5 Must-Haves For Your Law Firm's Digital Marketing Strategy In this article, we review five key areas to focus on when considering a go-forward plan for your law firms' marketing.
By Bobby Steinbach Edited by Chelsea Brown
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Law firms are businesses, too. Because the legal process is so specialized, formal and rigid, it can be easy to lose sight of this basic truth. Like any modern business, a law firm needs to develop a reliable and sustainable digital marketing strategy, or it can and will dry the well. In this article, we review five key areas to focus on when considering a go-forward plan for your law firms' marketing.
1. Optimized website and updated branding
Like it or not, your website and brand are the face of your firm. You wouldn't walk into the courtroom in a tank top and sandals; the same sort of focus on image needs to be projected on your digital presence. A modern, accessible, user-friendly website serves multiple purposes, including:
Preferential treatment by search engines
A foundation for your future content marketing and SEO strategy (we'll get to this bit shortly)
Protection against drive-by lawsuits
A positive trust signal that you are a competent, reputable law firm for potential clients
Related: 5 Digital Marketing Tips for the Legal Niche From a Lawyer
2. Content marketing and SEO strategy
Having an optimized website and brand are all well and good, but you still need to drive and engage traffic to the site! When planning a digital marketing strategy, content marketing and SEO should be one of the primary pillars to consider. While paid advertising is important for short-term lead acquisition, the long-term ability to acquire leads without paying a "Google Tax" is the primary motivation for investing in content marketing and SEO. For some law firms, establishing an in-house marketing team is the best path forward to execute an ambitious content buildout. For others, hiring a proven digital agency for law firms is a more appropriate option. Whichever route you choose, make sure you have a way to measure the efficacy of — and set milestones for — your content marketing and SEO campaigns.
3. PPC and retargeting campaigns
We've gone over why a content marketing and SEO plan is important to the long-term success of your law firms' lead acquisition strategy, but equally important is keeping the lights on in the short-term before content has had a chance to rank. The amazing thing — and primary benefit — of PPC and retargeting campaigns is the ability to back into exact unit economics. That is, answering the question of how much a retained lead from advertising dollars cost — or the ROAS — can and should be answered on a regular basis. Whether to increase budget, change strategy or cut ads completely is a simple function of your cost per acquisition vs. the expected value of a retained lead. When the value outweighs cost, we pump the campaign!
Related: How to Use Online Testimonials to Boost Your Law Firm's Business
4. Organic and paid social campaigns
The new "striking gold" is "going viral." Like striking gold, going viral with a social post isn't as easy as one might hope. We need to be realistic when thinking about the primary purpose of social media in a law firms' marketing plan. Unless you are one of the very few brands with a recognizable name outside of the legal industry, it is never our recommendation to view organic social media as a generator of business. Rather, posting on social is a defensive measure to avoid looking like what some might call a ghost town. In other words, don't make social media the reason for a client not to hire you.
On the other hand, paid social media campaigns can be an extremely effective driver of high quality leads. A personal injury law firm, for example, might use paid social ads to broadly target audiences for case types like product or premises liability and run evergreen creative for these practice areas. Similarly, a white-shoe firm might not use social media campaigns to convert leads directly but instead use the platforms to retarget site visitors, broadcast branded messaging and build overall brand awareness. Paid social media campaigns are an extremely versatile tool in the savvy law firms' marketing toolbelt.
5. CRM attribution
There's a famous saying by John Wanamaker — "Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half." For law firms, the true conversion event is not an on-site form fill or inbound call. Rather, a conversion is a signed retainer. Typically, these retainers take from 3-7 days (for B2C legal services) from initial intake until they reach a converted state, which means it is vital that a law firm's CRM is built to properly attribute inbound sources to final results. How you accomplish this is highly dependent on which CRM you've chosen, but at a fundamental level, you'll want to integrate tracking for:
Lead source, broken out by channel and campaign. Sometimes it may be worth going down to the ad or ad group level.
Cost data for the conversion (assuming it's from a paid campaign). Usually this data is joined against CRM records via an external BI tool.
Landing page information.
Any additional front-end data that you'd want to optimize based on back-end results.
Related: 7 Fresh Aspects That One Should Know About Digital Marketing
There is no "right answer" when it comes to planning an effective marketing strategy for your law firm. Market forces, firm practice areas, geographical region and local competition all play a part when it comes to planning your campaigns. However, the five key areas laid out above are a good general guidepost when it comes to understanding the avenues available for consideration. Think of these as your starting point — where you go is how you make the magic happen.
