Marketing For Criminal Defense Attorney: 8 Important Strategies

Strategic marketing for criminal defense attorneys is important for your law firm’s success. People won’t hire you if they don’t know your law firm exists. 

With an effective marketing strategy, you can improve your law firm’s online visibility. An improved visibility means more prospects will be aware of your firm, evaluate and hire you with ease. 

Your marketing strategy is important. It will determine if you’ll ever achieve your targeted goal or not. So, here, we’re going to discuss effective marketing strategies for criminal defense attorneys. We’ll discuss marketing strategies you can implement to make your law firm successful. Read on!

What Is Marketing For Criminal Defense Attorneys?

Marketing a criminal defense law firm involves improving the firm’s popularity online and offline. However, most businesses will focus on enhancing the firm’s online visibility, as online marketing is more budget-friendly and yields better results. 

Marketing involves creating a massive awareness for your brand. It can be traditional (word of mouth, etc) or online (SEO, PPC, email marketing, etc). With an effective marketing strategy, you can make it easier for potential clients to find your law firm. 

The more people know about your criminal defense law firm, and the excellent work you’re doing, the more interested they’ll become. If you have glowing reviews and achievements, it’ll be easier to convince new prospects to hire you for their criminal defense cases. 

Importance Of Marketing For Criminal Defense Attorney

There are several reasons marketing a criminal defense law firm is beneficial. Let’s discuss each of those reasons. 

1. Increase brand popularity:

Being popular online and offline can benefit your business. When your criminal defense law firm becomes the first name on the lips of people, new prospects will trust you easily.

Do you know why? The fact that you’re popular means there’s something special about your criminal defense legal firm. That’s how most potential clients will see it. 

People will only recommend legal firms they trust can deliver results. Everyone knows how sensitive legal issues are, even more so for criminal cases. 

Gaining online popularity via effective marketing will benefit your law firm. You’ll get constant recommendations and patronage. 

2. Increase your caseloads:

If you want more cases to challenge your ability and increase your achievements, consider kick-starting effective marketing procedures. When you market your criminal defense law firm, there’s a high possibility of new prospects learning about your law firm. 

You can combine diverse marketing strategies to improve the chance of potential clients learning about your law firm and hiring you. Combine search engine marketing and PPC. But do so only if you have a sound knowledge of both strategies. 

3. Generate more revenue:

With an effective marketing strategy, your law firm can start generating more revenue. More cases mean more revenue for your firm.

Higher revenue means your law firm will have the capacity to expand or give back to the community. 

You don’t have to break the bank to run an effective marketing strategy. With online marketing strategies like SEO, you can improve your criminal defense law firm’s online visibility and generate better ROI. 

Actionable Tip: The most important thing is to choose a law firm marketing agency or expert if you don’t plan to conduct your marketing processes yourself. Hire an online marketing expert who will decide the best strategy to create awareness for your brand.

The whole essence of criminal defense legal firm marketing is to create awareness. It involves making more people aware of your law firm and the services you render. 

The first step in legal firm marketing is to get people to know your law firm exists. Then, when they visit your website, consume your content, and check out your legal services and achievements, they’ll be more convinced to hire you for their cases. 

4. Build trust and confidence of potential clients: 

Trust is the foundation of every successful business. Prospects are more willing to do business with a law firm they trust. 

Legal issues are highly sensitive. That’s why everyone wants to hire the best legal team for their cases. 

The reason anyone would hire you to represent them in court is because they trust you. They believe you can help them get justice or freedom. They feel you can help them walk out from the courtroom victorious.

With an effective marketing strategy, such as creating a Google Business Profile or adding your law firm to other reputable online directories, you can build trust. 

How does adding your law firm to online directories help you build trust? 

It’s simple. With a Google Business Profile, you can ask your satisfied customers to give your law firm reviews. However, don’t try to influence their reviews. Let it come from them genuinely. 

If you try to manipulate your clients to give you a 5-star rating and glowing reviews, they’ll assume that you did the same for the other reviews you had. With this, doubts will start creeping into their minds. So, don’t ever try to manipulate clients’ reviews. 

5. Gain a competitive edge:

With effective marketing strategies, your criminal defense attorney law firm can gain a competitive edge. Strategies like search engine optimization (SEO) can help you rank high in search engines. 

Once you start ranking high in the search engine result pages (SERPs), prospects will find you easily. You’ll begin to get higher, more organic traffic and requests to represent different individuals in court. 

Unlike pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization will provide sustainable traffic. Additionally, once you rank high, you’ll maintain your position for a long period, provided you follow SEO best practices. 

Your competitors can’t overtake you in the search engine result pages overnight. That’s why search engine optimization is an important strategy for law firms looking to gain a competitive edge.

With pay-per-click advertising, your site will rank on the search result page. Unfortunately, once the money in your ads account is exhausted, your site will disappear from the search engine. 

With search engine optimization, your site won’t rank high overnight. It might take a few weeks to months. But if you keep optimizing and fine-tuning your strategy, you’ll rank high in search engines. Additionally, you’ll gain a competitive edge. 

How To Do Effective Marketing For Criminal Defense Attorney

Here, we’re going to discuss diverse marketing strategies to help law firms achieve marketing goals. These strategies are ideal for criminal defense law firms but will work for other legal practices. Let’s jump in!

1. Define your brand’s uniqueness:

Prospects won’t choose you because you’re a criminal defense lawyer. Sometimes, the fact that you have a professional-looking website and quality content won’t be enough to convince potential clients. 

Criminal defense cases are highly sensitive. Potential clients will scrutinize you with everything before making any commitment. 

So, define your criminal defense law firm’s uniqueness using the following: 

• State your qualifications and expertise.
• Mention your practice area and niche. 
• Your exceptional customer support can convince prospects that you are serious. So, include it while defining your brand. 
• State the number of cases you have won. Add case studies, too. 
• Your achievements can convince prospects to hire you, and it mustn’t be only about the cases you have won. You can state other related achievements. These are achievements that make you unique, trustworthy, and well-placed to help clients seeking justice or freedom in a criminal defense case. 
• Include testimonials and reviews of satisfied clients. Ensure the reviews are genuine and verifiable. As a law firm, it’s important to shield your reputation. It’s unprofessional to consider soliciting clients to give you glowing reviews. 
• Have flexible and secured payment options. People are very careful when conducting online transactions. Make potential clients trust you more by providing varied and secured payment options. 
• Offer free consultations. An individual who approaches you for free consultation today might become a paying client tomorrow. It’s impossible for someone who approached you for legal advice to hire someone to represent them in court. 

2. Know your ideal clients:

Most criminal defense lawyers or firms accept whoever walks through the day as a client. The idea is, as far as it’s a criminal defense case, they are in! But that shouldn’t be the case. 

As a criminal defense law firm, you need to choose your clients carefully. Know the cases you have a high chance of winning and go for those. Be honest with your clients. Let them know their chances of winning a legal battle. 

People will judge you based on the number of cases you have won. So, as much as you want to increase your caseloads and generate more revenue, you have to consider your reputation. 

With a solid reputation, you’ll go as far as a law firm. You’ll get recommendations and positive reviews from satisfied clients. 

Reviews might seem like normal complements, but they are not. Most potential clients will read reviews about your criminal defense law firm before making a move. 

3. Go after your ideal clients:

Now that you have identified your potential clients, how do you get them to show interest in your legal services? How do you show potential clients that you’re the best legal firm for their criminal defense cases? 

You can attract prospects via content and other marketing strategies. But let’s focus on content. Your posts can attract cases if you target the right people. 

Check this out. “Are you in jail and need a criminal defense lawyer?”

The above heading shows the content is specifically for people in jail or facing persecution for criminal offenses. 

Now, here’s another topic. “Is your loved one in jail for a criminal offense and needs legal help?”

You can see who this second subject is trying to target – the family of the person facing criminal charges.  

When an individual is in jail for criminal offenses, the family members are the right people to target. They are the ones who have the freedom to search and contact the best lawyer to help free their loved ones. 

On the other hand, if you’re suing someone for criminal offenses, it’s obvious you won’t have an interest in both topics. That’s how it is. 

So, as a law firm, it’s important to go after your clients. Give them a reason to consider you. A person or family that wants to sue an individual for criminal-related offenses will appreciate content that explains how they can get justice. 

4. Build a great website:

Everything starts and ends on your website. Without a website, you can’t rank in search engines. Additionally, prospects won’t take you seriously. 

Having a social media profile is great. But you can’t compare a social media profile to a website. So it’s important to have a website, not just any website, but a great one. 

Here are the features of a quality website:

• Choose a simple domain name. Ensure your domain name is easy for potential clients to remember. Choose a concise name. Potential clients should remember your domain name easily. That way, they can recommend your law firm to others.
• Use a responsive design. A website with a responsive design will display its content perfectly in all screen sizes. Visitors can view the content on all devices. 
•  Make your website mobile-friendly. Google considers mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor. A mobile-friendly website delivers optimal user experience. Google also appreciates sites that function seamlessly on all mobile devices. Over 60% of website traffic comes from mobile devices. So, if you want to rank high and get maximum traffic from mobile searches, make your website mobile-friendly. 
• Use intuitive navigation. Making your website a breeze to navigate will improve dwell time and reduce bounce rate. Visitors will be able to learn more about your law firm if they can navigate your site. It will also enable them to gain access to your contact information. 
• Use clear labels for each menu. This will clear the confusion of prospects when navigating your website. It will enable them to navigate your website and gain access to relevant information about your law firm with ease. 
• Have a unique logo. Having a logo is essential for branding. Potential clients will be able to identify your law firm wherever they come across your logo. It would help if you also chose the ideal color palette and fonts. 
• Add profile pictures on your website.  This gives your criminal defense law firm a face. Add the photos of each member of your legal team, and provide important details about each. In other words, state the practice area, achievements, cases won, and other vital information that shows how each member of your legal team is. 
• Integrate videos into your site. This will support your site’s legal literature and make visitors spend a longer time on your website. The longer people stay on your website, the higher your dwell time. 
• Add a call to action on your website. A visitor seeking a criminal defense lawyer will respond to your CTA fast. Examples of CTAs include “Contact our team” or “Fill out our form.” You can utilize a different call to action to capture attention.    

Another important thing to consider is your contact information. Your website should have your contact information displayed on every page. Make your contact information visible so that prospects can contact you with ease whenever they want. 

You can also add a chatbot to your website to make navigating it much easier. However, remember that most visitors won’t be comfortable speaking to a chatbot alone. So, make it possible for prospects and clients to contact you whenever they want or if they aren’t satisfied with the chatbot’s responses. 

5. Implement an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy:

Search engine optimization is an important strategy every criminal defense legal firm needs. By implementing an effective SEO strategy, your law firm can secure more cases and generate more revenue. 

SEO involves a combination of various marketing strategies. It’s categorized into on-site, off-site, and local SEO. There’s also technical SEO, which focuses on the functionality of a website. These include website speed, mobile-friendliness, URL structure, and others. 

What is on-site SEO? It involves activities performed outside a website to improve ranking and organic traffic. It includes strategically placing your keywords in the content to improve search engine ranking.  

Here are places you should add your keywords when performing on-site search engine optimization. 

• Meta title
• Meta description
• Body of the content
• Alt text
• URL

When you strategically add your keywords in these places, you boost your chance of ranking high in search engines. However, ensure you avoid keyword cannibalization and keyword stuffing. Both are unethical SEO practices. 

Keyword cannibalization involves using the same keyword in two or more pages. When you do, Google won’t know the ideal page to rank and may abandon all the pages optimized with the same keyword.     

What’s off-site SEO? It involves activities performed outside a website to improve search ranking, traffic, and online reputation. Link building is an example of off-site search engine optimization.

6: Add your business to reputable online directories 

Did you know most people visit online directories to search for legal services? They do. Google isn’t the only place people go to search for information, products, or services. Most people also find directories more convenient when searching for information. 

Numerous directories you can add your business to are out there. However, your major focus should be to use reputable directories. Examples include Avvo, Martindale, Nolo, Justia, Org, Super Lawyers, etc. 

Google Business Profile (GBP) is another wonderful directory from which to list your business. Remember, most of the directories listed earlier are paid. But Google Business Profile is free. 

Just follow the rules when creating your GBP. Avoid incorporating your keyword into your business name. Instead, write your business name the way it is. 

You can incorporate your keyword in your business description. Additionally, endeavor to add high-quality images to your GBP. Images help to add a face to your law firm. It allows prospects to form a strong connection with your criminal defense law firm on an emotional level. 

7. Acquire more quality reviews:

Reviews are a powerful tool. Most people read reviews before patronizing a brand. 

Reviews can help your law firm to build solid social proof. In other words, potential clients won’t have any iota of doubt that you can handle their cases after reading your reviews. 

Because your previous clients have said that you’re a capable lawyer via reviews, any prospect that stumbles on the reviews will have the same mindset towards you. 

How can you acquire quality reviews? It’s simply by delivering quality legal services. When you provide quality services, satisfied clients will be willing to give you glowing reviews. 

You can approach your satisfied clients to give you reviews. Share your Google Business Profile, and ask them to provide a review for your law firm there. 

Actionable Tip: Respond to every review you get, whether positive or negative. Show appreciation to your clients for the positive reviews and restate your willingness to keep delivering quality services. 

If you receive any negative reviews, respond to the client professionally. Show the unsatisfied client that you care and that you’re willing to solve their problems. 

How you respond to negative reviews or comments about your law firm or lawyers matters a great deal. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a mere comment on social media or a review. 

As far as your law firm or lawyers’ names were mentioned, you have to respond. Show concern and offer to provide further assistance. 

8. Kick-start a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign:

Pay-per-click is another marketing strategy that can help improve your law firm’s caseload. You can rank high in search engines and get reasonable traffic by targeting the right keywords. 

PPC campaigns aren’t difficult to run. However, it’s important to note that you’ll have to fund your ads account to sustain your position on the search engine result page.  

In search engine optimization, Google rewards your hard work and ability to follow SEO best practices by ranking your website high in search engines. The reverse is the case for pay-per-click advertising. 

In PPC, once you exhaust the funds in your ads account, your website will disappear from the search engine. 

Actionable Tip: If you can’t run an effective PPC campaign, you can hire an expert to help you conduct keyword research to find the most viable keywords, and kick-start your PPC campaign. 

Conclusion

Marketing for criminal defense attorney is essential to boost your law firm’s chances of getting more cases. With effective online marketing, you can improve your law firm’s online visibility. 

Criminal defense cases are highly sensitive. That’s why prospects will always want to hire the best lawyers for their cases. You can portray your law firm as the best for potential clients seeking criminal defense by implementing the marketing strategies highlighted in this post.