The Top 8 Most Effective Law Firm Marketing Techniques
by Arina Smith Marketing 17 April 2018
With the average small business spending $75,000 a year on digital marketing, getting a strong ROI is a must. If you’re not tracking the returns, you might have no idea if your law firm marketing strategies are working.
With a combined digital and traditional approach, you need to make sure your techniques use modern trends in every medium.
Marketing your law firm via old media like radio and television ads still works in some markets.
In most places, it’s important to have a digital presence to match your traditional approaches to marketing that have worked for years.
As the digital market begins to take over traditional media, it’s important to be at the cutting edge.
If you’re in a competitive market, you know how important it is to get your name out there.
Follow these 8 tips to make sure your law firm marketing strategy always hits the bullseye.
1. Tap Your Network:
It’s essential to please your customers. Not only because of the many ways they can talk about their good or bad experience online but because they could be your clients again very soon.
When it comes to marketing for a family law practice, you need to depend on both offline as well as online networks. Success in the legal industry is all about exhibiting your expertise on online platforms (website, social media, review platforms) and word-of-mouth marketing.
Estimates suggest that at least 60% of a business’s former clients are likely to be their clients again in the future.
If you’re doing right by your customers, they’re likely to come back. The only hurdle is to make sure they remember you and think of you when they need to work with your firm.
One of the best law firm marketing techniques you and your partners should use is to always be in touch with your former clients.
Contact them by phone to check in on how they’re doing. Ask them to review you and your business on Yelp or Google. Give them a discount if they return to you.
Law firms that offer free consultations on wills and living trusts find they get a lot of repeat customers.
2. Set Aside Enough Money:
While $75,000 is an average dollar amount for digital marketing, most marketing specialists recommend that you set aside more than that for total marketing.
Your law firm marketing strategy should tie up at least 2.5% of your revenue every year. This is on top of the cost for your actual marketing staff.
This money should be allocated for creating a strong brand presence, buying advertising space, and on pursuing clients. While you might not want to spend that much taking all of your potential clients out to lunch, it’s how you’ll expand your business.
This 2.5% is an investment that you need to make to ensure that your law firm marketing strategy doesn’t struggle from a lack of oxygen or not enough support.
3. Use A Multimedia Approach:
You need to make sure that you’ve got a plan to produce videos and new images at least every year or every 6 months. The photos of you and your partners that sit on your website need to be fresh and recent. No beehives or 70s sideburns, please.
You also need to make sure that you’ve got a strong video presence. As the web grows, every social media and potential marketing channel is producing high-quality, professional looking videos. You’ll be able to improve the perception of your office and show that you take law firm marketing seriously.
Video is the best way to communicate your approach to an audience efficiently. Make sure that you take advantage of your video scripts and subtitles to ensure that you’re mentioning what you specialize in and where you’re located.
4. Word Of Mouth Still Works:
Getting referrals from clients who are happy with your work is one of the best ways to ensure you continue to get a steady stream of good clients.
If your former clients are satisfied with what you were able to do for them and their projects, they would be the perfect people to refer you to more clients.
Reach out to your best clients and offer them a discount in exchange for a referral. Include a discount for your new customer as well and you’ll be able to gather twice the business with every referral.
By directing word of mouth, you can put into motion a law firm marketing strategy that builds a stronger base while bringing in the business you’re looking for.
Once you meet those new clients, follow our tips for making sure you make a strong impression.
5. Track Your Results:
Put into action a strategy to track your law firm’s marketing results. Come up with a code for the promotion that you’re running. Count how many emails go out with that code and compare it to how many people end up redeeming the offer.
You’ll start to get an idea of who is out there listening to your promotions.
Offer expanded services to existing clients. If they’re working with you for their personal legal needs, offer to give them a discount on professional legal services. If they have a family business, offer a discount to all of the members of their family.
Each time that you reach out, track your results and compare it to the billable hours that you do with that client. Calculate the difference between billable hours you’d normally charge for and the result with the discount.
That way you’ll know how to calibrate your promotions for the ideal results.
6. Create A Blog:
Creating a blog where you can share tips and recommendations for your prospective clients.
Don’t be afraid to give them a little peek behind the curtain to show them how much expertise you have to offer.
Your law firm marketing strategy can benefit greatly from a blog that gives out anecdotes about cases. Tell people in general terms some of the best stories you have of helping your clients out of a jam. Use lots of important keywords that potential clients might use when searching for your services.
These stories will circulate through social media and around the web, building brand authority and a strong web presence.
Start your blog with a number of your most frequently asked questions. Pick one at a time and answer them in a detailed manner in about 500 words. You’ll be able to spare answering some of your most annoying questions over and over and you’ll show your clients how knowledgeable you are.
Make sure that you talk often about the city where your law firm is located. Law firm marketing needs to embrace “local SEO”, where companies and firms use local terms to help gather results from in their own backyard.
Search engines love to return local results to users, so you can help them by letting them know where you are.
Check out the blog for Wiseman Lee for some tips.
7. Be A Greeter At Local Functions:
This one might sound strange but the only thing better than being social online with social media is to be social in person. People love to work with, vote for, and recommend someone they’ve met before.
If you help to usher people, greet people, or give information at local events, you’ll be able to strike up a conversation with people.
The more often you can start a natural conversation with your neighbors and people with who you share common interests, the better your business will do.
As a law firm marketing strategy, this is a little more time-consuming but if you pick out the right events to work at, you can have a major impact.
8. Use Social Media Intelligently :
You should start by creating an account for your firm. Then you should create one for every attorney at the firm. These accounts should be separate from their own personal accounts.
Designate someone at your office to manage all of the social media accounts for the people at your firm. They should gather a couple of photographs every week from every major player at your firm. They can then craft posts for each person and deploy them in a staggered manner.
If your firm appears at a large public function, there should be lots of posts about it. If your firm will be represented at a major public event, a jobs fair, or a career day, there should be many posts about it, asking for people to RSVP.
You should also use social media to promote your blog posts. Connect with your community and local businesses and a post appears that relates in some way to one of your posts, have your social media staffer put it up.
Be sincere, honest, and don’t be afraid to be funny on social media.
Law Firm Marketing Should Be Straightforward:
People have an inherent distrust of lawyers. That’s a hurdle that you have to get over with your clients in the most sincere way possible. By being honest and straightforward with them, you’ll win their support and their trust.
To ensure your marketing makes the impact you want it to, contact us for more tips.
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