Looking to better understand B2B digital marketing for law firms?
You are a lawyer looking to better marketing yourself online and want to better understand B2B digital marketing?
Perhaps you work in a law firm and are looking to read a little on the topic.
To all of you, we’ve got you covered.
In this article, we will look at what is B2B digital marketing, we’ll look at the business customer’s decision-making process, we’ll understand the strategies that could be effective in targeting businesses, the value of content marketing and more.
We’ve broken down this article in the following sections so you can better navigate:
- What Is B2B Digital Marketing?
- B2B Customer Decision-Making Process
- B2B Digital Marketing Strategies
- B2B Content Marketing
- B2B Digital Marketing Planning
- Takeaways
Let’s get started!
What Is B2B Digital Marketing?
B2B digital marketing is the digital marketing strategy and content you create to target businesses and commercial entities.
If your law firm offers legal services primarily to businesses and organizations, you will need to incorporate a strong B2B digital marketing effort to entire businesses to work with your firm.
A B2B digital marketing effort for your law firm is primarily intended to target businesses and organizations that specifically need the type of legal services you offer.
Your goal is to cater to the legal challenges and needs of these companies and provide them value.
Some B2B type of clients you can go after are:
- General counsels in corporate legal departments to provide general legal services to their legal department
- M&A legal services targetting company CFO’s or CEO’s of small and medium companies engaged in an M&A transaction to offer M&A legal services
- Human resource managers or CHRO’s dealing with employment-related challenges to offer employment and labour law-related legal services
Your B2B digital marketing efforts will be successful if you are able to target the right decision-maker in the business who can award you a legal mandate.
B2B Customer Decision-Making Process
Business customers will have different expectations and make purchasing decisions differently than personal consumers looking to hire the services of a lawyer or a law firm.
Expertise
Businesses will primarily consider the cost associated with doing business with your firm based on your level of expertise.
If the business needs to make an important and strategic decision, they will want to speak to an expert.
If the company is facing a situation where their survival is at risk, they will want to speak to a highly specialized expert and they will pay for that.
Cost
At the end of the day, businesses need to control their costs so they will look at factors like ROI when awarding a mandate to your law firm.
Depending on how much you are offering legal services, you will encourage or discourage businesses in dealing with your law firm.
Some legal services are geared to help their business customers run their ongoing business, a “run-your-business” legal service.
Your business customer will be sensitive to price as all businesses want to do more with less.
If the business needs strategic or legal advice to help with the survival of their business, the “bet-your-business” legal services, then the client may have less sensitivity to price.
Depending on the nature of the legal services you offer, you will need to define your client’s cost sensitivity and devise your digital marketing campaigns to cater to that.
Logic and Reason
Your business clients will also make decisions to retain your services most of the time based on sound logic and reasoning.
There is little emotion involved in retaining the services of one law firm versus another.
If your service offering logically provides and demonstrates value to the business, they will be included to retain hire your law firm.
They’ll want to see reports, white papers, case studies and calculate ROI.
Educated Decisions
Business decision-makers hiring external law firms must justify their decision to internal stakeholders, investors or others.
They’ll need to educate themselves on your services, how are you going to solve their problem, how you will go about it, how long will it take, how much do you estimate it will cost them and so on.
The more your B2B digital marketing efforts give the information and data your clients need to make a decision, the more you will accelerate your client conversion cycle.
Longer Decision Cycles
Having a company decide to retain your services, typically there may be several stakeholders involved.
You may need to convince someone at the legal department and eventually a higher-ranking person or even the CFO of the company.
You’ll need to cater to your marketing material for technical readers and non-technical readers.
So you’ll have material directly targeting the legal department operations manager and other material targeting the company management team like the CFO.
Long-Term Relationships
If companies find a good service provider where they feel they are getting good value, good services and they are satisfied overall, they will tend to stay a customer of your long-term.
For law firms, this is the most ideal situation.
You may have to assume a higher customer acquisition cost to capture a customer.
When you capture your customer, hopefully you can keep them for a long time.
With great service and quality legal services at an affordable price, you can potentially have the client for many years to come.
B2B Digital Marketing Strategies
Based on the business customer’s expectations, their needs and how companies make purchasing decisions, you will need to devise the right digital marketing strategies to cater to your B2B audience.
Understand A B2B Buyer’s Journey
You must bring your customers through a typical buyer’s journey.
A typical business client will do some research, will consider different service providers and will make a final decision.
The legal industry is still highly influenced by referrals and connections.
However, with all the information available online, more and more decision-makers use the Internet as an initial step to find information about your law firm and your services.
You want to make sure your law firm can be found notwithstanding where a business customer sits in the B2B buyer’s journey.
Define Your Target Audience
Saying that you will target businesses in general as part of your digital marketing strategy is too broad of a strategy.
You must narrow your B2B digital marketing efforts to the types of businesses you are specifically interested to go after.
What is your law firm’s main value proposition?
Who is the ideal customer that you would like to target?
How do you define this customer in terms of expectations, geography and needs?
You will need to develop your ideal customer’s persona.
The customer persona is the traits and characteristics of a good customer for your law firm.
Once you’ve identified your customer persona, you will want to develop B2B digital marketing strategies and assets catered to this specific persona.
By knowing who you are after, you can better appeal to their desires, needs, address their pain points and so on.
Develop An Amazing Website
B2B digital marketing without a website is like wanting to drive a car without an engine.
Your website is the engine of your B2B digital marketing strategy.
You will need an absolutely amazing website.
It must be nicely designed, professional, provide useful and relevant information about legal topics, provide information about your firm and the type of customers you serve.
Over 80% of buyers will visit your website before making a purchase.
Your website should have information to cater to the needs of your client persona whether they are in a research phase, actively considering your law firm’s legal services or in the process of retaining your services.
You should have content on your law firm’s value proposition and answer any questions your typical B2B customer will have when hiring external counsel.
This way, you will bake content into your website addressing the questions and concerns of different stakeholders in a company such as the legal department and finance department.
You will also have amazing content for your business customers to consume.
Tips, guides, legal tidbits of useful information your business customers will enjoy reading and will consider helpful in its day-to-day operations.
Build Online Awareness
With your B2B digital marketing techniques, you should expand your reach and build brand awareness.
Creating online awareness means that you reach a wide audience.
You want people to get to know you.
To get to know you, they must find you online.
And to find you online, you’ll need to ensure you develop the right digital marketing strategies to be ranked in search engines, to be present on social media platforms, to engage with your clients through email marketing and so on.
You want your law firm’s brand to be out there.
As a law firm, your brand awareness will play an important factor in your overall success.
There is always a human-factor in the legal industry that will play a factor.
Businesses may deal with a law firm particularly because they know a lawyer in that firm or they are just loyal to that firm.
You need to understand the psychological aspect of decision-makers behind the businesses you are targeting so you can develop the best possible brand awareness both online and offline.
The industry trends show that more and more people are buying legal services online or prefer to transact online than in person.
There is a change in social behavior occurring at this moment and your law firm needs to remain on top of it.
Try Different Digital Marketing Strategies
Trying different marketing strategies will give your B2B digital marketing efforts a good boost.
There are many ways you can market your law firm.
You can have a law firm blog where you discuss the latest legal information and topics in your area of practice, you can provide your users with digital documents and guides helping them in specific areas, you can send email marketing content and so on.
Depending on the customers you are trying to reach and the complexity of the legal cases or even volume, you will need to study your B2B digital marketing strategies and use a combination to achieve the best results.
Finding a good quality corporate client may take some time so you’ll need to try different digital marketing strategies and give them some time to produce results.
You should track your progress and ensure that you are on the right track.
B2B Content Marketing
Content marketing is one amazing B2B digital marketing strategy to use.
Companies and businesses love to read valuable content that is going to answer a question they have or a pain point in their business.
If your law firm delivers valuable content, you will organically drive businesses to your website to consume your content.
The more you get a business to come back for more, the more you develop a level of trust with those interacting with your site.
Ultimately, you may be in a good position to convert them as they will reach out to you by themselves.
If they don’t contact you, perhaps with a little digital marketing nudge, you will convince them to hire your law firm.
Businesses like to find information through articles, guides and publications as opposed to advertising or ‘marketing’ material.
Although you are delivering your content based on an ultimate marketing objective, the reader of your content will not see it that way.
They will see your content valuable information and they will appreciate it
A B2B digital marketing strategy will consider providing checklists, white papers, industry reports, webinars, case studies, cost savings and testimonials as a preferred option to help a business customer make a decision to buy.
B2B Digital Marketing Planning
Properly planning your B2B digital marketing efforts is also important for your law firm to have a clear objective in mind.
Your law firm must plan in advance the different steps it will take to attract, nurture and ultimately convert a corporate customer.
You start by defining your ideal customer persona, you define on which digital platform you can reach them to create awareness, once they initiated contact with you, you’ll define how you will reach out to them and provide them with valuable service offerings and keep them engaged.
You will also define the path they’ll need to take to reach out to you if they are interested in retaining your services and you’ll provide them any information and material they need to satisfy them and their internal stakeholders.
If you get all this right, you will be converting a lot of customers!
Takeaways
We’ve looked at the important considerations of a B2B digital marketing for law firms.
If your law firm caters to corporate and business clients, you’ll need to have a strong B2B digital marketing game plan to be successful.
You need to plan it carefully and define each step of the process.
We’ve looked at how a business customer will make a purchasing decision and the buyer’s journey, we discussed some digital marketing strategies that can be effective for your law firm, content marketing and more.
In any B2B digital marketing campaign, you’ll put together the effort and be ready that it may take some time to convert a customer.
Capturing a business client is a longer process than capturing an individual client.
A business customer will have different needs than an individual looking for the services of a law firm.
We hope that this article helped you in evaluating your B2B digital marketing strategy.
Do you have any tips or feedback to share? We would love to hear from you. Drop us a comment!
