Most law firms have the same ultimate wish: that the right clients find their services at the right time.
Unfortunately, things aren’t that easy.
To get the right clients, law firms in this space need to get the word out about their legal services. Unfortunately, there’s a vast sea filled with a billion distractions competing to hook their potential clients.
So how can you do it?
Well, it all comes down to the right marketing strategy.
A recent study shows that 57% of clients seek a lawyer independently, and many search for their legal services online.
While 46% of all law firms have a marketing budget. On the other hand, 66% of solo attorneys do their marketing independently.
How you choose to market your legal services can drastically impact your overall success.
Now, if you’re like other law firms, local legal marketing may seem like a completely different culture.
That’s why we’ve compiled this complete guide to help you better understand the different techniques for local marketing for your legal services
Studies found that 13% of legal service provider firms say no one is responsible for their marketing.
So, it’s quite challenging to be a full-time attorney, keep up with your current cases, and find ways to consistently get new cases.
In this situation, marketing your law firm while practicing law can get overwhelming.
This guide will help you with the latest local marketing strategies and techniques for your law firm. Then, all you have to do is incorporate them into your 2022 legal marketing plan.
You have a massive responsibility of onboarding new clients and ensuring that your law firm’s marketing strategy includes ads and promotions on multiple digital and social platforms.
In addition, it should have clear directions for products to be marketed digitally using SEO, blog posts, and social media platforms.
The marketing strategy should not be limited to SEO, content publication, etc.
So, it must include some extraordinary marketing tactics. Such as law firm process automation and having a mobile phone application where clients can log in and see updates related to their cases.
With all the crazy technological developments, you need to understand that making a marketing strategy and marketing your services will consume most of your time. So once again, we are here to help you understand how to market your law firm.
Before getting into the details of marketing and how you should do it, let me share statistics that 54% of law firms in the U.S. don’t feel the need to have a marketing budget.
On the other hand, only 14% of individual attorneys and 32% of law firms have reported that they are now putting a marketing budget aside with the pandemic and social distancing.
So now, without any further delay, let’s dive in and see how a law firm should market its services.
Law firm marketing needs to be divided into multiple below-mentioned sections:
- Create budget for marketing
- Design awesome law firm website
- Ensure your website is search engine optimized
- Claim your free online profiles
- Ensure your law firm has a social media presence
- Manage your law firm’s online feedback or reviews effectively
- Try content marketing
- Invest time in networking & business development
- Measure your law firm marketing success ratio
Four best practices for lawyers
If you are immediately looking into hiring a web developer, an SEO expert for social media marketing, and optimized content creation. In that case, I want you to step back and look into the following best practices that you should always keep in mind before getting into your organization’s marketing strategy.
You need to be very clear with your agenda on:
- Making client-centric services.
- Step by Step, strategically investing in marketing
- Hire marketing resources only if it is vital
- Evaluate your marketing strategy
To give you a broader view of marketing schemes for law firms, I will take you into on-ground SEO-optimized techniques.
You should be aware of Google My Business to start it all off. It’s okay if you don’t know or have not worked on it, but this will be a game-changer for your business.
“Google MyBusiness” to Promote Your Law Firm Locally
Your goal needs to be “On the top of the first page in every Google law-related search” to have a good marketing strategy. This can only be done by optimizing your law firm website and researching and planning the right keyword for every legal service you provide.
Why is the first position required? An excellent question with a very simple answer. To have a constant high stream of customers looking for services or solutions to their inquiries, you need a highly optimized website where not only keywords play a vital role, but also your local search contributes a fair share of searches.
Usually, law firms tend to have more clients from their surroundings. This is why you need to ensure that you use local search options for your business to be found. I will introduce you to Google My Business and guide you to promote your business in local searches.
Improve Your Local Search & Raise Your Law Firm Profile
Google My Business helps you display your law firm’s business details without any additional cost at all. The moment you enter your business office address will start appearing on the Google local map search results with your business label. For ease, we need to divide it into the following parts:
Relevance
Relevance needs to be defined as measuring how your selected keywords for your law firm against the services you provide reflects for Google to rank your business locally. To rank your business higher than others, you need to keep the tags of your services the same as your business.
Using relevance, Google would understand what the website is about and what the content reflects for customers.
Location
For Google to rank your website higher, the location/ address of your office needs to be updated and accurate. As you are planning to provide services for the local community, authentication of your address is very important. This address needs to be the same in Google maps, your website contact page, and any other social media platform you are using.
If your address is not authentic or verifiable. In that case, chances are Google will not rank you at all or not higher enough for everyone to find you on Google Maps.
Authority
Now for Google to authenticate your web content, you need to get others to notice you and tag you, including web traffic diversion on your web page. So basically, what Google does is rank those websites higher in search listings recommended more than others because of the available information.
This means that you can manage a high authority index. As a result, your law firm website will be a much higher ranking than those operating in the same industry. So, in short, if you have enabled and used Google My business accurately, you will eventually get more opportunities to rank higher in Google Searches. Following are the three tips to increase your ranking in Google Searches:
Local Finder
Every time someone looks at your business in Local Finder, your firm, along with its address, will show up. It helps the user see your law firm name displayed promptly rather than others reflecting the road map to reach your office.
Google Posts
Google continues to update its product. And for Google My Business, the latest upgrade is Google Posts. Google Postsworks as a new update blog pop-up system. It helps to show all the updates, news, and new advertisements when your business is being searched by people.
Let’s get you acquainted with directories. A virtual world is growing so fast that you will be lost somewhere with nothing at hand if you stop growing. This is why I am here to guide you with all the updates you need for your website to be well known and rank on the top of every search.
Lawyer directories
Web Directories are digital catalogs. They store your information and display it to the people looking for services in web directories. For example, you, a law firm, need to register yourself in a lawyer directory.
Each directory has some marketing schemes for you to choose from. You choose what type of marketing you want the directory to do, pay them accordingly, and the rest is on the directory to market your services. These services usually include ranking in top searches, SEO for your services, and generating online customer reviews.
Here is a list of directories to choose from as per your requirement.
Avvo
Avvo itself has the highest ranking in legal search responses. This means that not only people are going on Avvo to search for their relevant lawyers, but Avvo is also helping law firms to market their services to a very vast active subscriber base. In addition, Avvo ranks any law firm or lawyers on a client feedback basis.
Nolo
Nolo is an interactive platform where Nolo lets customers talk to their respective law firm or lawyers for free, eventually leading to an appointment if they are satisfied. In addition to marketing your services, Nolo lets you publish your blogs for user awareness.
FindLaw
Out of all FindLaw was the first lawyer directory made, and it is now divided into multiple websites. It provides a lawyer directory along with a chat forum where people and lawyers can discuss legal issues. It is a sort of Q&A platform.
By now, you would be asking, “why do I need to pay these lawyer directories when I can market my content”? This is a valid question, but the answer is more related to your revenue than marketing prospects. And here is why you need to be listed in any one of the highly used lawyer directories:
Lead generation
These directories help you with a possible lead generation by diverting the customer to you, specifically on your website where your services are published. This means you will have a conversation with a possible client who wasn’t looking for you on Google directly. This user could have gone to anyone if you were not present on that lawyer directory.
Local SEO
Similar to Lead Generation, these directories help you lead SEO as well. They market your services to people looking for guidance on those directories rather than using Google Searches.
Backlinks for SEO
As a result of lead generation and Local SEO, your web traffic will increase within days by backlinks you have used for your SEO marketing skills on the directories.
Bottom Line
Having said all this, an effective marketing strategy shows who you are, what you can do, how much you consider for your client, and why someone should choose you to represent them in a legal case.
All of this is done by developing and executing a marvelously crafted marketing campaign to spread around the news of your presence with catchy, attractive slogans.
This is the ultimate guide to equip yourself with all the components for marketing your law firm. We discussed digital marketing, SEO, content management, lawyer directories, Google My Business, advertisement platforms, and whatever comes in between all these.
In the end, I am sure that you can understand the marketing requirements for your law firm. And you would be ready to follow the steps and make your marketing strategy by making measurable project points to gauge your marketing efforts.
I will be looking forward to your replies and questions in the comment section, if any. But, first, let me know if you still believe that you would survive without a good marketing strategy. Then, go through this guide again and convince me of your reasons for not having a marketing strategy for your law firm.
