Law firms thrive as long as they have a good reputation and keep getting new clients for whom to win their cases. But how do you achieve these two goals in the internet age? The answer is: by finding and implementing digital marketing strategies adapted to the legal industry. In this article, we will discuss the importance of digital marketing for law firms and what exactly your firm has to do in order to increase its visibility online when potential clients are looking for a lawyer.
Our law firm digital marketing specialists are always ready to give you even more detailed information on the benefits of using Google ads, social media platforms, and implementing other digital marketing strategies, with examples from success stories. Our mission is to help you reach out to ideal clients, bring them to your website and persuade them to call, fill out an online form, or follow another type of call to action resulting in an appointment with one of your lawyers. This is, in short, what a legal marketing strategy is about.
But, before we discuss online marketing strategies for your law firm, let us explain what digital marketing is and how it differs from traditional marketing.
Digital Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing: What’s the Difference?
Traditional marketing strategies represent all types of offline advertising and client communication. This type of marketing tactic includes the use of:
- outdoor billboards
- TV, newspaper, and radio ads
- leaflets distributed in mailboxes
- hosting in-person events
These have been the established forms of advertising and marketing for all types of companies – both in the B2B and in the B2C industry – for decades. But our world has changed tremendously after the discovery and spreading of the internet. This new world is called the online or digital world. And it has become even more convenient for consumers to interact with this world whenever they want since mobile phones became capable of connecting to the internet and evolved into smart devices with large touch screens.
As a result, traditional marketing efforts became more and more expensive and less and less effective at the same time. For this reason, many companies changed their marketing tactic and focused their attention and marketing budgets towards various digital channels.
What Is Digital Marketing?
So, what exactly does it mean to create digital marketing strategies for a law practice? Digital marketing, the powerful tool of today for attracting new clients and keeping current clients engaged, involves an active and visible presence in the online world through:
- a website
- social media accounts
- using Google ads and other digital paid advertising channels
- striving to rank in organic searches when people are looking for legal services
Also, while the ultimate business goal of any legal practice is to find new clients, digital marketing goals include other relevant aspects for your business, such as:
- building a valuable brand image, instantly recognized by potential legal clients
- establishing your law firm as an authority in your practice area (personal injury lawyer, criminal defense lawyer, estate planning lawyer, etc.)
- finding opportunities to grow your law firm and serve new areas and categories of clients
- creating modern and effective communication channels with clients and other lawyers
The Main Benefits of Implementing Digital Marketing Strategies for Law Firms
As we explained above, the internet and mobile phones offer consumers a quick and convenient way of searching for whatever they need – from a restaurant to go to dinner with friends to a lawyer when they need legal representation.
This is the benefit of digital marketing perceived from the user’s end. What about businesses? What makes digital marketing a more adequate choice for finding new clients than traditional strategies used in the past?
First of all, digital marketing strategies have measurable results. At any moment, you can log on to one of the platforms that monitor your digital marketing efforts (such as Google Analytics, and various other services) and check for:
- daily number of active users on their website
- how they interact with the site (time spent on page, number of pages visited, last page visited before leaving the site)
- what people say about your business (by monitoring brand mentions, negative and positive reviews and ratings)
- the return on investment (ROI) of your paid search efforts
Secondly, digital marketing services and the use of various digital and social media channels allow law practices to target the type of clients they want to serve. When you publish a newspaper ad or pay for a billboard at a busy intersection, you have no control over who will see your ads and contact you. However, when you use Google ads and SEO for law firms, you can personalize them to reach your ideal client profile in terms of:
- geographical area
- demographic profile (age group, education level, annual income)
- interests
Finally, digital marketing strategies are extremely flexible and easy to adapt and change depending on the findings from measuring their performance. You can stop a Google ad from running or edit it if it does not generate the expected number of qualified clicks. But, once you put up a billboard and you do not get the leads you were expecting, you have to take it down and pay for another one to be made.
The Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for Law Practices
Let us now focus on the comprehensive guide to law firm internet marketing. Our digital marketing service specialists use a mix of the following strategies for other clients like your law firm or independent practice:
1. Search Engine Optimization
SEO for law firms is one of the most effective ways to find potential new clients through organic Google searches. Statistics show that 57% of consumers look for a lawyer on their own and most of them resort to online searches. For this reason, if you want to turn website visitors into leads and leads into clients, you need to implement search engine optimization strategies.
What exactly does SEO mean? It is a digital marketing method that aims to:
- make your website a relevant search result for keywords used by potential clients who are looking for legal services
- optimize the structure and content of your website to meet Google’s ranking criteria
- turn your website into a reputable source of information, which will generate valuable backlinks (other sites linking to your web page)
- put your law firm on the most popular map apps (Google Maps and Apple Maps)
SEO involves both on-page and off-page tactics. An experienced full-service digital marketing agency will perform all the essential steps to improve the domain authority and search rankings for your website, by:
- reducing the load time of your website
- improving the security and user experience
- conducting keyword research and implementing these keywords in the existing content
- creating original, informative content on a consistent basis
- encouraging users to leave positive online reviews for your business
2. Focusing on Local Search Strategies
Local search is one of the latest and most effective types of digital marketing strategies for local businesses. Law firms usually serve a specific geographic area. Even a large successful firm with offices in several states wants to find qualified leads from the surrounding area for each office. It makes no sense for a potential client in New York to find your New Orleans office in Google results.
For this reason, digital marketing specialists use key terms that include local elements, such as:
- in (city name)
- near me
- close to (city name)
At the same time, local search marketing involves creating and maintaining a Google My Business profile (recently renamed Google Business Profile) and NAP citations (business name, address, phone number) on relevant online directories and forums.
3. Social Media Marketing
Social media has evolved into a digital world where consumers can interact with anyone – friends, celebrities, their favorite brands – and look for products and services they need. According to Pew Research Center, in 2021 Facebook remained one of the most widely used platforms among US adults (69%). Moreover, this platform has the most even spread of use by various age groups, compared to other platforms:
- 73% – 50 to 64 age group
- 77% – 30 to 49 age group
- 70% – 18 to 29 age group
And the legal industry already has a strong presence in the social media world, with 81% of law firms and independent lawyers claiming to have a business profile on at least one social network, according to Finances Online.
Why does social media play such an important role in the digital marketing plan of any company? Here are some reasons:
- social media posts can be shared and reach new audiences, where you may find a lot of target clients
- social proof (likes, comments, and shares) is a ranking factor for Google and other search engines
- Social networks offer a free chat feature where you can talk directly to potential clients
- Social media analytical data offer you valuable insights into the demographic profile and interest of your most active followers
- You can generate a steady stream of traffic from your social profiles to your law firm’s website
4. Content Marketing
Content remains the most valuable tool for:
- building brand awareness
- establishing your reputation as an expert in your field
- promoting relevant keywords
- building engagement with potential and current clients
If you perform a simple Google search, you will find a large number of law firm blogs. Your digital marketing agency partners will create an effective content strategy for your legal practice and produce all the necessary content, such as:
- long-form blogs
- guests posts
- social media posts
- content for landing pages and specific marketing campaigns
Content is at the core of SEO, social media marketing, and email marketing, as well. Every article posted on your website or on a guest blog under your law firm name in your own brand voice promotes your values and business goals. We cannot speak enough of the importance of original, informative content both for organic ranking and for winning your website visitor’s trust and converting them from leads into clients.
For this reason, you should entrust your content marketing strategy to an experienced digital marketing partner, with a proven track record in helping other law firms become successful.
5. Email Marketing
Email remains one of the most popular means of communication and a powerful digital marketing tool. Almost every business, from large legal practices to small grocery stores, send out a regular email newsletter to their subscribers at least once per week.
Just like other digital marketing strategies, email marketing efforts are measurable and offer you an indication of how often your subscribers interact with the content you are sending them. They are useful for sending subscribers the latest news (changes in legislation), useful information about your practice (adding a new lawyer to your team, expanding your practice area, or winning an award), as well as marketing messages (for example, starting a client referral program).
6. Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing refers to digital marketing strategies targeted specifically at users who access your website or various other digital properties from their mobile phones. Mobile advertising, specifically, is one of the most important elements of this type of digital marketing service. Mobile ads pose unique challenges because the digital real estate they use is small – you cannot place a large mobile ad over a website, because the user will most likely find it too obtrusive and leave the respective web page.
7. Pay-per-Click Marketing
Paid traffic has its benefits: you get instant results in terms of increased website traffic. Paid links always appear above organic search results and, being more visible, determine users to click them first. However, the competition for the most relevant keywords is very high. For smaller law firms and independent lawyers, it is very difficult to compete with large legal practices with a significant marketing budget.
Why Should You Hire a Digital Marketing Services Agency?
Statistical data show that more than half of the independent attorneys do their own marketing. However, the trend is decreasing, as more and more legal professionals discover the benefits of leaving digital marketing strategies to experienced professionals.
Just as you would never recommend a person to represent themselves in court, we do not recommend your law firm do its own digital marketing. Here are the reasons for this:
1. Creating an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy Is Specialized Work
Let us start with SEO for law firms – it involves technical work. SEO specialists will look at your website code and make changes to:
- eliminate errors
- improve page loading time
- reduce the size of files (images, videos)
- create internal linking
- implementing structured data
These activities require programming skills. As for the other crucial element of digital marketing service – content marketing – it needs specific copywriting skills. Digital marketing agencies have a multidisciplinary team at your service.
2. Running Digital Marketing Strategies Is Time Consuming
Digital marketing doesn’t just run by itself. You have to monitor analytical data and make changes continually. You have to produce fresh content on a constant basis. You have to identify new channels and methods to promote your law firm.
All these aspects take time – on a daily basis. Even if you hired a digital marketing specialist, they would still not be able to handle all these issues. A full-service digital marketing agency has a staff consisting of experienced professionals and allocates them to handle various projects and client cases.
3. Digital Marketing Is Continually Changing
One of the main challenges in the digital marketing process is keeping up to date with the effective techniques, as well as the ever-changing ranking rules set by Google. The search engine is constantly upgrading its algorithm to eliminate low-quality and spam links and give users exactly the types of search results they are looking for.
This means that you would have to stay constantly up to date with the latest trends in digital marketing and develop new skills very fast.
4. You Must Know How to Interpret Analytical Data
Here is another reason why you should hire a digital marketing agency: they know how to read analytical data from Google Analytics and the social media platforms and act quickly. For example, a sudden drop in traffic may have several causes:
- a website error making it unreachable by users
- the website received a manual penalty from Google
- Google is running tests before implementing algorithm changes
The same thing applies to various other metrics used in marketing. You need to act quickly if you want to prevent losing subscribers and potential clients based on the information collected by various marketing tools.
5. You Have to Respond Quickly to Comments and Reviews
Consumers are not patient when they contact a business online to find information. Whether they ask a question on Messenger or the Google My Business profile, they want answers in minutes or in hours. The “next business day” time frame is not applicable to the digital world.
Thus, you need specialists who can implement chatbots or assign a person to handle these comments and make sure that your potential clients receive the answers they are expecting in the shortest possible time.
Work with an Experienced Digital Marketing Service Agency
Triple Digital is a full-service digital marketing agency, with relevant experience in the legal industry. We work with independent lawyers and large law firms and help them create their unique brand image and attract the relevant target clients.
We have an internal team of professionals specializing in various branches of digital marketing, from website development to SEO and content writing. We have a proven track record of success, which we can demonstrate with case studies.
We work closely with our clients and ask for their feedback at each relevant point of creating their digital marketing plan. You will always have a dedicated person you can contact if you have questions. Also, you will receive ongoing reports from us, detailing the results of your marketing campaigns in a form that you can understand.
Do not leave your law firm’s internet marketing to chance. Just like everything in your law firm, it must be done professionally and match your brand identity. We encourage you to schedule a meeting with one of our digital marketing specialists and start building your strategy for success: 833-TRIPLE-D!