In 2009, the legal field officially became over-saturated. Ten years later, the bulk of law firms are still feeling the trend, which has translated negatively for partners in two ways: It’s now harder to acquire ideal clients, and there’s fiercer competition for the best and the brightest new talent.

I know this because I keep having the same conversation with law firm partners and senior attorneys. It goes like this:

“My law firm can’t find enough good clients/new talent.”

That sums it up.

It’s easy to see why most law practices are looking for better ways to get more clients and woo the best recruits. Guess what? You can do both of those things with the right lawyer marketing strategies, specifically digital marketing.

What is “law firm marketing”? When you market your law firm online successfully, you’re accomplishing two things: You’re putting yourself front and center of both potential new clients and potential new talent, and you’re leading them through the buyer’s funnel to contact and hire you. The only caveat is that competing law firms are also catching on to the need for digital marketing, so you need to not only attract clients and recruits, but also outperform and outrank your competitors.

If you’ve found yourself asking “How do I get new clients for my law firm?” or “How can I get better legal talent?” I’m here to save the day.

How to Market a Law Firm in 2019

Law firm marketing used to be simpler. Aside from referrals, most lawyers’ marketing strategy consisted of a few print ads, billboards, and TV commercials that always seemed to follow the same script (“were YOU unfairly injured and want COMPENSATION?!?”).

The game has changed.

Your target audience now spends at least 8 hours online a day, and when they need an attorney, 97% of them head to Google instead of the Yellow Pages. More than 70% of them prefer to get their questions answered and learn about your law firm via online articles rather than ads, and they frequently do their research on a mobile device.

Put all those together, and there are five key lawyer marketing strategies that will help you attract and convert new clients and new talent, as well as outperform and outrank competing law firms. They are:

Turn your law firm’s website into a 24/7 sales representative Invest in content marketing and SEO for lawyers Expand your online footprint beyond your website with video marketing, PPC, social media, and local SEO Manage your reputation and use your online presence as a recruitment tool Track, measure, and analyze everything

I’ll go through each lawyer marketing strategy and the individual tactics you can use to leverage it. By the end of this article, you should have a nice list of to-dos—and to-don’ts—for your law firm’s marketing plan.

A Note About Buying Lawyer Leads

Do you like to play Russian Roulette? Because that’s exactly what you’re doing when you buy leads for lawyers. Here’s why:

You have no control over the quality of leads you get Number of leads is unreliable You don’t know how the advertising is actually done, meaning you could attach your name to some unsavory practices Ethics issues: You know better than I the Model Rule 7.2 and its Comment 5, which specifically prohibits (1) paying anyone to recommend a lawyer’s services, (2) fee splitting with non-lawyers, and (3) misleading the public. The New Jersey Committee on Attorney Advertising recently (2018) issued an opinion stating pay per lead ads for lawyers are not inherently unethical but need to conform to professional standards. The million dollar question: Are you going to trust a random lead generation company with your practice’s reputation and credibility?

If you want lead-generation-specific tips, read this guide to lawyer lead generation »

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The guide below is an in-depth look at the best legal marketing strategies in 2019. Need help with your marketing? View our attorney marketing services, or contact us here. Looking for resources on a specific attorney marketing topic? Try these:

1. The Most Important Lawyer Marketing Strategy for 2019: Turn Your Law Firm’s Website Into a 24/7 Sales Rep

Where do people go when they need something? It used to be the Yellow Pages, but now 93% of consumers go online to find a local business. That means your law firm’s website is arguably your number one marketing asset. All things should begin and end with your website.

If you ignore everything else in the article, pay attention to this: You need a professional website, and your website’s design, functionality, and user experience need to be on par with the best websites your potential clients have ever visited—no ifs, ands, or buts. If your website doesn’t “WOW” users, it may as well not exist.

To accomplish this, your website needs to be five things:

Fast

Mobile-friendly

Easily found

Appealing

Authoritative

Your website should be fast

Half of the online population (47%, to be exact) expects a website to load in 3 seconds or under. If it doesn’t, the user will click the “back” button.

You can’t afford to make this mistake. The legal field is an I-need-it-now field—and we all know there’s no shortage of lawyers—so you need to take every step you can to keep the clicks you do get.

TO-DO: Go to Google’s PageSpeed Insights and test your site speed. If it’s in the red, send an email to your web team or send an email to us to fix it for you.

Your website needs to be mobile-friendly

One key aspect of a successful website for attorneys? It’s mobile-friendly, meaning it’s optimized for smartphones. Why? Take a look at the graph above. More than 63% of searches in the U.S. now happen on smartphones or tablets over desktop computers. Now, think back to a time where you’ve been on a bad mobile website. Either the buttons are too small to click, the text is too hard to read, or there’s god-knows-what happening with the design. Chances are, you clicked the “back” button. I would have. I still do, every time.

Here’s the thing about websites. You don’t just order one from Amazon, open the box and put the batteries in. It’s built layer by layer of code, and there are a plethora of moving parts. Optimizing a website for mobile isn’t as easy as flipping a switch, so I’d recommend you call your webmaster TODAY and get started on the migration.

TO-DO: Test your website on your mobile phone. Do the contact buttons work? Are the photos sized correctly? Is the text large enough to read? Scrutinize it like you think a client would. If it’s not the most beautiful, easiest thing you’ve ever seen, have your web team work on it.

Your website should be Optimized for User Experience (ux).

People are judgmental. But hey, you know that—you work in law (badum TSH). Once your website loads, users form an opinion about it in 0.5 seconds. In fact, 75% of people have cited a law firm’s website as the number one factor in deciding the credibility of a business.

Because this happens subconsciously, all visual aspects of your web pages need to be tailored to psychologically encourage trust, authority, and friendliness. That goes for colors, shapes, photos, font of the text, calls-to-action—if it’s visual, it needs to have a purpose.

Not only should it appeal to a visitor’s subconscious, but your website also needs to have basic user experience (UX) in mind. User experience includes the entire interaction someone has with a website. This includes the pieces of content available, the colors, the layout, and how users are interacting with the company. People should leave your website feeling 100% satisfied.

TO-DO: Ask a family member or friend to look at your website through a mobile phone. See if they can navigate around on their own without prompts from you. If they can’t, chances are other consumers won’t be able to, either. Also, pay attention to their interest level. It’s extremely obvious when someone is bored. If they get bored after two seconds of looking at your site, you may need a redesign.

Your website should be easily found by search engines like Google.

There are two basic assumptions I consider when making law firm marketing plans:

Most law firms are local (as opposed to national) Most attorneys provide need-based services

What this means—and which brings us to the second strategy—is that your best bet at capturing new clients when they need you is through search engine optimization (SEO) for attorneys.

2. Invest in Content Marketing and SEO for Lawyers

Search engine optimization is the practice of making your website show up higher in search engines like Google and Bing when people search for your services. These days, when people need something, they pull out their smartphone or tablet and either type it into Google search or use voice commands to open local listings. Your law firm needs to be on page one of Google, or it may as well not be listed at all—55% of all clicks go to one of the first three organic search results.

To give you an example of how powerful SEO can be, take a look at one of our legal client case studies. Below is a screenshot of this law firm’s organic website visits (website visits that came in through search engines).

Compared to the first month, SEO helped this lawyer increase organic visits by:

439% (percent change over 12 months of local SEO for law firms).

(percent change over 12 months of local SEO for law firms). 869% (percent change over 18 months of local SEO for law firms).

Throughout the lifespan of this client, organic search has accounted for nearly 80% of all web form submissions from prospective clients.

We covered making your website fast and mobile-friendly, which is half the battle in search engine optimization (SEO) for lawyers. Your next step is to focus on the other aspects of SEO, including:

Adding schema for attorneys (schema = extra website code that helps search engines understand what your web page is about)

Optimizing your landing pages for specific action-related keywords, like “legal advice for retirees” or “corporate litigation practices”

Adding relevant markup and keywords in title, image, and heading tags

Optimizing images and adding keyword-rich descriptions

Offsite local SEO, which we’ll discuss further down

Content marketing, which we’ll also discuss further down

TO-DO: Open an incognito tab in your web browser. Search for your legal service + the city in which you’re located. Do that for your top five key phrases for which you want to be found. If your law firm doesn’t show up on the first page for every single one of your top search phrases, you need to contact someone about professional SEO services—it is not a DIY thing.

Learn 10 steps to law firm SEO success here »

Invest in content marketing for law firms, not just seo

Who wants to hire a lawyer who doesn’t have authority in the industry? Despite this obvious correlation, some of the law firm partners I talk to haven’t ever really looked at the content on their site. What your website says—literally and visually—makes up a person’s mind over whether to contact you or not.

When was the last time you looked at your firm’s website? What’s the overall message? Is it easy to read? Is it navigable? Do you have a blog? Your website is an online salesman (one of the core tenets of Blue Corona’s digital marketing strategy), so it needs to encourage prospective clients and recruits down the funnel from awareness to consideration to action.

TO-DO: Build out content on your website. Start with your main services, and work out from there. After you’ve built your main pages, start a blog. For topics, just answer some of the main questions you get when a new client comes to you. By building a blog, you’re showing your authority on your industry as well as increasing your website’s SEO.

3. Boost Your Lawyer Marketing Strategies with Local SEO, Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC), Social Media, Email Marketing, and More

Unfortunately, not all the battles are fought on home turf.

You need to claim all your online real estate—meaning those spaces online you absolutely OWN (Google My Business listing, Facebook Page) as opposed to rent (Avvo). You also need to capitalize on paid search ads (PPC) and start generating plenty of reviews.

Claim your online real estate with local SEO Practices

Local SEO is the practice of getting your company at the top of search results for a local service area. It’s different than normal SEO because of the emphasis on the local pack. The local pack is the box of Google Map results in the search results page, under the paid ads, and above the organic search results.

The information in the local pack is pulled from your Google My Business account, which is why your GMB account needs to be claimed and optimized for local SEO.

Your Google My Business profile isn’t the only one that needs to be optimized for that local pack. One part of attorney local SEO is finding relevant online directories and claiming your listing. The top legal citation sources are:

(Read the entire list of best local SEO citations sources for attorneys here.)

TO-DO: Find and claim your Google My Business account. Then update the following:

Phone number

Address

Business hours

Reviews

You can learn more about how to optimize your GMB profile in this blog post, Do Law Firms Need SEO?

Use paid search ads (PPC) for attorneys



If you want to extend your brand and bolster your SEO efforts, we recommend PPC for lawyers. Paid search ads, or pay per click ads (PPC) are pretty much what they sound like: they’re ads you pay for when someone clicks on it.

The reason you should use them is that PPC ads have a prominent place in search results. When someone goes to Google and searches for something, the top 3 – 4 listings are usually advertisements from Google’s AdWords. Take a look—I’m in the Washington, DC area, and I searched for “personal injury lawyer.” Here’s what came up:

Those dominant paid advertisements took up the entire top half of my screen, and on average, 41% of clicks go to the top 3 paid ads on the search results page.

There is a caveat: PPC keywords for lawyers and legal services are expensive, with an average click costing $54.86.

You can somewhat get around that by using PPC remarketing, which is where you show ads to people that have either already visited your website or who have already given you their contact into.

TO-DO: Search for your legal service + your city. Which paid ads come up? Are they your competitors? Then do a search for your particular law firm. Chances are, one of your competitors is bidding on your name and showing ads when someone searches for your firm directly.

You can learn more about PPC for lawyers in a blog I recently wrote, Does PPC Marketing Work for Lawyers?

Yes, Law FIrms Need a Presence on Social Media

Does my law firm need a Facebook page?

Yes. Yes, it does. Why? Because 95% of millennials expect brands to have a Facebook presence. It’s not just millennials, either—87% of Gen X’ers think brands should have a Facebook page. Having one humanizes you, and gives people a window into what goes on behind the scenes. As far as people know, you and the rest of your law firm are stiff suits that just care about money (again—lawyer in the family, so I can say that). Prove them wrong by boosting posts of your firm at charity events and doing, you know, HUMAN things.

Which social media platforms should you be on? It depends on the type of law you practice. For example, let’s say you’re a divorce attorney. Because it’s a B2C service, Facebook would be a better bet to advertise on than say, LinkedIn.

But, let’s say your law firm provides legal counsel to small businesses. Because it’s B2B, LinkedIn would be a better bet than Facebook.

You can learn more about which social media platform is best for your law firm here >>

Beyond humanizing your firm and connecting with potential clients, having a social presence can boost SEO. Even though social media signals don’t have a direct impact on search rankings, they affect your search engine optimization efforts in primarily four ways:

Increased online visibility and traffic to your website

Increased authority and brand recognition

Broader content distribution and longer content lifespan

Improved local SEO

However, if you want to succeed on social media, you have to put some money behind it with paid social media ads. Otherwise, no one will know you exist.

Stay Top-of-Mind with Email Marketing for Attorneys

Nobody I know has gotten out of life without using legal services at least twice. That means with every client you take on, you have an opportunity to build brand loyalty and become their lawyer (and their sister’s lawyer, and their brother-in-law’s lawyer, etc.) for life. The easiest, cheapest way to do it? With email marketing.

Email marketing for lawyers has, on average, a 4,400% return on investment (ROI), making it a highly effective way to generate and close more leads.

Opt-in email marketing is one of the best ways to stay in front of potential and existing clients—92% of U.S. adults use email, and 70% on average have used a coupon or discount from a marketing email in the past seven days. And the best part? It’s one of the most cost-effective forms of legal advertising there is.

Catch Attention with Video Marketing for Lawyers

So, you have a website, you’ve optimized it for SEO, and you’ve started to expand your online footprint to social media and email. What’s left? Well, if you’re still looking for law firm advertising ideas, look no further than video marketing.

How are you differentiating yourself from other law firms in your area? More and more, people want to choose lawyers and law firms they can get behind. You can’t get behind someone you don’t know, so, how can you MAKE people get to know you? Easy. With video marketing and video PPC (and social) ads.

Because humans process video content much faster than they process written text, it’s an easier, quicker way to relay information. According to marketing industry influencer Krista Neher, the human brain can process images up to 60,000x faster than words. That means you can convey the same message in a 30-second video as you can in a 30-page e-book—and which one do you think your distracted prospects are more likely to engage with?

Another smart bet are paid video ads. Appx. 45% of people watch more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos a week. That means you have ample opportunities to target them with pre-roll or mid-roll PPC video ads.

Point-blank, YouTube is arguably the world’s second most popular search platform, and users consume more video on it daily than. If your law firm isn’t showing up, your competitors’ is.

4. Manage Your Law Firm’s Reputation and Use Your Online Presence As a Recruitment Tool

Generate reviews from past legal clients

Reviews are your best friend and one of your top assets. Before I buy ANYTHING, I look at the reviews, whether that’s a new TV or a new pair of lounge pants.

I’m not unique in that regard. Take a look at these statistics:

TO-DO: Check how many reviews you have. If it’s not many, start an initiative to gather them. You can send out a customized review link, or simply ask former clients if they’d be willing to share their experiences.

Use Your Online Presence for Recruiting New Attorneys and Legal Talent

You can’t retain your clients if they don’t like your attorneys. Customer experience is an especially important factor in the legal field because of the high stakes, which is why it’s so important to hire the right talent.

However, you have an additional hurdle. In 2007 there were 1,143,358 attorneys. In 2017, there were 1,335,963, a 16.8% increase. Combine that with the fact that the legal profession employed roughly 55,000 fewer attorneys than it did in 2017, and it’s pretty obvious that the ball is in the employer’s court when it comes to hiring top talent. Trouble is, you and your competitors are competing for the same talent, and if they have a better online presence than you, you’re SOL.

That’s because your new talent comes in the form of a millennial, and (excuse the broad generalization) one key aspect of this demographic is that in order to find them—and help them find you—you need to meet them on their turf:

You need to grab their attention where they spend the majority of their time on the web: social media You need to give them an online experience that will encourage them to apply to your firm

How Law Firms Can Use Social Media as a Recruitment Tool

All lawyer marketing plans need to include social as a recruitment tool, because your ideal candidate is online. Specifically, (s)he’s on social media. If you really want to attract the best and the brightest or woo prime candidates away from competitors, you need to be active on the following platforms:

Facebook/Instagram: I group these together because Instagram is in fact owned by Facebook, and they share the same ads platform. This is key because Facebook and Instagram are pay-to-play. This is where you should share your company culture, and highlight all the reasons someone would want to work for you. In the legal field, this also includes sharing conferences, landmark court cases, and prestigious attorneys.

I group these together because Instagram is in fact owned by Facebook, and they share the same ads platform. This is key because Facebook and Instagram are pay-to-play. This is where you should share your company culture, and highlight all the reasons someone would want to work for you. In the legal field, this also includes sharing conferences, landmark court cases, and prestigious attorneys. LinkedIn: This is where the professionals come to play. If you want to be a serious contender online, you need to be on LinkedIn. Use it for networking, recruitment, and to share your law firm’s view on the profession.

This is where the professionals come to play. If you want to be a serious contender online, you need to be on LinkedIn. Use it for networking, recruitment, and to share your law firm’s view on the profession. Glassdoor and Indeed: Many business owners aren’t aware they need to be on these platforms. The next generation of lawyers is online, and they don’t want to work somewhere they’ll regret. That’s why review platforms like Glassdoor have become so popular in job searches. Pew Research also found that vetting companies online is the number one resource reported in how job seekers found information about companies in their search (followed by connections with friends, professional connections, employment agencies, ads in print publications, and job fairs or other events).

TO-DO: Take an inventory of your social channels and your social audience from the perspective of a new recruit. What are they collectively saying? Would you want to work there? Are you accurately representing what it would be like to work for your practice?

5. No Amount of Lawyer Marketing Will Work Without the Right Tracking, Reporting, and Analytics

Lawyers don’t have the time to waste on ineffective advertising strategies. That’s why you need to accurately measure and track each and every advertising campaign (I mean EVERY advertising campaign) to find out which lawyer marketing strategies work and which should be changed or eliminated. Hey, if you keep making the same mistakes, you’re not going to go anywhere.

However, many business owners shoot themselves in the foot because they’re looking at metrics when they should be looking at Key Performance Indicators (KPI).

These are the KPIs that really matter to a law firm’s digital marketing strategy:

Total new clients

Leads

Revenue

Return on marketing investment (ROMI)

Lead-to-sale conversion rate

Booking rate (from calls)

Cost per lead (CPL)

Step 0: Analyze Your Law Firm’s Online Competition

After you finish reading this, I recommend the very first thing you do is get a digital competitive analysis done. The very first thing we do when we get a new client is perform this unique analysis so we can get baseline of where clients are digitally compared to their competitors.

The Secret to the Best Lawyer Marketing Strategies? A Law Firm Marketing Agency that Knows What It’s Doing

Like us. The truth is, you can execute your marketing plan flawlessly, but if your competitors are out-performing you, it’s all for nothing. At Blue Corona, we try and let our clients speak for us. Take a look at our internet marketing reviews from current and former clients to hear straight from them why we are the best small law firm marketing company for your needs. Everything we do comes from the perspective of a business owner, and we treat your business like our own.

Get your free analysis for lawyer marketing services and let us know how we can help to bring your law firm to the next level.