Your law firm can get more legal clients online by understanding who your ideal clients are, where they spend their time and how likely they'll be to use your law firm.
If you want to know how to get legal clients, here are 11 things that will take your legal marketing to the next level (no. 7 is often the most profitable).
1. Have a simple strategy
If you are you looking to get more new clients for your law firm, then you have to have an understanding of how many people are out there and how you're going to reach them in a cost-efficient way.
Getting someone to make an enquiry online is one thing, but getting them to turn into a paying client is another. So ask yourself the following questions:
Answering these two questions will help you determine how many website visitors, social media interactions and other online interactions you’ll need in order to generate enquiries. This helps you create the tasks in your law firm marketing strategy.
You can then determine how much time, resource and on which channels you need to do this.
Do you jump straight in and hire a social media manager or should you spend hours, yourself creating compelling social content that people want to engage with? Is social media important or should you invest time and money on paid ads across social media and search engines like Google.
What is the fastest and most cost-effective way to attract potential clients?
SEO, paid ads, social media, content marketing and referrals are all great ways to get clients online.
SEO can be particularly effective if done right. Find out how we increase website traffic by 918% using SEO.
Google ads is a great place to start. It's a fast way to show your website to people actively looking for your services. As a new lawyer looking for clients, you could emphasise that you are new and different, this may go against any negative perceptions of the legal sector and encourage visits to your website (and hopefully new client enquiries).
Find out more about marketing for law firms.
2. What makes you the best law firm?
This is about understanding expectations of the audience as they visit your website and engage with your content. It also needs to be evidenced from the first interaction with you, whether it be in a search engine results page or an ad from social media.
You need to convince your potential clients why they should become clients and then deliver on that promise. This needs to be different or delivered differently to your competitors, because people will be shopping around to find the most appealing solution to their legal problem. This often boils down to cost and customer service.
Some common ways that you can persuade potential clients:
And what if everybody near you is doing the same thing? Let's face it, everyone is local, friendly and cost-effective.
Well that's where your brand comes in and that's what your personality and the personality of staff needs to be clear. If people trust you, like you, and see that you’ve got great results for other clients, they're more likely to want to make an enquiry and instruct a solicitor.
3. Past clients can help
Reviews are massive online and help us all to make decisions about the product or service we’re about to try.
Ask every satisfied client for a referral and make sure you keep them engaged as your case evolves, but also after the event to ensure that they are happy to leave you a positive review and tell their friends about the services you provided.
Familiarise yourself with the places that you want people to see your reviews.
Common channels include Google Search results pages via your Google business account, Facebook reviews and reviews in other directories such as Yell and Yelp.
There are also a number of business directories you may want to be visible on.
To get reviews, make it part of your your client facing process:
4. Hold “meetups” or events (or even virtual meetups)
What better time than during a global pandemic to hold a virtual meetup?
Post-pandemic you could hire a venue (who doesn’t like free food). This is particularly useful for commercial law firms. The theme could be business specific, such as contracts, commercial property or even what the latest legislation means to businesses.
In this case you are essentially sponsoring the event and have a network of people to email in future.
Go where your competitors don't! Instagram is an example of a channel often overlooked by law firms. But the reality is that your target customers use it.
According to twiends.com
"Having an Instagram account means you can have “insta” access to whatever fanbase or target audience you desire through one simple concept: the follower."
5. Where to advertise
There is still a place for TV, radio and newspaper ads and I don't want to say that they are dead.
I would recommend that your law firm uses Google ads (formerly Google Adwords), Facebook, Instagram and YouTube ads as a way of reaching potential new clients where they are and inspiring them to take action.
This can be a cost-effective way of reaching new clients quickly. Most importantly, if you get the targeting right, you can be pretty sure you are reaching the most relevant people.
Paid ads work by deciding who you want your law firm to target. Then creating some compelling ad copy, visuals or video and getting in front of your audience with the right message at the right time, on the right device.
You can figure out how much a new, paying client is worth to you and then work backwards to determine how much you can invest in paid media.
Find out more about PPC marketing for lawyers.
6. Be more persuasive
It's likely that about 90% of visitors to your law firm website won't make an enquiry there and then. So you need to be aware of ways to re-engage them.
Understand where potential new clients are in the decision-making process, for example are they just looking for information on a particular subject or are they desperate for the service there and then (as people looking for criminal services may be).
Don't just show the same ad to everybody.
Someone may have looked at a service page but not made an enquiry and you need to think about why that happened. Do they need reassurances on price, quality of service or your experience?
How can you give them more information to help them make a decision?
A brief overview of re-engaging visitors (who did not enquire) to your law firm website
7. Invest in SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Search engine optimization is a long-term strategy for getting more relevant, qualified traffic to your website via search engines (mainly Google). This falls into 2 key areas
- How search engines, like Google, crawl and understand your website
- How users interact with your website
When it comes to SEO for solicitors, you should consider how Google views your site, but more importantly starts with what your user is looking for and how you can add value and help them.
Think about it... if someone searches for "personal injury solicitors near me" - you could pay upwards of £40 for one click in Google ads, because it is so competitive. However if your website appears in the organic positions, you'll have a steady flow of relevant traffic, for free.
It's a perfect way to get clients, because your visitors are ready to enquire (they're searching for you) and if you can get your website content and link building for law firms right, then you'll stay ahead of competitors for a long time.
8. Find partners
Estate agents, other law firms, business clients, medical experts, all represent opportunities for partnerships, which is really useful for link building purposes (a really important Factor when it comes to SEO) and also for promotional purposes.
Partners can share your content, your brand messages and they give you referrals.
How can you provide your partner with value, for example if you work regularly with estate agents, can you provide a legal guide to conveyancing that their audience might find useful. It could even be published on their website.
9. Feature your clients
Similar to showcasing reviews to demonstrate the successful work you've done for clients, you could also try and feature them in videos, images and case studies. This really helps potential clients to make a decision, demonstrating how you've helped people like them.
It is obviously tricky to feature clients using “distress” services such as family law, however for services like conveyancing there are some really positive stories to tell publicly.
10. Conversion optimisation
It's important to understand what stage in your marketing strategy development you should start looking at conversion optimisation.
This is the process of looking at how many people visit a website vs how many go on to make an enquiry.
It tends to be most useful when you get to a stage where you have a lot of visitors to your site and you can make assessments on how it is performing, for example are my headlines doing what they should? Could my enquiry forms be more persuasive? Are there any other elements such as video testimonials or reviews that could be applied to the page to encourage more visitors to enquire?
For new sites, this is less important (providing you’ve used someone who knows what they are doing to design your site). New websites should focus primarily with driving more awareness and traffic before looking at website behaviour in any depth.
11. Understand your data
The great thing about digital marketing for law firms is that data is everywhere.
You might be really happy that you have tripled your website traffic in the space of a month, but if your conversion rates (website visitors vs. people enquiring) has not improved, then you might be celebrating the wrong statistic.
You want to understand which pages and services are performing well in terms of generating enquiries and which areas you need to improve. Establish which metrics are the most important and look at data over a reasonable time frame. For example don’t panic if your website traffic dips compared to yesterday or last week as long as it has gone up month on month or quarter on quarter.
Do you want to find out how your law firm can get clients online? Make an enquiry here.