Wondering what are different types of digital marketing for law firms?
You are interested to develop your digital marketing footprint and looking to better understand the different digital marketing techniques out there?
Do you want to increase your law firm’s overall profitability through the use of different types of digital marketing techniques?
This is the perfect article for you!
In this article, we will look into 11 types of digital marketing techniques for law firms such as search engine optimization, search engine marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, legal blogs, email marketing and more. By the end of this article, you’ll be able to select the digital marketing strategy that may potentially work for you.
This article is divided as follows:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Search Engine Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Legal Blogs
- Email Marketing
- Mobile Phone Optimization
- Online PR
- Inbound Marketing
- Sponsored Content
- Marketing Automation
- Takeaways
Let’s get started…
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization or SEO is a type of digital marketing technique used to achieve higher organic ranking on search engine result pages.
What’s powerful with SEO as a type of digital marketing strategy is that you’ll have major search engines like Google do free advertisement for you.
When an online user performs a search query or keywords search on a search engine like Google, the search engine will provide that user with relevant results.
The search engine page offering the user relevant results is called a search engine results page or SERP.
Based on the keywords used by the user, the search engine will look into its billions of website page repository and select those websites and web pages that it considers to be the most relevant for the user.
Each user will receive a unique search results page based on the search terms, their location and browsing history.
Some of the search results suggested by the search engine are paid advertisements and some of them are free organic results.
The ultimate objective of search engine optimization is to employ all the right techniques and best practices in order to appear on the first page of a search engine results page.
The higher your website ranks on search engines, the more chances you have for a visitor to enter your website.
More website visitors, more chances to sell your law firm’s legal services!
Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing is a type of digital marketing for law firms paying search engines like Google and Bing to advertise your website.
Search engine marketing is essentially you paying the search engine to list your website in a prime location on the first page of the search engine results page.
The most popular search engine marketing is the Pay-Per-Click or PPC type of advertising offered by Google AdWords and Bing Ads.
With a PPC-type of search engine marketing, you will pay search engines to list your website for specific keywords on top of the search engine results page.
Each search engine results page will always have ten organic free listings and up to seven paid advertisements depending on the competitiveness of the keywords you searched.
If the keyword is highly competitive and lots of law firms or businesses will be advertising their website.
You may see four advertisement results on top of the search engine results page and perhaps three at the bottom of the page.
For example, at the moment of writing of this post, a search for “mesothelioma personal injury lawyers” results in four paid ads on top of Google’s SERP and three at the bottom.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a type of digital marketing for law firms you must absolutely leverage to remain competitive in your online marketing efforts.
Most of users interact with a social media platform on a daily basis.
People share content with one another, exchange information and even consume their news on social media platforms.
There are billions of active social media users in the world.
With social media marketing, you are able to connect with your customers directly and in a more intimate way.
You’ll be able to see what people are saying about your law firm, about your legal services, how they are interacting with your digital marketing assets and content.
All efforts you deployed on social media platforms to increase traffic to your website, increase your brand awareness, drive more conversion and sales will fall within the realm of social media marketing.
Each law firm will need to evaluate which social media platform will produce the best results for them such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, or LinkedIn.
If your law practice is primarily geared to a B2C market, you’ll have a much greater opportunity in leveraging social media marketing.
Let’s make it clear, B2B companies will also greatly benefit from social media marketing, but B2C will be more profitable as most social media users are individuals interacting on social media platforms for personal use.
Content Marketing
Content marketing for law firms is a fantastic type of digital marketing for law firms to attract relevant visitors and potential leads to your website.
Content marketing is the practice of writing and delivering amazing content to your website users.
The idea is that by providing amazing content to your users, you’ll entice the user to hire your law firm for your legal services.
The user will be lead to believe that if your online free content is so great and useful, perhaps your legal services will be the same.
Content marketing works well as you will use it along with other digital marketing strategies like SEO and social media marketing.
For instance, if you are a business lawyer, you can create an amazing guide for people looking to incorporate a business.
This great piece of content will be written using SEO techniques optimized for targeted keywords you are after.
You will then share your content on social media platforms for online users to consume.
With your content marketing strategy, you are creating content that is beneficial to your users.
You will write your content based on search terms online users will most likely use to find the content you are writing about, you will write your content to cater to your specific audience and are writing to provide them an answer to a question or a solution to a problem.
Legal Blogs
Writing and publishing articles on your law firm blog is a type of digital marketing for law firms where you demonstrate your legal expertise and knowledge.
Creating a blog, maintaining it and continually publishing great blog posts is a type of content marketing effort geared at helping your website users and providing them relevant legal information.
When a user looks for a lawyer online, they typically have a legal problem or they are looking to find out more information about a particular situation.
Having a blog where you provide informative content to your website visitors and provide tips and general guidance on how to solve a particular legal issue will be very useful to your clients.
By reading your blog posts, a website user will not only find a quick answer to their legal question but they may also be enticed to reach out to you for your legal services.
There are so many legal blogs out there and so much content.
You’ll need to be strategic to succeed in your legal blog post strategy.
Keeping your user in mind when writing will certainly make legal blogs an amazing type of digital marketing strategy.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a type of digital marketing technique where you reach out to your prospects by email.
You will define an email marketing strategy where you will send value-added emails to your customers, subscribers or prospects.
Email marketing is one of the oldest digital marketing strategies.
It still works great today.
One type of email marketing strategy is to provide users with a constant regular feed of relevant legal information provided they register and subscribe.
A user voluntarily subscribing to get content from you will have a much higher potential in becoming a paid customer.
If your subscribers felt that your content was so relevant and useful for them that they subscribed, that means you have already gained some level of trust with that user.
You can offer your subscribers things like blog subscription newsletters, access to free downloadable content, send customized and personal messages to your clients, offer your subscribers some free tips and legal material and so on.
Another strategy is to acquire a list of emails you pay to acquire and target.
This article does not get into the rules of your local law society about purchasing email lists for email marketing campaigns but it’s an email marketing strategy among others.
Mobile Phone Optimization
Mobile phone optimization is a type of digital marketing for your law firm where you engage with and advertise to your online users using a mobile device.
You can design mobile-friendly landing pages to target your audience.
Mobile devices play a key role in the overall growth of digital marketing.
According to IAB Mobile Advertising and Revenue Report, 71% of all internet time is spent using a mobile device.
Mobile advertising now accounts for two-thirds of overall digital spend.
Platforms like Google Ads, Facebook and Unity are the top three mobile device advertising channels providing the highest return on investment.
Mobile phone advertising can drive significant value to your law firm.
Most people will look up a law firm or a lawyer on their mobile device as the initial point of contact.
If they like what they see on their mobile device, they may either reach out to you or visit your website again using a desktop computer.
What’s important for your law firm is to capture the attention of your site visitor when they first come across your law firm’s website using their mobile device.
Online PR
Online PR is a type of digital marketing technique where your aim is to improve other digital marketing communication techniques such as SEO through link-building, partnership marketing and viral marketing.
Online PR is also a way for you to secure online coverage you’ve already earned through bogs and other content.
Online PR is not just about writing press releases similar to what we traditionally relate to when we speak of PR.
Online PR incorporates journalism, creative writing and story-telling, sales, media, SEO, web design and more.
Through online PR techniques, your aim is to influence your users with your content.
You may want to engage with traditional PR media such as newspapers, TV, radio and magazines but online PR is more geared to PR using online channels.
Online PR can include:
- Engaging with bloggers to write about your law firm
- Collaborating with brand sites so they can put your content out
- Influencer marketing
- Engaging online reviews of your law firm
- Engaging with comments on your legal blog
- Reporter outreach using social media
Online PR marketing will require a planned and coordinated effort for it to be successful and can result if amazing leads and new business for your law firm.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a type of digital marketing methodology where your chief aim is to attract and entice a targeted online user to become a paying client of your law firm.
With inbound marketing, you are thinking about your targeted customer persona and developing an overall and holistic strategy to create digital marketing material and assets targeting that customer persona.
You will employ different digital marketing tools to achieve this goal.
If you are a contract lawyer in New York, you will want to create amazing landing pages on your website where you present your contract law legal services.
You’ll use SEO techniques, your blog, content marketing and social media marketing to drive traffic to your landing page where you’ve devised a clear call-to-action such as giving out a free contract law guide in exchange for the user’s email address.
Then you’ll engage with your subscriber through email marketing providing them valuable information and content related to contract law.
Ultimately, you’ll have the targeted user reach out to your law firm for contract law legal services.
As you can see, all of the digital marketing techniques were used in a strategic way and in a particular sequence to achieve the best results.
Inbound marketing is effective as you can develop a nice pipeline of qualified leads and good customers.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored content is a type of digital marketing for law firms where you will pay another company, brand or entity to promote and speak about your law firm and services.
A popular form of sponsored content digital marketing is using influencers in an industry or niche.
You will pay an influencer to publish content about your law firm.
The content can be blog posts, content highlighting your services or online material presenting your law firm to the influencer’s followers.
It could also be done using video content or even infographics.
With sponsored marketing, not only you are able to find your audience but you can also capture their attention.
Sponsored content is a great way for publishers and influencers to make money online.
Three-quarters of publishers and media buyers leveraging sponsored content say that it has positively affected their bottom line.
Sponsored content marketing is like native marketing as the content you sponsored on the publisher’s website looks and feels like the publisher’s own material.
Sponsored marketing can be interesting for law firms looking to target niche customers.
If you are a business lawyer offering legal services to startups, you may want to have a local startup association or influencers in the startup space promote your law firm to their audience.
You can benefit from the sponsor’s notoriety and increase your chances of dealing with your prospects who can trust you more than any random business lawyer.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a type of digital marketing for law firms where you will use software to automate digital marketing operations.
With marketing automation, you accelerate the execution of repetitive marketing tasks in your overall marketing strategy.
You can automate the sending of email newsletters to your subscribers.
You can post media to your social media platforms in an automated way avoiding the pains and hassles of manual posting.
You can leverage software to nurture your leads.
You’ll need to nurture your leads as you may not be able to convert a website visitor or a subscriber to a customer right away.
Nurturing your lead will help you build trust with your targeted lead.
You can automate the emailing of targeted content specifically tailored for your lead thereby increasing your chances of conversion.
You can also use marketing automation to track all the marketing campaigns and activities in your law firm so you remain on top of your overall marketing strategy.
Takeaways
There are many types of digital marketing strategies law firms can employ to increase their marketing performance online.
In this article, we presented to you 11 types of digital marketing for law firms you must include in your overall marketing arsenal.
Successful marketing boils down to how well you plan your digital marketing strategy, the type of strategies you use in conjunction with one another and how well you capture your leads through your website or other channels.
We hope that you will consider the digital marketing types we’ve proposed on this post and implement them into your law practice marketing.
Do you know of other types of digital marketing strategies useful for law firms? We would love to hear from you. Drop us a comment!
