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In this article, we will discuss B2C digital marketing for law firms in detail. We will look at what is B2C digital marketing, why it’s important, who is your law firm’s audience, how you can succeed in B2C digital marketing, a customer’s buying journey, the personal and emotional side of B2C purchasing decision and more.
We have divided this article into the following sections to help you navigate to the section of your choice:
- What is B2C digital marketing for law firms?
- Why is B2C digital marketing is important?
- Who is your law firm’s B2C audience?
- How does your law firm succeed in B2C digital marketing?
- How to respond to your customers’ needs
- Consumer’s buying journey
- B2C digital marketing should have a personal touch
- B2C purchases are more emotionally driven
- B2C clients relationships
- Takeaways
Let’s get this started.
What is B2C digital marketing for law firms?
B2C digital marketing stands for “business to consumers” digital marketing.
Whenever you purchase something personal in nature from a vendor, you are entering into a B2C transaction.
For example, you purchase a cell phone from Apple for personal use, you are in fact a consumer transacting with Apple selling you a mobile device.
The B2C digital marketing is the digital marketing practices employed by businesses to sell their products and services to cater to the needs of a consumer.
In the context of your law firm, if you are offering legal services for personal bodily injuries, you are in fact offering your legal services to a consumer and not a business.
We do not refer to the term consumer in the legal sense such as under consumer protection laws or statutory sense.
We are using the term consumer in the marketing context to refer to the fact that you are marketing your legal services to an individual.
B2C digital marketing techniques for law firms will differ from B2B digital marketing techniques as a consumer’s buying journey is different than a businesses’ buying journey.
Why is B2C digital marketing is important?
B2C digital marketing for law firms is and extremely lucrative business.
At the end of the day, we all have personal needs, have personal issues, personal challenges and need products and services for personal reasons.
For law firms adopting B2C digital marketing strategies that fit their niche and areas of practice, they can achieve a massive market reach if their marketing is done right.
Think about it.
40% of the world’s population uses the Internet every day.
There are more than 1.79 billion monthly active Facebook users in the world.
If you have an offering geared towards consumers and individuals, through digital marketing, you can potentially tap into these billions of online users.
It’s not to say that it will be easy.
But it’s certainly possible.
B2C digital marketing gives you the possibility to target a wide audience, create brand awareness and interact with your potential clients.
B2C digital marketing for law firms is also quite interesting as it will cost you significantly less than traditional marketing channels like TV, print, local newspaper ads and radio.
You’ll probably have an online and offline marketing strategy of course, but digital marketing can provide you significant value.
With digital marketing techniques, you can have a solid marketing plan generating leads online without having to incur important costs as you do in traditional means.
Depending on your B2C digital marketing efforts, you may decide to leverage a PPC advertisement campaign where you’ll spend some marketing money to do so.
That’s entirely up to you, you choose your budget and you choose how to run your PPC campaign.
Who is your law firm’s B2C audience?
You will not be able to appeal to all consumers the same way using the same digital marketing technique.
Your law firm’s B2C digital marketing strategies will need to target a segment of the population.
Having a good understanding of who is your customer, you’ll be able to define a robust B2C digital marketing campaign to target them successfully.
So who is your audience?
In the case of a personal injury law firm, you may decide to target a population between the age of 35 to 45.
This will give you a wide audience to reach.
You can break down your audience to those who live in the State of New York.
You can drill even down to those who suffered a cancer-related misdiagnosis.
The more you know who your audience is, the better you can cater to their needs.
With the audience segmentation that you’ve done above, you can then position your law firm in such a way that this specific audience can see value in hiring your firm for services.
What’s great about digital marketing is that you can find data and information to provide you with an idea of how many clients you may potentially reach or if you can aspire to get a good amount of traffic with your campaigns.
You’ll be able to make digital marketing decisions based on data and facts.
If your strategy works and gives you a positive ROI, then you will surely continue to work on that strategy.
If the strategy does not work, you’ll make changes and tweak things around.
How does your law firm succeed in B2C digital marketing?
For any type of digital marketing strategy to work, you’ll need to put your clients first.
If you devise a plan where you are thinking of your clients, their needs, their pain points and what they are searching for online, then you can build the right B2C digital marketing campaign to attract them.
For example, a law firm offering medical professional malpractice legal services to individuals, you’ll need to ask yourself how you can attract your clientele.
One question you may ask is what would a person who suffered injury or misdiagnosis at the hands of a professional doctor be searching for online?
The answer may be that the prospect is looking to find out what professional malpractice means.
Perhaps they want to know what are the criteria to consider when evaluating if they have a case?
Or even, they may be looking to find out how much they can claim even if they did have a case.
Your law firm’s B2C digital marketing campaigns will need to consider these customer persona questions and develop material and content to answer these questions.
If done right, you will attract a prospect to your website and lead them to contact you.
How to respond to your customers’ needs
To be successful in your B2C digital marketing efforts, you’ll need to provide information and material catering to your customers’ needs.
You need to provide them with reasons to decide why they should select your firm and not another and you’ll need to ensure that you reach an audience you are able to serve.
A person looking for a personal injury lawyer has suffered personal injury and has a need to understand his or her rights and recourses.
Your B2C digital marketing efforts will need to call out your customers’ needs immediately.
Then, the prospect will need to make a decision to contact your law firm and not the competitor.
Your B2C digital marketing efforts will need to offer a pitch why you are better and can achieve better results than the others.
Finally, if you have hundreds of people calling your law firm, you should be able to serve the customers to ensure you keep good online reviews.
If you are unable to answer customers or they are not happy in their first interaction with your firm, then you will lose that customer and they may spread their poor experience to others.
You want to avoid that as much as possible.
Consumer’s buying journey
B2B buyers are more sophisticated people having a good technical understanding of the product or service they intend to buy.
They are managers, owners, executives and so on.
B2C buyers will typically look for the best price available for the product or service they are looking to buy.
With that in mind, a personal consumer’s buying journey will be different than a businesses’ buying journey.
The personal consumer will want to know they will get a good service from your law firm.
That’s the feeling of trust.
They want to make sure they are paying a good price for your legal services.
That’s due to their price sensitivity.
And they want to have confidence that others have done business with you and were satisfied.
That’s social proof.
When you factor these things in your consumer’s buying journey, you can craft B2C digital marketing strategies specifically targeting each of these factors influencing the decision of a personal consumer.
B2C digital marketing should have a personal touch
B2C digital marketing should have a personal touch.
Think about it.
You will prefer to deal with a company or a law firm that can create a personal connection with you.
If you engage with your audience on social media by genuinely interacting with them, your audience will see that you are not a ruthless and faceless law firm looking to make more money.
If your audience can relate to you and develop a relationship with you not because they need to spend money with you but because they enjoy that interaction, that can drive real results for you.
B2C audience has a tendency to prefer entertainment whereas a B2B audience will want reports, facts and expertise.
You can appeal to your B2C clients by appealing to their emotions, their senses, by engaging with them and connecting with them on a more personal level.
If your law firm is able to incorporate these psychological preferences of a B2C customer, you will have greater success in your B2C digital marketing.
B2C purchases are more emotionally driven
B2C purchases are more emotionally driven than B2B purchasing decisions.
An individual looking to hire a law firm will decide based on factors like price and your firm’s expertise of course but will also be driven by their personal emotions.
Hiring a personal lawyer remains a highly personal thing.
Can the client feel they are in good hands with you?
Does the client believe that you understand their problem?
Will you take the time to listen to them?
These are emotional factors that will lead a client to select one lawyer over another.
In your B2C digital marketing campaigns, you can appeal to these emotions to signal to your prospects that you do care and you do listen.
The goal is to build a level of trust and provide positive emotional vibes to your prospects so they engage with you.
If they feel that you are giving them the right price, you can solve their problem, others attest to that and they feel you can listen to them and fight for them, the deal is closed!
B2C clients relationships
B2C clients will generally have a one-time purpose or transaction in mind whereas a B2B client will look to have a long-term relationship.
You need to keep in mind that a B2C client will generally have a one-time compelling reason leading them to contact your law firm.
In the case of our personal injury example, a person who has suffered a personal injury and looks for compensation will have this sole purpose in mind when looking to deal with your law firm.
In other words, they are not interested in a long-term relationship with your firm but rather looking for your law firm to provide them with an immediate solution to their problem at this very moment.
With a personal client, your focus is on how to immediately solve their problem.
Takeaways
B2C digital marketing techniques will be slightly different than B2B digital marketing efforts.
In this article, we discussed B2C digital marketing basics for law firms to understand in selling their legal services to individuals.
What is digital marketing?
Why is B2C digital marketing important for law firms to master?
Who is your audience?
A person looking to hire a lawyer will have different considerations than a business looking to hire a lawyer.
One will typically be looking for an immediate fix to a legal situation while the other may look for an ongoing legal service that will add value to their business.
B2C digital marketing should also focus on the human emotions.
There needs to be a personal touch.
We hope that you enjoyed this article.
What are your views on B2C digital marketing for law firms? We would love to hear from you. Drop us a comment.
