Law Firm Marketing Techniques To Reach Its Target Audience Digitally
Mar 06, 2021
10 min read
Building a high-quality pipeline of leads and acquiring potential clients for your law firm isn’t a walk in the park. It requires days of marketing efforts, strategies, and time. If you want more clients for your law firm and are looking to expand your business, then the internet, as a medium for marketing, could be the perfect place for you to garner a significant amount of exposure and visibility.
Having a great online presence can help you in attracting more eyes over the internet to your online business, it helps you to get ahead of your competitors as well. As per the statistics released in 2019 by Georgetown Law, the average revenue growth in the law market was around 5.4%.
However, the market size for online legal services in the USA has expanded into a $9 billion industry as of 2020. Many tech-savvy legal experts and marketers predict that the post-pandemic phase, the year 2021 can turn out to be a golden year for online law firms as they predict a market size of $767.1 billion.
2021 will be a crucial year for law firms that exist online, as they must fuel their ignition by working towards website optimization for better search engine rankings and enhancing their online visibility so that they can reach their target audience and can generate more leads. Let’s look at some of the major law firm marketing techniques that can help you to reach your target audience over the internet.
1. Personal Branding Is A Must
No matter how easy the internet has made the online search or product/service buying, online users will always remain a bit skeptical about the effectiveness and legitimacy of the product/service providers. Nowadays it’s a matter of seconds for a client to stop over your website and cross-check some information about your previous works, attorneys, or existing law partners.
Therefore the law firms must develop their brand name over their social media accounts, Google listings, and other similar platforms. It will help them to reach those clients who have been surfing the internet in search of reliable lawyers. As per a study made in 2020, 76% of lawyers prefer LinkedIn to build their social media presence, 60% prefer Facebook, 37% have Twitter accounts.
Your clients want to know the face behind your law firm’s business, so even when they search your name on a search engine, they must see some credible information so that they can trust you. A strong digital presence eases your way of doing business and portrays your firm as a successful one. Building a well-branded presence over platforms like LinkedIn gives a direct statement to your potential clients that your law firm is a prominent one. Make sure you add details like bio, contact details, expertise, e-mail, and a strong CTA.
2. Focus On Local SEO
If your law firm exists in New Jersey, it would make no sense for you to target clients that live in Minnesota. Isn’t it? Ignoring local SEO aspects is like throwing darts in a dark room, therefore always initiate your marketing plans by targeting audiences that exist in your firm’s location, target your home crowd first! Did you know 96% of the legal clients look for legal aid through Search Engines? Your local clients are also searching the internet for a law firm like yours, you can acquire all of them through local SEO.
Focus on local keywords for your website, make sure to get yourself ranked against those keywords, get your law firm listed in local directories. Heard about NAP? It stands for Name, Address, and Phone, make sure you provide these details on local citations because it will help you in ranking well in local search results. You can also make offline efforts to promote your online website, how? By engaging with local communities at local events, law school, or college events by sharing your knowledge with them in the legal spectrum.
All these efforts can help you to drive local organic traffic to your website which will help you in improving your local Search Engine rankings as well.
3. Get Instant Results Using Paid Search
Using Google paid search can help you in driving highly-qualified leads instantly. Well strategized Google Ads can turn your website into a lead generating machine because then you’ll be able to advertise directly to those who are looking for a law firm just like yours. It’s one of the best ways to drive targeted traffic to your website. Your Google campaigns can be optimized according to the needs of your audiences so that you can reach highly qualified leads in no time.
Your paid ad campaigns must incorporate a dense keyword strategy for the landing pages for a high-quality score with ‘Thankyou pages’ after leads submit their form. You must involve niche-specific long-tail search terms as well. Did you know 72% of legal clients access search engines via smartphones instead of desktops?
Therefore, you have to ensure that your website has been optimized for mobile users as well. The Google algorithm might demote and harm SEPRs of those web site’s that aren't mobile-optimized. Therefore, make sure that your law firm's website is mobile responsive, it’ll be easier for your paid ads to drive both mobile and desktop users to your website.
4. Video Content Is The Future
We would like to quote an article that was published by Forbes, which said “Video content Will Make Up 82% of Internet Traffic by 2020”. We know that YouTube (owned by Google) is the world’s second-largest search engine after Google. YouTube’s search engine gets 3 Billion searches every month! You might have noticed how several YouTube videos rank way higher than blogs in Google Search results. Have you?
According to a study made by American Bar Association, 27% of firms that have a team size of 10-50 lawyers, use video marketing to get more exposure, visibility, and clients. Law firms and lawyers can attract potential clients by building their YouTube channels where they can talk about specific problems, this will help them to attract potential clients organically because they’ll be able to rank higher in the SERPs.
You can treat your videos as a smart Call-To-Action for your viewers. You can link your YouTube videos on your website’s homepage, it’ll allow your visitors to know more about your firm, and they'll feel a connection. Linking these videos on your homepage will also encourage them to share their emails because it might make your video content relevant which makes them think that your firm is a trustworthy one.
5. Publish High-Quality Content
Publishing high-quality, relatable, and relevant content on your website blogs can attract online readers who might be studying the same industry. You can provide useful information or articles to your readers that can be about recent amendments in your judicial system, your successful cases, answers to their search queries, etc. It will help you in driving potential customers to your website.
Always emphasize on publishing high-quality blogs rather than a bundle of poorly written pieces. The same goes for social media platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook. When you publish your opinions, videos, comments, and posts on such platforms it generates a sense of trust among your visitors. Choose one such platform that helps you to fetch more views, shares, and comments.
According to a report published by Law Technology Today, in 2019, 70% of the law firms got new clients through their company's website. So it’s highly advised that you should optimize and update your website content. Make sure that your website design is attractive, every page is readable and engaging enough for a visitor so that he or she spends more time on the website.
6. Use Social Media Promotions
Once you have optimized your website design, content, and other technicalities, you shouldn’t wait or just rely on your website blogs. If you have spent a significant amount of money as well as time on building your website then you shouldn’t ignore the power of social media promotions.
Promote your blogs on various social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Many marketers reveal that 80% of their social media leads are derived from LinkedIn. LinkedIn is 277% more effective Facebook lead generation! Promote your content through Linkedin Ads, it’ll expose your content to a much wider audience that will help you in driving loads of traffic to your website.
Social media promotions or sponsored posts are meant to provide great exposure because you are exposed to a wider audience which helps you in grabbing the attention of a large audience at once. Remember, the most popular marketing channels, among all types of firms are LinkedIn (42%), Email (41%), and Facebook (33%).
7. Have A Solid Online Reputation
How do you judge whether a restaurant is decent enough to have dinner at? Simply by looking at their reviews, right? This works similarly for the legal firms as well that exist over the internet, therefore you must manage your online reviews. You must encourage your previous clients to post their reviews or feedback on your attorney’s performance on review sites like Google+, Yelp, etc.
Customer reviews play a huge role in influencing the purchase intent of your potential buyers. The moment a user reads all your positive reviews, he or she steps into the first phase of conversion where they find your firm reliable and therefore click on your link to check your website. 93% of online customers go through online reviews before investing in a product or a service.
Make sure you reply to your online reviews, it doesn’t matter whether they are good or bad, the motive is to make every reviewer feel valued. You can address or resolve their queries, and can even make a disappointed client feel happier by assuring him or her an excellent service ahead in the future. Add client testimonials on your homepage as they help you in converting new visitors into high-value clients.
Conclusion
Online business is a very competitive sport, and when we talk about the legal industry, it is as furious as any other online business. To garner a large client base, you need to work actively behind optimizing your website and devote time to online marketing.
Every lawyer or law firm whose website exists online must keep an eye on the latest industry trends. Today, individuals who want to seek legal aid are looking for law firms that can provide them valuable information as well as relevant content so that they can trust them.
In 2020, 65% of law firms had spent their majority chunk of marketing budgets on online marketing (as per the data provided by Clio), why so? The reason is simple - 'Most of your potential clients are on the internet. Nowadays when people spend so much time over the internet and on their smartphones, nobody has the time to open their phonebooks or catalogs.
They'll rather find hundreds of law firms in a single click. So law firms must have a robust online presence to attract potential clients to their website. If you are a law firm, young, budding, or old, you must make use of the internet to attract more clients. Our experts at Saffron Edge offer the best legal marketing services to grow your legal business to new heights. Contact us today to know more!
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Google Revamps Search Quality Raters Guidelines Yet Again
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Adding to this Google would also set different evaluating parameters for each of the content depending on nature, purpose and importance. Linguistic Change in “Hate Pages” Some of the changes in language of their evaluation checklist for websites/pages that promote hatred or violence. Citizenship, Socio-economic, political beliefs, victims of atrocities were removed from their evaluation parameters. Gender was renamed to Gender or Gender Identity Ethnicity was changed to Ethnic Origin Reputation Checks for YMYL Content Creators Let’s take an example of ecommerce sites to best explain this point. Based on the updates on QGR, Google is suggesting that it would evaluate the authenticity of the site based on user reviews of people who have made a purchase on the site. This small instance would apply according to each service or product based business or informational website available online. However the degree and nature of authenticity would vary depending on the details that are on offer and value proposition of each site. Reviews, Testimonials and trustable citation sources will become strong parameters that validates the quality of a site which should be a food for thought for all content creators across all domains and industries operating online. Journalist Quality Parameter Expands Uptil the last guidelines, Pulitzer prize was the predominant benchmark based on which any journalistic piece was measured on the basis of credible citations or accreditations to Pulitzer prize winning authors or publishings. This has now been revamped with significant change to the language of the guidelines now suggest “...Newspaper (with an associated website) has won journalistic awards. . . . “ where as previously it didn’t feature extension of the newspaper in terms of its association with one or other award winning site. Source Outcome While it is still early to comment on these changes as they don’t reflect directly on your websites performance as of yet, but we are sure to see some incoming changes and patterns of shift in terms of the overall content and trust evaluation of each website and thereby its’ positioning by Google. Popular influencer Glenn Gabe has taken to twitter to highlight some of the more indepth changes and sections and shared his opinion with his followers that has been sparking constructive debates. Source With these latest updates, Google has cleared the shroud of ambiguity on content quality evaluation and reinstated that it is going to give importance to YMYL and EAT parameters for evaluating the quality and trust of the website which consequently could have a long term impact on your site’s visibility on SERP. If you’re concerned or even worried about what these updates could mean for your business, you can schedule a free consultation call with our SEO experts today. ...
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