Marketing Tips for Law Firms and Legal Professionals
The legal profession has always been highly competitive, long before the emergence of digital marketing, and this shows no signs of changing. Today’s law firms aiming to create and maintain a competitive edge are turning to the latest technologies and a range of optimisation tactics in order to improve the results from organic and paid search campaigns.
If they can use the right combination of tactics, law firms will be positioned to connect with the right audience at just the right time.
The following are some of my tips when designing and delivering an effective marketing strategy for your law firm.
1. Take a Comprehensive Approach to Digital Marketing
Building and managing a well-rounded online presence is absolutely essential if your firm is to be visible in a very noisy online landscape. There are a range of areas to cover when you’re designing your digital marketing strategy, including the use of search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics which offer genuine value to your target audience as you aim to grow your client base.
– Social Media
Social media platforms can also be used in creative ways to form connections with your ideal audience and provide informative content in formats that are engaging and easy to digest. In fact, determining ways to break down even complex legal procedures into bite sized pieces of content that are shareable across your target social media platforms could help you to significantly increase your online reach and expand your audience.
– Paid Advertising
It is also important to consider paid search and social media strategies. Whilst these spaces are competitive and can be costly, the visibility paid tactics can provide can be invaluable when it comes to out-performing your competitors. Despite the costs involved, a well designed and carefully managed approach to digital advertising can be far more cost-effective and deliver much better returns than print adverts, for example.
In developing and refining your digital marketing efforts, it’s so important to make full use of analytics tools and data to track your performance and to make data-driven decisions if you’re to maintain your competitive edge over the long term.
2. Create and Use a Marketing Calendar
A marketing calendar is very easy to design and implement and yet so many firms neglect it. The calendar will help you plan and schedule all aspects of your marketing campaigns. This ensures you’re creating content consistently throughout the year and around any important events. It can highlight key dates and topics that you can use as starting points when you’re planning and creating content. The other major benefit is that it draws together all of your activities across all of your channels, including traditional forms of advertising such as TV advertisements and billboards.
Marketing calendars are essential to every proactive marketing strategy, as this visual tool can help you to better align your marketing tactics with core business goals. This framework will ultimately make your approach far more robust and increase the likelihood that you will continue to invest your marketing budget into areas that will deliver a solid return on investment (ROI).
3. Tailor Your Messaging
Generic messaging simply won’t cut it. To truly engage with your target audience requires some research and hard work but you will give yourself the best possible chance of increasing overall engagement and conversion rates. Your content will need to align with the questions and concerns that are keeping your audience awake at night. Get it right, and this will ensure they feel that you understand their situation and have the skills and knowledge to help.
One of the best ways to speak directly to a subsection of your audience is to leverage audience targeting tools on digital platforms, including Facebook. These tools allow you to choose which groups of users will receive your marketing messaging. Additionally, many platforms enable you to retarget people who have already engaged with your business.
4. Build Local Visibility with Google Local Service Ads
As a law firm, you provide important services to your local community and one of the best ways to promote your firm to a local audience is via Google Local Service Ads (LSAs). LSAs work on a pay-per-lead basis, which means you will only incur a cost on an ad when it provides a lead.
LSAs appear in the area at the very top of a search engine result page (SERP). This means that utilising this form of advertising can seriously boost the local visibility of your law firm. It’s worth pointing out that only businesses that have been verified by Google have access to this form of advertising, further enhancing the trustworthiness and credibility of your law firm.
LSA advertising is there to make it easy for users to contact businesses directly, placing a particular focus on helping mobile users find relevant information when they’re on the go. So, even if you don’t yet have a full website, LSAs can be an excellent way for potential clients to get in touch with you directly without the need to go through a website.
5. Prioritise Local Engagement
To complement your online local strategy, you may want to consider helping local initiatives to build your brand awareness and establish your law firm as a contributor to the community. There are plenty of ideas here, such as offering pro bono services or sponsoring local events, many of which could lead to additional referrals and improved client retention rates.
Building in-person and digital connections with local organisations, professionals, and other businesses will really differentiate you from your non-local competitor firms, giving you a further advantage in a highly competitive space.
6. Leverage Video Marketing
If you put the effort into creating high quality video content, you can provide potential clients with a deeper insight into your law firm. This is a perfect opportunity to showcase your expertise and your core values in a way that will appeal to your ideal audience. Many people find video content to be more memorable than other forms of online content, and a professionally created video can hold people’s attention for longer, giving you more time to convey the information you want to share.
Video is also a highly portable form of content which can be shared across social media, integrated into email marketing campaigns, and embedded into your website. Whether you use it to explain complicated legal services in a concise and easily understandable style, or you want to provide your audience with some insight into the overall experience your clients have with your firm, creating a professional video with subtitles for additional accessibility can improve your performance in SERPs and enhance that all-important engagement level with your target audience.