Marketing and lawyers are like water and oil: they don’t mix. And yet, here we are, with the question of marketing a law firm, and that too in 2022. But the simple matter of fact is this: marketing a law firm may not be part of their academics, but it has to be done by the person heading the firm, as it would closely relate to the much more intricate details. And marketing a law firm s is imperative; how else are you going to get new clients and generate more revenue for the firm? So, here’s how to market a law firm in 2022.
We admit that marketing might seem a little too overwhelming for a person who’s spent much of their academic life reading law, but as marketing goes, it is relatively easy. In this passage, we‘ll look at some marketing strategies for your law firm, how to formulate a marketing plan, some popular marketing, and digital marketing tools and what are the basic tenets of marketing a law firm in 2022.
Marketing a law firm in 2022 for starters
For starters, know that printing out an ad or two every now and then in your local weekly magazine or daily newspaper isn’t going to cut it, and neither is it a good way to utilize the resources that have been earmarked for your marketing budget. So, what you will need is a strategy, a plan that is linear and accounts for most of your marketing tactics in an efficient manner so as to ensure the best results are gained with each cent spent.
Marketing strategies aren’t very hard to devise, especially marketing that relies much on digital media marketing and its related practices. You might want to take an experienced person on board for all this, as many aspects of digital marketing like search engine optimization (SEO) and paid digital media advertising would require an expert to keep a look at things. But aside from that, it is relatively simple, and marketing a law firm in 2022 isn’t much of a tall order.
Let’s first get into the goals of the marketing campaigns for your law firm, and what you want to achieve with them.
What do you want to achieve for your law firm with marketing
Every action has a goal, and something as complex and time-consuming as digital marketing should also have an end goal in mind, the achievements that you want to see for your law firm when you start marketing it. Here are a few pointers for starting on it.
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A well-established, digitally-present law firm
One of your primary objectives in marketing your law firm would be to portray your firm as a well-established firm with a solid digital footprint. So, ideally, what you would want from your digital marketing campaign would be to leave an indelible digital footprint of your law firm, to make sure if somebody in your area seeks out a law firm, they get your firm on top. Similarly, video marketing for lawyers can help legal firms to rank up on video-sharing platforms and generate leads
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Developing a website that caters to all
In this era, if you are a business with no website, you are a runner with no shoes on. You might run, but you can’t get far. Making a website, one that is well-optimized, caters to a lot of online inbound inquiries, and represents a major chunk of your marketing efforts; if it is a well-designed, fast and responsive website that helps translate leads into sales, it is an optimized and integral part of your marketing arsenal that will keep giving on and will become a cornerstone for your law firm and its marketing endeavors.
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Establishing a clientele
A major part of your revenue chunk would come from walk-ins, or people trying out your services for the first time. With digital marketing, establishing an entirely new list of clients is easier, as it allows you to protect yourself and cast your shadows wider than before. With that in mind, we shy away from stating the obvious: that another goal of your marketing your law firm would be to increase revenue. Of course, that’s the aim of every move you have in a business. Stating it from the perspective of a digital marketer, what you’re basically looking for is a substantial increase in the list of your clientele and people who approach you for the business of litigation. If your digital marketing efforts actively generate your revenue by increasing your client list or simply increasing the frequency of repeat customers and their visits, then it’s a win-win.
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An active digital marketing funnel
Much like a sales funnel, a marketing funnel relies on three steps from the customer that eventually translates into business for your law firm. These are awareness, evaluation, and conversion phases. The first step, where you make the consumer aware of your existence and your services whenever they search for it (for any keywords that you are targeting) is crucial as it is entirely based on outreach. In the second consideration stage, when the potential customer has a problem and might need help with litigation, they will start considering you as a viable means of pursuing their legal goals. Lastly, at the decision stage, in an ideal process, the customer will decide to go with you. For your marketing plan to have been very effective for your law firm, it will need to have achieved this: an active marketing funnel complemented by adverts in the digital space.
Developing the marketing plan
Now that we know why we are marketing the law firm, let’s get into the most imperative part of the whole process: the marketing plan. Because as you know, random adverts and a haphazard approach towards marketing a law firm will not give you desirable results. Therefore, if you have tangible goals and pre-set objectives that you want to achieve with it, you need an equally structured and tangential approach to creating a marketing plan that works effectively and efficiently.
As it is digital marketing coupled with an actual establishment, you will need both offline and online marketing plans, to ensure that no segment of your marketing is ignored. Also, here you will need metrics to ensure that whatever goals you have set, this marketing plan will objectively achieve them. Start by getting a good tool on your side: Google Analytics is one, as it is a comprehensive tool that you can use for all your metrics and results, compiled in one place. For your ROIs and KPIs, you can use CRMs (Customer Relationship Management Software) like Salesforce or HubSpot, which are the two most popular ones in the market right now.
Now onto the online part of the marketing plan, which constitutes the following.
SEO
Arguably one of the core tenets of digital marketing, search engine optimization is absolutely crucial for your marketing campaign, as it ranks your business higher and higher up Google’s search page, which is ideally what you would want from a digital marketing campaign. We won’t go into the details, but good SEO would lead you to rank higher on the search results page, allowing more and more people to access your website and subsequently use your business.
PPC
PPC is basically pay-per-click, which is an advert model used by Google, through its famous Google AdWords. These are basically adverts that show up while people are browsing or looking for a specific keyword (that relates to your business), and you only pay for the adverts that people actually interact with (unlike in conventional marketing, where you pay upfront for the cumulative cost, regardless of whether or not it brings you anything). Bear in mind that these adverts should lead to your website homepage or any other relevant page of your business.
Social Media Marketing for Law Firms
Social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, and even Instagram can help you make a bank for your legal firm. Posts and blogs, not to mention advertising on these platforms can bring you, clients, by the dozen. As these are some of the most popular platforms, with billions of users between them, this is basically an untapped pool of potential customers that you can link up with using two ways: one, by manually engaging with people and building a strong follower/ subscriber base out of account activity. Secondly, by paying these platforms to run adverts, you can go one step further and attract clients from a wide circle, increasing your business and upping your revenue considerably.
Legal Directories for Law Firms
Specific for your law firm, these are basically the Yellow Pages of the interest, specifically made for the legal fraternity. These are available on the internet and are both free and paid. For link building, which is an integral part of SEO, you can register yourself with these legal directories and Google will display your name and your firm’s details whenever a person searches for it or any related keyword.
Email marketing
Email marketing is yet another way to get more repeat business, all the while getting new business leads and generating new business from the emails you send to potential customers. It is basically mass emailing select strata of users, by attaching adverts, notifications, and newsletters alongside many others to make sure the person who receives the email opens it reads it and responds positively.
Contextual Link Building
Guest posts or blogging is another great way to start getting people to your website. This works when you approach a blog, which will be interested to carry any blogs you may submit to them, and in return, will give you a link back. Research different and interesting topics that garner a lot of traffic, pour your heart out into the blog and submit it. Follow any or all guidelines that they have, and whenever somebody interacts with the blog, they will know all about you and your law firm.
The offline part consists of, Billboards, conventional marketing tools, TV adverts, or sponsoring a local event are some of the offline marketing techniques and tools that you should use in tandem with digital marketing techniques to ensure that maximum outreach is possible, which in turn, results in maximum lead generation and revenue.
Parting words
Having a marketing plan and knowing what to do and why you are doing it are the basics of marketing your law firm in 2022. With these done and done right, you will see exponential growth in the business of your law firm, with new leads nearly every day, lead conversion into the business will also be accelerated with the use of proper personnel and software. All it takes is a little warming up to the new technologies of today and the phenomenon that is digital marketing, which has taken the entire world by storm. Done right and your law firm will benefit from all the goodies Google and digital marketing, in general, have to offer.
