Online or digital marketing for a law firm or legal practice is entirely possible. However, it differs from traditional online marketing, where you just have to create a few landing pages and run ad campaigns. There’s more to successfully operating your law firm or legal practice amid heavy competition than just that.
In this article, we’re going to review all you need to know to reliably market your law firm to attract potential clients and build an online brand. Note that this is meant for a law firm that lacks an online presence or has one that could use a facelift.
Now, let’s look at all the factors that you need to pay attention to. These are all the industry’s best practices, and even digital marketing agencies focused on the law niche offer these services, such as Grow Law Firm’s digital marketing packages.
Website Optimization
The first step is to create a professional and modern-looking website for your law firm. If you already have one, then it might be time to look at the closest competitors and see what they’re doing differently.
Outdated websites with old-looking layouts, designs, graphics, or even information can be detrimental in a field with cutthroat competition.
You additionally need to test your website to be:
- User-friendly
- Mobile responsive
- Fast loading
If you happen to skip any of these, then the rest of your efforts will be significantly less effective.
Don’t forget to optimize your website’s content for search engines (SEO). Research and use relevant keywords related to your practice areas. Also, make sure you provide clear and concise information about your services, attorneys, contact details, and location.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is an excellent tool to get high-value and targeted traffic to your website’s core pages by ranking for certain keywords, queries, or phrases on Google. This process usually takes time—Longer in more hotly contested domains such as criminal defense or family law.
The idea is to develop a content strategy that includes creating informative and valuable content such as blog posts, guides, articles, infographics, FAQs, and even downloadable resources and videos.
You should focus entirely on topics that are relevant to your target audience’s legal needs, questions, concerns, and pain points. Also, make sure you regularly update the content to keep it fresh and relevant while maintaining a consistent schedule for adding new content to the website.
Social Media Marketing
Social media can be a game-changer when done right. But when done wrong, which seems to be the trend, it will get you nowhere. The best way to do it wrong is to create a bunch of posts and videos, post them on 3-4 social media platforms and call it a day.
The correct way to do it is to think of social media websites as platforms where you need to be active, consistent, and social while sticking to topics that are relevant to your practice. You need to create authoritative and highly valuable content.
Most importantly, you need to tailor your content to the platform you’re posting it on—Which means changing it up in terms of content, layout, design, or posting frequency. This is typically called a “platform-specific strategy,” where you create different plans for different social media platforms, such as:
- Comments, opinions, and hot takes on industry topics and news on Twitter.
- Long-form textual advice, guide, or how-to type posts on LinkedIn.
- Sharing photos and videos of client interactions, testimonials, case studies, or behind-the-scenes on Instagram.
- Uploading a mix of content on Facebook and boosting a few posts about your achievements or success stories.
Share informative and engaging content, including blog posts, news updates, and legal tips. Engage with your followers by responding to comments and messages. Follow other accounts and comment on their posts. Generally speaking, spend more time on the platform, and it will begin to reward you.
Local SEO
Optimize your online presence for local search if your law firm serves a specific geographic area. Ensure that your business listings are accurate and consistent across online directories—Mainly Google My Business.
SEO is a larger science, and we only touched upon local SEO—A subset of the whole thing. SEO, in general, requires more round-the-clock optimizations to increase your website’s traffic reliably. Here’s a guide to SEO for lawyers if you’re interested.
SEO is a set of complex activities, and you need to be in for the long haul to see any measurable impact. As such, it often helps to hire an external agency to take care of your SEO (including local SEO) needs. They can be quite cost-effective, allowing you to focus on your business while they handle the stuff under the hood. You can discover the best SEO companies online that serve your region or domain to get the best deal.
In Conclusion
There are other tactics as well, such as email marketing, Google PPC advertising, and online reviews. But starting everything in one go might overwhelm you. Begin with the four aspects we discussed today and go from there.
Keep in mind that a lot of these activities will not be the same between two law firms. The reason is that everything from keyword planning and content work to email copy and SEO will differ greatly depending on your particular audience. For example, the activities for SEO for bankruptcy lawyers will look different from the SEO strategies for estate planning law firms.
You should do your homework to fully understand your domain’s online marketing scope and condition your strategies accordingly.
