Want to know how digital marketing will grow your law firm’s business?
Why should your law firm consider investing more in digital marketing?
Can you really increase your law firm profitability with digital marketing?
These are great questions to which we have the answers!!
In this article, we give you 13 reasons why digital marketing will help you grow your law firm as a business. We will look at the benefits of digital marketing, how your customers are online, your competitors are online, how you can target your audience, how you can compete with major law firms, how digital marketing is cost-effective and so much more.
By the end of this article, we hope that you can appreciate the strategic value of digital marketing for your law firm!
This article is divided into the following sections:
- Benefits of Digital Marketing For Law Firms
- Get Free Leads To Your Law Firm
- Your Law Firm Customers Are Online
- Your Law Firm Competitors Are Online
- Digital Marketing Helps You Get to Know Your Target Audience
- Digital Marketing Levels The Playing Field
- Digital Marketing Is More Cost-Effective Than Traditional Marketing
- Digital Marketing Increases Your Law Firm’s Return On Investment (ROI)
- Digital Marketing Lowers Your Customer Acquisition Costs
- Digital Marketing Helps Your Conversion Rate
- Digital Marketing Caters to Mobile Consumers
- Digital Marketing Builds Brands
- Digital Marketing Improves Your Law Firm Credibility
- Digital Marketing Entices People To Take a Favorable Action
- Takeaways
Let’s get started!
Benefits of Digital Marketing For Law Firms
Why should your law firm engage in digital marketing you say?
Well, it’s simple.
Digital marketing works.
Digital marketing is the method of choice for your law firm to market itself, build its brand, reach out to prospects and convert them into paying customers.
Digital marketing offers your law firm many benefits leading you to ultimately be more profitable.
Here are some benefits to consider:
- you can directly communicate with your potential clients and current customer base
- You can increase your brand awareness and reach
- You can market your law firm in a more cost-effective way
- You can put yourself in front of your customers on organic search engine results
- You can track and measure your digital marketing performance and consumer engagement
- You can target potential clients on searching on mobile devices
And the list can go on.
All of these digital marketing strategies are aimed for one purpose: increase your law firm’s sales and profitability.
Get Free Leads To Your Law Firm
Is there anything better than free leads?
Better yet.
Is there anything better than having Google send customers your way for free?
With digital marketing, you can make this happen!
You can optimize your online digital marketing strategies and website optimization in such a way to rank on the first page of Google’s search results.
Rank on Google’s first page for your targeted keywords and start seeing the magic of digital marketing in action by getting free organic leads from Google to your website.
Ok, granted.
Appearing on the first page of Google is not entirely free as you need to put a lot of time and effort in making it happen.
Nonetheless, implementing digital marketing strategies to organically rank on search engines may cost you much less compared to your overall marketing yearly spend and provide you a much higher return on investment.
Free leads from Google is the best gravy you cannot refuse!!
If we are telling you that digital marketing can lead your law firm to get free organic leads, we hope that you will consider incorporating digital marketing in your marketing arsenal immediately!
Your Law Firm Customers Are Online
Digital marketing can help grow your law firm business.
More and more of your customers are now online.
With the accessibility and speed of the internet, the consumer purchasing behavior has changed and will continue to evolve.
According to KPMG, with the advances in technology, logistics, payments and trust, coupled with internet and mobile access and consumer demand for convenience, the global online shopping arena is now US$1.9 trillion.
Millions of consumers are no longer going to shop in stores.
Rather, they may be shopping while sitting in a coffee shop or looking up vendors when they have a moment to spare as they are standing in a lineup to pay for their groceries!
These are just funny examples, but you get the point.
If you are a practicing lawyer or running a law firm, you must get into the digital shopping arena to grow your business.
How do you do that?
With digital marketing!!
Digital marketing strategies and processes will help you increase your sales and client conversion.
Your Law Firm Competitors Are Online
If your law firm does not go online to find customers, then your competitors will.
If your competitors are in this business, then you have less chances of doing business.
Digital marketing is crucial for your law firm to thrive but also to prevent your competitors from taking away your market share.
With digital marketing strategies, you’ll keep up with what your competitors are doing.
Consider the actions, strategies and successes of your competitors as a benchmark for your law firm to achieve and surpass.
If you are a business lawyer in California, you know there is a lot of competition in your area.
Look at what other business lawyers are doing online, how they’ve set up their websites, what content they are producing, how they are digitally marketing themselves and take notes.
By implementing digital marketing strategies that elevate the game as compared to your competitors, you can help grow your law firm business.
To beat your competitors, look at leveraging digital marketing techniques targeting local mobile searches.
In fact, according to a Junto study in 2019, 61% of mobile searchers are more likely to contact a local business if they have a mobile-friendly site.
Wait there is more!
Based on a Statista study in 2020, 52% of the entire web traffic in the world is now on mobile devices!!
How does this translate for you lawyers out there?
Simple.
Get yourself in the digital marketing space and find ways to lure all the mobile searchers to your website.
The more visitors you lure to your website and your firm, the less your competitors will get.
If you have strategically designed and built your website to convert leads, then you will be laughing all the way to the bank (or should we say online bank)!
Your competitors can eat your dust.
Digital Marketing Helps You Get to Know Your Target Audience
You can grow your law practice through digital marketing by getting to know your target audience and interacting with them.
Learn more about your targeted audience.
What are they searching for online?
What is your typical customer’s pain point?
How can you help your customers online or provide them a quick solution?
How are they looking for lawyers online in your niche?
Are your clients on social media?
What are they saying about you or your competitors?
There’s a lot of data you can gather online to better understand your audience.
No need to guess, just look at the data out there!
Digital marketing for law firms will help you devise a laser-focused strategy to go precisely after the businesses or consumers you intend to pursue.
Run an online survey to get to know your audience.
The more you interact with your targeted audience, the more you develop trust and credibility.
That will directly result in additional business for your law firm.
People are more likely to do business with an organization they can trust as opposed to one they have never dealt with.
Digital Marketing Levels The Playing Field
If you are a sole practitioner, small law firm or even a mid-sized firm, digital marketing will help level the playing field with the international law firms, the BigLaw type of firms with deep pockets pouring millions into their marketing.
With digital marketing, you now are in a position to compete with any law firm, in any space, anywhere.
Major law firms will continue to spend millions of dollars in marketing in general to keep their base.
That’s a fact.
The good news for you smaller sized law firms is that you can go head to head with these big boys and capture some of their market share.
For instance, boutique law firms are thriving in digital marketing.
Boutique law firms specialize in a niche area of practice and focus their digital marketing strategies to capture the legal market specifically in their niche.
This makes them worthy competitors to big law firms.
In fact, big law firms are constantly watching out for boutique firms not to take their market share.
If they feel the boutique firm is giving them too much of a hard time, they’ll try to buy them out.
That’s a separate topic altogether, now back to digital marketing.
Businesses are looking to reduce their costs and increase their profits.
One way they will do that is by forcing their legal departments to spend less.
If legal departments have the option of paying $1,000 per hour to a major law firm versus dealing with a specialized boutique law firm at half the price.
More and more businesses are going to deal with specialized boutique law firms as they get greater value at much less the cost.
Digital marketing will allow you to position yourself as an expert in your field.
You can position your boutique law firm specialized in a specific niche so you can compete hard with anyone in your legal space.
Build a strong online presence leveraging digital media techniques so you can chip away at the BigLaw market share!
Digital Marketing Is More Cost-Effective Than Traditional Marketing
Digital marketing will boost your law firm’s revenues and profitability as it provides you with a cost-effective way to market your law firm and services.
Small businesses have little resources to spend on marketing in general.
If a small business had to invest in marketing to bring in new leads and customers, digital marketing should be on top of the list.
According to Gartner’s Digital Marketing Spend Report, 40% of respondents claimed to experience considerable cost-savings by leveraging digital marketing methods to promote their products and services.
Digital marketing is cost-effective for your law firm as you can continually evaluate its effectiveness and tweak things around.
Unlike traditional marketing strategies, you don’t need to spend a lot of money before finding out that the marketing campaign was not successful.
If you are on the wrong track, then you’ll minimize your losses by pivoting and changing your marketing plan.
Digital Marketing Increases Your Law Firm’s Return On Investment (ROI)
Digital marketing will yield a higher return on investment (ROI) for your law firm.
Most businesses invest money and expect profits or a high return on investment.
The marketing dollar you spend is an investment and naturally you must expect to generate a decent profit.
You can do that with digital marketing.
You can easily track your investment and return on investment so you can maximize your return and profitability.
What’s amazing about digital marketing is that you don’t need to spend a lot of money to determine if your digital marketing strategy is producing the intended results.
If you are on the right track, you’ll invest good money for good marketing.
By establishing clear goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to measure and assess your digital marketing performance, you can take great advantage of online marketing strategies.
KPI’s can be measured based on channel-based measures, source-based performance and campaign-based performance.
Channel-based measures are the traffic, leads and reach resulting from social media, search engines, blogs or other similar channels.
Source-based measures are leads coming from organic traffic, direct traffic or referrals.
Campaign-based measures are related to conversion rates based on specific digital marketing advertisement campaigns.
Digital marketing is powerful as you can make decisions based on real data and performance analytics your marketing efforts provide you in real-time.
You need to be in this game to increase your law firm profits.
Digital Marketing Lowers Your Customer Acquisition Costs
In some areas of the law, lawyers need to spend a lot of money to acquire quality clients.
Over the last five years, the cost of acquiring new customers has generally increased by over 50%.
Law firms already have a high customer acquisition cost due to the highly competitive nature of the industry.
This makes for a super high customer acquisition cost for law firms.
A customer acquisition cost is a measure of fixed and variable costs your law firm incurs to acquire a new customer.
If you are looking to improve your customer acquisition costs and increasing your marketing ROI is one of the most cited marketing priorities.
Digital marketing will help lower your law firm’s customer acquisition costs as most of the digital marketing costs are low.
If you target your audience by email marketing campaigns, social media interactions and posts, highly valuable web pages, your cost will be very low to convert quality customers.
If you calculate your current customer acquisition cost and compare it to your digital customer acquisition costs, you will quickly see where you should invest more money.
Digital marketing should be where to invest to increase your customer base.
Digital Marketing Helps Your Conversion Rate
Conversion rate marketing is a process where you refine your user’s online experience positively influencing them so they select your law firm to do business with.
Businesses owner in general are streamlining their digital marketing campaigns for conversion optimization to ensure they convert the most online traffic to leads and sales.
Studies show that only 22% of companies are satisfied with their conversion rate.
With the right digital marketing strategy, your law firm can improve its conversion rate by converting online traffic into paying customers.
The higher your conversion rate, the more your digital marketing strategy is effective.
Remember that you can spend a lot of money on digital marketing but if you are unable to convert the online interest and traffic you generate into paying customers, then your marketing strategy is entirely useless.
The real measure of success is the dollars you generate from your marketing efforts no matter how you are marketing your law firm.
Through digital marketing and conversion rate marketing, you can define the action you would like your online user to take that you can qualify as a successful measure of your digital marketing campaign.
Do you want them to reach your site, download a whitepaper and then move to your contact page?
If that’s what you define that to be a conversion, then a user following that online journey will be deemed to be a conversion.
At the end of the day, call it whatever you want to call it, your conversion metrics must lead to increased sales and profitability.
Digital marketing offers you all this possibility!
Take advantage of it.
Digital Marketing Caters to Mobile Consumers
Here are some statistics about mobile search that will get you to think very hard about digital marketing.
52% of the entire world traffic is now done on mobile devices according to Statista.
78% of location-based mobile searches result in an offline purchase according to Junto.
Google is the platform capturing 96% of the entire world’s mobile search according to Jody Nimetz Co.
These numbers are mindblowing!
If your law firm is not catering to mobile consumers, then your law firm has lost half the battle before even starting the game.
No doubt that digital marketing will steer you to capture your customers wherever they are.
If half of the world online searchers are using a mobile device and more than three-quarters of them looking for a local law firm end up doing an offline purchase, you need to make sure you capture this market through your digital marketing strategies.
Everyone is a likely owner of a mobile device and readily has access to the internet.
This makes it absolutely essential for your law firm’s website to be optimized for mobile search and mobile site visits.
Digital marketing is the key for you to unlock a lot of potential for your law firm by tapping into the mobile search and mobile digital marketing strategies.
Digital Marketing Builds Brands
77% of marketers believe that branding should be a key part of your strategy if you want to grow your business.
Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos stated “Your brand is what other people say about you when you are not in the room”.
This is a profound statement.
Branding your law firm is crucial to your long-term success.
Digital marketing helps your law firm build an online brand giving your law firm an identity, a voice and a way for customers to remember you.
According to Moz, although your branding is not a direct ranking factor for your website, a good brand will positively improve your SEO results and ultimately your digital marketing success.
When you produce tailored digital content to your audience, provide them with valuable content and interact with them, you are effectively building your brand.
If you think about it, a brand is a way for you to speak to your customers, it’s a statement about the quality of your legal services, it’s a commitment to your high standards of quality and so much more.
Through your digital marketing efforts, you can develop a robust brand awareness, a statement about your law firm and market recognition.
You want to be known for something unique and special.
You want your customers to reach out to you to say “listen we reached out to you because we know how great your law firm is and how you’re highly specialized you are”.
This is the direct result of successful branding.
Now, you can do that digitally.
You don’t need to spend thousands, if not millions of dollars in building a brand through traditional marketing efforts.
Now you can build a gigantic brand with enormous global reach through your digital marketing strategies.
The power you can unleash through digital marketing is absolutely incredible.
Digital Marketing Improves Your Law Firm Credibility
As a lawyer, one way to sell yourself is to boast about your knowledge in your legal area of practice.
Demonstrating that you are the go-to person in regards to a specific area of the law will bring you more and more clients as you’ve built your credibility to a point where customers keep pouring.
The same thing goes for your law firm’s online presence.
Your law firm can benefit from its online credibility.
The more you have credibility, the more people will come back to your law firm’s website.
They will also send others your way.
You can develop your law firm’s credibility through digital marketing.
Pay attention to what type of content works best with your target audience and ensure you write about that.
Provide your users with thorough advice on how to solve their problems.
Give them material helping them in the research or thought-process.
Highlight case laws your law firm was involved in and successfully executed its mandate.
Provide statistics and legal data to your users to inform them about a topic or a trend.
Write about your area of expertise by discussing hot legal topics or subjects noteworthy for your users.
Producing awesome digital assets and content will help you increase your law firm’s credibility online and lead more and more prospects and potential clients to visit your website.
Digital Marketing Entices People To Take a Favorable Action
Digital marketing strategies entice people to take a positive, profitable and favorable action on your website or through your digital marketing assets.
If your objective is to create brand awareness, you want to develop digital marketing strategies aimed at increasing the visibility of your law firm.
To achieve this goal, you may have prepared a very useful guide you want to distribute to as many people as possible in exchange for their email address.
You may want to leverage social media platforms to promote your law firm’s guide so you can create the awareness that you need while at the same time your users are taking a favorable action of providing you with their email address.
You can also have a unique call-to-action on your website leading your site visitors to submit a request to you or engage with you as you intend them to do.
That could be a profitable action taken by your website visitor as the call-to-action will lead them to the next step in your marketing funnel.
Takeaways
Digital marketing is no doubt one powerful marketing strategy for your law firm.
If you do not have any meaningful digital marketing plans, you can give your law firm a major handicap in capturing new clients, growing its business and becoming more profitable.
In this article, we looked at 13 reasons why you should make the digital marketing part of your marketing plans.
We will go further and say that digital marketing should be put on your number 1 priority for the ongoing success and profitability of your law firm.
We hope that this article was useful to you about digital marketing for growing a law firm practice.
Do you have any additional points you would like to share? We would love to hear from you. Drop us a comment!
