If you are wondering why you’re not getting as many new clients as before — the reason is an obvious one.
Your competitor is getting them.
When I was running digital marketing at LegalZoom, lead generation drove 80% of our business. We focused on our Google Ads optimization and landing page conversions like our life depended on it — because it did.
On a daily basis, our team would review landing page performance, Google Ads campaign metrics, and acquisition results based on the changes we did. I didn’t have the arsenal of marketing software and tools back then.
But what you have at your disposal today gives you no excuse to not drive growth for your legal practice.
Legal marketing for law firms online
A search for “law firm marketing” returns over 160 million Google results. Most of the content is junk — but reinforces my point that the law industry is packed with supply and demand for more leads and good clients.
You can see what your law firm is up against.
Many attorneys hire internet marketing companies to manage their law firm’s website and lead generation.
As a boutique internet marketing agency, we support larger agencies with our white-label lead generation and advertising services that power their legal clients’ campaigns.
If your law firm can afford to outsource your marketing, you are one step ahead of the game. Depending on your coverage, your law firm marketing agency might run a mix of Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Retargeting advertising, some display campaigns, and localizing your targeting to your community. The same marketing channels goes for national law firms, just with a different geoprahic target settings.
The problem is, not many law firms can afford to hire these agencies.
So, in this article, I will show you 12 actionable marketing tactics you can implement right now to get more leads and paying clients to grow your practice.
Let’s dive in.
You can do your own marketing
It doesn’t always have to be complicated. It’s really a matter of doing the right thing.
I believe in learning new skills to keep myself sharp. And the best way for me to learn is by doing it — I love reading, but that’s theoretical. I’m a more practical individual.
When I wanted to develop websites in WordPress, I did a lot of reading on websites and watched a ton of YouTube videos. While that was educational, it wasn’t good enough. So instead of spending more hours reading and watching, I created a free WordPress account and went to work.
The same is true for you.
Advertising platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads can be tricky if you get into the weeds, but you can do your own marketing without the bells and whistles and still generate a healthy amount of leads for your legal practice.
Warning: These are things that internet marketing agencies don’t want you to know, so they can charge you money to do it for you.
There are 12 legal marketing tactics you can execute to help you attract and convert new clients:
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Creating video content from your smartphone
Video is one of the fastest growing content type as social media takes over daily activities, and it’s not going anywhere for a long time.
Agencies will try to see you a video creation service and charge you hundred or thousands of dollars to create videos for you. But you already have 24/7 camera crew with you – your smartphone! How many videos have you watched that you were able to identify with? Unlike any other forms of content, video is a quick way for you to connect with your clients and show them who you really are.
Attorneys are human too right? So show them that side of your legal practice. Your videos do not need to be shot by professionals, it doesn’t need to be perfectly edited or have the perfect background music. Try being real with the clients you want to connect with.
Need ideas for your next video? Here are three ideas to get your creative juices flowing:
- When you are on your lunch break and have a thought about how people can cope with a family inheritance dispute – take out your smartphone and record yourself.
- If you’re meeting with your team, have someone record your meeting (if it’s not case-related) to show your clients that you’re real people too.
- Client testimonials are is important. Talking to a satisfied client? Ask for permission to record the conversation on your smartphone and use it on your website.
Don’t think your content is ready for sharing on social media? That’s OK.
Once you have this content, you can either pay someone on Fiverr.com to edit and make it look better for you at a very affordable price.
Or if you’re in the mood to expand your skills, use video editing tool Movavi to do it yourself.
Dirty secret: Many marketing agencies outsource their editing to freelancers for a fraction of what they charge you.
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You can advertise on local search engines
Obviously Google is the search engine everyone wants to advertise on. And so do you.
But did you know that there are a handful of search engines that focus on local traffic and communities that live near your legal practice?
Granted. The volume of local search engines is pale in comparison to the reach you can obtain from Google’s. But when you focus on local search engines, you are targeting very specific markets and could be more effective with your advertising budget.
Here is a list of the different types of local search and the top local search sites:
- Search Engine (Google, Bing and Yahoo)
- Review Sites (Yelp, Urban Spoon, Zagat)
- Yellow Page Directories (Insider Pages, Superpages)
- Local Directories (CitySearch, Localeze)
- Business Directories (InfoGroup/InfoUSA, Acxiom)
- Niche, Industry Specific Directories
Here is a list of activities to focus on for local search:
- Claim and Verify Local Listings
- Optimize Local Listings for Increased Local SEO Traffic
- Eliminate Duplicate Listings
- Help You Increase and Manage Reviews
- Submit Your Business to Additional Local Directories
- Setup Analytics Tracking to Properly Track Local Activity
- Promote Your Local Listings
Dirty Secret: Advertising agencies don’t like you to advertise in local search engines. Why? It’s easier to manage advertising just in Google using their local target settings. Law marketing is extremely hyper local. So if you are so inclined to give this a try, you might be surprised with the results.
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Answer questions in Quora.com consistently
This is a long-term investment into the growth of your legal practice. Unlike paid advertising, which gets your leads immediately, participating in Quora helps you diversify your reach and not only focusing in a single medium like paid advertising.
Type in the topic you are interested in. In this case, I typed in “family law” and get a ton of questions regarding family law. If you’ve not realized this…you have just found a goldmine of opportunity here.
So what does investing your time in Quora get you? A lot! This is one of the best sites to build your authority without being biased. See those questions? These are people who are looking for answers. And your legal expertise helps you build authority in the community.
Yes, your an attorney and your time is precious. But so is everyone else’s. If your legal practice is in it for the long-game, then giving value will build a solid foundation and bring you high-value clients organically over time.
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Create a solid Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page
How’s your FAQ page? If you are like most attorneys who are so focused on cases and neglected your best selling tool — your website — then your FAQ is most likely cookie-cutter or you may not even have one.
Spend time putting a list of questions together that you’ve been asked frequently and make sure that you’re answering them with as much detail as possible. New clients who are considering hiring you as their attorney have a ton of questions. They want to make sure that you are the best representation for their case.
A well curated FAQ page might be where they’ll go after filling out your contact form, while they wait for your office to call them. The information on this page can reinforce why they should be working with you and give them peace of mind.
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Launch your Google Ads campaign
First, Google AdWords has changed it’s name to Google Ads.
Look, your marketing agency might sell you SEO services as well, promising to dominate the search results. But unless you are a big law firm (big brand) it’s going to be tough to outrank the bigger guys.
Google Ads let’s you cheat. Instead of waiting around for Google’s algorithm to rank the arsenal of content you’re building, you can jump straight to #1 position now.
Check it out:
Jimenez Law Group is able to take over #1 for one of the best keywords in their industry. So even the smaller players can duke it out at the top of Google’s SERP, and all it took was a few minutes of setting up a campaign, instead of weeks/months/years of SEO.
The bigger guys like LegalMatch and Findlaw too years to rank for a keyword like “family law attorney” but they also have the luxury of time given their coffers are significantly larger.Google Ads has invested a lot of time to make their interface more user-friendly and intuitive to launch campaigns to advertise across Google’s network. You can create a new Google account and set up your advertising campaign within a couple of hours with their tutorial.
The most important thing to pay attention to is your day parting and location settings when you set it up. Day parting is the setting when you can schedule your ads to run during certain times of the day and days of the week. Majority of our law firm clients run their ads between Monday – Friday from 6am to 5pm Pacific Standard Time (PST).
While there are nuances and bells and whistles involved in fine-tuning a Google Ads campaign, these are things that you can do a Google search for and learn about it. A few helpful resources to get you started:
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Building your own landing pages
You’re an attorney, not a web developer. I get it. But did you know that not every marketing agency have web developers as well?
Many agencies outsource their web development work but run the project management of it. That’s why you’ll always talk to a project manager, and rarely the web designer or developer!
As a legal marketing agency, I understand why law firms work with us — mainly because of our experience in digital marketing and lead acquisition. But for the most part, you’re paying for an agency’s time to generate leads for you so you can use your time on your client’s cases.
Building your own landing page is not an easy tasks, but doable if you put the time into it. If you can’t afford hiring an internet marketing agency then your next best option is to build it yourself by learning how to use the same tools the experts use.
These tools offer beautiful templates that you can select with a click. And they provide customization so you can get a new landing page up within minutes. Launching a landing page is already half the battle won.
Pro Tip: Instapage, Unbounce, ClickFunnels.com are all tools that marketing agencies use to build your landing pages and lead funnels. Instapage and Unbounce is more intuitive but they’re all powerful and relatively easy to learn landing page builders you can do yourself.
Conclusion: Congrats, Now What?
Pick one thing and start doing it today. I recommend launching your Google Ads campaign and building a landing page. Then sit back and wait.
I’m serious.
Don’t sit in front of your computer, refreshing every five minutes waiting for something to happen.
Check back in a day. Then, create more campaigns, more ads, and ad groups. Start tweaking. Read the data. And make necessary adjustments to improve your lead generation performance.
