Your law professor will teach you everything about the law. But I guess that creative marketing ideas for law firms aren’t one of the things being taught in law school.
The aim of law school is to prepare you to provide legal services to people in need. You must learn the marketing aspect yourself or hire an expert to handle it for you.
By deploying creative law firm marketing ideas, you can achieve results most of your competitors can only dream about. But what are some of those creative ways to market your firm?
Here, we’ll discuss several innovative marketing ideas for legal firms. After reading, you’ll know the steps to improve your law firm’s caseloads and generate more revenue. Read on!
Creative Marketing Ideas For Law Firms
As a law firm, you need to deploy innovative marketing strategies to set your firm apart. You’re competing with other law firms who are probably implementing diverse strategies to increase their caseloads. However, with these innovative strategies, you can have a competitive edge.
1. Create a great website:
Having a website is the first and most important step in marketing your law firm online. A website will serve as your law firm’s digital face. It will function just like your marketing representative.
Let’s assume you already have a website. The next thing is, does your website convert? Do you think your website’s quality is better than your competitors’ websites?
These are the things to consider when creating a website:
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- Understand your potential clients. Know their demographics, interests, and requirements. With these details, you can build a robust online persona. This can help you build a solid brand image, and send the right message to your clients.
- Build your brand image. Use a unique logo that can help prospects identify your law firm anywhere and with ease. Use a unique logo that helps you build a unique brand identity. It’s important to have such in order to set your law firm apart. Additionally, choose the ideal color palette, and topography.
- Label each menu item clearly. The essence is to make it easier for visitors to navigate your site. When you label your site’s menu items clearly, you are automatically helping your visitors to eliminate confusion. This will make navigation a breeze for your visitors too.
- Use intuitive navigation. Ensure your visitors can move from one page to another with ease. That way, they would want to return to your blog. An unsatisfied visitor that had difficulty in accessing pages on your website is unlikely to return or recommend anyone to your website.
- Use a responsive design. Note that over 60% of website traffic comes from mobile device users. There are more mobile phone users than there are people in the world. These statistics should tell you all you need to know about the importance of making sure your website has a responsive design. It means your website will work on all screen sizes and types.
- Use social media buttons. The essence is to make it easier for visitors to share your posts to their friends and followers. This can help improve organic traffic to your website and increase your online popularity.
- Add your contact information. The last thing any law firm wants is to make it difficult for potential clients to struggle to gain access to their contact information. Make your contact information accessible, and available on all pages.
2. Write thought-provoking content:
From your home page’s content down to your blog section, your content should inform, educate, and inspire readers to take action. Publish content that will make readers hungry for more. Even though other blogs have written about the topic, you can deliver your information from a different angle.
Visitors won’t just convert to leads the moment they land on your website. It’s your blog posts and profile as a lawyer that will determine whether they will proceed to the contact phase or not.
So, populate your website with high-quality and information-packed posts. Show potential clients that you are an experienced and knowledgeable lawyer.
People want to hire the best lawyer to handle their cases. No one wants to risk hiring a lawyer they don’t know much of, or think can handle their cases.
Clients will access your law firm and legal team in the best possible way they can. They will read your content to understand your position and knowledge of various legal topics. That will help them decide whether to hire you or not. If they like what they see, they will give you a call right away or visit your physical office.
Actionable Tip: Conduct in-depth research before writing your content. Even if you have in-depth knowledge of a topic, don’t just start writing. Laws aren’t static. They can change at any point in time. A new government might come in, and change the law. So, you must conduct in-depth research before you start writing your blog posts.
Analyze your competitors’ posts to see what they are writing, and note their style of writing. Note the structure of their blog posts, titles, and other information you think you can deploy to make your blog post superior.
Finally, always remember that consistency is vital. You don’t have to publish content every day. Have a schedule and abide by it. In other words, you can post content twice or thrice a week. But ensure you are consistent.
Lawyers are often busy most of the time. They spend time preparing documents, and represent their various clients in court. So there is a high possibility that you might be too busy to write your content.
If that’s the case, consider hiring a legal content writer to write your articles. An experienced legal content writer will ensure you get quality articles that will match the quality you as a lawyer will produce.
You can also request to read the content written by a legal writer before publishing it on your page. That way, you’ll ensure you and the writer are in tune.
Here are the benefits of giving your content writing tasks to a competent legal writer.
- Hiring a legal writer offers you a great opportunity to get quality content consistently.
- It will help you save time and have the chance to focus on other aspects of your business.
- A legal writer with sound SEO knowledge will ensure your content are well-optimized to boost your search ranking.
- Publishing high-quality content will help to establish you as a thought leader in your practice area.
- Publishing high-quality content consistently will increase your site’s opportunity to gain valuable brand mentions and backlinks.
- People will share your blog posts if they find them valuable. They will share your blog posts on their various social media accounts to help their followers learn about the information you shared in your post. An increase in social shares leads to increase in organic traffic.
3. Search engine optimization:
Search engine optimization is another creative marketing idea that can take your law firm to greater heights. Effective SEO strategies can improve your online visibility and help your website land more visitors.
What’s SEO? It involves a combination of diverse online marketing strategies implemented to improve a site’s ranking, organic traffic, conversion rate and online reputation.
Search engine optimization involves on-page, off-page, technical and local SEO. The various search engine marketing strategies come under these categories. Now, let’s break each down for better understanding. But we’ll start with the basic process – keyword research.
- Conduct in-depth keyword research:
Keywords are important in SEO. Google algorithm uses keywords to understand the context of your content. People will also find your web page based on the keyword you targeted.
There are two major categories of keywords – long-tail and short-tail. The short-tail keywords have higher search volume, but are highly competitive. It takes a lot of effort and time to rank for short tail keywords.
The long-tail keywords have lower search volume, and most are easy to rank for. The reason for the word “most” is that the probability of ranking high for such keywords is based on the keyword difficulty. Most keywords aren’t that difficult to rank for. They aren’t that competitive.
So target long tail keywords to boost your chances of ranking high in search engines. When you rank high, organic traffic to your website will increase. This improves your chance of generating more revenue.
- Focus on on-page SEO:
On-page search engine optimization involves placing the keywords you want to rank for, in the right places. You will have a primary keyword, and secondary keywords. However, ensure your primary and secondary keywords are related.
You can target multiple keywords in your blog posts, but ensure all of them are elated. But ensure you have your primary keyword in your meta description and meta title. You can sprinkle the rest keywords (secondary keywords) in the body of the content. You can even sprinkle some short tail keywords in your content. This helps improve your chances of ranking high for different keywords.
However, adding keywords in your content isn’t the only thing that matters. It’s also essential for you to follow SEO best practices. Follow ethical SEO practices to ensure Google doesn’t penalize your website.
Avoid keyword cannibalization and over use (keyword stuffing). These two unethical SEO practices can ruin your website’s reputation in search ranking. Google won’t hesitate to penalize any website that commits these two offenses.
Where should you place your keywords?
Place your keyword in the body of the content. Your primary keyword should be in the meta description, meta title, URL, Alt Text and body of the content.
Use your keywords naturally in your content. In other words, your keyword should be hard to differentiate when reading your content. When you add your keyword in a sentence, it should fit in perfectly.
If you want prospects in your geographical location to find you, consider targeting location-based keywords. This includes keywords that have the name of your location (city, or state), depending on where you reside.
- Take off-page SEO seriously:
After you complete your on-page SEO, kick-start your site’s off-page SEO. Off-page, also called off-site SEO involves activities done outside the website to boost ranking and traffic.
Off-page SEO strategies can be a highly effective marketing strategy to improve your law firm’s revenue generation potential. It includes strategies like adding your business to local directories.
- Technical SEO:
Technical SEO is an important aspect of your search ranking. It focuses on the functionality of your website. These include URL structure, website loading speed, mobile-friendliness, and others.
Mobile-friendliness is a major ranking factor. Google prioritizes websites that function seamlessly on all mobile devices.
When you access a mobile-friendly website on a mobile phone, it will display its content as it does on desktop devices. You won’t have to strain your eyes to read the content on the site.
The population of mobile phone users has increased. So don’t be surprised to find that most of your visitors will visit your site via mobile device.
You can check if your site is mobile-friendly using diverse tools. If it’s not, contact an expert to help you fix your site. A site that isn’t mobile-friendly will lose organic traffic and ranking.
Another thing you need to fix is your website’s loading speed. If your website takes too much time to load, it will affect your ranking and organic traffic too. Google wants websites to load under half a second, if possible. However, the acceptable loading time is 3 seconds.
Another additional second will lead to loss of organic traffic. Visitors will always be impatient, and you can’t blame them. They believe a serious company should have a website that loads up without any delay. That’s how it should be.
You can use various tools such as Pingdom, GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insight, and others to check your website speed. Use various tools to check your website speed, and check multiple times to be sure of the actual speed.
If your website doesn’t load fast, you would need the services of an expert to fix the problem. Site loading speed is a technical issue that requires specialized knowledge and time. Fixing a website with poor loading speed takes time.
- Local SEO:
Local SEO is highly important for law firms looking to gain popularity in their geographical area. It involves using location-specific keywords, and creating profiles for your law firm in reputable directories.
For instance, if your family law firm is located in Chicago, your keyword could probably be “family law firm in Chicago.” When you target the right local keywords, search engines will rank you high in search results of users.
Prospects will be able to find your law firm with ease when you target the ideal local keyword. And when they do, they will not only contact but make plans to visit your physical office.
4. Incorporate a Chatbot feature on your website:
When you visit most of your competitors, you’ll immediately get a message asking that may prompt you to reply. That’s called a chatbot. It seems simple, but is actually a form of AI (artificial Intelligence).
The chatbot is doing the job of a chat support. It is helping your visitors find the answers they seek instantly.
Unfortunately, you won’t be around to reply to visitors or chat with them. Even if you have a chat support, you don’t expect the person to reply to potential clients outside work hours, unless the job description involves doing so.
The chatbot is a computer algorithm that responds to visitors based on their inputs. It interprets users’ inputs and offers a guide based on the inputs and perceived needs of the visitor.
Chatbot will help direct your visitors to valuable resources based on their inputs. It will help them find answers to their questions without wasting your visitors’ precious time.
Having a chatbot will not only help to improve user experience. It will also save your law firm a lot of money. Hiring a human chat support will cost money. And even if you have one, they won’t work round the clock. It would cost more money to sustain such services.
While chatbots are great, it’s important to understand the pitfalls. A frustrating chatbot can have a negative impact on your law firm. How? It will give clients a reason to turn their attention away from your law firm.
So, while using chatbot, give users the opportunity to contact you, if they deem fit. In other words, let an unsatisfied user have access to means to reach you, or leave a message for you.
If a client sends you an email message, reply as quickly as possible. If you can’t do so immediately, make the client understand that you’ll respond within 24 hours. This gives them the confidence that they won’t have to wait several days to get a reply from you.
Chatbots are crucial in lead generation. You can even configure yours to gather visitors’ phone numbers and emails. With these details, your team can follow up visitors and convert them to leads.
You can also segment visitors by demographics using chatbot. To implement this, add questionnaires within your chatbot.
You can focus on getting information about gender, age, or practice area they are seeking ( real estate, corporate law, estate planning, family law, personal injury law, etc).
5. Implement effective content marketing strategies:
Content marketing can help your law firm build a solid reputation online. It will establish you as a thought leader in your practice area and improve your search ranking, too.
An effective content marketing strategy is guest posting. With guest posting, you can build valuable backlinks to your site to improve your search ranking and referral traffic.
Backlink is one of Google’s ranking factors. In fact, it is Google’s major ranking factor. A high-quality backlink can set your law firm apart. Backlinks serve as a vote of confidence from other websites to yours. In other words, it’s a sign that other blogs trust the value your content provides.
Post regularly on reputable blogs. If you have a LinkedIn profile, you can also publish high-quality blog posts there. Your blog should not be left out. Publish high-quality and information-packed blog posts on your blog too.
6: Add your business to local directories:
Add your business to reputable directories. Examples include Martindale-Hubbell, Avvo and your local bar association directories.
Google Business Profile is another great option. Having a Google Business Profile will improve your search ranking and make it easier for potential clients to find you online.
Several local directories exist. However, your focus should be to create a profile in directories considered reputable.
Additionally, when creating a Google Business Profile, remember to optimize your profile. Incorporate your keyword in the description and add relevant images.
Upload images of different sections of your law firm in your Google Business Profile to put a face to your law firm. Use high quality pictures too. This is important to ensure you maintain your professional status and reputation.
Actionable Tip: Google doesn’t support adding keywords to business names. Your business should be the same across all platforms. Additionally, add your physical address and other contact information in your Google Business Profile.
Conclusion
Here are creative marketing ideas for law firms. With these ideas, you can position your law firm for online marketing success.
Most people seeking legal representation prefer to search for lawyers online. And when they do, they will assess your website, and content, qualification, and achievements to determine if you’re capable of handling their legal issues.
We discussed several marketing strategies you can implement to improve your search ranking and gain massive online visibility. You can implement them to improve your law firm’s revenue generation potential.
Julhas Alam is a seasoned SEO strategist and the leading voice behind the insightful articles at LawFirmSEOExpert.com. With a rich background in digital marketing and a specialized focus on the legal sector, Julhas combines industry expertise with a deep understanding of SEO to deliver actionable insights and strategies tailored for law firms. Holding a passion for data-driven results and cutting-edge SEO techniques, Julhas has been instrumental in boosting online visibility and client acquisition for numerous law practices. When not dissecting search engine algorithms or exploring the latest digital marketing trends, Julhas enjoys reading success stories of other businesses, adding a personal touch to their professional acumen.