We’ve put together 23 proven law firm marketing ideas for you and your law firm to implement. It’s challenging enough to be a full-time attorney, keeping up with your current cases, let alone trying to figure out how to consistently acquire new cases. Marketing a law firm while trying to practice law can get overwhelming.
How Do You Market a Law Firm in 2023?
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What You Will Learn:
- Quick steps you can take to understand how your marketing measures up today
- Where to go to find information about your competition
- How to build a roadmap for your digital marketing success
- Easy ways to build your brand for free using social media
- Where to spend your money online to get high-quality leads and referrals
Define Law Firm Marketing Goals
Many law firms do not focus on digital marketing, because they’re used to “traditional marketing”– print, radio, and billboard advertising. Spending a large sum of money for some amount of “impressions” or value-added placement is common in this realm.
With digital marketing for lawyers, your law firm can segment your marketing budget into various categories that will reach different audiences with different messages – thereby increasing the effectiveness of your overall marketing strategy.
Your attorneys may want to take part in this process so they are able to connect fieldwork with your digital strategy – this leads to the most effective results company-wide.
By spending some of your legal firm’s advertising budgets on professional law firm branding services and advertising ideas for law firm growth, along with some remarketing services to bring visitors back to your law firm’s website, you could earn far more targeted views than you would receive with “traditional” methods, plus you’ll be able to track your digital marketing metrics and make campaign adjustments accordingly.
Get Referrals from Other Attorneys
One of the major drivers of quality cases is from getting leads from other attorneys in the area.
The majority of attorneys have a carved-out nitch of a practice area or sub-practice area in which they excel. So, there is a wealth of referral opportunities from other attorneys.
Just make sure the referrals are a two-way street. In most states, you can share the fees if you’re both working the case.
Want to know how to generate more referrals? We provide more info in this guide: How Attorneys Can Generate More Referrals
Evaluate Your Law Firm Website’s Performance
One of the first steps is to evaluate your website’s performance to see if everything is working how it should.
Page load speed is a high-value indicator for website performance, so making sure that your law firm’s website is serving static pages or using a CDN may help reduce the load times for your visitors.
The analysis report will also indicate some quick steps you can take to optimize your website’s performance.
If your firm has an in-house developer, you can simply forward this report for immediate improvements and move on. Your website may never get a “perfect score,” but this analysis will help your firm understand what factors are being used to determine your website’s performance rating and allow you to make the adjustments you need to outdo your competitors online.
Side Note: If you are currently working with FindLaw, you may not have access to your website’s data. If you’re considering moving from FindLaw and are looking for FindLaw marketing alternatives, the marketing experts at Digital Logic can help guide you through the process and ensure as stable a transition as humanly possible.
Optimize Your Law Firm’s Web Pages
By adjusting your website’s content engagement with the data you collect from paid search campaigns, you can further amplify your message to your target audience.
Internet space is a highly competitive market for the legal sector. In order to rank high on search engines as a legal authority, you will need to use every tool in your arsenal.
Ranking on Google’s search engine is the only way to get traffic to your service offerings and land the big-ticket clients you are aiming for.
Make sure that all of your attorneys are listed on the website because potential clients may also be seeking your law firm based on the individual attorneys that work at your firm. If search engine optimization, or SEO, isn’t something you aren’t comfortable with just yet, we offer specialized local law firm SEO marketing services to keep your website bringing in high-quality leads.
By constantly working on both your website and promoting your legal firm on other high-authority websites, our law firm marketing agency will be able to establish your presence online as one of the top law firms in your area specializing in your practice areas, saving you a lot of paid search campaign spending in the long run.
Optimize for Mobile Viewers
In addition to having a website that can be found by your potential clients, you also need to make sure your site is mobile-optimized.
With 95% of smartphone owners using their devices to search for local information, it’s important that when they find your law firm’s website, they have the ability to get the information they need quickly and efficiently.
In order to ensure your website is optimized for mobile, you’ll need to utilize click-to-call buttons, create a site that automatically resizes for all mobile devices, and ensure the page loads quickly.
Google now does a mobile-first index. So, Google search engine crawlers observe how your website appears on a mobile device before a desktop device. Therefore, if you want to rank, it goes without saying that your site must perform perfectly on any size device.
This is a great guide to reference for some of the best legal website designs. If you’re going to hire a law firm marketing agency for your next web development project, consider using our law firm marketing team to ensure your law firm’s success online.
Write Legal Blogs To Help Potential Clients Discover You
While most Law Firms do this step poorly, you should use this opportunity to really connect with your audience and prepare them for working with your law firm. By having high-quality content marketing rather than useless legal mumbo jumbo on your website updated regularly, both search engines and your website visitors will appreciate your site more and interact with it.
Since the website seems to be delivering more value to your visitors, search engines will take notice and elevate your law firm’s website above the other digital participants who are not doing as well with their content strategy.
By focusing on providing high-quality legal content that will actually help potential clients, and by posting blogs regularly, you can really dig deep within your law firm’s practice area niche and become the ultimate authority for the area of law you most desire to practice.
While this effort does take time, the results are real and compound over time.
Once the Google’s search engine crawlers start to see that your law firm’s website is the most relevant for the keywords you are targeting, your legal firm will begin to see results in the form of organic traffic.
Additionally, if lawyers from your firm are able to share the results of recent cases with your website visitors and social media followers, they may want to reach out to that individual attorney for his experience working with similar cases. There is an endless number of topics you can write about.
Use Visual Aids Wherever Possible
The general public typically views law firm content as “dry and boring.”
This is due to the high volume of text content necessary to cover all the legal material on a legal website.
However, by developing unique visual aids, such as photographs, images, infographics, or other custom designs, you are giving your target audience something valuable to share with their network through social media.
Interesting visual content, if it provides real value to its viewers, will increase your law firm’s brand reputation and encourage potential clients to connect with your firm through Facebook, Twitter, or other social media platforms. They may even check out your firm’s website on their own!
Include FAQs For Potential Clients
FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) pages are a great way to preempt qualified responses from your legal team about the type of services you provide and the manner you wish to convey to your potential customers.
As voice search becomes more relevant to search engine ranking, questions such as “How can I get my immigration visa renewed?” through a voice search on a mobile device may bring a potential client to your website because you’ve already supplied a direct answer to this question on a FAQ page.
By giving a sample of the voice that you present to your clients, prospects can begin to relate to your law firm’s brand and build enough confidence in your legal team to consider you for their important case. There are thousands of questions you could write down that potential clients and current clients ask you. Answer these questions via your legal website and have the answers indexed on major search engines, like Google.
Review Your Firm’s SEO Performance
Perhaps the most important step in any law firm digital marketing strategy is evaluating the website’s performance on search engines.
Again, you may never have a “perfect score,” on any audit, but this analysis will provide recommendations that you (or your marketing agency) can implement immediately to improve your website’s search engine performance.
While SEOPTimer won’t provide the full law firm marketing audit, it will give you a general overview of what your website “looks like” to Google and other search engines, so you can make sure that your website is meeting the preferred criteria to achieve the results you expect.
Take Advantage of Online Legal Directories
Many attorneys fail to even indicate the practice areas in which they specialize or which locations they service. This is vital information for your website visitors and potential legal clients.
It’s also important to keep your law firm’s details up to date and complete across the directories so that potential clients are more likely to discover your business.
We recommend that all practicing attorneys connect their digital profiles to your law firm’s digital marketing platforms. This helps the entire organization grow digitally.
When utilizing online directories, such as Google Business, Avvo, or Justia, you want to ensure that your practice areas, name, and location details are entered in the exact same way across the board. This helps to establish your legal firm as a credible resource when Google’s search engine crawlers review the information.
The more online directories that verify your online identity, the more trustworthy search engines will take your information. In turn, the more Google will serve it back to potential legal clients that are looking for things related to your law firm’s specializations – it’s a win-win for everyone!
This is a great resource on free directories you can publish your information to.
Run Google Ad Campaigns
Anyone with a Gmail account can set up a Google search advertising campaign for a law practice, but it takes years of training and experience to actually run law firm ad campaigns that perform well. You also must ensure that all of your ads conform to current lawyer advertising rules.
There are some attorneys who attempt to run Google AdWords campaigns, but often they stop because they don’t see the results they want.
If you want to run a search campaign on Google, make sure to include negative keywords and have all the tracking in place to measure which keywords are driving new client leads.
If you’re interested in learning more about lead generation for lawyers, we wrote a comprehensive guide: Lead Generation For Lawyers.
Since the legal industry is highly competitive across the board, we highly recommend investing in PPC management services for law firms. The amount that you’ll pay in management fees or additional PPC costs will be a small percentage of the overall growth your law firm will see.
At Digital Logic, we also offer law firm Local Service Ads management as part of any attorney online advertising package.
Remarketing your Law Firm
Have you ever visited a company’s website and then later noticed the same company’s ads on another website, mobile site, or even on Facebook?
This is a simple yet effective marketing campaign called remarketing. Remarketing is a low-cost law firm advertising effort that proves to be very effective.
Now that you’ve been to this page of our site, we are going to follow you around the internet with our ads.😜
Retargeting also supports an extremely important marketing strategy known as brand differentiation.
By investing in professional remarketing services, you will win more available legal cases because the spread of ads should gain an edge over your competitors.
Potential clients invest less trust in companies if they’re unfamiliar with them, further instilling trust in your firm because of its high visibility on all of the media channels that your visitors prefer to visit.
Test Your Google Ads Campaigns
One important tactic to conserve your digital marketing budget is operating several A/B or split tests with your paid advertising campaigns.
By running the same ad for multiple audiences, you can discover which audience responds best to each advertisement. You can also test different ad copies on the same target audience to find out which message has the most impact on that audience.
Each consumer is unique, and so the approach to targeting and attracting that client needs to be different.
This is where the messaging can have a huge impact in connecting with your potential audience.
A relatable lawyer will get the client before a ‘mass-produced text’ lawyer will.
Once you find the best ad for your target audience, you can then allocate more of your advertising budget to developing new content that is even more target-focused.
Since our law firm marketing experts are able to pull the Google Analytics data, we can quickly pull the legal marketing ads that aren’t converting any clients and push the ads that work.
At Digital Logic, we don’t waste our clients’ time or money.
Get Online Reviews & Testimonials for Your Law Firm
One of the most important aspects of law firm marketing is establishing credibility and trust with the potential client.
By sourcing your testimonials directly from your clients, you’ll be able to share your expertise confidently with potential clients as they view your website to decide if your practice is able to handle their important case.
You’ll want to ask directly through social media, email marketing, and even face-to-face for written testimonials. If you plan to send clients to directory listings, we recommend sending them to your Google Business listing, as this will help improve your website’s rankings more than, say, Justia or Avvo (and certainly more than FindLaw).
Additionally, it’s going to carry the most authority with also helping your law firm show up in the map listings when local consumers are searching for legal services.
Each attorney representing your law firm may be able to bring hundreds of positive testimonials to your practice, so make sure to inform them of the best strategies to earn these reviews and have them posted to your website.
Hiring Digital Logic was the BEST decision I ever made! The entire team is absolutely excellent; Their SEO expertise will change your entire approach to marketing. Give it time and you will see your business bloom!
Belen Olmedo Guerra — Belen Law Firm
Embrace Social Media Marketing for Lawyers
If you’re marketing your firm online, you simply cannot ignore the power of social media. Facebook is probably the most effective social media platform for lawyers to connect with potential clients. It’s also a great platform to keep existing clients informed about changes in your law firm or new practice areas being covered.
Consider developing social media marketing content so that your existing clients will want to share it with their network, simply because it’s useful information. If you can tap into this wealth of connectivity online, you’ll find that the rewards are potentially great once your social media referral funnel has been established.
If you find that you don’t have the time to invest in maintaining a social media presence, Digital Logic offers social media services for attorneys.
Stay Up To Date With Your Legal Clients
By keeping up with your existing clients using social media marketing, you may be able to understand the trends that they are following, in order to make more relevant content that they would be willing to share with their network.
By reading your clients’ daily communications, you may be able to glean a perfect content strategy to inform them of your law firm’s expertise and possibly share some helpful legal hints that they would want to share with loved ones.
During holidays, use the opportunity to connect with your existing clients and their network personally. You don’t have to use every opportunity in your digital marketing strategy to promote your law firm, but by establishing a regular presence in your local community, that trust developed may be the key factor in a potential client’s final decision during an important case.
If there’s something special that one of your attorneys does for their clients every year, think about showcasing them to invite a more personable approach to your law firm’s digital marketing strategy.
Share on Twitter
Although we do not necessarily recommend spending much time on Twitter to directly bring in leads for your law firm, we do recommend utilizing the platform in some capacity as it grows in popularity and because of the way search engines pick up on content shared across Twitter.
It would be wise to have your law firm’s Twitter feed publishing content from your websites, like new blogs or press releases, as well as resharing your content from Facebook to bring some of your followers to your more attractive digital media assets.
The more social platforms you share on also help play a role in SEO with linking and content discovery.
If you are able to build a base of potential clients in your region, you can advertise special offers to these specific target audiences very cheaply through Twitter, so that’s something we think will help boost credibility online in general, as well as, create some unique opportunities to reach out to a new client base.
Social media marketing requires law firms of all types to be engaged across different platforms to meet the demands of clients in the information age.
Run Email Marketing Campaigns For Your Law Firm
Did you know that email marketing has the highest ROI of all digital marketing strategies?
While it’s not typical for law firms to use this common tactic, if you can creatively connect with and pitch your existing client base, you might be surprised at the results you’ll get! Since nearly everybody on earth uses email, you’ll need to make sure your law firm’s content sticks out and has value to its reader.
By writing relevant blogs and sharing advice with existing or potential clients through email marketing, you can ensure that your articles have more visitors as soon as you publish them, and continue to provide value to your clients even before or after their case.
You may also try asking followers from your social media platforms to connect with you via email subscription to boost your connected readership. Content marketing can take place off of your website, so make sure your content is getting viewed by sharing it with the people who are most likely to read it first.
Invest in Sponsorships
Since your law firm’s website will be needing backlinks from high authority websites, contributing some of your marketing budgets to events, causes, and charities can help boost your brand’s recognition in the area, as well as deliver high-quality SEO to your main website.
Funding a scholarship for a local university is another creative way to connect your law firm to a highly reputable university.
This will lend its credibility to your website for an honorable placement, in addition to the lasting appreciation the community will give back to your law firm’s contribution, not to mention an .edu link back.
We believe that building relationships with the community you hope to serve is the best way to reach out to clients. This will help your law firm’s brand grow and build credibility. Over time, this will organically improve your digital marketing efforts.
Conduct a Competitive Analysis For Your Legal Firm
Audit Google & Bing Search Listings
Google’s SERPs, or search engine results pages, are a great method to learn what is going on with certain keywords or competitors.
By typing in the search terms you’re hoping to rank for, you can find out where your website ranks among competitors, and also understand what is determined to be “good content” by the search engine ranking factors.
You may be surprised at what floats to the top – and if you hope to get there, you’ll need to understand what makes it happen and how to overcome it. Make sure you are logged out of your Google account and know that the results will be filtered (and displayed differently) depending on your location.
While you may not be ranking for all of the keywords you hope to at first, you may be surprised at what keywords you are ranking highly for on other search engines like Bing and Yahoo. This is because each search engine has its own users with different behaviors, in addition to the algorithm calculating your website’s value and relevance in a different way.
You’ll want to make sure that law firm SEO is part of your long-term digital marketing strategy if you hope to compete online today.
The first thing you want to take care of on the search engine results page is ensuring you can own as much of the real estate for brand-related search terms as possible. You can do this by setting up directory listings and making sure you are getting client reviews.
Dig Into Your Law Firm’s Website Google Analytics Data
Google Analytics is the preferred platform of most webmasters and digital marketers, but you may have another tool in mind to examine and increase your website’s SEO traffic.
By digging into your website traffic, you will notice trends that develop, such as peak visitor hours, viewing devices, actions, and behaviors, as well as, finding out where your traffic is actually coming from. By taking note of these trends, you will notice changes over time that allow you to move your focus from one aspect of your digital marketing strategy to hone in on another – such as amplifying your Twitter outreach if there is a higher percentage of actions taken on links posted to that platform.
SEO Analysis
Ahrefs is an amazing tool for competitor link profile research, especially for law firms and attorney SEO.
In fact, we believe it to be the best tool available for this purpose.
With this tool, you can examine the keywords that competitors are ranking for, along with a list of their backlinks acquired, as well as the estimated paid search spending. Of course, there is no way to guarantee complete and accurate information, but you will be able to gather a large amount of data about your competition.
This information can help you determine the best course of action for your digital marketing strategy as well as ongoing progress tracking for link building.
The easiest way to do competitor research is to do an online search using the same keywords that your law firm targets.
If your law firm specializes in immigration law, you know that you’re not the only one doing this and will want to know who is already successful in the space you are targeting. Unless you’re starting out with millions in capital, you’re more likely to be competing with much bigger firms, as well as some smaller firms that are using digital marketing for lawyers to the fullest potential.
Ahrefs is a fantastic tool to determine what you’re going to be up against, and we use this for all of our law firm clients’ SEO.
Hire A Trusted Law Firm Marketing Company That Can Show You Current and Previous Client Success Metrics
There are hundreds of different law firm internet marketing companies out there. Make sure they’ve done work in the legal category and can show you the successful digital marketing metrics of other law firms they work with.
Do some quick searches to make sure they’re not working with other attorneys in your market who you would consider a direct competitor. Check the agency’s Google Business reviews to make sure they have a good track record.
Look for agencies who are good at not only helping larger firms but can also help marketing a small legal firm.
Digital Logic offers a free proposal.
