The legal industry is highly competitive, with many firms offering similar services. This adds pressure to stand out from the crowd and attract new clients. Through digital marketing, especially SEO, PPC, and social media, lawyers can start to get their message across and connect with potential clients.
Legal firms need to fight several uphill battles before they can begin litigation or other legal work. Strict regulatory requirements like the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Code of Conduct, technological disruption from legal tech companies, disruption of the traditional legal model, and higher expectations from clients really start to add up.
Like any other business, a legal firm is still a business and needs to look after the bottom line and be profitable. It is, therefore, crucial to contact potential clients where they are spending their time and when they are in the state of mind to discuss their needs.
This is often where companies make missteps. Some, for example, will jump on the opportunity that a new social media platform offers, but the users on there might not be your target audience or definitely not looking for legal advice.
“Horses for courses” became a cliche for a good reason. This is also true of digital marketing, where we could help you start conversations with potential clients.
We would like to touch briefly on the 3 previously mentioned digital marketing options and how they can help you grow your business.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is optimizing your site and its content so that you get featured in top organic search results more often. If done right, you will see a steadily increasing volume of relevant traffic coming to your site from search engines for the same monthly investment.
SEO results compound over time and offer the best value for money in the medium and long term.
The best conversion rates of visitors into leads are also when people visit your site after searching on a search engine.
They clearly showed their intent by typing a specific search term in their search engine. Proper keyword research is very important, though, before your site is optimized to ensure that relevant visitors reach your site.
So if someone types in “lawyer” and you come up in the search results, it might be someone looking for what you specialize in but also someone looking to study law or looking for someone with another specialization.
The competition for such terms is extremely fierce, and the return on investment often doesn’t make sense.
However, if you are a firm specializing in family law, focusing on a search term like “lawyers who deal with custody after a divorce” will deliver far more relevant leads to your business.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising offers the same as SEO but with a higher continuous cost and faster results. The challenge with paid ads, though, is optimizing the ads so that you don’t burn through an advertising budget for general terms like “lawyer.”
If approached correctly and there is a focus on the right keywords targeting the right audiences, you can build a lead-generating channel that will deliver at a very steady and predictable rate.
When SEO and PPC work together, you often see the best results. PPC covers the bases in the short and medium term, while the results from SEO steadily improve. As organic search results become dependable and bring in a steady stream of relevant traffic for your legal firm, you can lessen budgets on PPC.
Not many professions receive as much hate and ridicule as the legal industry. Some of it might be understandable depending on what side a person sat off a ruling. A lot of it, however, stems from misinformation about lawyers and how they help.
Social media offers the opportunity to speak to existing and past clients as well as potential new clients. Offering advice and practical information helps to change some of those common misconceptions. It also does a great job of building brand awareness, which will help your brand stand out when people use search engines to look for the services you offer.
The biggest benefit of digital marketing is that it is measurable. You can track the effectiveness of your respective marketing efforts against preset KPIs. This will help you to evolve your campaign and steadily increase the number of relevant leads your business gets.
The data also offers a wealth of insights into the people who search for your services and helps you understand what is important to them.
Armed with this knowledge, you could market your legal firm far more effectively and cost-effectively than with most other marketing options.
