Digital Marketing Strategies for Lawyers
Whether you are a solo attorney with a new practice or a large law firm with tens of attorneys in employment, you can benefit from a bold and effective marketing strategy. With so much competition in the attorney marketplace, it can be difficult to know where to place your efforts to stand out from the crowd and make it easy for prospective clients to find you.
While there are some marketing efforts that can be managed in-house with little experience, time, or effort, others are better suited to professionals. Your budget will likely factor into this decision, and you may need to prioritize some strategies over others depending on your total amount of spend.
Identifying your total budget as well as the reasons for wanting to embark on a digital marketing strategy, is a critical first step before considering which strategies are worth your time and exploration. Regardless of whether you apply all these strategies aimed at digital marketing for lawyers or only a few, you will receive immediate benefits that can help your business grow or scale.
Digital Marketing for Lawyers: Top Strategies
Goals and Audiences
In a prior blog post, we detailed why identifying your ideal client is important prior to set any marketing strategy. Without knowing what type of client you are speaking or directing your attention to, it would be difficult to know which tactics to apply, and you will end up trying to speak to everyone everywhere.
Targeted, intentional marketing for the people that are most likely to seek out you or your firm for help will get you the most for your money.
Determine what goals you have for implementing a marketing strategy, whether that be for customer acquisition or retention, or you need a boost over overhaul in reputation. Knowing your specific goals will help steer you to which strategies you should focus on first.
Website and Content
If you do not yet have a website for your firm or practice, make it a priority to get something up, even if it is lightweight in nature. Your website will allow you to utilize many other optimization tools to attract prospective clients to your business. With many online tools offering ready-to-use templates, there is no barrier to creating this digital front door to your business. It is the ante to play when considering digital marketing for lawyers.
If you already have a website, ensure that the content on your website speaks to the audience(s) you identified above. Everything from the words, tone, or layout that you use in communicating with your audience should be optimized for your audience.
Think about the goals for your website, as these might differ from your marketing strategy goals. Is the purpose of your website to increase your company’s awareness, act as a lead generation tool, or a combination of these? The type of content you put on your website is dependent on the answer to these questions, so take the time to really think it through.
Search Engine Optimization
Although we have spoken about search engine optimization (SEO) in many other articles, its importance of it cannot be overstated. When prospective clients search for your firm’s primary focus on Google, for example, “personal injury lawyer”, they are most likely to click on the first results. When it comes to digital marketing for lawyers, using tactics to get your website to the top of that list is what SEO is all about.
The search terms people put into Google or other search engines are known as keywords and are what you will want to identify and place into the content within your website. The more keywords in your content, the higher the likelihood your website will be deemed relevant and float to the top of the search results.
Consider variations of keywords your clients may use to search for your services and incorporate them into the content within your site.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click advertisements, or PPC, are a relatively inexpensive way to brand your law firm in various locations. PPC simply means that you will pay the publisher every time your advertisement is clicked. They can be placed on social media pages, search engine sites, or in other marketing tools like email.
The beauty of PPC is that you get to control what your overall spending is, placing ads in as many or as few locations as you would like. It is also easy to experiment with – if you are not seeing a large generation of lead flow or site traffic with your current ad locations, you can try others. After all, online marketing is largely experimentation until you determine what resonates with your audiences the most.
What’s Next
While this article covers our top strategies applicable to digital marketing for lawyers, many more ideas can be found on our website. If you feel stuck or overwhelmed with where to start, reach out, and one of our experts will be happy to discuss your project and needs.
