Online marketing for lawyers presents many opportunities for lawyers to promote their firm and practice groups, as well as to generate new business opportunities from existing or potential clients.
The growing importance of online marketing is evident as we have witnessed the power shift from traditional to digital marketing. Seconds eMarketer, US digital marketing spending surpassed traditional spending in 2019 for the first time, and it’s only going up from here. It’s clear that in today’s digitally connected world, if you want your law firm to remain competitive and drive a steady flow of new clients and high-value cases, you need to market online.
Our Beginner’s Guide to Online Marketing for Lawyers includes the essential strategies and components of online success marketing strategy. It focuses on three things: raising your profile, building credibility in your areas of expertise, and reaching the right people with the right message.
Read on to find out how you can be on the right track to reach new clients and grow your law practice. By the end, you’ll also know how to connect the many moving parts of online marketing to your overall goal, which is return on investment (ROI).
1. Laser focus on your customers
Your past, present and potential customers are the lifeblood of your business. Every aspect of your company’s online marketing strategy should be built around them. To successfully engage customers and prospects with your online marketing, you must first understand what they really want and what challenges they need help solving.
We recommend creating a buyer persona for your company, which according to HubSpot is “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” Then use these personas as a guide to create personalized content that your prospects will want and need at each stage of your marketing funnel.
You can create an ideal customer profile with this free guide.
2. Build your marketing framework and define SMART goals
A basic idea we want to reinforce is that marketing should be evaluated holistically. Instead of thinking about campaigns, you should think in terms of growth frameworks and long-term business goals. Your framework should be a written marketing plan that guides the direction of your campaigns, goals and growth for your business.
Your efforts will be much more fruitful, and much easier to implement, if you start with a framework for successful goal setting known as SMART goals:
SSpecific: Setting specific marketing goals for each campaign and for your business as a whole will facilitate prioritization and ensure accountability.
Mmeasurable: what criteria, or KPIswill you use to measure success?
AAchievable: While your goals shouldn’t be so high that you won’t reach them, it’s important that they’re not too easy. Make sure they are worth the time, effort and resources you invest in achieving them.
Realista: ask yourself if what you propose is practical. Do you have the time, team and resources to implement the campaigns needed to achieve your goals?
Timely: How long will it take you to achieve your goals? Set deadlines for both short- and long-term goals.
3. Getting Found Online: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You can have the most amazing website or blog, but what really matters is making sure your target audience can find your website. This is where SEO comes into play, which is an essential part of any effective online marketing strategy for lawyers.
At its core, SEO drives traffic to your website by allowing visitors to find your business easily when they search online. When your site is optimized for SEO, search engine bots can better understand what your pages are about. The easier it is for a search engine to understand your pages, the more connections it will make between each page and related search queries, leading to higher search rankings. Great search rankings ultimately translate into:
Increased visibility of your website More clicks to your website More potential customers who know about your products and services
To learn more about SEO, visit our post: An SEO Checklist for Law Firms.
4. Drive leads with conversion rate optimization strategies
Law firms that focus on generating new qualified leads and acquiring new clients through online marketing must ensure that their website is optimized for conversions.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of converting website visitors into qualified leads. CRO works by capturing the contact information of potential leads who visit your website (ie with calls to action such as “download” or “subscribe”). While search engine optimization can help law firms increase their online presence, conversion rate optimization can help businesses turn casual browsers into leads.
To implement CRO, you first need to calculate your conversion rate by taking the total number of conversions and dividing it by the number of visitors, then multiplying it by 100. The result is a percentage, and that number is your conversion rate . For example, if your law firm’s website had 53 conversions and 2500 visitors, your conversion rate is 2.1%, the standard rate for law firms.
Related: A lawyer’s guide to conversion rate optimization
5. Build audience connections with content marketing
Quality content that builds a dialogue with your target customers will ultimately strengthen and deepen your relationships and lead to more business.
However, content marketing is more than just your law firm blog. When executed correctly, content includes articles, eBooks, webinars, guides, quizzes, videos, podcasts, and more. All of these content formats can be powerful growth drivers for your business.
Whichever tactic you decide to leverage, always keep your focus on your prospect’s needs and strive to provide content that meets their needs, answers their questions, and helps solve their problems. At the same time, your content should be able to position your attorneys as thought leaders in their practice areas and your firm as a trusted source of useful information.
Download our free eBook, The Content Marketing Lawyers Guide and learn how to develop an effective content marketing strategy.
6. Launch a social media strategy
Cultivating an attractive image through social media is an integral part of online marketing and public relations for any law firm today.
Social media platforms should be used to connect with your audience, build your law firm brand, drive website traffic, and increase leads. This involves posting quality content (that can be reused from your website) to your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running paid social media ads. Also, don’t forget to train a professional social media biography as it is often seen more than any content you share.
To learn more about how to create a winning social media strategy, check out this free e-book: Advanced Social Media Strategies for Law Firms.
7. Find customers through search engine marketing
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is an effective method of delivering quality traffic and leads directly to your law firm’s website. SEM is
also called online advertising, paid search or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.. These terms are often used interchangeably to describe the same concept: traffic bought through online ads, often on Google. SEM allows you to bid for ad placement on a search engine’s sponsored links when a potential customer searches for a keyword related to your legal services.
While SEO takes time to deliver improved rankings and increased traffic, SEM can quickly increase visibility and drive more qualified visitors to your site while you wait for your optimization efforts to pay off. And since SEO and SEM each have their strengths and weaknesses, the most effective strategies often incorporate both. By leveraging retargeting and other advanced SEM tactics, you can further improve the effectiveness of your paid campaigns.
8. Expand connections with email marketing
Email marketing remains one of the most important communication tools in online marketing for lawyers. Email is a great way for your law firm to capture new business or keep your firm top of mind with past and present clients. Top performing law firms focus on sending relevant, valuable and personalized emails. An effective way to personalize your email campaigns is by email targeting.
A weekly or monthly newsletter it’s a great way to stay in touch with subscribers. A series of well-written emails that offer informative, educational, and engaging content can also be an incredibly effective means of connecting with existing and potential customers in a way that piques their interest and inspires interaction with your business. To ensure that your email content provides consistent value to subscribers, ask yourself the following questions:
What do my subscribers want to know? What questions are asked? What are they looking for? How can my company help them with a problem?
9. Measure and analyze performance constantly
In an ever-changing and rapidly changing business landscape, the need to measure online marketing success as efficiently as possible has grown in importance more than ever. By measuring and paying close attention to your online marketing metrics, you can better understand the impact and effectiveness of your online activity.
To get started, make sure to install it Google analytics on your website. This free tool is one of the most powerful reporting platforms available for digital marketers. Google Analytics will tell you how many users have landed on your law firm’s website and which pages they’ve visited. You can also customize the platform to record lead activity to better evaluate the performance of your different campaigns and marketing channels.
Take away:
We hope this guide has helped you better understand all the fundamental digital marketing tactics that are essential when it comes to online marketing for lawyers. It takes a consistent and persistent presence to stay on top as a law firm, but there is no one-size-fits-all online marketing strategy for law firms.
This post has been edited and republished since July 27, 2021.
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