Looking to drive online traffic to your law firm? An effective online marketing strategy can potentially help your business stand out and gain new clients. This article lists some common marketing practices that can be beneficial for law firms.
In this article
Digital marketing can potentially create opportunities for legal businesses to spread awareness about their services. Whether you are part of a new law firm just starting out or a well-established one, finding new clients may take some work.
Considering this, building a brand name with the help of digital marketing tools can help you achieve quality leads —meaning potential clients— and build an online presence in the market.
What is digital marketing for law firms?
Digital marketing for law firms can be defined as promoting and selling legal services online. It typically involves building your firm’s presence on social media platforms, search engines, and other industry-specific websites.
Leveraging the potential of digital marketing strategies, law firms can ideally create meaningful communication with returning and potential clients based on gathered information over time. Before we discuss the benefits of having digital marketing strategies in place, let’s get familiar with some common marketing terms.
How can digital marketing be beneficial for law firms?
Maintaining a credible reputation may be of the utmost importance for any law firm. Keeping this in mind, a firm should market its services to reach their desired audience. We have listed below some of the ways digital marketing can benefit law firms.
Helps create brand awareness
According to a report by IBISWorld, there will be 34,944 law firms in Canada in 2023. Considering this, promoting your business can help you make more people aware of your brand in the industry. Leveraging social media marketing, you can reach out to a larger audience with insightful content related to legal services. This —in turn— could create brand awareness among people looking to understand specific laws and compliances.
Aids in building trust through reviews
Trust may play a vital role for potential clients while opting for legal services. Clients often rely on customer testimonials and the organization’s track record to make a decision. Using digital marketing, law firms can showcase their experience and achievements to catch the attention of their audience either on their website or other social media channels.
Assists in targeting specific clients
With digital marketing, law firms can ideally reach out to potential clients through customer segmentation. Businesses may drive more revenue by spending the right amount on advertising and targeting a specific set of audiences.
What is customer segmentation?
Customer segmentation means classifying customers based on specific characteristics including behaviour, age, demographics, income, job type, or relationship status. For example, if you are a corporate lawyer, you can sort the target audience by factors such as company size and industry. Doing this can help you execute precise marketing campaigns.
6 Effective digital marketing strategies for a law firm
It can be challenging for legal organizations or lawyers to understand how to market a law firm effectively. In this context, we have listed some commonly used digital marketing tactics that can be adapted for law firms.
1. Research your target audience
Before you start executing a digital marketing strategy for your law firm, you first need to know where your targeted audience spends most of their time on the internet and what type of content they like.
You can start your research by interviewing past clients on how they found your firm and by doing competitor analysis. Try to look at market research for your industry to identify potential challenges or shortfalls in legal services that your firm can fill. For example, if you are a divorce lawyer, there may be no point in targeting clients who need help with employment issues.
2. Identify your marketing goals
Once you have identified your target audience, the next step could be to set marketing goals to be able to evaluate the efficacy of your law firm’s digital marketing strategy. You may consider the following questions while determining your goals:
- Do you want more positive reviews from clients?
- Do you want to gain new clients?
- Are you looking to amplify the online presence of your firm?
- Do you want more traffic to your firm’s official website?
When identifying your goals, you should potentially aim for a realistic target and determine how much time and effort you can put into digital marketing for your firm.
3. Zero in on the right marketing channels for your firm
As mentioned above, you should research your target audience and identify where your clients spend most of their time. You should ideally select the right digital marketing platforms for your legal business after considering all such factors.
In order to select the right marketing channels for your legal business, discuss the following set of questions with your stakeholders:
- Who is your target audience?
- How competitive is your market?
- Where do your potential clients go to get answers to problems you can solve for them?
For example, if your competitors are leveraging social media platforms to share informative content related to different laws, you may also consider investing time in posting helpful content on various social media platforms.
Here are some common marketing tools you may consider investing your time and money into:
As these tools could be expensive, it’s best to try to be strategic and begin your marketing journey with small campaigns and then expand your goals and amplify the channels used accordingly.
4. Focus on your website’s SEO
Your firm’s website can be crucial to your online marketing journey. There is no doubt that managing social media platforms or directory listings is important, but a website is online real estate you own and a place where your clients can read about your services and achievements.
In light of this, you should potentially focus on improving the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website. SEO is an approach to being found online in the search results of search engines and bringing organic traffic to the website.
You can leverage the checklist shared below to help ensure that your website is optimized for SEO.
5. List your business on legal directories
Legal directories can also be an ideal way to become more visible to clients. Conduct research to explore popular directories in your area or nationally that list law firms or lawyers and create your business profile. A strong presence in such directories may provide you with more chances to drive clients who are looking out for legal professionals.
6. Gather online reviews
Clients might prefer hiring legal services from professionals who have an ample amount of reviews online. It can be a good practice to request your past and existing clients to give you reviews on your digital channels. According to one of our surveys, 49% of respondents believe that online reviews have helped them enhance their brand’s image in the market.
Also, maintaining a reputation on social networks may be equally important. Therefore, make sure that you respond to each review —whether it is good or bad— in a professional manner.
The takeaway
While law firms can leverage the marketing strategies mentioned in the article, that does not indicate that they must execute them all in one go. Start with implementing small-scale strategies and leverage marketing tips that fit your business. Above all, it’s advisable to keep track of the performance of such strategies.
