When it comes to marketing your law firm online, there are many challenges you will face. For example, if you run Google Ads you will be competing for the same keywords as other law firms. Depending on how competitive your market is, the cost to run ads can get expensive. How will you control costs? How can you make your ads more compelling? Attracting the attention of potential clients and staying visible on search engines are key to your online marketing success.
Measuring your marketing efforts is also a challenge, especially when it comes to measuring the ROI of your overall marketing strategy. With so many factors to take into account and so many potential pitfalls, it can seem like a daunting task. However, with the right strategy, the right partnerships and a bit of effort, it’s possible to succeed in marketing your legal services online. Here are six tips that can help you navigate the challenges and succeed in marketing your legal services online.
Plan Your Marketing Strategy
The first step in marketing your legal services online is to plan out your marketing strategy. There are several strategic considerations that you should take into account before you start marketing your services. These considerations include the types of clients that you want to acquire, your marketing channel(s), your budget and the overall objectives for your marketing strategy. As you plan your marketing strategy, you should also keep in mind that a marketing strategy is a strategy – not an “if/then” checklist. You don’t need to pick a marketing channel and then decide if you will use it or not. You should instead pick a marketing channel, learn how it works, and then decide if it fits your marketing needs.
Test Different Marketing Channels
When choosing your marketing channel(s), you should start by examining the client acquisition process. The client acquisition process consists of three main steps: finding, attracting, and converting new clients. The purpose of each step is to make sure that you are reaching the right audience and converting them into clients. Finding clients online is about identifying where your target audience is located and where they search for information and services you provide. Ultimately this will involve testing different marketing channels and testing out which ones can cohesively help you to achieve your marketing goals. Some of the most common marketing channels include:
- Google Ads. Read more about Google Ads for law firms.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Learn more about SEO.
- Social Media. This can include building up your social media assets such as your Facebook business page and LinkedIn profile.
- Business & personal profiles. This can include sites like Avvo and Yelp. Often times, after people initially discover your website, they will do additional research about your practice online. Making sure you have these profiles setup and updated is important.
- Google My Business. This is the business information you can see on the right side of some Google search results when you do searches for specific businesses. Learn more about Google My Business.
Use Client Testimonials
One of the most effective ways to market your legal services online is to use testimonials. A testimonial is a written or verbal endorsement of a product or service. It typically describes the good experiences that a client has had with a product or service. In marketing your legal services online, you can use testimonials to highlight the excellent work that your law firm has done for past clients. You can also use testimonials to highlight the skills and experience of the lawyers working at your firm. If you are operating in a practice area that is highly competitive, you can also use testimonials to help you differentiate yourself from other attorneys. Oftentimes, what other people say about you and your practice can be the deciding factor for someone to pick up the phone and call. Common place to utilize testimonials include:
- Your website
- Google My Business
- Yelp
- Legal profiles and directories like Avvo
Write Compelling Copy
Whether this copy is for Google ads or blog posts on your website, writing compelling copy is key. When it comes to writing your marketing copy, it is important to keep the copy simple and easy for readers to understand, and easy to read. If your copy is too complicated or too technical, it will significantly limit the amount of people who are able to read your copy. An important tip when writing your legal services marketing copy is to avoid (or reduce) using legal jargon. For some really good tips and content on copywriting, check this out this site.
Measure Your Marketing
You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Being able to measure your marketing efforts is vitally important. Yes, this may sound basic but, in fact, many lawyers today have no idea how to measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. This is an important step, not only because you need to know if what you are doing is working and if you need to change something, but also because it will help you stay grounded and objective. The most common way business measure performance is through Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool that can give you a wealth of data about your website along with data about where your website traffic comes from.
You can setup goals in Google Analytics that can measure how many times people take certain actions like fill out a contact form, click on a button or engage with live chat.
Additional ways to measure success include:
- Google Ads conversion tracking. This will allow you to track leads from Google Ads including phone calls, form submissions and just about anything else you want to define as a conversion.
- Callrail. This is a popular 3rd party call tracking service that is good for tracking phone calls and lead form submissions. You can even set it up to record calls so you can listen to them for quality control purposes.
Once you have measured your digital marketing activities, you need to analyze the results and see where you can improve. Are there areas in which you could do better? What marketing platforms are performing the best? What content is performing the best? What could you do differently? The data will help you identify what is working and what could be improved. This can be especially important if you are just getting started.
