Marketing tactics to grow your law firm
Law Firm marketing promotes the value of a law firm to potential clients and employees.
Connecting with new clients and top talent requires a highly targeted and optimized website with personalized content. However, 97% of law firms have no personal content on their site.
Law firm marketing in the over-saturated legal market creates challenges for law firms and partners. It’s harder to acquire new clients, and there’s more competition than ever to attract the best talent.
The right digital marketing strategies are critical to achieve and sustain a successful law firm. A successful digital marketing strategy is a combination of multiple marketing tactics that work together to boost brand awareness and attract clients.
Here are the most important aspects of your digital marketing strategy to focus on:
In the digital age, people no longer turn to telephone directories to find local businesses. Instead, they search the internet and have access to not only your business’s website, but also to reviews and other research.
Because of this, your website is one of the most important marketing assets you have. It’s vital that you make a great impression.
Your website’s design, usability and user experience need to be competitive with other websites and offer a quick and pleasant experience for the visitor, and it should give them the information they need.
Most importantly, your website needs to load quickly. Many users hitting a slow-loading site will quickly hit the “back” button and go to another site, costing you a lot of potential clients.
Your website should also be mobile-friendly. Many people use their smartphones or other devices to find the information they need, so desktop-only sites tend to fall by the wayside. Users form an opinion about your site as soon as they set eyes on it, and you want users to leave your website feeling satisfied.
Websites take time to build, maintain and optimize. Test your website on multiple devices, correct issues and continue to monitor it’s performance.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making your website rank higher in search engines like Google when users search specific keywords.
Users make their decisions based on the first few results on the first page. If your site doesn’t show up there, it’s less likely people will see it.
Most law firms serve the local area, which is why local SEO is so important. Local SEO is the practice of getting your company in the top search results for a local service area. Though similar to SEO in many ways, this tactic emphasizes the local Google Map result in the search results page.
All of the information that comes up in this result comes from your Google My Business account. Start by claiming your account, listings on legal directories like Nolo and Lawyers.com and any other online real estate you can find. Then, update your phone number, address, business hours, reviews and any other relevant information.
SEO tactics, such as adding code and structuring your website in a deliberate way, help the crawlers understand, categorize and index each web page.
Making your website fast and mobile-friendly is a huge part of SEO, but there are other things you can do to boost your ranking, such as:
Content marketing uses different types of online content, such as blogs and videos, to answer questions and concerns for your prospective clients.
In addition to increasing traffic to your site, content marketing establishes you as an authority in your industry. This gives your reader confidence in your abilities and informs the decision to contact you for legal services.
Content takes time to build, but you can start with your site itself. Add or improve the content on your site, such as the services page, “about us” page, FAQ page and more. Once you’ve done that, you can start a blog and post about common questions, basic information about common legal matters like divorce or retirement, depending on your specialty, and other relevant topics. Over time, this high-quality content will drive traffic to your site and boost your rankings.
Blogs are a great way to start publishing content. High-quality blogs have a few of the following features:
One of the downsides of PPC ads for law firms is that they’re expensive. If you’re working with a limited budget and a high cost-per-click (CPC) for a competitive keyword, you’re going to have fewer clicks per day. While this may be valuable for a lifetime client, it’s not a guarantee.
The best way to ensure you’re maximizing your budget with PPC ads is to be highly targeted with your keywords and keep them specific to your practice, such as the type of law you practice and your geolocation. It’s also smart to include ad extensions, which are a bit of additional information like reviews or quick links, that entice users.
With a specialized practice and a low number of clients, it can be more difficult for law firms to use PPC to find ideal clients. Fortunately, choosing a highly targeted keyword helps you stay detailed in your targeting to attract the right clients. You can also boost your targeting by adding relevant and actionable call-to-action buttons, descriptive keywords and a unique selling point for your law firm that sets you apart.
Customer trust is paramount to a person choosing your firm over a competitor’s. Many people consult online reviews to inform a buying decision about anything, especially something as important as a legal matter. For most, a review is as valuable as a personal recommendation.
If you don’t have any reviews, you can politely ask your clients to review your firm by sending out an email with a review link. If you have plenty of reviews, take a look at the neutral or negative reviews and try to address their problems politely and professionally to show other customers that you’re dedicated to their satisfaction.
You can’t please everyone, but you can turn your negative feedback into an opportunity to earn more customers.
Social media gives you a chance to position yourself as a leader.
You can leverage the power of the following platforms as recruitment tools:
Marketing can be a time-consuming process, especially if you’re just getting started with some of these strategies. Because of this, it’s important to accurately measure and track your campaigns to discover what’s working and what could be improved or changed to maximize your efforts.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) should be your primary focus when measuring progress. These include:
All of these KPIs will help you measure your efforts against your goals to see what areas of your marketing strategy need to be tweaked to ensure future success.
Law firm marketing involves many different areas and a lot of planning, but done right, it can separate your law firm from a sea of competitors vying for the most valuable clients and top talent.
If you want to boost your marketing efforts, M16 Marketing® can help. Our talented team of website designers, SEO consultants, digital marketing strategists and content creators can help you revamp your strategy from top to bottom. Contact us today to get started!
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