The act of luring new potential clients to your law company is known as law firm marketing. A marketing strategy for a legal practice can include a combination of internet marketing, SEO, blogging, print, and digital ads. Your marketing strategy may also involve a variety of additional strategies, such as utilizing marketing technology for law firms to automate specific duties. However, promoting your business can quickly take up a lot of your time and effort, regardless of how you go about it.
Everything you need to know about effectively marketing your law business, from SEO to networking and everything in between, is covered in this guide. This manual will explain fundamental words related to law firm marketing, the procedures you should follow to create a marketing plan, and how to track your progress. Additionally, you'll discover useful statistics to guide your marketing decisions, industry best practices and insights, and the top technologies and tools for marketing law firms.
Do attorneys require marketing?
The expansion and success of your law practice depend heavily on how well you market your legal services. Marketing is a powerful tool for drawing in and keeping legal customers.
Marketing words for Law Firms
Before beginning the strategy and execution phase, it is crucial to comprehend the fundamentals of law firm marketing. We've compiled a simple glossary of the key marketing terminology you should be familiar with.
Even though there are obviously a ton more marketing jargon you can learn about, this concise list is a wonderful place to start, particularly if you're new to law firm marketing.
Market Potential
A potential client for your business is a marketing lead. There is more involved than just a website visitor. Once someone takes an action that indicates they are interested in communicating with you, they are considered a marketing lead. For instance, customers might call your business, complete a "Contact Us" form, or supply you with their contact information in another way.
Rate of Conversion
Your conversion rate is the proportion of visitors to a particular webpage or advertisement to those who ultimately "convert" to leads. You may monitor the conversion rate for your entire website or just one specific page. You can also assess how effectively your intake procedure converts prospects into paying customers.
Call-To-Cction (CTA)
An explicit appeal for a website visitor or lead to take the next step toward becoming a paying customer is known as a call-to-action, or CTA. This may, for instance, be a button in a paid advertisement that links to your website's "Contact Us" form.
Landing Pages
A landing page is a web page designed to persuade site visitors to perform a certain action, such as clicking a link, completing a form, scheduling an appointment, or dialing a number. See the article Should Lawyers Use Landing Pages for additional details on landing pages.
Optimization for Search Engines (SEO)
The process of improving websites so they show up near the top of search results for pertinent keywords is known as search engine optimization, or SEO.
Words or phrases that describe the subjects you base your pages on are known as keywords (sometimes referred to as keyword phrases). If you're a divorce lawyer in Manhattan, for instance, you can choose to target a keyword phrase like "NYC Divorce Attorney."
These are the queries that internet users type into Google or other search engines, to put it simply. Your keyword—and/or versions of it that are semantically close to it—should appear prominently on your website to let search engines know that it is relevant to the issue at hand. Yoast SEO is a feature-rich SEO solution that you can add to your WordPress website with ease. Read about WordPress Law to find out more about Yoast SEO and other WordPress plugins.
Income from investment (ROI)
ROI is a performance statistic that is utilized in many business sectors, but marketing is one where it is particularly crucial. Make sure you're getting solid returns on your spending across all your marketing campaigns if you want to expand your law company and keep it profitable.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Pay-per-click, or PPC, is a form of paid online advertising where advertisers are charged a predetermined sum each time a site visitor clicks on their advertisement.
Ten Actions to Market your Law Firm
A marketing strategy for a law firm of any size may be developed and carried out with ease if you take the proper approach. Whether you wish to build a long-lasting solo practice or quickly expand your company, you can use the following stages to assist you in achieving your objective.
When developing a marketing plan for your law practice, consider the following nine factors:
1. Make a marketing budget
A solid marketing budget is a crucial part of any business plan for a law company. You must set your objectives and calculate the amount of income required to make them a reality to calculate the amount you will need to invest in your law firm marketing campaigns. You must next consider how many cases you must bill annually to reach that income target. Depending on your field of practice, this will change.
You'll be able to determine your overall law business marketing budget once you've done the research. Keep in mind the stage at which your legal firm is at—has it just begun or is it already well-established? Also consider how cutthroat your industry is. For instance, are you the only family lawyer in a small town or a business attorney seeking to establish a clientele in a competitive city like New York?
Don't forget to account for those prospective charges in the budget because law firm marketing technology can be a component of your total marketing strategy. You might utilize content marketing tools like HubSpot or specific apps for SEO, social media scheduling, or email marketing, as examples of law firm technology.
It's crucial to adhere to your marketing budget's constraints once you've established one for your law practice. Ultimately, if you aren't keeping an eye on your bottom line, taking on more cases won't help your firm develop.
2. Create a professional legal firm website
Your legal firm's website is frequently a potential client's first impression of you in the digital era. You can leave a lasting impression on website visitors who are considering hiring a lawyer.
Use reputable images and a standout law company logo to start. Next, succinctly describe the services you offer and the practice areas you cover. Make sure your contact information is prominently displayed and draw attention to any honors, accolades, or noteworthy experiences you have.
Check out our checklist for developing a law firm website if you currently have one or are considering doing so. It includes every essential element of a top-notch, highly effective law office website.
3. Ensure your website is optimized for search engines
Will prospective clients ever learn about you if you build a law firm website to sell your business, but no one can discover it online?
You must make sure your website adheres to SEO best practices if you want to get the most out of it for your legal company. It's crucial to make sure your website is well-designed. Having high-quality, valuable material is a part of this. This is what users of search engines like Google are trying to find.
Additionally, you should make sure your content is aimed at long-tail keywords. For instance, add the name of your city in addition to the word "lawyer" if possible. The best chance of outranking rival pages and being found by potential customers is to use long tail keywords.
Make sure to create a Google Business listing as well if you need to draw in customers in a certain region. Make sure to include your contact information as well as a concise, helpful explanation of your services.
4. Take control of your free online profiles
Potential clients can find you in a few different places outside just on your law practice website. There are several options to claim internet profiles for
free, from review websites like Yelp to your local state bar listing.
5. Ensure that your law practice is active on social media
By using online advertising, you may reach new customers by going to where they are. This refers to social media in the digital era. You'll need to determine which social media sites are suitable for your legal business and practice area since there are several to select from. Social media advertising can have a huge positive impact on the expansion of your legal practice with some careful planning.
You can market your legal business using social media in the following ways:
Join in on meaningful conversations by following legal thought leaders on Twitter.
Create a LinkedIn page for your law company. Make sure it's distinct from your own LinkedIn page, which you ought to optimize to help you stand out among colleagues and possible clients.
To establish yourself as an authority in your field and draw in more customers, launch a Facebook advertising campaign. Read about how to obtain clients as a lawyer to understand the procedure for acquiring new clients.
Lastly, confirm that you are abiding by the ethical and advertising laws applicable to your law practice. For instance, refrain from referring to oneself as a specialist or expert unless you have received official certification to do so, and be careful not to develop unprofessional lawyer-client ties.
6. Effectively handle online reviews for your law practice
Customers may start leaving you reviews if your law company has several active web profiles. It is essential to control these. The 2021 Legal Trends Report indicated that 82% of customers who were looking for legal advice sought for client reviews and 81% of consumers looked for referrals. A few unfavorable reviews won't hurt, but a steady stream of them could scare away potential customers.
Make it a habit to request online reviews at the conclusion of every case, especially when a client is ecstatic. Check your state bar's advertising regulations again to make sure your request complies. Don't overlook a bad review if you come across one. When it comes to directly answering your clients' comments, adhere to established practices for managing lawyers' internet reputations.
7. Experiment with content marketing
Use your writing prowess, which you already possess, to expand your law practice. Building your brand and authority through blogging and content marketing in general is a terrific strategy.
You can utilize material to highlight your subject-matter expertise. You will gain the trust and confidence of potential clients if you can respond to their common inquiries in a useful manner. It's more probable that they'll hire you if you can show that you're an authority in that field.
If you choose to launch a blog, be strategic and look for legal-related evergreen content marketing subjects. Make sure your content has a distinct topic, has a regular tempo, and offers good, useful information (without offering specific legal advice, of course).
8. Commit time to business development and networking
Make sure you're gaining anything out of the interactions with other legal professionals if you're going to spend time networking with them. Plan out your time and effort for the conversation by developing a strategy. Be ready to participate in relevant discussions that enhance your brand and generate referrals.
Lawyer referrals are a crucial part of every legal firm's expansion of business and increase in revenue. Therefore, learning how to develop referral connections with other lawyers is a worthy investment to ensure a law firm's sustainability.
9. Recognize your target market. To whom are you marketing?
You can generate quality content that prospective customers will actually want to engage with by knowing who your target audience is. For instance, if you work as a divorce lawyer, you probably already know how old your typical client is. Which social media platforms you should utilize to interact with them may depend on this.
Everything you produce and distribute should benefit your potential customers. Every time you update your website, send an email, or write a blog post, keep them in mind.
10. Track the marketing efforts for your legal firm
It's crucial to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, regardless of the strategy you choose to use for your law practice. Without measurement, you won't know which campaigns are succeeding and which are failing at generating new revenue. Your marketing plan will be successful if you can identify the marketing tactic that isn't working well. This will allow you to stop spending money on the ineffective strategies and increase your spending on the ones that do.
Perhaps you want to create a new website to assist you attract more customers. Or perhaps you've developed a great deal of goodwill over time and are receiving a lot of nice feedback from previous customers. You can only learn this by looking at the numbers.
Start by finding out how customers learned about you. Although only anecdotal evidence is produced by this somewhat low-tech method, it's an excellent place to start. To really understand how your marketing is performing, you'll need to conduct a more thorough review.
Implementing website monitoring is the greatest way to monitor the success of your legal firm's digital marketing campaigns. For the majority of law firms, the free edition of Google Analytics, an analytics tool that aids website owners in understanding website traffic, is a solid option. Here is how to set it up on your website.
Google Analytics will assist you in identifying pertinent metrics, such as the website that visitors came from (also known as a "referring domain"), the length of time that a particular visitor spent on your site, and of course, the total number of visitors to your site.
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Salty Red Dog Marketing, LLC is a marketing agency in Red Bank, NJ, Westport, CT, and everywhere in between. We service businesses with marketing strategies, digital marketing, social media, and consultations.
Contact: info@saltyreddogmarketing.com
Phone: NJ: (732) 783-4822 // CT: (203) 429-9671
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