Wondering what does digital marketing mean for law firms?
More specifically, what is digital marketing for law firms?
Digital marketing is a vast topic and you want to learn more about it particularly as it relates to lawyers and law firms!
This is the perfect article for you!
In this article, we will look at everything there is to know about digital marketing for law firms. What is digital marketing, digital marketing assets, search engine optimization, content marketing, B2B and B2C digital marketing strategies, online customer journey and more! At the end of this article, you’ll know all the basics of digital marketing for law firms.
This article is divided into the following sections:
- What Is Digital Marketing For Law Firms?
- What are the B2B and B2C strategies
- What Is The Role of Digital Marketing To a Law Firm?
- How Is Mobile Digital Marketing?
- Takeaways
Let’s get started!!
What Is Digital Marketing For Law Firms?
Digital marketing is a way for you to market your law firm online.
There are many ways you can refer to digital marketing!
Online marketing.
Digital advertising.
Internet marketing.
Digital marketing.
At the end of the day, they are all referring to the same thing.
In the last decade, internet usage has more than doubled!
In fact, over the last three years alone, the worldwide internet usage has continued to go up by 5%!
This makes digital marketing a powerful marketing tool!
Digital marketing refers to your online marketing efforts or asset development efforts in an attempt to bring traffic and leads to your business.
This can be done in many ways.
Email marketing.
Pay-per-click advertising.
Social media marketing.
Marketing automation.
And more…
Through digital advertising techniques and practices, you will give your company the best chance possible to convince someone to buy your product or services.
Your Law Firm’s Digital Marketing Assets
To perform digital marketing, you will need to create, maintain and market yourself with your digital marketing assets.
Anything you produce or create online designed to increase traffic to your law firm’s website or increase your law firm profitability will be your digital marketing assets.
There are a number of digital marketing assets you could own.
Your law firm’s website is your primary digital asset
Your law firm’s website is your primary digital marketing asset and the most important one for converting leads to customers.
In most cases, you use digital marketing strategies on different online platforms to lead a customer or an online user to your website.
You will then use your website as a means to entice the user to pay for your product or services.
More digital marketing assets
Digital marketing assets can also be:
- Your online brand
- The videos you have posted online
- Product or service demos
- The images you’ve posted
- Infographics
- Company photos
- Your blog on legal topics
- Web pages on your area of expertise
- Legal FAQ pages
- Your downloadable products like forms
- Your online tools like calculators
- Details about cases you won
- Whitepaper
- Social media pages
You’ll be surprised how many digital assets you own without realizing it.
The legal industry is highly competitive and saturated, to stay ahead of the competition, you need to employ robust digital marketing strategies to beat the game.
The more you are creative, the more you will succeed.
Digital Marketing Strategies
Digital marketing strategies are methods you employ to run a digital marketing campaign for your law practice.
There are many strategies out there.
There are some digital marketing strategies that many businesses employ and so should law firms.
Here is the list of the most important strategies:
- Search engine optimization or SEO
- Social media marketing
- Pay-per-click advertising
- Paid search advertising
- Paid social media advertising
- Content marketing
- Email marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is specific tactics used to appear on the first page of a search engine results page (SERP) organically.
In other words, you want to have the search engines like Google do free advertising for you by ranking your website on the first page of a search result for free.
This my friends is where you will find the gravy!
Although SEO efforts take a long time to produce any meaningful effort but once they do, you will be rewarded with a constant stream of traffic and users visiting your website.
The more users visit your website, the more you can convert them into a paying customer of your law firm!
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is another way to attract visitors to your website for free.
Millions of people are active users of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
If your law firm is able to devise a plan to engage with the public through social media channels, you can directly engage with your prospects.
It will take a lot of effort for you to have your law firm rank well on social media platforms but when you do you will see an immediate increase in your profitability.
Content marketing
Content marketing is a broad category of digital marketing strategies to increase sales through online channels.
Any content you produce, whether talking about case laws, your areas of expertise, legal news, legal trends or anything relevant for your business is a form of content marketing.
Just like SEO and social media marketing, content marketing is another way you can get search engines to rank your website or content for free.
Getting free organic traffic is a gold mine for your business.
You can be surprised by the number of additional clients you can convert through effective content marketing strategies.
Email marketing
Email marketing is one of the oldest online marketing strategies out there and still working very well.
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy you employ to nurture, communicate and exchange in a personalized way with your clients or email subscribers.
You can offer your clients special content, invite them to VIP events, give them feedback on what your law firm is doing, keeping your clients actively engaged with you.
Your law firm clients will feel cared for and important.
Email marketing is one true tried and tested way you can increase your goodwill and particularly communicate with your base.
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
Some other digital marketing strategies can be employed with some investment of yours such as pay-per-click advertising or PPC advertising.
Pay-per-click advertising is the different online paid advertisement strategies possible to your law firm where you will be charged by your marketing service provider for every click they are able to generate leading an online user to your website.
PPC is a broad term of click-based advertising.
If you pay a search engine like Google to advertise for you, you are effectively doing PPC advertising more commonly referred to as “paid search advertising”.
If you pay a social medial platform for advertising on a click-based system, you will also do PPC more commonly referred to as “paid social media advertising’.
If you have a very specific audience to target with precise keywords, PPC can be quite valuable.
The advantage of PPC is that you get a lot of performance reporting so you can quickly assess if your campaign is a success or not.
You could pivot quickly as needed.
Paid search advertising
Paid search advertising is a pay-per-click type of advertising where you pay a search engine to advertise your website on top of a search engine results page (SERP).
There are several search engines out there like Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Google is the most dominant one by far.
So you’ll need to work mainly on paid search advertising through Google for maximum results.
Bing and Yahoo can also be quite interesting to target a niche market or audience, perhaps in certain countries or regions, people may have a tendance to use Bing or Yahoo more than Google.
You’ll need to do your research to see what’s best for you and gives you the highest return on investment.
For law firms, the caveat is that you’ll need to be ready to put a big advertisement budget to run an effective paid search advertisement campaign.
Search engines know that legal keywords are in high demand and they charge a small fortune for them!
According to a HubSpot study, they’ve identified the 150 most expensive keywords on Google by industry and the most expensive keyword goes to the legal!
In fact, the keyword “Houston Maritime Attorney” was selling for a whopping $1,090.00 per click!
To all you Houston Maritime Attorney’s out there, we feel your pain!!
Paid social media advertising
Paid social media advertising is similar to paid search advertising but on a social media platform.
You’ll be paying companies like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or other platforms to advertise your law firm on a per-click basis.
Social media is where everyone hangs out!
Heck, they even get their news from social media.
If you are not on social media, you are missing out on a huge potential to get visibility to your website.
Paying social media platforms to advertise for you can make a lot of sense for your law firm if you can find the right audience to target with the right content.
You want to make sure that you have a decent budget to run this type of campaign as the legal industry pay-per-click advertisement is quite expensive.
Other digital marketing strategies
There are other digital marketing strategies that could be employed such as:
- Native advertising
- Affiliate marketing
These are other strategies that businesses use to optimize their digital marketing efforts and success.
Does Digital Marketing Work for Law Firms?
In a nutshell, digital marketing works.
Digital marketing works great for law firms!!
Digital marketing should be one important law firm marketing tool in your toolbox, hands down.
No matter if you are a sole practitioner, a small law firm, a boutique law firm, a national law firm or even an international law firm, there’s something in digital marketing for you.
If you know who are you are targeting, you can target them at any time from anywhere.
That’s why online is such a powerful marketing strategy.
Digital marketing is fantastic but you’ll need to have a solid plan, execute flawlessly and have the right team in place to convert the leads into a customer.
If you do not have a strong infrastructure to help you convert a user to a client, you can adversely affect your digital marketing success.
You need to have a great website, great site architecture, internal navigation menus, site speed and so on.
You have to have relevant pages, useful content for your users, an easy-to-read and understand material and more.
You must have a great call-to-action structure where you invite users to contact your law firm.
When they contact your law firm, you need to quickly respond to their inquiry or answer their call.
If you succeed in driving your client in your marketing funnel and execute all the steps flawlessly, you are on your way to elevate the marketing game of your law firm!
What are the B2B and B2C strategies
Depending on your legal area of practice or your law firm’s niche, you’ll be focusing your digital marketing strategies for either a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C).
If you offer legal services to individuals who suffered a bodily injury as a result of a defective product, you’ll need to engage in B2C digital marketing.
On the other hand, if your law firm represents the manufacturers or distributors of these products, you’ll be deploying B2B digital marketing strategies.
B2B Digital Marketing Strategies
A B2B digital marketing strategy for law firms is highly competitive.
All major law firms are in the business of targeting companies and businesses so to sell their legal services.
If you are too broad in your B2B digital marketing strategy, you may be spending a lot of time and effort, perhaps even a lot of cash, to get little results.
A B2B digital marketing strategy can be effective when you can target a niche.
For example, if you target manufacturers and distributors at large to represent them, you’ll be finding that digital marketing is a cash black hole!
You can think about targeting a niche.
For instance, go for “car manufacturers in Houston”.
If you are able to create relevant B2B marketing content targeting car manufacturers in Houston, you can dramatically increase your chances of attracting them and converting a sale.
B2B sale cycles can be much longer and more involved but you need to start from somewhere!
If you sell a very unique legal area of expertise for a very targeted business at the right price, they may be willing to cut down on their legal costs and hire you for their specific legal needs.
B2C Digital Marketing Strategies
B2C digital marketing strategies are different than a B2B digital marketing strategy as you can afford to go broader without diluting yourself to thin.
In our example of a product causing bodily injuries, you will have a better chance of finding an individual who has suffered a bodily injury in your city, state or country than if you target a very narrow segment of the population.
So you are a lawyer looking to find individuals who have suffered bodily injuries as a result of a defective product.
You want to ensure that your B2C digital marketing is broad enough to cover the entire population that you can legally serve in your jurisdiction.
You don’t want to bring traffic from other countries let alone pay for irrelevant traffic.
So you will want to focus on “bodily injury claims for car accidents in Texas”.
This is a campaign that you can work on where you are looking for individuals in Texas, suffering a bodily injury from a car accident.
This focused campaign will be much better than “bodily injury claims” where you may target an audience that you could not effectively serve.
What Is The Role of Digital Marketing To a Law Firm?
Digital marketing is an extremely valuable marketing channel for your law firm as you can create a plan, execute it and accurately track the results of your digital marketing campaign.
All other offline marketing channels like newspaper ads, events, show sponsorship or billboards can be effective but difficult to accurately calculate your return on investment.
Digital marketing gives you useful data
For example, if you pay $10,000 to have your law firm advertised in an event attracting 5,000 people, you may acquire some clients as a result of this event sponsorship but you will not know unless you survey all your clients how they found you.
This can be tedious and inaccurate.
Digital marketing on the other hand gives you all the data, metrics and KPI’s for you to monitor and track.
If you are doing a digital marketing campaign with a $10,000 budget, you can quickly assess if your campaign is generating leads and converting them to customers by tracking the user’s online journey.
If your campaign is returning $20,000 in revenues, then you’ll continue the same strategy.
If your campaign is returning less revenues than what you invested, you may want to switch things around.
Website traffic data
Using digital analytics software tools, you can measure your website traffic and performance by page, by geography, user language or any other relevant metrics you need.
How many users visited your website?
For how long did they stay on your website?
What percentage of users bounced back and left your website?
Where did they come from?
These are all things you can track using online analytics tools like Google Analytics.
Leveraging your website data, you can assess which marketing channels are producing the best results for you and focus your time and attention on those channels.
Marketing content performance
Tracking the performance of your marketing content can be very useful in the digital marketing space.
Something your law firm could not measure through other offline marketing content distributed.
If you attend an event where you leave flyers and brochures about your law firm, your team, your areas of practice and so on, how would you be able to determine the number of leads generated through the distribution of that marketing channel?
If you publish an online whitepaper or a digital marketing brochure, you will know exactly how many people downloaded your brochure, visited the page, where they came from and even if they have shared your page on social media platforms.
Customer journey tracking
Your law firm can increase is digital marketing success by understanding your customers’ online journey.
What was the first touchpoint between the prospect customer and your law firm?
How did that journey evolve?
What was the hook allowing you to convert the lead to a customer?
Tracking your customer’s digital journey can reveal fantastic data for you to optimize your digital marketing funnel and increase your sales conversions.
Did the customer come on your website to read legal content and then downloaded a guide and finally directly came to your site, went to your contact page and sent you an email asking for your legal services?
You can track all of this data.
This is called attribution modeling.
The better you know how your customers interact with you digitally, the more you’ll be in a serious digital marketing league!
How Is Mobile Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is not exactly the same when your user is on a desktop computer as opposed to a mobile phone or a tablet.
Just so you know, more than 60% of all internet activity around the world takes place on a mobile device.
This means that 6 out of 10 of your customers will be searching for a lawyer or a law firm on their mobile smartphone.
The majority of people in the world now own a smartphone and have easy access to the internet from anywhere.
It’s a safe bet for your law firm to plan for a mobile digital marketing strategy and adapt yourself to the desktop as needed.
You can monitor the traffic to your website based on a user’s coming through a mobile device or desktop and track which device appears to be more profitable for you.
A lot of times, people will find your law firm on their mobile device but then eventually visit your website through a desktop if they are more serious to get to know you.
If you succeed at attracting them on their first visit, then you’ll still be in the game to win that customer.
Takeaways
Digital marketing is there to stay and is as strong as ever.
For your law firm to transition into the new era of marketing, you’ll need to add a solid infrastructure both online and offline to bolster your digital marketing efforts.
You can devise plans, execute them and track them.
This is an ongoing cycle.
Take what works and do it better.
See what does not work and change it around.
Eventually, you’ll find a great digital marketing strategy leveraging your digital marketing assets to maximize your law firm’s online visibility, lead generation and sales.
Who can say no to that!!
We hope that this article convinced you lawyers out there that you need to seriously think about digital marketing.
We hope that you like this article.
Do you have any thoughts on digital marketing? We would love to hear from you. Drop us a comment!!
