Law Firm Marketing in 2020 [Proven Tactics to Get Clients]

You didn’t get into law to market a business. You got into it to defend the innocent or ensure the guilty received their due.

And yet, here you are — wondering how you can succeed in the hyper-competitive legal industry.

But with so many law firm marketing strategies to choose between, it can be a headache to know where to start.

And without the right knowledge of how to access your target clients effectively, many law firms waste time, money, and resources.

In this article, we’ll cover the leading digital marketing strategies your law firm needs to know to succeed in 2020.

Law Firm Marketing Strategy #1: Create a Clear Brand Narrative

A successful strategic narrative tells the story behind your existence as a company, defining what makes you unique in a human way.

Your narrative should be reflected in your website content, content marketing, visual branding, social media presence, and so on. This continuity conveys your law firm’s values, ethics, and company mission at all times.

This story-line should communicate how your law firm believes that value is created, along with how you intend to bring that value to the table.

A strong strategic narrative should humanize your company to your potential client base. Studies have shown that people tend to see legal companies as people rather than objects, leaning toward services that foster the human context.

It has been shown that a company’s ‘warmth and competence’ tend to be twice as persuasive as the benefits of the services offered. In this respect, a confluent story-line serves to entice customers who feel aligned with these values.

In this sense, when crafting a strategic brand narrative, you should communicate your unique sales points as having a shared purpose with your target audience. By doing this effectively, you show your customers how you endeavor to meet that purpose.

Take Starbucks’ mission statement, for example.

A summarized version of the coffee company’s narrative, the mission aims ‘to inspire and nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.’ Here, Starbucks defines itself as focusing on community values and enriching the human spirit, while inspiring and nurturing customers.

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With this statement, Starbucks is targeting a specific subset of hot beverage drinkers. Simultaneously, it excludes those that don’t fit the ethos and image.

Starbucks’ narrative is far more likely to appeal to college students, new mothers, and book groups than to truckers, late-night drunks, and laborers.

By creating a clear brand narrative, Starbucks can hone in on its niche, make them feel comfortable, and entice that target audience through its doors.

This principle is no different for your law firm.

Potential clients want to know that your law firm stands for the same values as they do. In this regard, a family law office would craft a narrative based on approach-ability, family values, and human connection.

A top contract law firm for Fortune 500 companies is more likely to devise a narrative that conveys sleek professionalism, ROI, and no-nonsense litigation.

Law Firm Marketing Strategy #2: Devise a Measurable Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy without feedback metrics is like holding a candle to the sunshine — a bit pointless.

To truly understand the value of your marketing efforts, you need solid digital marketing metrics.

These metrics provide quantifiable data on how effective your digital marketing strategies are in achieving your law firm’s goals. Without well-defined metrics, your firm will have no idea which marketing campaigns work well and which are a waste of resources.

When creating a legal marketing strategy, defining your goals is paramount.

By creating a vision of what your law firm’s aims are, you can reverse engineer the steps needed to achieve these end goals. This allows your law firm to more effectively allocate time, money, and resources to achieve these marketing goals.

The goals set out in your marketing strategy will define how you approach marketing campaigns, the marketing strategies you deploy, and the channels used to reach your audience.

For example, LinkedIn is likely to be the most useful channel for identifying new partners for your firm. On the other hand, pay-per-click (PPC) ads on insurance websites are likely to have a higher chance of successfully drawing in personal injury claimants.

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Quantifiable metrics tend to cluster into four main groups: customers, product, positioning, and financial.

• Customer metrics revolve around setting objectives that aim to improve acquisition, value, and retention.
• Product metrics tend to focus onpricing, adoption, and development.
• In terms of competitive positioning, your firm may be seeking to increase your market share or build your reputation.
• Financial goals could include improvement of customer equity or better ROI for tools you use.

Once you have defined your goals and set out clear metrics, you can build a structured marketing strategy. Matching legal marketing tactics to goals enables you to more easily devise logical marketing campaigns aimed at securing specific results.

It is wise to install the ‘Lean’ model for strategic testing. Often referred to as ‘build-measure-learn,’ this tactic invites you to test marketing campaigns and use your metrics to understand their impact.

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To complement these campaigns, you should implement feedback systems from the beginning ( such as Google Analytics or similar).

By leveraging the feedback from these tests, you learn to shape better and more effective campaigns into the future.

Law Firm Marketing Strategy #3: Define Your Target Market and Narrow Accordingly

Market segmentation is the practice of dividing your law firm’s target market into sections of potential clients grouped by similar characteristics.

Traditionally, law firms focus advertising and marketing efforts on ostentatiously showcasing their achievements and legal credentials.

However, it’s clear that addressing client needs is a far more successful approach. In this respect, grouping clients together enables you to better understand the common needs of each group and target those needs accordingly.

Through target market segmentation, your law firm can more clearly identify why new clients are coming to you, what their aims are, and the approach they prefer. By understanding these factors, you can concentrate your marketing efforts and resources on the areas which are having the greatest impact on your caseload and other bottom-line metrics.

There are two main ways to identify your key target market:

1. Study your current customer base

Which type of person employs your legal services and what are they hoping to achieve? Create profiles based on your clients’ demographics, needs, and values. Attempt to understand what drew these clients to your company in the first place. By getting under the skin of your existing clients, you can replicate the effective parts of your current marketing efforts.

2. Consider your competition

Who do they serve and why do their clients choose them? Try to identify the key successes in your competition’s marketing strategy and the legal services they offer. This will help to fill in the gaps in your own marketing campaigns.

Target market segmentation also helps to convey your legal expertise to your new clients. While you may practice law with a generalist approach, marketing like a specialist will attract customers with specific problems.

Hone in on what each segment needs and offer this to them directly to prevent your company from appearing like a ‘jack of all trades’.

Law Firm Marketing Strategy #4: Optimize Your Law Firm Website

Studies have shown that 75% of people judge a company’s credibility based on the quality of its website, proving that your law firm’s website is a key marketing tool.

Not only does it serve as an informative platform to outline your ethos, values, and legal services, your website also works as a lead generation funnel.

Law firm website optimization best practices:

1. Leverage effective search engine optimization (SEO) tactics

By engaging in SEO, you can increase search engine rankings and enhance the visibility of your services.

In this vein, your law firm’s website should speak both to humans and Google.

To support human readability, SEO techniques should enable Google’s SEO spiders to quickly scan your law firm’s website (in order to rank it accordingly). This means using relevant keywords on all pages and frequent blogging. A sitemap, title tags, meta descriptions, and alt tags should support this.

2. Use language that identifies your client’s concerns and outlines the services that will solve them

This demonstrates the value your company provides. Showcase this value with sections covering your mission and principles, practice areas, credentials, awards, and case types.

3. Focus on visuals

Make it easy for new clients to understand your motives and specialism with sleek, clean branding that complements the legal services offered.

For example, Bick Law, an environmental law firm, brandishes an elephant on their landing page to visually drum home their ethos:

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4. Add additional media on the homepage

Think about creating a firm introduction video or explainer video to help decode complex legal jargon.

5. Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly

Over 85% of customers consider mobile-friendliness as more important than web browser design.

6. Invite conversion through clear call-to-action buttons

A brilliant example of this can be seen on Kraayeveld Law Offices’ website. The divorce law firm’s landing page expresses their sympathy by imploring each potential client to simply ‘Start a conversation today’. Clever call-to-action touch points like this should be teamed with your contact information displayed on every page.

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Law Firm Marketing Strategy #5: Highlight Your Credibility with Testimonials

Statistics show that 88% of consumers claim that they trust online testimonials as much as word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family.

Since credibility is such a dominant factor in choosing legal representation, it would be wise to include solid customer testimonials on your website.

However, while testimonials can increase revenue by around 62%, it’s important to ensure you are harnessing testimonials correctly.

Customer recommendations can be sticky business for law firms when making results-based claims. While adding a disclaimer can dissipate this issue, it will also dilute the effectiveness of the testimonial.

To combat this, harness experience-based testimonials instead.

Have clients ratify your level of customer service and endorse the treatment they received throughout their legal process. For this to work best, display a range of testimonials that cover all your legal services.

Law Firm Marketing Strategy #6: Conquer Google with Effective SEO Techniques

As noted above, search engine optimization is a stellar method for increasing visibility in Google’s rankings.

There are three main arms to successful SEO for law firms: technical, on-page, and off-page SEO techniques.

1. Technical SEO

Technical SEO pertains to the techniques that enable a search engine to discover your law firm’s website and understand what it is about. Conquering technical SEO enables search engines to map your website and rank it to the appropriate search terms in Google.

Practically, this means ensuring that all titles and headings are chock-full of keywords. Tools like the free CTR Tool are ideal for helping you craft strong title tags. Equally, meta descriptions and alt tags need to be filled with appropriate keywords to complement those used in the website’s content.

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2. On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO refers to the content used on your law firm’s website. This includes everything from the descriptions of legal services through to your business blog. To stay relevant with Google, your content stream must be updated regularly.

While keyword stuffing may have worked in the past, Google’s algorithms now search for engaging content that’s useful to the reader.

For your law firm, this may take the form of educational blogs that offer pro-bono advice, case studies to highlight your services, and unique insights directly from your professional legal teams.

3. Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to your law firm’s online presence on third-party sources, such as backlinks and shares on social media. Google recognizes these links as recommendations from external parties and ranks these backlinks according to the visibility of the user posting them. For example, a viral social media post pinged across Facebook will carry far more weight than a spam posting on a legal forum.

To incite higher quality backlinks, try to link with reputable media sources and find significant social media influencers to endorse your company.

Law Firm Marketing Strategy #7: Contribute Authoritative and Engaging Content to the Legal Sector

As noted above, your content marketing strategy should contribute engaging information to the legal sector. Demonstrating your law firm as an authority on the niche topics surrounding your services helps to boost credibility and increase visibility.

To improve your content marketing, let your readers decide what you write about. Ask your audience directly through surveys and email marketing campaigns, or use analytics tools (like Google Analytics) to measure the engagement of your posts. Whichever topics most hook the readers the most, double down on these strategies. You will likely find that content that connects with readers via analogies and real use cases tends to work the best.

Always remember to write for your readers first and Google second. Search engine algorithms are smart enough to weed out ‘black hat’ content marketing aimed simply at improving rankings. Keep posts regular and ensure to re-post on various social media channels to attract a diverse target market.

Final Thoughts

Harnessing digital marketing strategies to attract new clients to your law firm is no mean feat. The sheer volume of legal entities makes it difficult to rank highly on search engines and stand out on social media.

Yes, optimizing your website and improving your online presence are a solid step forward. However, a far more valuable approach would be to employ an experienced marketing agency who have a comprehensive knowledge of law firm marketing strategies.

With so many cases already cluttering your inbox, why bury yourself in the stress of marketing your law firm as well? You dedicate your time to the legal services, and leave the digital marketing to us!

Suggested Reading

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• Law Firm Web Design: 2021 Guide for the Perfect Lawyer Website
• Law Firm Website Design Cost: What You Can Expect to Pay
• Facebook Ads for Lawyers: Strategies to Get Clients in 2021
• Lead Generation for Lawyers: Tactics to Get Clients in 2021
• Justia Marketing Review 2021: Why It’s Not Worth it for Lawyers