Wonder what are effective law firm marketing strategies you can deploy online?
You are looking at increasing your law firm’s web presence and want to understand the lay of the land with respect to successful online marketing strategies for your law firm.
In this article, we will look at the most effective online law firm marketing strategies that you can leverage to build your brand, increase your brand awareness, rank better on search engines, drive more traffic to your website, create a rapport and connection with your prospects and clients and ultimately increase your law firm’s overall profitability!
Lawyers love disclaimers, so we will make one here…
Being found on Google or having an amazing website is just one part of the equation. People will work with your law firm and pay you for your services when you deliver results and value to them.
Employing a great marketing strategy must be considered in such a way that you are able to effectively service and engage with the visitors and site users that come to your website and furthermore deliver great legal services.
With that being said, in this article, we will cover the following topics:
- Build an awesome law firm website
- Build your law firm brand online
- Law Firm SEO
- Content marketing for law firms
- Legal blogs
- Email marketing for law firms
- Pay-Per-Click Advertising
- Social media marketing
- Online law firm marketing strategy is a must
Without further ado, let’s get started…
1- Build an awesome law firm website
Your first line of attack in your law firm marketing strategy online is to build an awesome website that to bolster your credibility, elevate your brand, help you generate leads and ultimately help you build a larger client base.
Building a top-of-the-line website is not merely putting up a few pages on the internet, adding some haphazard content and expecting visitors will rush to your website and pay you for your services. That is far from the case…
To succeed, you should approach your web building strategy methodically, plan ahead, execute well and monitor your results.
There is no denying that as a law firm, you must have a website. Period.
However, with so much competition out there and with the constant evolution of technology, web design, web development techniques and architecture, you need to build an awesome law firm website to increase your profitability and to put you ahead of the competition but keep you there.
In your planning stage, set smart and achievable goals for yourself.
How will you generate leads through your website, what conversion rates would you like to see, what is your budget for building the best website ever, do you have any branding strategies and so on.
Also, make sure that your website will be developed from ground up as a mobile-first website.
A crucial element in building your website to maximize your online law firm marketing strategy is for your site to be mobile-first! If you do not get this right, you will be significantly disadvantaged to a point where we can tell you upfront that you will lose half the battle even if you hit all the other law firm marketing strategy nails on the head!
More people do their searches on platforms like Google using their mobile devices. If you are not in the mobile search game, you will not be in a position to take the maximum benefit of your online marketing strategies.
2- Build your law firm brand online
Building a brand, particularly an online brand, is foundational to your long-term success particularly with the overall effectiveness of your law firm marketing strategy online.
To build a memorable brand, you will need to think beyond the appearance of your logo or its colour palette.
A brand is about a message, a statement, a feeling, a vision, a commitment. A brand will resonate with your clients, your audience and your prospects.
When you think of Apple, what comes to your mind? How about the famous swoosh logo from Nike? Mercedes-Benz? Do each of these brands make you think in a certain way, feel a certain way? How do you associate with them?
Your law firm branding should be the same.
Make a statement about your law firm, convey a feeling, share a vision, commit to some standards. When your clients engage with you, they will engage with you based on your brand’s message and the standards that you’ve established.
Don’t let them down.
Building a law firm brand online is about:
- What is your law firm’s mission?
- What is your law firm story?
- Who is your targeted audience?
- How do you engage with your audience?
- What are your strengths and weaknesses?
- Who are your competitors?
- Is your website designed to reflect your image and vision?
- What will your audience expect from you?
The questions are short and sweet, however, the reflection, thought process and implementation challenges that go behind it will need to be tactical and strategic.
3- Law Firm SEO
Law firm search engine optimization (Law Firm SEO) is a process through which your law firm devises and implements SEO strategies and best practices to better rank on search engines. Law firm SEO is an online law firm marketing strategy allowing you to leverage your website for client acquisition purposes.
Law firm search engine marketing is a great way to increase your law firm’s business.
Imagine that your law firm has a 24/7 salesperson communicating with your prospects and driving you a constant stream of leads and clients.
By having a great website and implementing a great law firm SEO strategy, you will complement your traditional client acquisition strategy. Having a website drive leads is a long-term and recession-proof client acquisition strategy!
Your law firm’s website can be a powerful lead generating machine. Consider that:
74% OF CONSUMERS VISIT A LAW FIRM’S WEBSITE BEFORE CONTACTING THEM AND TAKING ANY TYPE OF ACTION.
4- Content marketing for law firms
Content marketing is a powerful strategy to add to your law firm marketing online efforts.
You do law firm content marketing when you create online material and content in a strategic way to give your site visitors and audience valuable, useful, practical and relevant information answering their questions and helping them solve their problems. Your ultimate objective with content marketing is to drive your site users to take action resulting in a sale or profits to your law firm.
Through content marketing strategies for law firms, your focus is not to pitch your products and services but to provide highly valuable and relevant information to your site users.
The more you help your users with the information you share with them, the more you will gain credibility leading the user to consider mandating your law firm for legal services or taking a profitable action with your firm.
Online content marketing for law firms and lawyers can be done effectively through:
- Infographics explaining a complex concept in an easy and visual way
- Web pages providing useful information
- Podcasts to present your ideas and views
- Videos to share useful tips and content
- Books to share your legal research or views
Go ahead, if you write about it, they will come!
5- Legal blogs
Starting a legal blog can be amazing for your law firm and help you scale up your online marketing strategy.
Let’s face it, it’s going to require from you a lot of work, time and effort to start a legal blog but more importantly to maintain it going forward.
With the proper discipline and strategy, your blog will help bolster your web credibility, help Google and search engines better track and index your website and web pages and ultimately bring more targeted and profitable traffic to your website.
Implementing it the right way, your legal blog will have a direct positive result on your online legal marketing strategies as a whole, such as:
- Greater online reach
- Increased ability to rank for keywords
- More pages indexed by search engines
- Build brand authority with great content
- Bring valuable content to help your site users
- Answer customer questions
- Drive significantly more traffic to your website
A legal blog can have a dramatic impact on the success of your law firm online marketing. Do not neglect to start a blog and do not neglect to keep it up-to-date!
6- Email marketing for law firms
Through email marketing, your law firm can communicate with its audience, clients, prospects, site visitors, develop a stronger relationship with them and ultimately increase your revenues through increased customer conversion.
According to an Adobe study, millennials spend about 6.4 hours each day reading their emails.
We all use our emails, every day.
With our mobile device, we get our emails in real-time, all the time. We constantly check our emails, read them over and over and consume a lot of information through inbound emails.
We check our emails when we are at work, when we are on vacation, when we are at home or whenever we are connected to the internet.
Email marketing will allow you to develop a closer relationship with your clients and website users. Customers love to feel that they are unique and that your law firm is dealing with them in a special and customized way.
According to Marketing Sherpa 91% of adults surveyed in the US say that they like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with.
Your law firm marketing strategy cannot deliver the same punch without a solid email marketing campaign. Through email marketing strategy for your law firm, you can:
- Target and personalize your content to your specific customer
- Help enhance and elevate your overall credibility
- Build customer relationships through constant communication channels
- Build excitement surrounding a new offering or achievement of yours
- Increase traffic to your site through well-crafted email links
- Drive additional sales and conversion by building trust with your audience
Email is almost 40 times more effective than Facebook, and Twitter combined in helping your law firm acquire new customers. (McKinsey)
Email marketing is a powerful tool in your law firm’s internet marketing arsenal, give it a shot.
7- Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising or PPC for short is a form of online advertising where you pay the advertiser a fee every time a user clicks on your ads directing them to your website. PPC is widely used to advertise with search engines and social media platforms.
A good PPC advertising campaign can be a profitable advertisement technique for your law firm and used as part of its overall online marketing strategy.
What’s interesting about this type of advertising is that you can track and measure your advertisement spend, the number of leads you get to your site through this channel and how many eventually convert to paying customers.
If you make more money than what you spend in advertising, then you are in business!
An effective pay-per-click advertising strategy will:
- Give you instant responses from prospects
- Help you take advantage of market trends and opportunities
- Help you achieve your law firm goals
- Drive highly targeted traffic to your site interested in your services and offerings
- Complement your online and offline marketing channels
What’s quite interesting about this type of advertising is how well you can track it. It’s important to emphasize again.
Traditional advertisements are more difficult to quantify from a return on investment (ROI) point of view whereas a PPC campaign is highly measurable so if your strategy is paying off, you can continue to invest into it. If your strategy is not giving you the results that you need, you will then pivot.
Overall, pay-per-click advertising is a great way to increase your law firm’s profitability provided you define a proper budget and put together a solid plan.
8- Social media marketing
Social media!
Everyone is connected, more and more people have a profile, billions of people around the world are actively using social media platforms on a daily basis.
Social media!
We cannot ignore this social media!
Social media marketing for law firms will help increase your brand awareness. Let people know who you are, what you do and that you are there to provide them with great legal services.
Through our law firm’s social media pages, you can directly engage with your audience and develop a relationship with them. This can significantly help improve your sales.
Keep in mind that engaging with your audience is not necessarily answering legal questions and providing legal opinions but engaging in a way that your audience can connect with you.
Over 51% of marketers surveyed stated that the relationship built with the customers on social media positively impacts sales results.
Beyond that, social media marketing will help your law firm website better rank on Google and search engines.
Social Media Examiner indicates that more than 58% of marketers who have been using social media for one year or longer still see improved search engine rankings.
A well-designed law firm social media advertising campaign can help you:
- Increase your brand awareness and loyalty
- Increase the inbound traffic to your website
- Improve your search engine ranking and increase the organic traffic to your site
- Increase your conversion rates and increase your revenues
- Gain market insights based on what people are saying on social media about you, your competitor or the market conditions
- Become a thought leader and share your great content on social media
As the new generation of millenials take the markets by the storm, you should know that according to a study, 62% of millennials show more brand loyalty to those that engaged with them on social media!
It’s time for your law firm to get on the social media marketing bandwagon! If you don’t, you could potentially miss the boat, as they say!!
9- Online law firm marketing strategy is a must
There you have it!
You can see how online law firm marketing strategies can take your law practice to a whole new level.
Build your brand, increase your brand awareness, rank better on search engines, drive more traffic to your website, create a rapport and connection with your prospects and clients.
Increase your law firm’s overall profitability by implementing the different strategies we covered in this article.
Every law firm should have a solid online legal marketing strategy, no excuses.
If you are not in a position to implement all the best practices, we invite you to start wherever you are comfortable and continue building on your successes.
Eventually, your internet marketing will represent a highly lucrative and profitable client acquisition channel that you will leverage for many years to come.
We hope that you enjoyed this article.
Did you adopt any of the strategies we discussed here? Share with us your experience. We would love to hear from you. Drop us a comment now!
