Law firm marketing online is becoming an important aspect of advertising for law firms for several reasons. In order to reach prospective clients it’s important to have a well-designed site that is user-friendly. Online law firm marketing helps a firm communicate its legal expertise to an audience. It can also help establish meaningful connections in various social networks. Law firm marketing also helps a business cross-promote other events the firm may be involved in to help increase brand awareness. Online marketing efforts should compliment a law firm and be presented with a strong, but consistent, web presence. Below are a few tips on how to market your law firm online.
Start with a Niche in Mind
When it comes to online marketing for lawyers, there are many benefits of going niche. This is important both in terms of law firm practice structure and legal marketing. “Going niche” is a very good move for your online marketing. Although younger, smaller firms are up against many other firms that share your practice area. Their advantage is that they’re already promoting and marketing their firm really well. On the other hand, if you find a highly specialized area that fits you and your firm well, then your chances of dominating that niche become more likely. Finding a niche will allow you to establish a reputation and web presence. Attorneys should always start with a niche in mind as a successful strategy for online marketing.
Going Niche All the Way
You should understand what it means to “go niche” and seek help if you need it. Try to figure what your niche is by asking yourself three big questions. What kind of cases are you interested in and do you prefer? What does your competition look like? Is there enough of a market for those cases? When you finally figure out what niche is the best for you and your business make sure that it is the sole focus in everything you do to promote your firm. Make sure it’s the primary focus on your website, social media, messages for your online marketing, and all the content you produce. Look for opportunities to display your expertise in your niche field. It’s important that a firm is properly positioned within its market, knows who they are and maintains focus in order to succeed.
Expand Search Engine Marketing Strategies
It’s become a harder to differentiate what’s an ad and what is not. Ads look nearly undistinguishable from organic listings, and a big amount of users claim they can’t tell the difference. There are now four ads above the organic listings, Google moved the Maps snack pack listing right under the ads, and they are experimenting with ads in the snack pack itself. This means that there are four paid ads and three organic Maps listings above the first real organic listing. Ranking #1 organically now would mean that you’re #8 on the actual SERPs. Additionally, organic still gets the most traffic, especially the first three organic listings. It’s obvious that Google is doing its best to drive people to click on more ads and its working. This does not mean that you should no longer go for organic and do all paid ads, take a different approach.
How to Expand Your SEM Strategy
If your firm relies on being found on Google as an important source of leads, take a diversified approach. Get as many pages to rank for priority keywords. Try to rank key pages for key terms, with slight variations and long tail targets for other, less important pages. Develop an international pay-per-click strategy. Include a custom landing page for your ads in your PPC campaign. Go after your main keywords through SEO initiatives while using PPC campaigns for less important practice areas. Using these two different strategies as oppositional tactics can help accomplish different goals. Ultimately, improve your map rankings. Although the relative importance of organic listings in search engines has diminished, they’re still an extremely valuable part of online marketing for lawyers.
Understand and Cater to Your Target Market
Great lawyer marketing is all about audience. You should understand their needs, their desires and their points of resistance. To better understand your audience you can try online surveys, extensive research reports and email questionnaires that will help. The internet has all the information you need. You should offer various ways for people to get in touch with your firm. Now a days people are looking for more convenient ways of having a conversation or answering a question that does not include speaking on the phone. Other forms of communicating include texting, live chat, contact forms, email and more. It’s important to try to understand your leads’ and clients’ expectations for when dealing with a law firm. Implement free consultations and provide an online payment option.
Engaging Law Firm Websites
Although Google sometimes implements algorithm updates that have overnight effects on rankings, many changes go into effect over time. Google is increasingly relying on engagement metrics. Engagement metrics are data points that indicate how people are behaving on your site. This measures how many people leave your site immediately after landing on it, as well as pages visited per session and how many pages people navigate to within your site after entering it. Many things come into play when it comes to people interacting with your site, such as design, structure, speed and content of your site. It’s important to focus on how to make your site more engaging. Three ways to do this are: 1) create high-quality, interesting content, 2) talk about yourself, people want to know about you – what you stand for, why you do what you do, what you’re about, and 3) keep your site clean and simple. Quality of the design and development of your website affects your SEO and the conversion of leads into clients.
Target Prospects Ahead of Time
SEM initiatives for law firms, typically focuses on people looking to contact an attorney right then. Although this is important, it’s also worth focusing on ways to reach people before they’re ready to hire an attorney. It would be essential to be able to provide searchers with valuable information related to their situation so they’re more aware of whom they should be speaking to. It would help them understand and evaluate the situation beforehand. There are many ways your firm can target prospects, including having plenty of engaging, authoritative content throughout its website, having bigger pieces of downloadable content, such as ebooks, checklists, how-tos, etc. This will allow you to deliver some custom automated email content to open up a line of communication and begin to develop some trust with your leads. Another approach is to grow your email list. Email marketing automation is a way of following up with people who have shown an interest in your area of expertise. Consider running PPC ads for more general keywords.
The Boost of Referrals are Good for Business
Referral marketing is the oldest, most reliable form of lead generation for lawyers everywhere, in every practice area. Referrals lead to a significant amount of business. It’s essential that firms take advantage of internet marketing tools to boost their referrals. Firms can use digital tools to boost referral by utilizing client email lists, fostering your professional network through social media, and adding to the review and testimonial process. Email marketing allows you to maintain good relationships with former clients and staying within their field of awareness. Email newsletters will keep former clients up-to-date with your firm and provide informative legal content. Fostering a professional identity online is important for personal branding and attracting new clients. It can also establish a network of attorneys who can help increase your referral network. Clients are usually happy when they’ve received compensation after a case has been handled successfully, which is a great opportunity to ask for reviews and testimonials from those clients.
Attorneys Building their Personal Brands
A brand is what people associate with a name, a logo, and a company as a whole. In the digital era, the internet allows attorneys to build their personal brand through professional social media profiles, attorney-specific content, and even their own websites. Actualizing your personal brand starts with focusing on what you stand for and how to help your clients. Attorneys can improve their personal brand by cultivating trust and authenticity, having great photos and developing a strong USP, and not neglecting social media. When building your personal brand, it’s important to establish trust and authenticity with your audience. You can do this through great reviews and testimonials from former clients. People’s perception of you as an attorney can come down to their initial impressions of you and two things that matter the most for this are excellent photography and a strong unique selling proposition. Effective social media strategy is a huge part of branding yourself. Apart from your personal social media accounts you should create professional social media pages for your firm’s attorneys, where people can see a timeline of experience and history of that attorney helping his or her community.
Business-Savvy Lawyers
Law marketing should be viewed as the regular day-to-day operations within a business. Lawyer marketing initiatives require attorneys to understand their firms as a business. It’s important for firms to develop better systems for tracking and analyzing their ROI. Some tips on treating your firm like a business are developing a tight integration between marketing and intakes, encouraging brand ownership and representation and knowing your numbers. You need to make sure that someone in your firm is tracking how many people turn into actual clients, how much the cases end up being worth and what happens to them once the cases are closed. Try measuring your marketing initiatives and production performance.