Key takeaways
- Defining your brand and the unique value you provide will set you apart from other law firms
- Reviews, awards, and certifications will help build trust with potential clients and show you’re an expert in the space
- SEO tactics, social media marketing, and content marketing can help generate leads without enlisting expensive marketing firms
Choosing the right lawyer is a decision clients don’t take lightly. They need a law firm they can trust to get them the best possible outcome. With plenty of competition from other law firms in your area, how can you set yourself apart and win new clients?
Your attorney marketing strategy needs to communicate that you’re a reputable firm with the expertise to win cases and produce positive results. However, many lawyers don’t know how to relay this to potential clients and struggle to choose the appropriate marketing channels.
There are six areas you can focus on to strengthen your legal marketing efforts. Use this attorney marketing guide to define your firm’s brand, gain the trust of potential clients, and generate new leads.
1. Define your brand and attorney marketing strategy
A successful law firm is built on a recognizable and memorable brand. It involves homing in on your specialties and defining what makes your law practice different from the competition.
Make sure your law firm branding is crystal clear about the value you provide to clients, the core benefits of your service, and how you’re different from other firms. This is known as your unique value proposition (UVP). Your UVP should appear on all of your marketing materials and speak to the unique mission of your law firm.
You can differentiate your legal services by specializing in a certain legal area, serving a particular target audience, offering specific benefits, and communicating your values. Here are a few examples:
- Practice area: Family law, personal injury, or criminal defense
- Target audience or demographics: Business owners, fathers or mothers going through a divorce, or people in a certain geographic region
- Specific benefits: Affordable services, approachable legal staff, or extensive experience
- Values: Building community, diversity and inclusion, or environmental sustainability
Once you’ve determined your legal marketing strategy and what sets you apart from competitors, you can use these details across all your marketing efforts, including your webpage, online advertising, and social media profiles.
2. Establish credibility and build trust with potential clients
People who need an attorney must be assured they’re hiring one they can trust. You can gain potential clients’ trust and future referrals by highlighting your awards, certifications, customer reviews, and case studies.
If you have legal industry awards, certifications, or organizational memberships under your belt, be sure to incorporate these on your website, email marketing, landing pages, and in other marketing campaigns. For example, some law firms leverage awards by putting badges on their site like “Best Attorneys of America” or “2022 Top 10 Client Satisfaction.”
Using client reviews and case studies is an effective way to establish credibility in the legal space. If you provide excellent customer service and facilitate positive legal outcomes, your clients will be more likely to leave testimonials on review sites like Yelp. You can then feature these reviews on your website and referrals webpage for potential clients to see.
You can also include the result of each court case with the testimonial to prove your ability to win cases and satisfy your clients. For instance, you can list the details like “not guilty,” “case dismissed,” or the monetary compensation you won for your client.
3. Show your expertise with social media marketing
Social media marketing can build brand awareness and draw new business to your firm. You can leverage social media platforms to show you’re an expert in your specialization and to reach new prospective clients.
LinkedIn is one platform law firms use to promote their business in a professional manner. LinkedIn focuses primarily on professional content and is more formal than other social networks, making it a good match for lawyer marketing.
You can use LinkedIn to post links to content on your website, like blog articles or legal tips. You can also engage with other professionals who could potentially become new clients.
For example, let’s say there’s a discussion with your peers regarding new business tax laws. You can contribute to the conversation, provide links to relevant articles, and even encourage people to reach out with a phone call if they have more detailed questions.
4. Join online review platforms to show off your firm
Many potential clients will want to get a second opinion before choosing you as their lawyer. One way for them to research your law firm is through online review platforms that are loaded with testimonials from your previous clients.
Consumers put a great deal of trust in online reviews. In fact, 79% trust online reviews as much as receiving a personal recommendation from family or friends.
Online review platforms like Yelp provide an easy way for potential clients to research your business before deciding if you’re the right fit. Yelp allows you to create your own business description, add your address, website, and phone number, and build an online presence for your law office—all for free.
Most importantly, reviews provide a first-hand glimpse into your business and show potential clients how effective you are at ensuring positive outcomes for your previous clients.
5. Leverage SEO tactics to outrank your competitors
Fine-tuning your search engine presence will help you land clients online and increase conversion rates. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your online content to rank higher on search engine results pages.
The goal is to be among the first search results people see when they are conducting online research. In fact, less than 1% of users will even consider the second page of results. For these reasons, it’s crucial to boost your firm’s homepage and other content to the first page of search results for terms related to your business.
One effective SEO tactic involves improving the speed of your website. Almost 40% of visitors will immediately leave a site if it takes more than five seconds to load.
A simple way to drastically improve the speed of your site is by reducing the size of your images and minimizing file sizes. You can adjust your image file sizes by using a free image compressor like TinyPNG.
6. Generate site traffic with content marketing
Your law firm’s website serves as the digital face of your company and has the potential to generate a substantial amount of leads for your firm. But for your website to have an impact, you have to get people there first. That’s where content marketing comes in.
Content marketing involves creating pieces of digital content—like articles, infographics, or white papers—and using them to drive people to your website.
Blogging is one online marketing tactic that can draw people to your site and turn them into clients with helpful information. However, there’s more to it than simply writing articles about whatever comes to mind. To get the most out of your blog and turn it into a lead generation machine, develop your own keyword strategy by conducting keyword research to help you develop high-quality content.
Conducting keyword research entails using a keyword research tool—like Ahref’s Keyword Generator or Semrush—to find topics that have high search traffic and are relatively easy to rank for on search engines. For example, you may find that many people are searching for terms like “cost of traffic violations” or “benefits of a business attorney.”
Next, you’ll create a list of terms and generate article ideas for each keyword, then write one high-quality article for each keyword you find. For instance, you could craft an article titled “Top 10 Benefits of a Business Attorney.”
Once you have a list of articles, set a publishing schedule and start writing. You can write one or two articles per week to start and then increase if you feel it’s necessary. Stay consistent and stick to your content calendar if you want to see an uptick in your site traffic and conversion rates.
If you’re not confident in your writing abilities or simply don’t have the time, you can always hire content marketers on websites like Upwork to help build your content library and online reputation.
Attorney marketing is built on trust, expertise, and credibility
Your legal marketing strategy should showcase your trust, expertise, and credibility—precisely what potential clients want.
It starts with establishing your brand and being perfectly clear about what value you provide your clients. From there, you can move onto other marketing tactics like social media marketing, content marketing, and SEO.
Try the above law firm marketing ideas to propel your firm to the next level. To keep the ball rolling, check out these tips for marketing a law firm in a digital world.
