What is Law Firm Marketing?
Law firm marketing is the act of promoting your law firm services to attract potential clients. It involves creating a marketing strategy and is commonly implemented using several methods that include paid advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, and social media marketing.
Why Do Law Firms Need Marketing?
Law firms need marketing to keep existing clients and attract new ones. Having new cases is one of the top priorities of any firm as the future of the business depends highly on it.
What Are The Benefits of Legal Marketing?
Legal marketing is beneficial to a law firm in many ways. Here are some of the main reasons that a law firm can benefit from law firm digital marketing.
Attract new clients
Manage and improve reputation online
Improve ranking in search engines
Gather data to improve digital marketing strategy
Law firm marketing is the practice of attracting new potential clients to your law firm. A law firm marketing plan may cover a mix of digital marketing, SEO, blogging, print, and digital ads. Your marketing plan may also include many other tactics, including leveraging law firm marketing technology to automate various tasks. But no matter how you approach it, marketing your firm can easily consume a lot of your time and energy.
In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about properly marketing your law firm—from SEO to networking and everything in between. This guide will help you understand key law firm marketing terms, steps to take to start building your marketing plan, and how to measure your efforts. Plus, you’ll learn helpful stats to inform your marketing choices, best practices and industry insights, and the best law firm marketing technology and tools to use.
While the terms law firm marketing strategy and marketing plan may sound similar, understanding the difference between the two is important for streamlining your marketing efforts. Essentially, your marketing strategy explains the whys behind your firm’s marketing and drives your marketing efforts forward. Your law firm marketing strategy captures your firm’s marketing goals, target audience, services offered, core message, and more.
In contrast, your marketing plan defines the specific actions you will take to execute your strategy and achieve your marketing goals. Your attorney marketing plan will also outline the types of marketing you’ll use for your firm. This includes social media marketing or search engine optimization.
Launching a mobile-optimized website with a modern website design
Reach more users and get them to stick around with a beautifully designed law firm website that loads quickly and looks great across devices, operating systems and browsers. Your website is your best online marketing tool because you have total control over the look and feel of your web design and the content it features.
Improving your search engine optimization (SEO)
If you’ve already established an online presence for your law firm, it’s time to ensure your practice comes up at the top of search engine results when your client base is looking for providers.
Use our guide about local SEO for lawyers to learn how backlinks, social media and online reviews influence your law firm website’s placement among search engine results pages (SERPs).
Using call-to-action (CTA) buttons, lead generation forms and landing pages
Want to improve your website traffic conversion rates? Add clear call-to-action buttons, lead generation forms and landing pages to your website. Use these to get more:
Free consultations
New leads
Email marketing subscribers by collecting names and contact information)
Creating content marketing resources
As you consider your digital marketing strategy options, blog content is a critical priority. According to Google Search, content is the #1 factor that affects the strength of your online presence and local SEO.
Using email marketing to connect with leads and clients
Email is an effective marketing channel with a sizable return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every $1 spent on email marketing campaigns. That’s well above what experts consider a solid marketing ROI of 5:1. Use email to follow up with:
New leads who haven’t booked a free consultation yet
High-quality leads who have had a free consultation but haven’t converted to new clients
Past clients to generate repeat business, referrals, online reviews and testimonials
Each law firm has individual needs and challenges, so there’s no definite answer to how to market a law firm online. Some popular marketing efforts include branding, search engine optimization, paying for advertising, hosting webinars, running social media, and publishing content. But before you engage in any of these activities, first you’ll need to understand the purpose of each one of them and then decide if they’re going to help you achieve your goals. To understand your marketing goals and eliminate the guesswork in your digital marketing, you need to craft a clear strategy that maps out exactly what you need to do to succeed.
A marketing tactic is any action taken to promote your attorney services, generate interest in, or otherwise increase visibility for a product or service in search engines. Some of the most popular law firm marketing tactics these days are local SEO (search engine optimization), paid advertising such as Google Ads, Bing Ads or Facebook/Meta ads, content marketing, social media marketing, webinars, and more. Simply put, strategy is a detailed blueprint to achieve your goals and tactics are the actionable steps you need to take in order to execute your strategy.
Marketing is essential for every business, including law firms. A well-executed marketing campaign can help attract new clients, build a strong brand image, and establish a competitive edge in the legal industry. However, running a successful marketing campaign for a law firm can be challenging. In this article, we will discuss how to run law firm marketing campaigns that work.
Define Your Target Audience
The first step in creating a successful marketing campaign is to identify your target audience. Who are the people that are most likely to need your legal services? What are their needs, goals, and pain points? The more specific and detailed your target audience is, the more effective your marketing campaign will be.
For example, if your law firm specializes in personal injury law, your target audience might be people who have been in car accidents, slip and falls, or workplace accidents. You could also target specific demographics, such as young adults who are more likely to engage in risky behavior and are therefore more prone to accidents.
Develop a Strong Brand Identity
Your law firm’s brand identity is the way your clients and potential clients perceive your firm. A strong brand identity helps your law firm stand out in a crowded market and creates a memorable impression on potential clients.
To create a strong brand identity, you need to have a clear vision of what your law firm represents and how you want to be perceived. This includes your law firm’s name, logo, website design, and overall messaging. A consistent brand identity across all channels helps to build trust and recognition with potential clients.
Create Valuable Content
Creating valuable content is a powerful way to attract potential clients to your law firm. By providing helpful and informative content, you can establish your law firm as a thought leader in your industry and build trust with potential clients.
Content can come in many forms, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, social media posts, and e-books. The key is to create content that is relevant to your target audience and provides value.
For example, if your law firm specializes in immigration law, you could create content that provides guidance on how to navigate the immigration process, tips for preparing for a visa interview, or an overview of the latest immigration policies.
Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your website and content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). By using SEO techniques, you can improve your law firm’s visibility and attract more potential clients to your website.
To optimize your website for SEO, you need to focus on several key factors, such as keyword research, on-page optimization, and link building. Keyword research involves identifying the most relevant and high-traffic keywords related to your law firm’s services. On-page optimization involves optimizing your website’s content and structure to make it more search engine-friendly. Link building involves acquiring high-quality backlinks from other websites to improve your website’s authority.
Utilize Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a form of online advertising where you pay each time a user clicks on your ad. PPC advertising can be a powerful tool for law firms to attract potential clients to their website and generate leads.
To create effective PPC campaigns, you need to conduct thorough keyword research, create compelling ad copy, and target your ads to your ideal audience. You also need to track and analyze your campaigns’ performance regularly to ensure you’re getting the best ROI.
Leverage Social Media
Social media is an effective way to connect with potential clients and promote your law firm’s services. By leveraging social media, you can build a following, engage with your audience, and promote your content.
Online marketing for your legal practice does not need to be complicated or overly expensive, and when done correctly it should bring in new clients and leave you with a substantial return on your investment.
A well-thought out and properly executed digital marketing strategy can attract more of the clients you want on autopilot, freeing you from the concern of where your next client will come from. It can empower you to be more selective with the clients you choose to work with and to charge more for your services.
The biggest mistake we see is that most attorneys do not have a comprehensive and cohesive strategy when attempting to market their legal practice online. They get lost in the sea of buzz words and acronyms (SEO, PPC, CRO) and quickly give up trying to figure it out, or decide that internet marketing for lawyers simply doesn’t work.
Unfortunately, law firm marketing isn’t something you can toss aside, especially if you’re going to increase your clientele and revenue. While law firm marketing can be overwhelming, it is essential to growing your law practice.
It helps you make a name for yourself in the crowded legal market and distinguishes you from your competitors. In addition, marketing your law firm will help your target audience locate you faster and keep your current clients loyal.
So, how do you ensure that your law firm’s marketing produces the best results? We understand your concerns and have developed law firm marketing campaign tips that guarantee amazing outcomes.
Every law firm is different, and so are their needs. Metric Marketing is a law firm marketing agency that has been in the industry long enough to understand that law firm marketing strategies can’t be handled by a one-size-fits-all approach. That is why we take the time to have consultation calls and really get to know our clients, their practices, their markets, and their competitors. This is because digital marketing for lawyers that practice workers’ compensation law in California is going to look different from digital marketing for lawyers that take on immigration law cases nationwide. We are aware that each law firm has its own focus and is working under different constraints.
To effectively support the growth of your firm, we need to know what you do, and where you want to go. Once we get started, we closely monitor and report on key metrics. We constantly gather data to make informed marketing decisions and reduce guesswork. The path that each of our clients takes may be different, but they share the same destination: dominating their specific online niches and markets.
Once you have a law firm SEO marketing plan, you must start with the end in mind. That’s why $500K attorneys rely upon a quality website as part of their marketing efforts. Having a great site is the foundation of marketing for small law firms, and drives suitable prospects from your various traffic sources.
Law firm websites are the digital equivalent of walking into an office. Even small firms should have a well-designed site that highlights their practice areas while adhering to general and local SEO best practices.
Think about it this way: You shouldn’t really invest marketing dollars in social media ads or content video content, for instance, until you’re happy with your website. Once it showcases your firm in the best light, then you can ramp up your marketing efforts to rank higher online.
