Effective Digital Marketing For Lawyer Entrepreneurs

Like any other business, law firms need effective strategies to promote their legal services. Regardless of the size of your firm, you will need to have effective marketing tactics to get clients and expand your reach. 

Law firms looking to get more organic traffic and leads must focus on various factors, such as search engines and social media, to reach potential clients. To know more about this topic, read on and discover the best online advertising strategies for your law firm.

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing or online marketing refers to advertising efforts on the internet using digital means of communication. Law firms today use digital channels to connect with current and potential clients. 

Digital marketing can be accomplished through email, social media, and other web-based platforms. Essentially, if an advertising campaign involves digital communication, it can be defined as digital marketing.

Why Is Digital Marketing Important For Lawyers?

For any law firm, having a credible reputation is crucial. The company must market itself to its target audience without jeopardizing its brand. 

In the past, traditional marketing, such as broadcast media or radio commercials, has worked well for law firms. But, the marketing industry is changing, and businesses, especially legal service providers, have to follow the trend if they want to stay competitive.

Digital marketing introduced innovative ways to boost a brand’s reach through multiple marketing strategies. Below are several benefits of digital marketing for law firms:

Boosting Brand Awareness

Brand reputation is one of the most crucial decision-making factors for clients that differentiate a formidable law firm from a weak one. Having a concrete mission and vision that communicates your goals to potential customers can help boost brand awareness. 

Digital marketing can be a crucial factor in this effort as it efficiently promotes your plans to the target audience. Building the name of your law firm and framing it as a professional company can help attract more clients.

Improving Customer Experience

Today, business practices, especially for law firms, are centered on the customers. Your advertising campaign should assure clients of the legal services they will receive and that your company can meet all their demands. You can achieve this feat through interactive websites, automated social media responses, legal customer relationship management (CRM), and email marketing, among others. 

To stay competitive globally, your law firm must establish customer loyalty through the right digital advertising strategies.

Reaching The Right Clients

If you want to expand your firm’s operations, you will need key insights about your current clients. Knowing the most profitable segments in your campaigns can help your business grow by fine-tuning the strategies according to its audience.

You can base the division or segmentation of your customers depending on demographics or psychographics. You can also use customer feedback to get more information that can help you develop the right marketing campaigns.

Building Trust

Potential customers do in-depth research online to know more about law firms and their practices before they choose to work with them. Highlighting responsible law firm practices and credible data through your website or social media accounts can create a sense of trust in the enterprise. 

For example, James L. Finegan, P.C., a Colorado-based law firm, shares all their practice areas on their website so that prospective clients know what legal services they can get. The firm’s informative website helps present the company as credible and trustworthy.

To build clients’ trust, you need to establish your firm’s reputation by using digital marketing to share relevant legal content that attracts your targeted audience.

Digital Marketing Strategies For Law Firms

Now that you know why having an effective digital marketing campaign is essential to your law firm’s success, you need to know the best strategy for your company.

In this guide, you will discover the basics, so you know exactly where to start when setting your law firm for success from the very beginning. Here are four essential digital marketing tactics every law firm should implement to get more traffic and leads:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can serve as the primary source of organic traffic for legal institutions given the nature of the business.

Simply put, potential clients use Google, the market leader for search engines, to look for attorneys in their area. If your content is not showing up on the platform, your firm will get drowned out by your competitors.

SEO for lawyer entrepreneurs is essential because your goal is to reach potential clients already looking for legal services like yours. For example, if someone types “injury lawyer in Colorado” in the search bar and you fit the bill, you would want your law firm’s website to rank at the top of the search results. 

The legal industry is highly competitive, even in the smallest of service areas. If you want to stay ahead of the competition, you need an effective SEO strategy. Staying at the top of the search results can be one of the best ways to draw in new site visitors and turn them into paying clients.

Keyword research is the foundation of any SEO strategy. This is the process of identifying what search terms your target audience is using to look for the services you offer.

Today, several useful keyword research tools can help you identify these key terms. These solutions can measure how many searches the keywords generate per month and how competitive they are.

After getting your hands on the keywords, you have to strategically place the terms throughout your site to boost your chances of increasing their rank in search engines.

2. Content Marketing

It is a fact the best SEO strategy revolves around content marketing. This is because your potential clients are not only searching for law firm service pages but also answers to their queries in the form of articles and videos.

For instance, if a person searches for “how to get worker’s compensation,” they are looking for a guide on the process rather than a law firm’s website talking about their legal services. 

This advantage presents several opportunities for law firms to share relevant and informative SEO-focused articles or other content types to generate more traffic and leads.

With content marketing, you can attract more traffic from a big audience looking for questions related to the legal services your law firm provides. High-quality content can help you build trust, attract more followers, get even more visibility, and, ultimately, generate new leads.

Today, online content can take many forms, like blog articles, videos, or even email campaigns. You can use various mediums to develop engaging content and help your audience discover more about what your law firm offers and how you can help them. 

To achieve the best results from your content, you need to identify the keywords that might draw in more prospective clients. These long-tail keywords are perfect if you are thinking of writing blog posts for your website. 

You can then publish the blog posts and share them on your social media accounts. Additionally, you can create videos that feature the legal services you offer and post them on YouTube for more traffic. You can also build an email list of your subscribers, so you can notify them every time you publish a new article.

3. Paid Advertising

Paid advertising or pay-per-click marketing is a process that involves running paid display ads to generate more leads and increase visibility for your law firm. 

For this strategy, you will pay a fee for each user that clicks on your advertisements. Although it can be a bit more expensive than your other campaigns, it can provide faster results and give lots of valuable data in the process.

Investing in your SEO campaign is crucial if you want sustainable growth for your firm. That said, this strategy can take a few weeks to a few months before you see any results. That is why many organizations opt to invest in PPC simultaneously, so they can begin generating leads right away.

Additionally, running paid Google Ads for competitive markets is a must because they are often displayed above the search results. If you see that your competitors are paying for paid ads that are burying your content in the main search results, you should consider running your own paid ads. 

Check and see whether your competitors are running paid ads. You should also monitor the search results for your target keywords to see if ads are dominating them. If they are, you may need to create key landing pages on your site while running paid ads to generate more high-quality leads.

Unfortunately, PPC advertising can be a little fickle, so working with a reliable PPC expert is a good idea. With professional help, it can be easy for you to set your targeting parameters, identify valuable keywords, and determine your budget, so you know every dollar is being put to good use. 

4. Social Media Marketing

Social media advertising is a marketing area that most lawyer entrepreneurs are familiar with. That said, the process can still be misunderstood and underutilized. 

While there are several social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and beyond, not all of them can be beneficial to your advertising efforts. The websites you use should depend on your target audience and how they interact with online content. 

This type of marketing is an attraction-based advertising campaign that can help prospective clients notice your business. By posting high-quality and eye-catching content based on topics relevant to your target audience, you can get new followers, establish trust, and potentially attract more paying clients once they need to hire an attorney.

Other accounts may follow and interact with your profiles for months or even years before they find a need for your services and contact you. This means that social media marketing does not always produce fast results. 

When using social media to advertise your law firm, your goal should be to nurture and maintain an audience for a long time. Thus, you become an obvious first choice if or when they need legal services.

Although social media websites are casual platforms, do not make the mistake of posting random cat memes or sharing links to pop culture listicles for the sake of engagement. Instead, focus on publishing content that your prospective clients would be interested in.

For example, if your law firm specializes in personal injury cases, you can share articles about responsible driving or work-related injuries. But remember to make your profile interesting. Share relevant posts about lighter topics and thought-provoking questions to get your audience to interact with your content.

Remember that you also do not have to be present on every social media website at once. Choose one or two sites where your audience is the most active. You should adjust your strategy until you produce consistent leads from the websites. After that, you can consider expanding to different platforms where your prospective clients are also spending their time.

Developing A Digital Marketing Strategy

It can be challenging for lawyers to know where to begin when developing a digital marketing strategy. There is a wide range of tactics to try, making the development process stressful and overwhelming.

But the most successful law firms invest in the following areas that make the most sense for their practice, their company, and their clients:

1. Know Your Customer

Before you start considering what strategy to invest in, you first need to understand where your prospective clients spend the most time online and what type of content resonates best with them.

Knowing your customer can help in this effort. Read up on industry research for your firm’s practice area, interview clients on how they came across your company, and study the data you currently have to learn about your target market. 

For example, if you’re an employment lawyer, you may have clients that spend a lot of their time online on LinkedIn. Therefore, you can design a digital marketing strategy that involves building a presence on that website.

This is why it is essential to know your client, their pain points, and what they are looking for. Doing so can help you develop a more targeted marketing approach that addresses your potential clients’ needs.

2. Outline Your Goals

To know if your digital marketing campaigns are effective, you need to outline your goals from the get-go. Consider the key questions below:

• Do you want more traffic for your law firm’s website?
• Do you want more online consultations?
• Do you want more potential clients to reach out to you through social media?
• Do you want to increase positive online reviews from clients?

Regardless of your digital marketing goals, your mission should include attracting new clients and building a credible online presence for your law firm. Keeping this in mind can help ensure that you are spending your marketing budget effectively.

When setting your digital marketing goals, make sure that you are setting realistic targets. If you are still unfamiliar with social media marketing, aiming to post content every day on your accounts might be a little bit difficult to achieve.

You need to understand how much time and effort you can invest in digital marketing for your law firm and then outline your goals from there. 

Online marketing can be your key to reaching new clients. How you get discovered can be up to you and what works best for your audience.

3. Determine The Best Marketing Channel For Your Law Firm

The best marketing channel for your company will depend on numerous factors, including your audience and where they browse online. If you know your customers, you can choose the right platforms to invest your effort, time, and money.

Aside from usual digital marketing channels, like SEO and PPC, there are other ways to help with marketing your law firm online. You can use interaction management tools that can help drive positive reviews for your company.

While choosing a digital marketing channel to invest in, keep in mind that lawyer marketing online can be competitive. If you’re not vigilant, you may not notice how costs are adding up, and you may go over your budget. You have to be strategic and start small before trying out several channels simultaneously.

4. Create An SEO-Friendly Site

For many modern law firms, a website can be the cornerstone of a digital marketing strategy. Unlike other platforms, like directory listings or social media profiles, a website is a property you own, and it is essential to establish credibility. 

A prospective client looking for you online and finding a state bar listing but not a website might just keep on looking.

Your website is crucial to branding yourself and your company. This space is where potential clients will discover information about you, your employees, achievements, credentials, and the type of legal services you offer. 

SEO can make it easier for potential clients to find you in search results. This channel is a competitive field within law firm online marketing, with some ad agencies focusing solely on SEO for legal service providers. 

You can have an SEO-friendly site by following the steps below:

• Ensure your site is clear and easy to navigate. Add content that is easy to understand for all types of readers.
• Use target keywords throughout your site.
• Produce high-quality and informative content, like blog posts, to showcase your expertise to site visitors.

In addition to getting more website visitors, you need to convert them into paying clients. You should inform clients to hire you by using reviews and professional images. Provide a clear idea of what they should expect in terms of legal services and price.

You should also make it fast and easy for clients to hire you by using calls to action (CTAs) throughout your website. Display your contact information where it can be easily found on your website.

5. Monitor Campaign Performance

Once you have key data about your target clients, marketing goals, metrics for success, advertising channels to invest in, and ideas for site improvement, check in regularly to ensure everything’s working. 

Today, several tools, solutions, and software can help you monitor how your ad campaigns are performing. These tools can tell you where new clients are coming from so you can identify which channels to invest more in and which ones to drop.

Doing so can help you fine-tune your digital marketing strategy. It also ensures that you are getting the most out of your advertising budget by allocating more money to effective campaigns.

Remember that your law firm’s marketing tactic should be a living, breathing document. You need to adjust your strategy as necessary to ensure that you are getting a good return on investment (ROI) on your digital marketing expenses.

Successful Digital Marketing For Lawyers

Digital marketing is now a crucial factor for the success of modern businesses, law firms included. With an effective online advertising campaign, you can widen your law firm’s client base and stay competitive, both locally and globally.