minds. Set up automated campaigns that will continue to position you as the convenient and easy-to-reach resource when the potential client is ready to move forward with their legal concern.
In addition to marketing-centric promotional messages, send helpful and educational messages as well. These less promotional emails will continue building your brand as a thought leader and may create a positive image of your firm from clients who benefit from the free information provided.
How to Grow Your Legal Practice with Email Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns are a highly effective way to grow your law firm when used as part of a well-rounded strategy. Learn the best practices to set them up and optimize them.
Streamline Your Marketing and Intake Processes with Law Ruler
The key to making marketing work is having an effective way to track it and ensure proper follow-up with the leads you get through your marketing efforts. Law Ruler’s legal CRM does both. With AI-enhanced marketing automation and streamlined client intake forms, Law Ruler helps you improve your marketing while also saving time for your team. Schedule a demo today to see how our legal CRM can be a strategic part of your marketing efforts.
Transform Your Law Firm
Maximize your client intake process and acquire more leads with Law Ruler’s all-in-one legal intake and marketing automation software. Schedule a personalized, one-on-one demonstration of Law Ruler today!
0 Comments