What digital marketing content law firms should create to succeed?
Wondering what’s the best way to convert a prospect to a paying customer of your law firm?
What digital marketing material can help sell your legal services?
You asked the question…
We’ve got answers…
In this article, we will go over what digital marketing content law firms should create to succeed in converting customers. We will understand what is your buyer’s journey to hire a lawyer, we will look at what digital marketing content is best for a customer in the different phases of a buyer’s journey and how you can close your deals!
We have divided this article into the following sections to help you navigate to the section of your choice:
- Your buyer’s journey
- The awareness stage
- The consideration stage
- The decision-making stage
- Digital marketing content for brand awareness
- Digital marketing content for legal service evaluation
- Digital marketing content for decision-making
- Takeaways
Let’s get started…
Your buyer’s journey
Digital marketing content law firms should create must be planned based on the buyer’s journey.
The buyer’s journey is the process that a buyer goes through in order to learn about your services, consider your law firm’s offerings and make a decision to hire your firm or not.
Both individuals and businesses go through the same buyer’s journey when making a decision to hire a lawyer.
The B2C purchasing decision will be different than a B2B purchasing decision.
Both a business buyer and a consumer will go through the same decision-making phase when looking to hire you law firm.
Let’s understand the different stages in the buyer’s journey so we can then determine the best digital marketing content law firms should create to cater to the needs of a prospect in each stage.
The awareness stage
The first stage is the awareness stage.
In this stage, your potential clients are looking to identify their needs, their legal issue and better grasp the challenges they are facing or the goals they are after.
For example, consider a startup organization.
A startup may be actively looking for financing and they’ve pitched their business to venture capitalists.
In this process, they realize that that they need to go through a due diligence process, they may need a data room and perhaps a lawyer to help them with all of that.
So the startup has identified that they need legal services in the context of their corporate financing and fundraising process.
Once the objective is identified, you’ll need to determine how would a startup company go about to find a law firm to support them.
Some questions you can ask yourself:
- How will the founders of a startup look for legal services?
- Where would they go to educate themselves on the fundraising process?
- What are the typical challenges startups face in the fundraising process?
- What are their immediate priorities?
Based on the answers above, you can identify the digital marketing content and material your law firm will need to create to answer these questions.
The consideration stage
The next state in a potential client’s decision-making process is the consideration stage.
This is the stage where a buyer is actively looking for a solution to their problem or to find a way to take advantage of an opportunity.
In the case of a startup company, if they’ve identified that they need legal services in the context of a fundraising due diligence process, now they will actively look for a corporate financing lawyer.
They may do that online or offline.
We are concerned with the online approach as that’s how most people will start their investigation before buying a product or a service.
The startup founders in charge of the fundraising process will perhaps search for terms like “due diligence lawyer” or “fundraising law firm”.
They will potentially read whitepapers, industry reports and material related to a law firm’s services.
They’ll consider the size of your law firm and decide if they prefer to deal with a boutique-type of firm or a larger one.
They will potentially see if they can handle the due diligence themselves or should they work with a lawyer.
As a law firm, you’ll need to determine what mental process your potential client will go through when they have identified the legal services they need.
The digital assets your law firm will create will consider this mental process your client will go through.
Here are some questions to ask when your client is in the awareness stage.
How will they evaluate the legal services they need?
How will they identify what’s best for them?
What type of questions will they typically ask when they call your law firm for more information?
How price-sensitive are they?
You’ll need to understand how your client will behave in the consideration stage so you can eventually create digital marketing content and assets to cater to those in this phase.
The decision-making stage
The decision-making stage is the final step before the buyer makes a purchasing decision.
Digital marketing content law firms should create in this stage should provide clear reasons why the buyer should select your law firm.
At this point, your potential clients have searched online to educate themselves on the type of legal services they may need, they’ve assesses a few law firms, they reached out to a few, identified their needs and requirements and they have now either short-listed a few firms or are making up their mind to make a final decision.
In the decision-making stage, your potential client is looking to ensure they have adequately covered the topic, gathered all the needed information and have all the data they need to make a decision.
In the example of a startup company looking for a law firm to help them in the context of a due diligence fundraising process.
The founders have done their research online, contacted a few law firms, evaluated pricing, looked at online reviews, looked up the law firm’s size and expertise and have gathered all the data relevant for them to decide.
Considering a startup has limited cash and is in the process of raising funds, depending on where they are in the startup phase, they’ll have different price sensitivities.
You’ll need to understand the main considerations and challenges faced by your prospective clients.
By providing them the key pieces of information targeting their unique needs and challenges, price sensitivity and other factors relevant for your client persona, you’ll maximize your chance of converting them.
Now that we understand the different stages of a client’s buying journey, let’s see what type of digital marketing content law firms should create for each of these stages.
Digital marketing content for brand awareness
The first stage in a buyer’s journey to buy or to hire a law firm for legal services is the awareness stage.
The awareness stage is the process where your prospective clients look to find information and content to better target their needs, identify their challenges and find information on how they can address them.
Blogs
Blogs are amazing digital marketing content law firms can create to build brand awareness and target a large audience.
Blog posts are very useful as they are good means for you to share useful legal information attracting potential prospects to your website.
If you are looking to provide legal services to startups in a fundraising stage, you may want to write about:
- The due diligence process
- Difference in due diligence process in the context of a debt financing vs equity financing
- Fundraising considerations for startups
And so on.
The idea is for you to write content in your blog to educate startups looking to raise funds or engage with users interested in fundraising.
Although you are writing blog posts strategically to drive relevant startup traffic to your website, your main objective is to provide useful content that your potential clients can consume without any obligation on their part.
Infographics
Another great way to educate your clients about a legal topic or show value is through infographics.
Infographics are highly useful digital marketing content law firms should consider in their digital marketing toolbox.
Infographics are a great way to summarize complicated concepts into easy-to-digest and visual format.
Infographics also works very well on mobile devices.
The more you can show value to your potential clients, the more they’ll be inclined to engage your services.
Another reason why infographics may be interesting for you to reach out to a wide audience is that it’s a great way to engage with people on social media platforms.
If you produce a nicely designed and useful infographics, you may have thousands of people sharing that on social media.
This will help increase your reach and provide you with brand awareness.
Question and answers
Questions and answers are another fantastic way to help your potential clients in the initial stage of their buying process.
By answering the most commonly asked questions by your clients, you can help educate them on the legal challenges or opportunities they are looking into, you can provide them some useful tips and guides and provide them a general understanding of a complicated subject in simple terms.
Digital marketing content for legal service evaluation
Webinars
Webinars serve as a great medium to provide more detailed material to your clients and prospects.
Webinars can be quite effective when a client is considering the services of your law firm.
You’ll be able to provide more detailed information about your law firm’s services and offerings.
With webinars, you can provide startups detailed explanations about the due diligence process and fundraising.
You can provide guidance on some legal areas, give tips and valuable information your clients will find relevant in their day-to-day lives and business.
In your webinar, you will be sure to mention how lawyers can help in the process or even your law firm’s value proposition.
You can provide those details about how you can help a startup in the fundraising process without necessarily providing a sales pitch.
Webinars are great to help clients consider your services.
Whitepapers
A whitepaper is an authoritative document providing a detailed review or assessment of a topic or problem along with possible solutions.
A whitepaper is a great digital marketing content for law firms looking to provide a more in-depth overview of a certain topic or service offerings.
A corporate financing lawyer will use a whitepaper to provide startups with a detailed assessment of possible pitfalls in a typical fundraising process along with possible solutions.
This will serve as an advanced problem-solving guide to the user.
The whitepaper can be made available directly on the website.
Perhaps you can use it as a lead magnet to get the user’s email address for eventual email marketing campaigns.
Research reports and case laws
Research reports and case laws presented in simple terms are fantastic digital marketing content law firms should develop.
Research reports and hard facts are great for people to make decisions and know they are making decisions based on concrete facts.
This is a highly valuable document that will help in the awareness stage and the decision-making stage to convince your clients they need to do business with you.
Your firm can provide reports on how startups are more successful at raising financing with the support of a corporate financing lawyer than without.
You can refer to industry trends and demonstrate how startups have a reason to deal with your law firm to tap into opportunities and contacts by referring to actual data of how your firm has helped other startups.
A research report is a great document for more sophisticated clients to consume.
Case laws are specific cases you analyze and provide your commentary.
Perhaps to talk about an interesting case your law firm was involved in.
You can provide concrete material to your clients providing additional justification how your law firm understands its clients and can help.
Digital marketing content for decision-making
The last stage in your buyer’s journey is the decision-making stage.
This is when a potential client is going to decide to hire your law firm or deal with a competitor.
Digital marketing content law firms will create will serve to hit the home run.
At this stage, you want to bring in the business, so it’s all about your law firm.
The content and material you provide your potential clients to convince them to do business with you is intended to close the deal.
In most cases, case studies and other forms of social proof can provide a potential client the comfort and assurance they need to select your firm.
Case studies
Case studies are details given about a case or a matter a potential client can relate to and find validation that they must select your law firm.
For example, you can discuss an important financing transaction you’ve handled where the information is publicly available and you outline how you were able to help them.
You use your case study to draw parallels with your prospective client’s needs.
For example, you can refer to a famous IPO your firm worked on and discuss your client’s opportunities and challenges.
You’ll target your material to be extremely relevant to your prospective client.
Naturally, you will only disclose publicly available information.
Option evaluation
In the decision-making stage, the clients are evaluating their options.
In the decision-making stage, you now must really sell yourself.
When the customer was in the awareness and consideration stage, you were targeting the customer, their needs and wants.
In the decision-making stage, you need to be clear about how they will stand to gain in retaining the service of your law firm.
The digital content you’ll create will reflect clear reasons why you are better in terms of quality, expertise along with any other factors you want to pitch.
Don’t be shy to provide justification for why your law firm is better than the competitors.
You are here to provide rational data points to your client to hire your law firm.
Focus on your expertise, focus on how you can help customers in a similar situation, focus on how you’ve helped others, focus on hard data and facts, be as objective and clear as possible.
At the end of this decision phase, hopefully the prospect has turned into a paying customer.
Takeaways
Law firms must be mindful of their customers’ buying journey when looking to hire the services of a lawyer or a law firm.
The buyer’s journey is essentially composed of three stages: the awareness stage, consideration stage and decision-making stage.
A customer will typically start at the awareness stage to better understand their legal issue or needs, the move to the consideration which is a more detailed investigation of the legal services relevant to them and finally they make a decision based on the data they’ve gathered.
You can create digital marketing content addressing your customers’ needs in each of these stages.
In this article, we’ve discussed each phase of the buyer’s journey and presented to you the best digital marketing content law firms can create to ultimately convert the lead to a customer.
We hope you enjoyed it.
Do you have any views you’d like to share on this topic? We would love to hear from you. Drop us a comment.
