It's measurable, flexible and generates loads of enquiries; I’m going to share with you 9 reasons that lawyers need digital marketing.
Lawyers need digital marketing for law firms (or online marketing) to generate new enquiries from online channels such as Google and social media. Budgets can be scaled up and down as needed, making most digital marketing more affordable and measurable that traditional law firm marketing.
Traditional vs digital marketing
It's important to clarify why digital marketing is different than other marketing.
People tend to lump mediums like radio, newspaper and TV advertising into the category of “old” marketing.
To my mind there is no old and new marketing, there is just digital marketing.
That's not to say that there is no place for advertising your business on local radio stations or newspaper and magazines, but the uptake in in using digital devices to browse the internet and find products and services has grown so dramatically over the past 10-years that it has become a bit of a no-brainer for law firms.
In short, digital marketing is a good idea for law firms because your potential clients are online.
You can more precisely measure the return on investment for your marketing spend.
While you can calculate how much money goes into both traditional and digital marketing methods it can often be unclear as to how many customers made an enquiry because they heard your radio ad.
With digital marketing, everything is measurable. That means you should know exactly where your calls and your enquiry forms are coming from, whether it be from SEO paid search on Google or social media ads.
Create a strategy
In order to make your law firm grow, you need to increase the number of relevant enquiries that you get. So your strategy is to get more enquiries.
Your strategy is a way of outlining the series of steps that you're going to take to get more enquiries and the fastest way to do that to use digital channels such as search engines and social media.
Creating a strategy allows you to understand how you want your law firm to be perceived by potential clients.
You'll then be able to understand how to position your firm, how to get it in front of potential clients and then the resources and budget you need to make that happen.
Understand your customers
Another reason lawyers need digital marketing is that it provides loads of data that can help make your business better.
For every legal service that your law firm provides, you should create user-personas.
This allows you to understand the problems of the people you are targeting as potential clients.
Creating these users stories helps you to create user journeys on your website or across your online channels that can engage and persuade potential clients to make an enquiry with you.
For example what is it that will motivate somebody who's suffered an injury or accident that wasn't their fault, to get in touch with you.
What is their background, what devices do they use and what is it they're looking for from a law firm?
Connect with customers who are actually looking for you
In Google there are over 3.5 billion searches per day.
So when people have a legal problem, it’s safe to say that Google is one of the first ports of call.
Whether people are looking for a local solicitor and search “Solicitors in Birmingham” or an answer to a legal question “Do unmarried fathers have any rights?”, the first thing you should do is see if your website can feature prominently in the search results in Google.
There are two really effective ways to do this:
1) PPC for law firms
PPC marketing for lawyers is another reason lawyers need digital marketing.
It's an effective way of getting immediate visibility in Google search engine results by creating ads that are specific to a search term.
You need to be aware of which search terms it is that you want to bid on and then create both ads and website landing pages that are relevant to that search term.
You'll be charged when somebody clicks on one of your ads in a search engine results page. Just be aware that some services are very competitive for example you can pay over £50 or for one click on personal injury related search terms.
2. SEO
If you get your SEO strategy right, then you could have a steady flow of incoming website traffic for months and years to come.
If you don't believe me, take a look at this law firm case study where we increased the website traffic and enquiries by over 1000% and it continues to grow.
To start generating free traffic from search engines and you need to look at a few things:
- How is your website performing organically at present?
- What search terms can you optimise your website for?
- Which of the above are high enough volume and low enough competition for you to rank?
- Can Google crawl and index your website?
- Which links can you get from other websites to help show Google that your website should be highly ranked?
Find our more about SEO for solicitors.
Build awareness via social media
Social media platforms present a great way for your law firm to build brand awareness.
Building relationships on social media channels means you can build an audience who are prepared to amplify your content.
For example if you post an insightful article on Facebook to an audience of 500 people, that message could be shared by enough of those people that the original post gets 5 times more eyeballs on it.
Creating connections on Linkedin is a great way of building an audience for commercial legal services - not to mention the fact that business people may also need personal legal services.
Social media can also provide you with a great additional customer service channel. If you're short on staff and happy to get enquiries from various different channels, you can use Facebook messenger whereby people can ask you questions and you receive them directly on your mobile through the Facebook Messenger app for example.
Find out more about how to market law firms on social media.
Social media ads
Earlier on we looked at how useful it is to use PPC to connect the customers who are actively looking for your services.
Social media ads are a great way of connecting with potential clients who are passive.
For example of you offer legal help for families by doing a “reach” campaign on Facebook and Instagram. This can be a cost-effective way of getting your law firm in front of parents with kids and letting them know that you are there to provide legal assistance should they require it.
Across Facebook Instagram and Linkedin you can create single image ads or even use video ads to build awareness and generate engagement for your law firm.
LinkedIn and Facebook ads are also great ways of finding new, talented and staff members.
Whether you are looking to recruit people who are already in the industry or admin and paralegal staff, social media channels and effective way of getting applicants.
Remarketing
This is where things get clever.
You can use website cookies to anonymously track behaviours and interests, then serve relevant ads to people when they are browsing third party digital marketing channels, like social media channels.
These are the ads that seem to follow you around the internet when you've been on a retailer or travel website. Well if these ads are served to you at the right time on the right device, they can be very effective.
It could be that somebody has been on your website on the conveyancing-quote page, but not proceeded to get a quote.
Next time they're looking at a property website, your ad could be appear in front of them and remind them that you're there if they need any help and they might be able to proceed and get a quote from you.
You need to have code on your website to capture cookies and build lists, then also have the relevant GDPR notifications in place.
Turn your legal website into a sales machine
Your law firm website can be your biggest business development tool and it can work hard when you aren't even thinking about it. It's the hub of your digital marketing strategy.
By optimising your web pages for sales and creating clear user journeys that allow people to find information, you can dramatically increase the number of people who land on your site vs the number of people who make an enquiry.
Think about how you structure every page on your website. Do you lead with a benefits to the visitor or do you start talking about yourself in platitudes; "We are different." "We understand you".
What is it that's going to motivate people to make an enquiry and how obvious is that across your web pages.
Most importantly you should create a mobile optimised version of your website.
You can measure everything
Digital marketing makes it easy to measure everything.
This means that if you spend £3,000 or $5,000 on your marketing in 1-month you should be able to tell exactly what the return on that has been.
You have a clear cost per enquiry, not just for your marketing efforts but for every channel. For example has social media bEEN as cost-effective for you in one month as Google ads have been? What's your investments in SEO worth after 3 to 6-months?
While it's easy to get blinded by all of the stats and figures associated with digital marketing, it's also very beneficial to tell you what works, what doesn't and allow you to make quick changes to benefit any campaign.
See if we can persuade you why lawyers need digital marketing. Get in touch here.