As an attorney, you offer a highly specialised service, but you are not excluded from requiring a digital media strategy to attract clients and grow your firm. Online marketing is crucial for law firms to build meaningful interactions with potential and returning customers. This is done by carefully growing and analysing data gathered over time. When your law firm successfully interacts with clients online, you build brand awareness, establish yourself as a thought leader in your field, and put your firm at the top of people's minds when they need your services most. So what does a law firm need to think about when creating and executing a successful digital marketing strategy?
1. Establish who your client is
Your first port of call is asking yourself who you want to reach. Since 4.66 million people use the internet, it is important to find the right clients. If you don't know where to start, hire a digital marketing agency to help you study the market and figure out what trends are operating in your specific industry area. You could start by making a profile of your dream client, then look at your current clients and look for similarities to figure out what kind of client you ideally serve. Digital marketing is much cheaper than traditional marketing, and when used correctly, it works very well. It goes straight for your target customer, but first, you have to have a clear idea about who that is. As a law company, you'll have an area of expertise. For example, if you're a divorce lawyer, you shouldn't try to get clients who need help with environmental law. So focus on your core area and curate content that specifically speaks to that niche of clientele.
2. Focus on your core objectives
Digital marketing for a law company has two main goals: keeping clients and making sure your firm has a good reputation among people who need legal help. To reach these goals, you need to set up a lot of smaller goals that enable this to happen. This also entails understanding how past clients have come to hire you. What are they trying to find? Where do they look for you? Do a lot of people visit your website, but only a small number actually follow through on hiring? If you used social media more and made your law website better, would you get more clients? If your law firm has a good digital marketing plan, you can actually track how a client found you back to the first time they interacted with your business online. This process of collecting data, doing research, and making a report is called "attribution modelling." It helps you figure out how clients find and hire your services. When you have this information, you can then make better decisions about the marketing budget and strategy for your law business. Which in turn allows you to follow through on your core objectives.
3. Create a strong legal website
A strong website for your law company builds your business's credibility and gives potential clients an overview of the services you offer. It's both a sales pitch and a hub of information, and it's the heart of the law firm's internet marketing strategy. A successful website does a number of things: It shows off how good your law firm's services are.It provides contact information. It offers great case studies.It shows what your law company stands for. And, it gives answers to frequently asked questions as a way to build trust and move up in search engine rankings. Also bear in mind that your law firm's website should be easy for possible clients to use, whether they're on a computer, a tablet, or a phone. It should also be set up so that search engines can find and rank it, and each page should have a clear call to action that tells potential clients what to do next to get in touch for your services.
4. Focus on client-centred content
Regular, educational content creation is very difficult to curate. It needs to be accurate and strategically meet the pain points of your clients. If law firms don't show that they are the best in their field by giving clients useful information, they could lose out to the competition. This makes it essential to have legal and marketing experts writing the best and most useful content for your digital media channels. A good way to manage this process is to create a marketing team to gently steer your team and create strong legal content that covers every step of the client's journey.
5. Paying attention to branding
Lawyers should not only focus on marketing themselves but on marketing their law firm’s brand. The more well-known a brand is, the more likely it is that present customers will tell their friends about it. Core to this is keeping your clients top of mind. Maintain stability in how you talk to your customers, whether it's about getting good work done on time or giving great customer service. Ensure that your positioning is strategic, consistent and accurate and cleverly shows how your company solves specific kinds of problems and not just general ones. All this information should be strategically spoken about online, in order to underpin your brand’s image and build a strong brand awareness.
6. Ask for reviews from your clients
Referrals are still an important part of how law firms do business. Before, people would tell their friends about a business. Now, you can find them in reviews and comments on the Internet. User-generated content (UGC) includes things like recommendations and comments from people who use the Internet. UGCs help a company look more trustworthy because they come from real users. No team in the company is in charge of selling UGCs or has anything to do with them. Instead, they come from real experiences that have been turned into content and shared on multiple channels. After using a product or service, a lot of people write reviews about it online. Most of them don't, though. So, you should always ask your satisfied customers to leave a comment on your pages or on their own sites. You can put some of the good ones on your website as social proof to help improve the overall online picture of your brand.
The bottom line
Digital marketing is essential for law firms. It is a primary source of marketing and often the first port of call when clients are shopping around for legal representation. Because lawyers aren't typically ‘techy’, they are not savvy when it comes to online activity. But this leaves a lot of opportunity for the competition to sneak in and steal potential competition. So it is essential that law firms avoid these six common mistakes when it comes to their digital marketing plans, and pay careful attention to growing their online presence in these important ways. To invest in your firm’s digital marketing presence in the next 48 hours, contact Merchant Capital today.