Today, the legal field is tougher than ever. With many law firms popping up all over, every lawyer in the business knows that it’s tougher to acquire ideal clients. And even though there is new talent entering the field every day, recruiting the cream of the crop isn’t an easy task either. Not when there are many firms all vying for their attention.
This problem is real and it is concerning. But… there is a solution.
With the right attorney marketing strategies, you can both get more clients and hire the best recruits. Sure, you may already be marketing your law firm… but here, we speak of digital attorney marketing. The right digital marketing can do wonders for your firm across the board. A successful online marketing campaign will accomplish many things for you, but the most important one is that you will put yourself front and center of your audience.
The right digital marketing will also make sure that your digital marketing outperforms and outranks your competitors in the legal field. Nearly everyone knows the benefit of digital marketing now, so you can be sure that your competitors are working on digital marketing for their law firms. With a company like RankToday, you can be sure that you law firm’s digital marketing consistently ranks high on search engine results pages (SERP) and gets you the results you need.
To do attorney marketing right, there are several legal marketing strategies to implement. These are:
In this article, we will go through all of these attorney marketing strategies one by one and break down their importance in any legal firm’s marketing plan.
Let’s start with Number 1.
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The days of the Yellow Pages are long past and today, everyone heads directly to the all-seeing, all-knowing Google when they need something. The percentage of people who search online for local businesses is now about 90%. It goes without saying that, then, your website should be the biggest tool on your marketing arsenal.
If you’re only going to take one thing from this article, let it be this: make sure you have a competent, professionally designed website. Your website’s design and its functionality will make or break your online presence.
To be considered “well-designed” and functional, your website needs to be:
Your website’s speed is incredibly important for many reasons. Around 50% of the online population expect websites to load in under three seconds. Around 40% will abandon a website if it takes longer. Around 80% of them say that they won’t re-visit a website if it has troubles loading fast.
Isn’t that enough of an indication of how important website speed its?
Seeing as how critical speed is, you need to make sure your website loads fast and serves your potential clients as quickly as possible. If not, they’ll simply find another lawyer – after all, the world is full of them – and you’ll have lost good business.
To ensure that your website is fast, test it using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. If it’s low – or god forbid, in the red – get it fixed immediately.
When you are conducting attorney marketing, mobile-friendliness might be pushed aside for other factors, but that would be a bad idea. Whatever your field is, mobile-friendliness is critical to a website’s success. Since a significant amount of the population access the internet by way of a mobile device, Google and other search engines now give priority to website’s that are optimized for mobile devices.
And the unfortunate thing is that if your website isn’t already mobile-friendly, you’ve already made a bad mistake. Websites are built with layers of complex code and many moving parts. Optimizing a website for mobile-friendliness is a terribly difficult job if it’s done too late. If you haven’t yet made a website or are planning to create a new one… then make sure you work with someone who can create a website that is mobile friendly.
If you already have a website, test it on a mobile phone. Make sure everything works, everything is formatted correctly to fit the mobile screen and everything is visible. Take a critical at your website and see if you are having a good experience with it.
If you’re not... contact your webmaster immediately and get started on the process.
Law firm marketing needs to take into account two important factors about the legal field. First, most law firms serve a local area, instead of a whole country. And second, most lawyers provide services on a per-need basis.
You need to make your website is easy to find within your local area and when people are searching for particular services you provide. How are you going to have a business if you can’t be found, after all? Ensuring you are found easily involves SEO and Local SEO, fine-tuned for attorneys. We will look at this in more detail below.
People are… Well, people have short attention spans and are easily distracted when there isn’t anything to hold their attention. They are also judgemental. If your website loads under three seconds and they haven’t already left, they’ll form an opinion about your website within the next one second. 46% of people actually cite website design as a key factor in deciding a website’s credibility and trustworthiness. 94% of the time, the first impression of your company depends solely on your website.
A website’s appeal is very important if you want it to succeed. Make sure every visual aspect of your website comes together to provide a look that inspires trust and retains attention.
Equally important is ensuring that your website is designed to provide the best user experience (UX). User experience entrails everything that is part of someone interacting with your website. From the content, to your animation, the widgets and add-ons… everything needs to work smoothly and be easy to use. Make sure people have a fully satisfactory experience with your website.
What we mean by “authoritative” is that your website needs to be trustworthy, provide valuable, meaningful content for your audience and have backlinks to and be backlinked by other trustworthy websites.
For a website to be considered trustworthy, it needs to be well designed, get a certain amount of traffic and work without many errors. Providing valuable and meaningful content is also a part of being “trustworthy”, and it will ensure that you get a steady inflow of traffic and are seen positively by your audience.
Backlinks are perhaps the most important part of SEO authority, as they serve as a vote of confidence from other websites.
When all three of these factors – and several others, too -- are perfectly in sync, your website is considered to be “authoritative” by search engines. And that will do wonders for your search engine rankings and your brand’s success as a whole.
We mentioned that the content on your website is important when it comes to your website’s authority. And authority is important if you want good clients and good recruits.
Content marketing is an important part of your attorney marketing strategy. You need to take a good look at the content on your website. Both literally and visually, everything that makes up your website has a significant impact on whether or not someone contacts you for their legal needs or not.
Once you’ve looked at your law firm’s website, consider the following questions:
The answers to these questions are important. Your website needs to encourage clients and recruits to take action and it can’t do that unless your website has good, solid content.
Make sure you build your website’s content. Starting from the core of your services, create more pages, more content. Write more articles, blog posts… Answer frequently asked questions. Allow guest posts to add some variety. Building a website filled with quality content will show your authority in the legal field, contribute to your SEO and positively impact your overall attorney marketing strategy.
SEO for Attorneys is also very important when it comes to your overall attorney marketing strategy. SEO – or Search Engine Optimization – is the practice through which your website’s search engine rankings are increased.
Considering that people rarely, if ever, visit Google’s second page, it is vital that you rank high as possible. To tell you the harsh truth, if you aren’t on the first page… well, you might as well not have bothered to try at all.
Making your website fast and optimized for mobile will already have made great strides in your website’s search engine optimization, but that’s not all SEO consists of. In addition to those, you need to consider the following aspects of SEO:
SEO isn’t a do-it-yourself process and requires a fair amount of knowledge and experience. If your website doesn’t appear in the first Google results page for the keywords you want associated with your firm… you need to get in touch with digital marketing experts. Preferably someone with attorney marketing experience, like RankToday.
While just working on your website and then relaxing does sound nice, it’s not all that easy. A large portion of attorney marketing takes place outside the website.
By utilizing Local SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising and other methods, you should expand your digital presence outside of your website to make sure you have a cohesive legal marketing plan.
Local SEO is basically SEO, but targeted for the specific local area that your law firm serves. It is very different from normal SEO. While normal SEO works to get your rankings up in general, local SEO focuses specifically on the local pack. “Local pack” being the little box with a Google map snapshot of the local area and some business details listed. It is situated under the paid ads but above the organic search results.
The local pack pulls information from your Google My Business account, which is why claiming and optimizing your My Business account is essential for Local SEO. So make sure you’ve claimed it and update your phone number, address, business hours and reviews.
But it isn’t the only profile that needs to be claimed and optimizing when you’re working on attorney marketing. A key part of attorney local SEO is the process of finding online legal directories and claiming your listing. Currently, the top legal citation sources are:
There are more, of course, but these are some of the critically important ones.
Pay Per Click Advertising can do wonders for your SEO efforts. With the right PPC company providing you with PPC services, you can easily extend your brand’s reach and improve your attorney marketing strategy. PPC ads are just what they sound like: they’re ads you’ll pay for every time someone clicks on it.
PPC is incredibly effective is because paid ads are given a prominent place in the search engine results page. I’m sure you’ve seen it every time you Google anything. The first few listings – anywhere from three to four listings – are often ads from Google’s AdWords.
These paid advertisements are given a significant amount of dominance over the results page. They take up nearly half or more of the results screen. And according to studies, 41% of clicks go to the paid ads – the top 3, more often than not – on the search results page.
However, that increase in clicks and subsequent conversions and sales comes with a price. PPC can be expensive. For lawyers and attorneys perhaps even more so than standard prices. PPC keywords for lawyers and legal services can cost over $50 on average.
There is however a way to get the best of both worlds – or at least, to some extent. You can use PPC remarketing. You basically show your ads to people who have already visited your website or who have already given you their contact information.
You might want to take a look at the search results for legal services in your city to see what legal firms dominate the results page and then consider whether PPC is a worthy investment for you. PPC will definitely improve your attorney marketing campaign, but you do need to consider if you have the budget and the necessity for it.
A social media presence is important for any company in today’s world. A law firm can gain a lot by a consistent presence on social media, especially Facebook, at the very least.
Not only do millennials – and the Generation X and others, too – expect every brand and company to have a Facebook presence, but a social media presence can also humanize you and provide a different perspective on you and your firm. People have trouble seeing past the brand, and showing them that there are real people behind the brand can go a long way. In addition to posting about the human, day-to-day things, charity events and whatnot that your firm is involved in, you can also post an ad or two.
While Facebook is a one-platform-fits-all… platform for law firms to be on, any kind of law firm can have a presence there. Should have a presence there, in fact. Depending on the exact nature of your work, however, you can also have a presence on other social media platforms. Say you provide legal counsel to businesses… In that case, LinkedIn would also be a good fit for your company.
But the benefits of being on social media are more than just humanizing your firm and connecting with your audience. A good social media presence can also bolster your SEO. While social media doesn’t have a direct impact on search engine rankings, they can affect your SEO process in several ways:
For the best success on any social media platform, boost your brand with some social media ads. Since most social media platforms offer good return on your investment when it comes to advertising and the ads will introduce you to your target audience, it’s worth it.
Email marketing is easily the best marketing strategy when it comes to return on investment (ROI). It has an ROI of a whopping 4400%. That’s $44 dollars for every $1 you spend. You can utilize this to market your legal firm with astounding success.
With every client you have and with every client you take on, email marketing offers a way for you to build on their trust and stay connected to them. Brand loyalty can be a powerful tool in the legal field. Your loyal clients will recommend your firm when their friends or family need a lawyer and that’s another client for your business.
Use opt-in email marketing as part of your marketing strategy. It’s easily one of the best ways to stay connected with your existing and potential clients. After all, 92% of US adults have and use email. With it’s incredible ROI and effectiveness, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective forms of legal advertising you can do.
So your website is all prettied up. It’s optimized for SEO, it’s got great quality content. You’ve also got a great social media presence. Your email marketing campaign is on fire. Is that all?
Nope.
If you want to continue advertising your law firm, you need to look into video marketing.
Video marketing is a powerful tool. Considering that a minute of video is worth about 1.8 million written words, you can convey a lot – and we do mean a lot – of information within a relatively short video. People also find it easier to retain information when it is combined with visual aid and we don’t even need to mention it, but: people do prefer watching things over reading things.
By launching an effective marketing campaign, you can tell your story to your audience and connect with them in a manner no other form of marketing allows. People feel at ease hiring someone they know, so video marketing to let them come to know you. Let them see the real you, see the people who make up your firm and build trust.
Paid video ads are also incredibly useful. People as a whole watch over 1 billion hours of YouTube videos a day. 1. Billion. Hours. Even allowing for the fact that a significant portion of them might not be your target audience, that is a lot of hours. And a perfect target for you to deploy some pre-roll or mid-roll video ads.
YouTube is the world’s second most popular search engine, beating Bing, Yahoo and others. It has a massive audience, with over 1.9 billion users. There’s just no reason why you wouldn’t invest in video marketing and YouTube ads. But if you want more reasons, consider that:
Think about it. Video marketing is the perfect addition to your attorney marketing strategy when you’ve mastered everything else. In fact, it’s the perfect addition even if you haven’t mastered everything else.
It goes without saying that you need to have a positive reputation, but we assume you know that. If you’ve got a positive reputation, backed by real customer reviews, you’ve got a great asset in hand and should use it in your attorney marketing.
The power of reviews is easily seen in statistics:
Check whether you’ve got a good collection of reviews. Make sure they’re positive reviews. If they are not positive reviews, connect with the customer and see if you can help them change their mind. If you don’t have many reviews, start gathering them. Send out a customized review links, ask former clients if they’re willing to share their experiences with your firm, and present these reviews and testimonials prominently. Hell, you can even create video ads with reviews/testimonials on it.
You can’t run a legal business without a team of good, talented attorneys. Attorneys who are liked by your clients. The legal field is a high stakes game, and customer experience needs to be given priority if you want to succeed. You need to hire the right talent.
While there has been an increase in the number of attorneys – a 15% increase from 2008 to 2018 – over the past years, it doesn’t mean that everyone is fit for your team. You need to hire the cream of the crop, the best of the bunch. You need a team of attorneys who you can have complete confidence in. Who will represent your firm in the best manner. The trouble is that you aren’t the only firm looking to hire new talent. Everyone is. And you’re all competing for the same talent.
If your competitors also have a better online presence than you… well, you’ve got bad luck.
However, it doesn’t mean you are stuck there. You can use your online presence to make finding new talent easier. Seeing that the new generation of lawyers are all millennials, you just need to go fishing in the ponds where they swim: social media. If they can have a positive online experience with you… you’ve already made good progress.
Consider the following social media platforms:
You should also keep in mind that websites like GlassDoor and Indeed. While they aren’t social media platforms in the common sense of the word, they are critical because they provide an unfiltered look at how it is work for a company. All of your potential recruits will more than likely look at how your firm is reviewed in these platforms. And if you are a good firm to work for… there are good chances you’ll find recruits who were initially looking up another firm and saw that your reviews are better, and so consider you a better company to work for.
You need to track, monitor and analyse each and every campaign that you launch as part of your attorney marketing strategy. Yes, every single one. The truth is that there is no exact science to digital marketing and there are chances that some campaigns are ineffective. Some campaigns can be improved. Some have to be abandoned. Whatever it is, you won’t know unless you are accurately measuring and tracking everything. And then you’ll just be wasting time and money on ultimately useless campaigns.
You need to look at your campaign’s metrics, yes, but the important thing to keep track of is your Key Performance Indicators (KPI).
For law firm’s digital marketing strategy, the following key performance indicators are critical:
A good digital marketing company will do the heavy lifting for you and set up the whole system. Everything will be tracked, monitored, measured, and analysed and you’ll get reports in hand with everything you need to know.
Get a digital competitive analysis done by a good digital marketing company like RankToday. A digital competitive analysis is one of the first things we do when we get a new client. It allows us to get a baseline of where our clients are compared to their competitors in terms of their digital presence. The data gathered from the analysis will be used to form a sound strategy for your firm’s attorney marketing.
Let’s get this out of the way. There are other digital marketing companies providing the same services as RankToday, but they aren’t nearly as good as RankToday. Not by any metric.
You need a company that knows what it is doing at every step and can execute every step as close to flawless as possible. That’s RankToday. Yes, even we’ll make missteps because, again, digital marketing for lawyers is not a science. There isn’t a formula to follow. But we give priority to our clients and ensure that they get the best digital marketing service possible.
We have a team of in-house experts who’ll craft a marketing campaign that highlights all your strengths. Our experience has prepared for every curveball possible and when we do come across one, we’ll easily adapt our strategies on the fly so that you’re campaign proceeds without a hitch.
We could keep praising ourselves, but why don’t you make a judgement for yourself? Contact RankToday now for a free consultation and get started on your attorney marketing process.
