We've put together 23 proven law firm marketing ideas for you and your law firm to implement. It's challenging enough to be a full-time attorney, keeping up with your current cases, let alone trying to figure out how to consistently acquire new cases.
Marketing a law firm while trying to practice law can get overwhelming.
While some of these law firm marketing ideas will be easy to implement, it's always good to have an experienced guide to help you through some of the more advanced tactics.
By spending some of your advertising budgets with online video advertising through YouTube and Facebook, along with some remarketing to bring visitors back to your website, you could earn far more targeted views than you would receive with "traditional" methods, plus you'll be able to track your metrics ongoing and make adjustments accordingly.
One of the main drivers of quality cases is from getting leads from other attorneys in the area. The majority of attorneys have a carved out nitch of a practice area or sub-practice area they excel at. There is a wealth of referral opportunities from other attorneys. Just make sure the referrals are a two-way street. In most states, you can share the fees if you're both working the case.
This report will also indicate some quick steps you can take to optimize your website's performance. If your firm has a developer, you can simply forward this report for immediate improvements and move on. You may never get a "perfect score," but this analysis will help you understand what factors are being used to determine your website's performance rating and allow you to make the adjustments you need to outdo your competitors online.
Also, recommend that your practicing attorneys connect their digital profiles to your law firm's digital marketing platforms. This helps the entire organization to grow digitally. Areas like Google Business Listings, Avvo, and other directories are a great place to update your practice areas and location details to make sure that search engines know your information is complete and accurate. The more places online that verify your online identity to be complete and accurate, the more trustworthy search engines will take your information. In turn, the more Google will serve it back to potential customers that are looking for things related to your law firm's specializations – it's a win-win for everyone! This is a great resource on free directories you can publish your information to.
Anyone with a Gmail account can set up a Google search advertising campaign for a law practice, but it takes years of training and experience to actually run campaigns that perform well. There are some attorneys who attempt to run search campaigns, but often they stop because they don't see the results they want. If you want to run a search campaign, make sure and include negative keywords and make sure you have all the tracking to measure which keywords are driving new client leads. Measure everything.
There are hundreds of different law firm internet marketing companies out there. Make sure they've done work in the legal category and can show you success metrics of other law firms they work with. Do some quick searches to make sure they're not working with other attorneys in your market who you would consider a direct competitor. Check their Google business reviews to make sure they have a good track record.
Law firms can sometimes be seen as "dry and boring" online, mainly because of the high volume of text content necessary to cover all the legal material on one's website. By developing unique visual aids such as photographs, images, infographics, or other custom design, you will be giving your target audience something valuable to share with their network through social media.
Allow all of the attorneys and staff at your firm to participate in developing your brand's image online, because they are the ones that clients will face when they actually interact with your company, and they will feel much more satisfied with the experience if your marketing efforts are genuine and accurate.
Interesting visual content, if it provides real value to its viewers, will increase your law firm's brand reputation and encourage people to connect with you through Facebook, Twitter, or other social media platforms. They will likely even check your website out on their own to see what else you might have to offer if they are interested in your visual content, and that doesn't cost a cent!
By keeping up with your existing clients using social media marketing, you may be able to understand the trends that they are following, in order to make more relevant content that they would be willing to share with their network. By reading your clients' daily communications, you may be able to glean a perfect content strategy to inform them of your law firm's expertise and possibly share some helpful legal hints that they would want to share with loved ones.
During holidays, use the opportunity to connect with your existing clients and their network personally. You don't have to use every opportunity in your digital marketing strategy to promote your law firm, but by establishing a regular presence in your local community, that trust developed may be the key factor in a potential client's final decision during an important case. If there's something special that one of your attorneys does for their clients every year, think about showcasing them to invite a more personable approach to your Law Firm's digital marketing.
FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions) pages are a great way to preempt qualified responses from your legal team about the type of services you provide and the manner you wish to convey to your potential customers. As voice search becomes more relevant to search engine ranking, questions such as "How can I get my immigration visa renewed?" through a voice search on a mobile device may bring a potential client to your website because you've already supplied a direct answer to this question on your FAQs page.
By giving a sample of the voice that you present to your clients, prospects can begin to relate to your law firm's brand and build the confidence in your legal team to consider you for their important case. There are hundreds and hundreds of questions you could write down that potential clients and current clients ask you. Get these questions indexed on search engines.
While most Law Firms do this step poorly, you should use this opportunity to really connect with your audience and prepare them for working with your law firm. By having high-quality content marketing rather than useless legal mumbo jumbo on your website updated regularly, both search engines and your website visitors will appreciate your site more and interact with it.
Since the website seems to be delivering more value to your visitors, search engines will take notice and elevate your law firm's website above the other digital participants who are not doing as well with their content strategy.
By focusing on very high-quality content that will help potential clients, and posting blogs regularly, you can really dig deep within your law firm's practice area niche and become the ultimate authority for the area of law you most desire to practice.
While this effort does take time, the results are real and compound over time. Once the search engines start to agree that your website is the most relevant for the keywords you are targeting, your firm will begin to see results. If lawyers from your firm are able to share the results of recent cases with your website visitors and social media followers, they may want to reach out to that individual attorney for his experience working with similar cases.
There is an endless number of topics you can write about.
One of the most important aspects to law firm marketing is establishing credibility and trust with the potential client. By sourcing your testimonials directly from your clients, you'll be able to share your expertise confidently with potential clients as they view your website to decide if your practice is able to handle their important case. You'll want to ask directly through social media, email marketing, and even face-to-face for written testimonials to add to your website. Even sending links to law firm directory listings you own like FindLaw and Avvo might be a good idea to put your law firm's reputation above the competition when it comes to digital marketing.
Each attorney representing your law firm may be able to bring in hundreds of positive testimonials to your practice, so make sure to inform them on the best strategies to earn these reviews and have them posted to your website. The most important place to get reviews is on your law firm's Google Business listing because it's going to carry the most authority with also helping your website rank and to show up in the map listings when people are searching.
Social media is such a powerful influencer, you simply can't ignore it if you're planning to market a business online. Facebook is probably the most effective social media platform to connect with your potential clients, and to keep existing clients informed about changes in your law firm or new practice areas being covered. Consider developing social media marketing content so that your existing clients will want to share it with their network, simply because it's useful information. If you can tap into this wealth of connectivity online, you'll find that the rewards are potentially great once your social media referral funnel has been established.
Although we do not necessarily recommend spending much time on Twitter to directly bring in leads for your law firm, we do recommend utilizing the platform in some capacity as it grows in popularity and because of the way search engines pick up on content shared across Twitter. It would be wise to have your law firm's Twitter feed publishing content from your websites like new blogs or press releases, as well as resharing your content from Facebook to bring some of your followers to your more attractive digital assets.
The more social platforms you share on also help play a role in SEO with linking and content discovery. If you are able to build a base of potential clients in your region, you can advertise special offers to these specific target audiences very cheaply through Twitter, so that's something we think will help boost credibility in general online, as well as, create some unique opportunities to reach out to a new client base. Social media marketing requires companies of all types to be engaged across different platforms to meet the demands of clients in the information age.
Did you know that email marketing has the highest ROI of all digital marketing strategies? While it's not typical for law firms to use this common tactic, if you can creatively connect with and pitch your existing client base, you might be surprised at the results you'll get! Since nearly everybody on Earth uses email, you'll need to make sure yours sticks out and has value to its reader.
By writing relevant blogs and sharing advice with existing or potential clients through email marketing, you can ensure that your articles have more visitors as soon as you publish them, and continue to provide value to your clients even before or after their case. You may also try asking followers from your social media platforms to connect with you via email subscription to boost your connected readership. Content marketing can take place off of your website, so make sure your content is getting viewed by sharing it with the people who are most likely to read it first.
Since your law firm's website will be needing backlinks from high authority websites, contributing some of your marketing budgets to events, causes, and charities can help boost your brand's recognition in the area, as well as deliver high-quality SEO to your main website. Funding a scholarship for a local university is another creative way to connect your law firm to a highly reputable university. This will lend its credibility to your website for an honorable placement, in addition to the lasting appreciation the community will give back to your law firm's contribution, not to mention an .edu link back.
We believe that building relationships with the community you hope to serve is the best way to reach out to clients. This will help your law firm's brand grow and build credibility. Over time, this will organically improve your digital marketing efforts.
Another very easy and crucial first step is to evaluate the SEO performance of your website. Again, you may never have a "perfect score," on this report, but this analysis will make recommendations that you can implement immediately to improve your website's search engine performance. This isn't a complete SEO Audit, but it will give you a general overview of what your website "looks like" to Google and other search engines, so you can make sure that your website is meeting the preferred criteria to achieve the results you expect. We recommend using SEOPTimer.
By adjusting your website's content engagement with the data you collect from paid search campaigns, you can further amplify your message to your target audience. Internet space is a highly competitive market for the legal sector. In order to rank high on search engines, you will need to use every tool in your arsenal. Ranking it the only way to get traffic to your service offerings and land the big-ticket clients you are aiming for. Make sure that all of your attorneys are listed on the website because potential clients may also be seeking your Law Firm based on the individual Lawyers that work at your company.
If SEO isn't something you aren't comfortable with just yet, we offer specialized law firm SEO marketing/search engine optimization services to keep your website bringing in high quality leads. By constantly working on both your website and promoting your Law Firm on other websites, we'll be able to establish your presence online as one of the top Law Firms in your area specializing in your practice areas, saving you a lot of paid search campaign spending in the long run.
In addition to having a website that can be found by your potential clients, you also need to make sure your site is mobile optimized. With 95% of smartphone owners using their device to search for local info, it's important that when they find your site, they have the ability to get the information they need quickly and efficiently. Utilize click-to-call buttons, create a site that automatically resizes for all mobile devices, and ensure the page loads quickly.
Google now does a mobile-first index. Google search algorithms look at how your website looks on a mobile device before a desktop device. websites If you want to rank, then it goes without saying, your site can't look like garbage on mobile. If you're going to hire a law firm marketing agency for your next web development project, consider using our team to ensure your law firm's success online.
Google's SERPs, or Search Engine Results Pages, are a great method to learn what is going on with certain keywords or competitors. By typing in the search terms you're hoping to rank for, you can find out where your website ranks among competitors, and also understand what is determined to be "good content" by the search engine ranking factors. You may be surprised at what floats to the top – and if you hope to get there, you'll need to understand what makes it happen and how to overcome it.
Make sure you are logged out of your Google account and know that the results will be filtered (and displayed differently) depending on your location. While you may not be ranking for all of the keywords you hope to at first, you may be surprised at what keywords you are ranking highly for on other search engines like Bing and Yahoo. This is because each search engine has its own users with different behaviors, in addition to the algorithm calculating your website's value and relevance in a different way.
You'll want to make sure that search engine optimization is part of your long-term digital marketing strategy if you hope to compete online today. The first thing you want to take care of on the search engine results page is making sure you can own as much of the real estate for brand related search terms. You can do this by setting up directory listings and making sure you are getting client reviews.
Google Analytics is the preferred platform of most webmasters and digital marketers, but you may have another tool in mind to examine your website's traffic. By digging into your website traffic, you will notice trends that develop such as peak visitor hours, viewing devices, actions, and behaviors, as well as, finding out where your traffic is actually coming from. By taking note of these trends, you will notice changes over time that allow you to move your focus from one aspect of your digital marketing strategy to hone in on another – such as amplifying your Twitter outreach if there is a higher percentage of actions taken on links posted to that platform.
Ahrefs is an amazing tool for competitor link profile research, especially for the law firm and attorney SEO. In fact, we believe it to be the best tool available for this purpose. With this tool, you can examine the keywords that competitors are ranking for, along with a list of their backlinks acquired, as well as the estimated paid search spending. Of course, there is no way to guarantee complete and accurate information, but you will be able to gather a large amount of data about your competition. This information can help you determine the best course of action for your digital marketing strategy as well as ongoing progress tracking for link building.
The easiest way to do competitor research is to do an online search using the same keywords that your law firm targets. If your law firm specializes in immigration law, you know that you're not the only one doing this, and will want to know who is already successful in the space you are targeting. Unless you're starting out with millions of dollars in capital, you're more likely to be competing with much bigger firms, as well as some smaller firms who are using digital marketing to the fullest potential. Ahrefs is a fantastic tool to determine what you're going to be up against, we use this for all of our law firm clients SEO. This is a fantastic example on Ahrefs on how to do a competitor law firm domain comparison.
One important tactic to conserving your digital marketing budget is operating several A/B tests with your paid advertising campaigns. By running the same ad for multiple audiences, you can discover which audience responds best to each advertisement. You can also test different ads on the same target audience to find out which message is the most impacting on that group. Each client is unique, and so the approach to dealing with that client needs to be different – this is where the messaging can have a huge impact in connecting with your potential audience. A relatable lawyer will get the client before a 'mass produced text' lawyer will.
Once you find the best ad for your ideal target audience, you can then allocate more of your budget to developing new content that is even more target focused. Since we're able to pull all of the analytics data, we can quickly pull the ads that aren't turning any clients and push the ads that are. Time is money, and we don't like to waste either!
Have you ever visited a company's website and then later noticed the same company's ads on another website, mobile site, or even on Facebook? This is a simple yet effective marketing campaign called remarketing. This is a low-cost marketing effort that proves to be very effective.
Now that you've been to this page of our site, we are going to follow you around the internet with our ad.
Retargeting also supports an extremely important marketing strategy known as brand differentiation. By remarketing your firm across many channels online, you will win more available cases because the spread on ads should gain an edge over your competitors. Potential clients invest less trust in companies if they're unfamiliar with them, further instilling trust in your firm because of its high visibility on all of the media channels that your visitors prefer to visit.