What You Need to Know About Growing Your Law Firm Marketing Team
Marketing is definitely not what it used to be. Law firms used to bring in new clients via print advertising or word-of-mouth advertising. But now, with the internet running the show, marketing is a lot more complicated. So, how do lawyers get new clients?
Most law firms realize that there’s no way that they can deliver top-notch legal services while also appealing to their target audience online in a way that actually works. That’s why hiringa law firm marketing agency to handle your digital marketing strategy is so important.
An experienced law firm marketing team can rebuild your law firm website from the inside out, help your site appear at the top of search results on popular search engines like Google, build your social media presence – and, most importantly – turn potential clients into paying new clients. Below, we explain just how an agency like Digital Logic can do that.
Whether you’re a small law firm or a new business looking to get noticed by your target audience or a large law firm looking to boost your website traffic using online marketing channels, you can definitely benefit from working with an established law firm marketing company.
Do Lawyers Need Marketing?
If you’re a lawyer, then marketing your legal services is critical for both the growth and success of your legal firm. Digital marketing is the most effective way to consistently attract and retain paying legal clients.
Which Marketing Efforts Should Your Law Firm’s Marketing Team Be Responsible For?
As a lawyer, you already have a lot of responsibilities. The main one is that you help your clients clean up their legal messes by ensuring they receive the best case outcome possible. That is your expertise, so it’s natural that you – and most law firms, for that matter – have no idea where to begin with a law firm marketing plan. That is where we come in.
Aside from offering basic legal services, these are the marketing tactics your law firm should also be investing in:
Law Firm Acquisition
No one in any industry can just expect a constant stream of potential clients coming in from off the street. In the age of the internet, you have to attract potential clients every day with the content on your law firm’s website, social media posts, 5-star reviews from past clients, email marketing campaigns, and Google ads.
This is a lot of work to do on your own, especially if your law practice is booming, so that’s why so many law firms turn to professional digital marketing campaigns for their law firm marketing strategies.
Monetization for Law Firms
Eventually, these prospective clients may turn into actual clients, which turns into monetization for your law firm.
This is often the hardest part about selling any sort of product or service. Getting your name out there can be easy, especially with a solid law firm marketing plan. But turning those potential clients into money is usually the hardest part of the buyer’s journey.
If you’re struggling with both acquisition and monetization, then you need a professional agency – like Digital Logic – to take over your digital marketing efforts.
Our law firm marketing professionals know how to properly market your practice areas so that potential clients will be more likely to invest in your law firm.
Marketing Disciplines Law Firms Should Consider
Now what we have listed above is just the bare minimum that all successful law firms should be tackling.
There are so many marketing tactics and advertising ideas for law firm growth in the world of law firm marketing that lawyers should consider, including:
Content Marketing for Law Firms
Informative content like blog posts, in-depth landing pages, social media posts, short videos, and other resources are crucial if you want to attract clients to your law firm’s website.
Most law firms will get more from their marketing budget over the long term if they invest in content marketing services from a reputable law firm marketing company.
Converstion Funnels for Law Firms
Conversion funnels basically refers to the “buyer’s journey.” This is the journey that all buyers have to go through before buying a specific product or service.
It’s important for law firms to have conversion funnels that will not only attract clients but keep them until the very end when they hopefully pay for your services.
The better your strategy and marketing efforts are for search engines and pay-per-click advertising, the more conversions your law practice will get.
Data and Analytics for Lawyer Marketing
What is your target audience, and how are they responding to you?
Monitoring KPIs (key performance indicators) and metrics can not only help you answer these questions but bring in new clients too. If your law practice doesn’t know where your marketing dollars are going, you could be wasting a good portion of your online marketing budget.
Email Marketing for Law Firms
A solid email marketing strategy can help you get contact information from prospective clients while also maintaining the attorney-client relationship with current and past clients. If you want to reach more potential clients that have already expressed interest in your law firm, this could be a helpful marketing tool for your law firm.
Paid Ad Campaigns for Law Firms
Paid Ad Campaigns can include pay-per-click (PPC) ads, social media ads, sponsored listings,Local Service Ads for lawyers and more.
Search Engine Marketing for Law Firms
Search Engine Marketing, also known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is crucial for both big and small law firms.
Google is the world’s largest search engine, and everyone goes there to search for just about anything, from fun facts to products and services.
Law firm SEO involves getting your law firm up to the top of Google search results without spending thousands of dollars from your marketing budget on Google ads.
Search engines like Google have very complex algorithms that can change on a regular basis. That’s why it’s so important to hire a team of professionals who can develop a good marketing strategy to get your law firm to pop up first.
Social Media Marketing for Law Firms
In our increasingly online world, it’s important for all local businesses to leverage social media.
A good social media presence can be a powerful marketing tool, especially for attracting clients in younger generations.
Many potential clients may turn to your social media platforms in order to do more research on your law firm or legal services. Meanwhile, satisfied clients may turn to social media to talk about how wonderful your services are, which can give you more leads.
Either way, using social media to your advantage is an important part of law firm marketing.
Testing Your Marketing Efforts
A big part of finding the best digital marketing strategy for your law firm is testing, adjusting, and then testing again. All law firms are different depending on practice areas and geographic location. An online marketing strategy that works for one law firm may not work for another.
Law Firm Marketing Team Roles
When you work with a professional digital marketing team like Digital Logic, you can expect your marketing budget to go towards roles like developing your law firm marketing plan, law firm SEO, PPC advertising, content marketing, and lead nurturing.
Legal Marketing Team Roles: Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization leads to the organic acquisition of new clients. In other words, you don’t have to use your marketing budget to advertise your business and bring in prospective clients.
Instead, these clients come to you for free through a solid SEO strategy.
Local SEO for law firms often involves creating high-quality content with relevant keywords on your website that ranks well on Google. In our increasingly online world, every new business and law firm can reap the benefits of local SEO.
SEO also involves social media marketing and any other tactic that essentially “spreads the word” about your law firm.
Basically, any type of content that brings more traffic to your website should be the priority for lawyer marketing.
At Digital Logic, we offer professional SEO services for lawyers.
Legal Marketing Team Roles: PPC Advertising
What does PPC mean for your business?
Meanwhile, paid acquisition (PPC advertising) means that you pay for Google ads or social media ads to bring more traffic to a law firm website.
PPC advertisement is a great financial investment because a digital marketing team will use market research to know which type of paid ads will target clients. They know which practice areas are most Googled and sought after, so they will likely boost those practice areas to prospective clients.
The main goal of paid ads is to complete the buyer’s journey (more on this next), or turn leads into actual paying clients. Meanwhile, SEO and content marketing mostly focus on attracting clients and getting that target audience to the decision phase.
When you’re looking for a law firm PPC manager, you really should only consider marketers that have a good understanding of organic content, as well as pay-per-click advertising, so that they can integrate the pieces of content or landing pages that serve as assets for the paid ad campaign.
At Digital Logic, we offer law firm PPC management services.
Legal Marketing Team Roles: Content Marketing
Content marketing is crucial for attracting potential clients and moving them all the way through the buyer’s journey.
All content on your law firm’s website must have a good mix of logic and emotion in order to attract and keep the client. Additionally, each blog post and landing page must build your law firm’s brand.
An experienced content team at a digital marketing company knows exactly how to tailor your law firm’s content so that you can get more clients.
We do this through topic and keyword research.
Basically, we want to know: which legal topics and keywords are people in your area Googling? Are these topics or keywords related to one of your practice areas? And how can we write a blog post or a page that will rank well enough on Google so that it pops up at the top of a client’s search results? And finally: how can we integrate both logic and emotion into a piece of content so that we can get a client from the awareness stage all the way to the decision stage?
Before you invest in or implement any paid or organic search efforts, your law firm’s creative and content team should clearly understand your brand voice, your overall marketing message, and your law firm’s brand identity, including colors, fonts, and iconography.
How Law Firm Content Marketing Helps Guide Prospective Clients Through the Buyer’s Journey
Before you hire a lawyer marketing company to handle all your SEO and content marketing needs, it’s important to have a good understanding of the buyer’s journey or digital customer journey.
Awareness Stage for Potential Clients
During this stage, a local business or law firm will make efforts to catch the attention of new clients.
The clients usually have a problem that needs to be solved, but they’re not aware of that yet.
Drawing a client’s attention and subtly letting them know that they have a problem is often achieved through various marketing channels, such as a good law firm website or a strong social media presence. Informative content that appeals to the emotions is ideal to keep potential clients moving forward in the buyer’s journey.
Consideration Stage for Potential Clients
During this phase, the client realizes they have a problem that could be solved by hiring a lawyer.
So they consider hiring a lawyer, but they don’t really know what type of lawyer can help them. They may spend time gaining legal knowledge through Google or social media. The best type of content for this stage involved both logic and emotion.
Evaluation Stage for Potential Clients
During this stage, the prospective client is evaluating whether to hire you or one of your local competitors. Again, logical marketing initiatives are best. You want content that’s going to push them to decide on you.
Decision Stage for Potential Clients
In this stage, the prospective client is ready to hire someone, whether that be you or your top competitor.
They may have never hired a lawyer for anything before, so they may be apprehensive about whether they’re making the right decision.
Your law firm’s website and content must have plenty of logic and emotional appeal so that the client can be assured they’re doing the right thing.
Loyalty Stage for Legal Clients
This is the stage where prospective clients become actual paying clients.
You must continue to reassure them that they made the right choice in hiring your legal assistance over your competitors. You do this by providing excellent and compassionate legal services that get them the results they need.
Then, once it’s all said and done, they will keep you in mind in the future if they ever need legal assistance again. Additionally, they may leave you positive reviews online and tell their peers about your quality legal services.
Legal Marketing Team Roles: Lead Nurturing
SEO, PPC advertising, and high-quality content are often not enough to turn leads into paying clients.
Investing in legal services is a big decision that often requires a big check. It takes a lot less effort to sell a single inexpensive product.
Even still, potential buyers may need some subtle encouragement to take out their credit cards and actually make the purchase. On average, potential clients are going to need much more nudging and “nurturing” to move them in the right direction.
Lead nurturing will fall into the hands of your digital marketing team.
We will put your marketing dollars towards two main things: promotion and retention. Promotion is about getting the word out about your law firm and legal services. Meanwhile, retention is about keeping that relationship going with past clients.
Your law firm marketing professionals can often accomplish both promotion and retention through local, in-person events, email campaigns, newsletters, and Google ads. The retention nurturing efforts must be worded a bit differently to appeal to the loyalty of those clients.
The team at Digital Logic has what it takes to create an individualized lead nurturing strategy for your law firm.
Types of Law Firm Marketing Teams
Just like there are many types of lawyers to choose from, there are many types of marketing teams to choose from, as well.
Each type of marketing team has its own set of pros and cons that you must consider before making a decision. Just like your clients, you too will have to travel through the buyer’s journey before initiating a solid law firm marketing plan.
In-House Marketing Team
An in-house marketing team is one that only works for you.
They come to your law office every day, learn the specifics of your practice areas, get to know your team, and create a legal marketing strategy just for you. The best part about having an in-house marketing team is that it’s easy to communicate with them because they essentially work with you. There’s no need to communicate only through email or Zoom.
Something important to realize, though, is that you will need to hire more than one person to handle your law firm’s marketing efforts.
As you can imagine, the research, writing, graphic design, and strategy involved must be split up between multiple people. So you will have to pay multiple people, instead of making just one monthly payment to an agency.
The biggest downside about having an in-house team is that you may have to deal with less-than-ideal results from your marketing campaigns as well as employee turnover.
Your marketing team may not like their job or work environment, or they may just experience burnout. As a result, they may quit, and you will have to deal with hiring more people if that happens.
Law Firm Marketing Agency
A marketing company, like Digital Logic, will have ample experience in not only law firm marketing, but marketing for other types of businesses as well. We’ve won many clients over with our law firm website design services.
A law firm advertising agency will worry about and accomplish all necessary marketing tactics, so you don’t have to.
The biggest downside of hiring a digital marketing agency is that they may not be in your local area, so they will have to work harder to get to know your brand, your staff, your goals, and your local competitors.
Additionally, you will have to communicate regularly with your agency via emails, phone calls, and Zoom meetings. If you don’t communicate frequently enough to approve your content, your agency will struggle to get you the desired results in the timeframe you want.
Consistent communication with your digital marketing company is crucial for your success.
Hybrid Legal Marketing Team
A hybrid law firm marketing team is basically a combination of the two aforementioned teams. You may have an agency, but you may also have one or more in-house people who can work together with you and your agency.
A hybrid team will have both types of benefits – you’ll have a team that knows your brand and your staff that you can easily communicate with AND you’ll have a team of experienced professionals.
The biggest downside with a hybrid team is that the in-house team may struggle to communicate effectively with the agency about brand vision and goals.
Additionally, the in-house team may not have as much knowledge and experience in law firm marketing as the agency does.
So, the bottom line, there is potential for a major disconnect between the two teams, which could make marketing campaigns suffer as a result.
How Much Should a Law Firm Spend on Marketing?
According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, law firms should devote around 10% of your firm’s gross revenue to digital marketing efforts. This number changes based on your law firm’s location, level of competition, practice areas, and other factors.
We provide more information here: How much should a law firm spend on a marketing budget?
Work With an Experienced Digital Marketing Agency to Grow Your Law Firm
The key to any successful law firm marketing campaign is the ability of the team to work together and pivot when necessary to accomplish common goals. Law firms have specific needs, so it’s important that you work with a legal marketing company that understands those needs, ensures your content is accurate, and provides you with options for your creatives and execution.
Digital Logic is a full-service marketing agency that has ample experience in not only law firm marketing, but we stay up-to-date on legal niches, such as bankruptcy lawyer marketing, criminal defense marketing, estate planning law marketing, family law marketing, immigration law marketing, and personal injury marketing.
Our well-researched digital marketing tactics are guaranteed to not only bring more organic traffic to your website but get you more clients too.
If you’re interested in what we can possibly do for you, check out our free law firm competitive analysis.
