Studies looking at how people find their lawyers showed a lot has changed in the past 100 years. Earlier on, individuals used to find their legal representatives through other relationships. Due to this, a lot of direct marketing power was taken out of the lawyer and into the hands of word-of-mouth and fate. Although this still happens, technology has managed to change the game for good.
Courtesy of the internet, lawyers can now reach a larger demographic that is occasionally turning to the web to find a service. Therefore, if you are an attorney and have not established yourself on the internet, you are losing out on a very large market base. Read through this article to find out the legal marketing techniques you can implement to boost your business.
Each type of business needs to be highly engaged in marketing and growing their brand. This includes your law firm too. Potential clients would like to connect and build trust with you. Business studies show that clients are very loyal once they find someone they can trust. There is obviously a direct relationship between the amount of loyalty that clients will have for a firm, and the methods in which they engage with you for services in the first instance.
Trust is the key to building your business online, and while advertisements like search engine ads and banner ads are critical in attracting potential clients to your website, they are not very effective trust-builders. You need to do more than this to establish trust- having strong and helpful content plans, and branded websites are some tips you can use to have consistent trust that encourages potential clients to take action.
With that mentioned, let us broaden the scope and have a look at legal marketing ways that can lead to growth of your law firm.
The first thing that you need to consider when thinking about lawyer internet marketing is building your online brand. ‘Branding’ is a word that would strike fear into lawyers due to the fact that it sounds advertising-related, and most lawyers don’t have the marketing expertise. Well, branding is easy since it is all about identifying what makes you unique as a lawyer or law firm, and making the decision of what you want to be known for. Afterward, consistently communicate these messages to the world.
Similar to picking a major in college, branding is simply about selecting the niche within which you are good at, and would want to be identified with. Branding is all about being on the ‘short list’ of attorneys practicing in this area. For example, if you are good at family law and that is what you practice, you might want to grow your brand around working with women, foreign adoptions, and military families. Also, if you practice business law, you can develop your brand around a specific industry like woman-owned businesses, manufacturing, processing, or family-owned businesses.
After identifying your niche, all you have to do now is to bring your brand to life via communications, social media posts, blog posts, article writing, graphic design, website, presentations, and events.
Editorial content is the only internet advertising format where consumer trust surpasses action. What is of key importance here is that the action to engage a lawyer will be driven by trust. Apart from family and friends being the most trusted promotion method, written content and any relevant information on your law firm’s website is absolutely important for building trust. Treating your current clientele with respect, care, and telling them to refer you to other people works. However, attracting and convincing new clients boils down to a powerful content plan.
We are aware of this due to the fact that trust is the first factor to consider when a person wants to select a lawyer. The kind of content that you have on your website is going to be of great influence. Blogging plus social media allows you as a lawyer to show your expertise in the legal field before you get the chance to engage with a new client.
The main reason why content marketing is trusted more than other promotion techniques is because it is forced onto an individual. The content on your website can be described as self-serving information that a potential client discovers after conducting their own research.
Displaying your level of expertise through content writing might seem as a conventional way of promoting your law firm, but that is due to the fact that it works. Therefore, there is no reason whatsoever that the success of speaking in a court of law, in conferences, and seminars should not be relayed into an online environment with the same kind of effectiveness.
Another thing to pay close attention to when it comes to attorney marketing is the use of social media. A lot of firms are now winning business via social media engagement. Social media is still very alive when used for lawyer internet marketing. Social media offers a good Return on Investment (ROI) bearing in mind how cheap it can be to run a social media profile. To make social media more effective for your online marketing campaign, you need to incorporate it into your marketing and public relations plans.
Nevertheless, social media marketing seems to work best for individual lawyers rather than a broad firm. This is true to some point because, a law firm might risk creating rifts between the personality and individuality of specific lawyers, and also the vision and underlying philosophy that they represent. However, with implementation of the right strategies, social media has proven to be successful for law firms too.
Speaking of strategies, the best way to get into social media as a law firm is just being community oriented. By posting content that is relevant to your audience, you can be able to stay on the top of your followers minds. On social media, you ought to be visible at the right place, at the right time, and doing the right thing. This simple technique is all about helping you stay relevant, and getting you in front of potential clients.
When utilizing social media, be sure to share your content with interested and relevant parties for more engagement and exposure. Be mindful about what you share, how you share it, and why you want to share it. Share information that is going to help out your audience. Utilize hashtags for more exposure and connect with individuals having the same vision as you.
Remember not to promote yourself too much. This is a great way for your followers to lose interest in your business. You should rather,offer advice, share community information, or events you are sponsoring.
Apart from content marketing, search engine advertisements are the most common form of online marketing for lawyers. Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo all offer Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisements that can be found in search results for certain keywords and phrases. The downside of this form of online promotion is that it is quite expensive with search terms like ‘attorney’ and ‘lawyer’ costing hundreds of dollars in advertising money.
Nevertheless, Pay-per-click advertising is certainly good for a law firm that would want to be at the forefront of search results for certain legal phrases. If you can manage to outrank your competitors on big search engines like Google, then you are able to attract more business than them. Finding the perfect words and phrases is key, and this might prove difficult for a firm with a wide range of services. The competition is also quite stiff. Therefore, this strategy takes more work than simply tagging ‘lawyer’, your firm’s location, and creating fancy ads.
When it comes to law firm marketing, you have to differentiate yourself and your business from the rest of the pack. Focus on those keywords that are niche areas of the law, even if they are the most lucrative ones. To start with, you will need to think like a client and think about the legal service you want and how you would search for it using the search engine. You should take advantage of high-volume keywords with low competition. Such keywords are those being searched by a lot of people, but only very few law firms are using them to promote their business.
Obviously, trust will again depend on how your Pay-Per-Click ad is designed and shaped. This is the main reason why having knowledge of your main audience and to whom your services are primarily aimed at is critical when coming up with an ad campaign.
Over 90% of search engine clicks are believed to be organic search results. Search engines such as Google, although being very sophisticated, tend to favor those sites with high-quality content and an utmost amount of credibility. Despite the fact that a full law firm SEO strategy can take months to implement, combining it with Pay-Per-Click and other legal marketing techniques can prove to be highly effective.
PPC advertisements show the ability to invest in ads. However, they don’t quite generate a high level of trust as blog posts, videos and other types of content. Google did a research concerning the effectiveness of Search Engine Optimization enjoined with a PPC campaign, and the results confirmed that PPC and SEO led to incremental growth of targeted sites.
From this simple scenario, it can be agreed that lawyer SEO is critical for any law-firm looking forward to more business. Let us have a look at more information in regards to search engine optimization for attorneys.
SEO is not a technical process. However, ensuring the technical health of your law firm website is of utmost importance and a part of successful SEO. How SEO works is a bit overwhelming to non-experts. Hiring professionals like us to create and manage your website might feel a bit like taking your car to the mechanic and hoping for the best. While our results and client satisfaction speak for themselves, Lawyer Marketing 360, would like to explain a little bit about how we conduct technical on-site search engine optimization.
Effective lawyer marketing techniques requires a proper and working SEO strategy. The right search engine optimization for lawyers, however, is not a one-time process. It needs occasional monitoring from the time it is launched. This means that we review and adjust your website on a frequent basis, so that we ensure that it is providing visitors with the information they are looking for, and aid firms to accomplish their goals.
As long as you are our client, Lawyer Marketing 360 will continue to oversee SEO best practices of your website in relation to Google Webmaster Guidelines in majorly, the following site areas:
As earlier stated, the most critical thing on your website is content. There is no amount of technical prowess that can make up for poor and low-quality content. As experts, we advise that optimizing content should begin with identifying content desires, which can be static pages and basic blogs. It can also include visually-engaging content like infographics, videos, and Slideshare presentations. Our team of creative writers and editors abides by all journalistic guidelines involving content authority.
First impressions are everything on the internet. Title tags appear in search engine results, browsers, and external websites. The tags provides the user with a snapshot of what your website contains. This is usually done through branding and the use of keywords. Properly done titles helps your content to stand out and make that good first impression.
Internal links are the ones that connect your page on one domain to another page on the same domain. They help to reference a website’s own content, assisting with information hierarchy and navigation. A good internal link strategy shows that your content is properly arranged and information is pretty easy to locate. This helps users to navigate your page easily, spending more time, and consuming more information about your business.
Your website ought to be technically perfect and display as fast as possible to potential clients. Studies show that a lot of people are likely to abandon a page if takes more than 5-10 seconds to display. Using a number of techniques, we can develop and optimize your website’s page speed.
Mobile compatibility has become a key factor in search engine rankings, mostly on mobile devices. Tablets and smartphones account for the largest share of internet usage today. In fact, they account for more than half of all searches. Having a website that is easy to navigate on a desktop monitor is not enough. Your website ought to be impressive and responsive when viewed on smaller devices too. Every site that Lawyer Marketing 360 produces through our web design services uses ‘responsive design’ offering the best user experience regardless of the device being used.
User experience is of utmost importance when it comes to law firm marketing. Links, titles, content, pages speed, and all other major site aspects all share one main theme- the user.
You call them clients or potential clients. These are the people that visit your website in the hope of finding legal help. How well an online marketing campaign works depends highly on the quality of your site’s user experience. In simple terms, your visitors needs to navigate through your site easily as they look to find relevant information.
Our team of experts is dedicated to lawyer marketing. We work effortlessly with you and offer advice on what works and what does not in regards to online attorney marketing. What guides us is the fact that technical SEO should never hinder user experience. We believe that prospects and clients are a critical factor in any decision, and that is why we work to make sure that they find your website, and get the information and help that they desire.
The name speaks for itself – off-site search engine optimization entails actions you can take off your legal website to enhance its rankings on search engines. The most common element of off-site optimization is link building to improve Page Rank. When determining where backlinks to your website should be placed, it’s essential to remember that link building is not all about numbers. Rather, it is about quality. Therefore, it is better to have 3 links from a relevant site rather than 500 links from a site with no relevance at all.
The issue with inexperienced attorney marketing ‘experts’ is that they promise to get you backlinks to your website but they have no connections with reputable websites in the legal field. Before hiring an SEO expert to work on your site, be sure to ask them the kind of strategies they are going to use so that you can ensure the safety of your site and money.
When well-managed, your law firm’s website accompanied by a strong SEO campaign can bring you a lot of new leads and bring excellent Return on Investment (ROI) to your firm. A search engine optimization campaign that is ill-managed can lead to too much work, stress, frustration, and a lot of wasted time and money.
Lawyer web design and offering an exceptional user experience to our client’s web users, is important. However, other elements of our consulting work are also critical. In addition to offering web and graphic design services, we also work on the technical side of law firm site optimization, such as keyword research, click-through-rate, building back links, off-site metrics, titles, Meta descriptions, and tags.
Lawyer Marketing 360 uses a holistic approach to marketing that is geared on utilizing search engine experts to build your law firm’s brand. A brand that is recognizable and relates to your audience, is more trusted, and hence more likely to attract new clients and retain them too. Using conventional PR methods plus the latest digital marketing techniques, we translate the good business that your firm conducts offline, into the online space.
At Lawyer Marketing 360, we add extra value to your business in ways that the competition cannot. Having a dedicated creative team helps us develop and execute innovative online marketing campaigns that establish online presence and increase the brand awareness of your law firm. Strong ideas are the backbone of a successful marketing campaign, and we are proud to have them.
Whether through practice area pages, infographics, videos, emails, social media, and blog posts, our expert team will create stunning content that will drive actionable leads. In the long run, all you want is more leads, more clients, and more business, right? If you are in search of attorney lead generation, then you are in the right place.
We offer you high quality and geo targeted leads to you. We do all the heavy lifting for you, and all youhave to do is pick up the phone and start receiving calls from potential clients in search of legal services in your niche and city.
When your law firm partners with us, we will handle all the details that your busy legal professionals don’t have to worry about. When you allow us to take care of the marketing part of your business, your legal teams can allocate more time and effort on what they do best. Partnering with us will definitely bring you better results and additional success.
Learn how Lawyer Marketing 360 is uniquely positioned to help your law firm succeed by contacting us for a free quote.
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