Effective marketing practices are the fastest and most reliable means of putting your business on the map. It doesn’t matter how good your service is unless you can market it properly. This is true for all businesses, and especially for law firms. Marketing and legal proficiency are not skills that go hand in hand, making it challenging to decide how to distribute resources.

You can mix and match various tools, including digital marketing campaigns, print ads, SEO and more. Or use dedicated legal software that offers law firm marketing services.

Compare Top Legal Software Leaders

In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to build your own law firm marketing strategy.

What This Guide Covers

• What Is Law Firm Marketing?
• Importance
• Common Attorney Marketing Terms
• Process
• Strategies
• Trends
• Best Practices
• Conclusion

What Is Law Firm Marketing?

Law firm marketing is a promotional strategy engineered to bring more clients to your law firm. It’s a healthy combination of paid ads, digital marketing, public relations (PR) features, print articles and more. You can configure your attorney marketing plan to highlight your firm’s specializations and reach the desired demographic successfully.

Running a law firm and practicing law run parallel to each other, and you can’t do either without appropriate law firm marketing. Your marketing plan has to align with your business objectives to maximize ROI while ensuring maximum effectiveness and reach within a fixed budget.

The alternative to building your custom marketing plan is either hiring a marketing agency or getting legal or case management software with built-in marketing capabilities.

Sales vs. Marketing for Lawyers

Sales and marketing are intricately intertwined when it comes to marketing for lawyers. Marketing strategies are responsible for making the firm and its brand recognizable. It has a lot to do with what your firm represents, what kind of clients it serves and what makes it unique.

The primary objective of a marketing campaign is to build brand recognition. There’s an overabundance of methods in which you can achieve this — ads, blogging, digital marketing and more. Marketing secures a steady stream of referrals and ensures potential clients can recall your brand when the time comes.

The sales strategy is about securing referrals and bringing your marketing efforts to fruition. It directly depends on your lawyer’s ability to convince potential clients that they have come to the right place and that your firm can meet their needs.

When combined and in the right amounts, sales and marketing can help build your firm’s credibility. If you can capitalize on the leads from marketing, they will automatically lead to new referrals.

Compare Top Legal Software Leaders

Importance

A fully fleshed out marketing plan allows law firms to amplify brand recognition and create targeted promotional content. You could be doing a million things right, but it won’t matter unless you can identify what’s working and assess its reception individually.

Marketing for lawyers means developing existing relationships and building new connections. It’s essential to understand which services are popular among your customer base and which ones need a rework. You can also conduct surveys to identify successful referral programs.

Law firm marketing is not just about promoting your business; it’s also about streamlining the plan to get the most out of your investment. With access to market research, you can leverage video marketing, website, social media, PR and advertising to target popular demographics.

Traditional attorney marketing strategies generally adopt a universal approach to promotional content. While a good catchphrase or a unique advertisement is essential to grab attention, you might waste company resources without access to relevant market research and data analysis techniques. A combination of the two guarantees better reach and ROI.

Common Attorney Marketing Terms

Before we delve deeper into the topic, we must familiarize ourselves with a few terms and concepts integral to law firm marketing. These are essential to understanding how a high-functioning marketing plan operates and what KPIs to keep an eye on.

Call-to-Action (CTA)

A call to action, more commonly called CTA, is a sign or prompt that literally calls the viewer to action. It’s usually a phrase or a command like “Sign Up” or “Contact Us” that actively encourages the user to engage with your business. You can include them in an email or digital marketing campaign with the CTAs hyperlinked to a landing page.

Landing Page

A landing page is a webpage that exists for one reason and one reason only — to convert visitors into leads. As part of a law firm marketing campaign, a landing page is where users “land” after they click on a CTA. Its purpose is to nudge the visitors to fill out a contact form or book a consultation.

Marketing Lead

You can consider anyone who fills out a contact form or books a consultation via your landing page as a marketing lead. If the visitor goes through the effort of signing up on your website, they are interested in your services.

Consistent leads are the sign of an efficient marketing campaign, but it’s on your sales team to finally convert leads.

Conversion Rate

Simply put, your website’s conversion rate is the number of visitors you can convert to sales. However, you can also apply this to different metrics; track the conversion rate of marketing leads or other web pages on your website. In fact, you can even compare your website’s conversion rate to that of your competitors to ensure it is performing to standards.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Return on investment (ROI) is a performance measuring tactic to determine your marketing campaign’s efficiency. It’s the net profit or loss percentage divided by the initial investment cost.

You can use it as a metric to benchmark your marketing strategy’s performance to industry peers and objectively determine whether it is profitable or not.

Get our Legal Software Requirements Template

Process

Every law firm is different in terms of size, scope and practice area. Therefore, their marketing campaigns should also be unique to meet their respective objectives. Creating your custom marketing plan is not very complicated as long as you don’t lose sight of goals. You can break down the process into seven simple steps:

Define SMART Objectives

SMART is an acronym for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely goals. These are qualifiers that ensure your business objectives are realistic and attainable. Once you clearly define your expectations from the marketing plan, your team can work on realizing these goals.

Setting unattainable or time-insensitive goals can lead to burnout. You should work with senior management to determine which goals are important in the short and long term.

Create Your Brand

If you don’t already have a brand, it’s time to build your brand. Create a logo, develop an advertising slogan and pick a color theme. Additionally, advertise your brand’s presence across all parts of your business for maximum visibility.

A strong brand acts as a rallying point for your advertising team. Having a brand makes connecting with your desired audience easier and helps focus all marketing efforts at a singular point.

Identify Your Audience

What kind of clients are you looking to attract? Which practice areas does your firm specialize in? What does your average customer look like? These are all crucial questions that will guide your marketing strategy.

Once you have a semi-concrete idea of your average customer’s requirements, you can configure your advertising and promotional content for maximum reach.

Define Your Budget

Without a definite budget, there can be no guarantee that the marketing strategy will be profitable or have a decent ROI. It’s all the more reason you should consult your business partners and top-level executives before making any decisions concerning the marketing budget. Once you have a budget, you can work to maximize leads and referrals within the fixed budget.

Budget is one of the things you shouldn’t tinker with much in a marketing strategy. Depending on the results, you can shift and reallocate resources to focus more on high-performing modules, but readjusting the budget multiple times can skew business goals.

The marketing budget will be different for a newly launched firm as opposed to a well-established one. Based on other factors like geographical location, competitiveness and the size of your firm, you can also consider using marketing technology.

Prepare a Marketing Strategy

Your strategy will depend on your budget and target audience. You can choose from any number of methods — try a combination of content marketing, paid advertising, social media marketing, email market campaigning and enhanced SEO.

The important thing is not to lose sight of your marketing objectives and budget. Keep switching things up and trying different strategies to see what’s working for you.

Compare Your Plan to Competitors

It’s always a good idea to track what your industry peers and competitors are doing. Keep tabs on their website, brand design and social media presence to understand their weaknesses and strengths and what you can do to improve.

If you have any industry contacts with prior experience in marketing, you can also consider reaching out to them. Also, if you can get first-hand accounts of the challenges and obstacles of implementing a law firm marketing strategy, it can make your job infinitely easier.

Implement, Monitor and Revise

With all the groundwork laid in, you can finally move on to the final step of the process. However, the job doesn’t end with simply implementing your attorney marketing plan. You must track KPIs in real time to understand how the plan performs compared to industry benchmarks.

Keep tweaking the marketing strategy till you completely align it with your business objectives within the confines of your budget.

Compare Top Legal Software Leaders

Strategies

While building a custom marketing plan for lawyers, there are many plausible strategies you can choose to implement. It’s up to you to decide which methods will be a good fit, keeping the business goals and budgetary constraints in mind.

We have curated some of the legal industry’s tried and tested marketing strategies for your reference:

Build a Website for Your Law Firm

In today’s day and age, a website is the cornerstone of any marketing strategy. All your ads, digital marketing and referral programs help lead potential clients to your website. Whether they’ll engage any further depends on your website’s design, information and overall aesthetics.

Many legal practice management or case management solutions come with built-in website building services. However, if you are building a website from the ground up on your own, there are a few things you could do to make it stand out.

Make sure the website:

• Contains attorney profiles
• Highlights your firm’s area of practice
• Has quality photographs
• Provides engaging content
• Is mobile friendly
• Prominently features your contact information
• Is SEO optimized
• Describes your firm’s core values and beliefs

As the first point of contact between you and potential clients, your website will be your first chance to create a good and lasting impression.

Leverage SEO To Improve Your Website’s Visibility

Search engine optimization (SEO) ensures your website gets maximum visibility. While SEO depends on multiple factors, including design, content, keywords and links, it makes the website and its content much more discoverable.

The higher your content ranks on search engines, the easier it will be to attract visitors to your website. More visitors lead to more leads and a greater overall conversion rate for your marketing plan.

You should also keep SEO in mind when creating business profiles on different platforms. A well-thought description, combined with correct labels, tags and keywords, can ensure your business ranks higher in a list of local or global companies.

Maintain a Social Media Presence

A social media presence can do wonders for your online presence and credibility. Most people today are on social media, and odds are a huge chunk of your target demographic is there too. For starters, you should have separate accounts for your law firm, both on Facebook and LinkedIn.

However, maintaining social media presence is not just about creating business profiles on social media. You have to regularly make posts, promote your website’s content and advertise your business to engage visitors.

Create and promote educational legal content, engage in conversations about legal and regulatory issues, and help explain complex parts of the law through your social media accounts. This can help further your brand recognition and visibility, leading to more leads.

You can invest in a social media team to manage your firm’s presence or outsource it to an external agency. Social media presence allows you to run paid advertising campaigns on the platforms themselves, leading to greater engagement.

Invest in Content Marketing

Content marketing is an age-old marketing strategy to increase brand awareness. You can create educational content in your area of practice. Combined with SEO best practices, it can establish your expertise and improve website traffic.

If you continue creating quality content about specific topics over a certain period of time, it improves people’s ability to recall your brand. You can comment on trends, explain the impact of regulatory changes and share helpful information about your particular niche.

Content marketing works for both written and visual content. Alongside your blogging efforts, you can also include video tutorials about navigating legal challenges and video testimonials of clients satisfied with your service. The more of your firm you put out there on the internet, the more people you’ll be able to attract with your content.

Compare Top Legal Software Leaders

Run Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing is one of the more popular forms of outbound marketing available to the legal industry. Send targeted emails based on customer responses to surveys and questionnaires. You can simultaneously promote your content and provide helpful information with personalized emails and newsletters.

An email marketing campaign tries to gently convince potential leads to engage with your firm or book a consultation. Some email marketing services even provide reporting capabilities to understand which emails create more engagement than others and why.

Manage Online Profiles

48% of consumers depend on online content to decide what products to buy, according to Google’s Consumer Insights. Similarly, online reviews play an important part in your law firm’s online presence. Google Business Profiles with good average review scores are more likely to feature on the first page than organizations with consistently poor reviews.

46% of consumers read user reviews before committing to any particular product or service. So not only do good reviews affect your visibility, but it also affects your ability to attract leads to the website.

If a client is satisfied with your service, follow up with a request for a customer review. Also, remember to look into negative reviews without fail. A few negative reviews won’t hurt your business, but listening to negative feedback and learning from mistakes is important.

Explore Traditional Strategies

Traditional marketing strategies have withstood the test of time. While digital marketing provides opportunities to reach a bigger audience at a fraction of the initial investment, there are specific demographics that you still can’t reach without traditional methods.

For example, if your law firm specializes in elder law, chances are you won’t be able to reach your preferred client base via social media marketing or digital content marketing. In such cases, your best bet lies with television ads and billboards.

Every strategy should include a combination of traditional and digital marketing strategies in a ratio comfortable to your firm. Putting all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea!

Develop a Collaborative Referral Network

You must develop relationships and connections to succeed in any industry. Invite industry experts to write guest articles on your website or arrange conferences and webinars on practice areas relevant to your firm. You can even create referral relationships with external attorneys from a non-competing area of practice, resulting in a mutually beneficial relationship.

Encourage your employees to contact legal networking groups and participate in events. The bigger your network is, the more leads you’re likely to secure. But always keep in mind that networking is not just about what you need; it’s about building relationships. It’s a continuous process of give and take.

Compare Top Legal Software Leaders

Trends

While law firm marketing is still relatively new, we’ve highlighted a few interesting trends on the horizon:

Prioritizing Personal Relationships

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, law firms are increasingly focusing on developing existing client relationships with personalized content. This includes using legal billing software to create personalized payment plans, provide dedicated client portals, prepare customized bills and more.

This change in approach has bled into attorney marketing strategies as well. Law firms are adopting a more direct and personalized approach to align their content with personal preferences. Improving the client experience helps nurture a personal connection with potential and existing clients.

So focus more on making digital content that answers your clients’ queries. Creating and maintaining meaningful relationships with your clients may be challenging, but it’s extremely rewarding in the long run. Just from a marketing perspective, good word of mouth and positive reviews can create a lot of traction.

Creating Mobile-friendly Websites

Mobile devices account for 63% of all organic search engine visits. As you can see, because mobile devices make up a significant amount of web traffic, site optimization is the need of the hour. Unless your website can adequately accommodate mobile and voice searches, you’ll lose out on a large chunk of traffic.

Site optimization for mobile devices means more and more people will view your site and its content on a small screen. So your images must load faster, and the design has to be snappy to maintain maximum engagement.

Another thing to consider is while on their phones, people are unlikely to spend a lot of time reading your blogs. Deliver relevant information quickly and in bite-sized portions to convert the average visitor into a lead.

Mobile and voice searches are faster, easier and more convenient. It seems unlikely that their momentum will slow down any time soon. Instead of fighting this trend, it’ll be more beneficial to roll with it.

Leveraging Marketing Tools for Success

Implementing firm-wide legal software can often be difficult and cost-prohibitive, especially for new and small firms. However, that doesn’t mean you’re out of options. There are a variety of services available which can help you manage your marketing efforts. Some of these include:

• Hootsuite for social media management
• Mailchimp for email marketing
• Clio for website designing
• Birdeye for online review management
• Logikcull for eDiscovery

While these are some of the most popular tools available for law firm marketing, they are by no means the only ones. Do your due diligence, and you might discover other applications much more suited to your requirements.

Compare Top Legal Software Leaders

Best Practices

You should always stick to a few guiding principles while building your marketing plan for lawyers. These best practices ensure that your strategy has the highest chance of success and doesn’t fall victim to common pitfalls.

Always Put Your Clients First

For client-facing industries like the legal industry, client experience is king. The easier it is for potential clients to understand and access your services, the easier it will be for you to convert your leads. It includes following up on leads as soon as possible, helping potential customers with their queries and being patient and understanding throughout the process.

While creating digital content or marketing plans, always ask yourself what major problems people face in your area of expertise. Your content must explain how your services address these problems and make them accessible to your target demographic.

Because your website is the first point of contact with potential clients, a large chunk of this responsibility falls on it. The most important thing is the website should be easy to use, accessible and mobile-friendly. Combine it with chatbots and a robust customer service plan, and you should see a significant uptick in leads.

Don’t Hesitate To Hire Help

Marketing is not necessarily a skill taught in law schools. Therefore, it should suffice to say that not all your employees will be experts in law firm marketing. In these circumstances, you should always hire external help.

For all your marketing budget, it won’t matter much if your marketing team doesn’t know what it’s doing. Marketing for lawyers requires a combination of skills, including SEO, web design, UI and UX design, market analysis, and more. However, it’s completely normal for your existing employees not to have every single skill you need to enable your marketing plan.

You can also consider implementing law firm marketing technology that provides built-in marketing tools like SEO optimization, website builder and more. You can also automate various marketing-related tasks, including following up on leads, reporting and tracking KPIs.

Measure Performance in Real Time

And finally, always keep track of your leads. Task your marketing team with keeping detailed logs of your referral sources, lead sources, conversion rate and other performance-related metrics.

Any marketing plan is a combination of multiple strategies working together in real time. These may include billboard ads, social media ads, digital ads, content marketing and Google Local Service Ads.

Unless you track which strategy is bringing you how many leads, you’ll find it challenging to allocate resources effectively. Because your marketing plan is dynamic, you must continuously evaluate its performance and make necessary adjustments. With access to relevant metrics, you can reallocate resources from underperforming areas to high-performing strategies.

Access to all the marketing data makes it easier to understand which parts are working and which are not. It also becomes easy to engage senior executives and make effective business decisions.

Get our Legal Software Requirements Template

Conclusion

As far as first impressions go, marketing for lawyers may seem overly complicated if you have no prior experience in marketing. That’s why it’s best to take things one step at a time. Take a step back and list your objectives, identify your target audience and prepare a rudimentary budget.

Develop and implement one strategy at a time, and it will all fall into place. Continuously measure your performance and never lose sight of your objectives. However, the most important ingredient in any marketing strategy is patience — it’s easy to get carried away and obsess over results. But like all good things, you need to give yourself time.

And if law firm marketing feels too overwhelming at any point, don’t hesitate to reach out for help.

Did we help you understand law firm marketing? Did we answer all your questions? Let us know in the comments section below.