How to Use Digital Marketing to Grow Law Practice

Digital Marketing for Lawyers

Digital marketing is a power tool to help grow your law firm or law practice. We explain how each part of the marketing mix works and can help you.

Marketing Strategy

By choosing which type of law to practice, you have already started segmenting your market. A patent attorney is not going to litigate a criminal lawsuit. 

While you as an attorney may have chosen a segment, your audience probably has little to no understanding of the differences. They may have some distinction, but for most, a lawyer is a lawyer. 

One of your challenges will be to help them self-select the type of attorney they may need. Then, out of those who have self-selected, you will need to choose which you wish to represent.

This is where market segmentation comes into play. Which type of client is best suited for you or your firm? How do you identify them? How do you convince them that you are right for them?

These are the questions that a good marketing strategy will answer.

Marketing Strategy for Lawyers goes into this topic in more detail

Web Design

Web Design for Lawyers

Communication is tricky. As humans, we are imperfect senders and receivers of messages. Our environment affects, internal need, state of mind, color, font, sounds, etc. all impact how we receive messages. This is especially important as context varies by industry.

As we said, there are numerous visual cues to support the message that we wish to send. For lawyers, the color, font, images, etc., all need to support your practice areas. 

As a professional, you will want to ensure that your law firm website design clearly projects a professional image. After which, your chosen target and area of practice comes into play. 

For example, patent lawyer websites are going to want to look more and feel more technical in nature. Therefore, he or she will want colors, images, fonts that support that image.

A family court attorney is likely to be quite different. He or she will want to project a professional image, but one that is more reflective of the client he or she serves.

Your legal marketing will need to reach and connect with your target market. Therefore, your law firm web design will need to convey your message within the right context to your potential clients.

For example, high-end divorce attorneys are going to want to project a classy, elegant by harder image than say a middle class divorce attorney. The middle class attorneys may want to project a more modest image that perhaps is more family friendly.

Web Design for Lawyers goes into this topic in more detail

SEO

SEO for Lawyers

Google’s algorithm works for one simple reason - users value the results. They value these results because they can find relevant information quickly and easily.

Bots function in three ways to achieve this.

  1. Classify the content using natural language processing and keyword usage. 
  2. Uses its algorithm to create a score based on ranking factors.
  3. Indexes the page under a given keyword in order of its ranking.

Our job in SEO is to help the bots. We can do this through a mix of

  • On page SEO using the right tags to help the bot classify the content and index you.
  • Off page SEO using link building boost credibility and thereby relevance
  • Basic Technical SEO ensures robot.txt is not blocking Google and a sitemap.xml has been submitted.

For more advanced technical SEO, you should consider hiring an SEO agency or SEO expert.

Again, many of the questions will be dictated by the type of law your practice. However, all lawyers will likely be faced with: “which attorney is right for me?” 

It is arguable that the general public’s knowledge of the sub-disciplines of the law is quite low. If you jump too quickly into specific questions for your area of expertise, you may miss out on an opportunity to educate and capture clients at the top of the funnel.

It’s important to remember, if you engage a client too late in the funnel, they are not likely to know who you are.  People don’t typically do business with people they don’t know and trust. This is why you will want to have at least a few questions and pages dedicated to the top of the funnel.

SEO for Lawyers goes into this topic in more detail

PPC

PPC for Lawyers

When it comes to PPC for lawyers, you are going to want to be cautious. The average CPC for legal paid search is roughly $7 a click, and the conversion rate (CTR) is below average.

This means you could waste a good amount of money on attracting the wrong people. The risk is relatively high since the general public has limited awareness of the different types of law.

For attorneys, I would save Google ads for the lower end of the funnel when clients are trying to decide between which lawyers in the right branch of law is right for their needs. 

As I said earlier, people need to know you to work with you, especially in a field where there are unequal levels of knowledge. Said differently, where they are dependent on you. 

For awareness building, you could choose a lower cost method like Google Display or Facebook. Instagram, Twitter, and the others are not likely your best choice given their advertising platform design.

PPC for Lawyers goes into this topic in more detail

Social Media

Social Media Marketing for Lawyers

Social lets you directly interact with your audience. Social push is generally in the form of paid advertising on a social platform to a target audience. Social pull is shareable content published mainly to your social network which they value enough to share.

The Big 5 social platforms as of today are likely to stay the top 5 for the foreseeable future. But, with many of the issues arising from the 2020 election, they may change in character.

Social listening and sentiment analysis are two tools which can help you determine where your customers are and with what they are engaging. Follow the data not stereotypes of who uses what.

The key difference between push and pull is in the interaction. Push is predominantly a one-way conversation. People don’t typically interact with one-way communication for long. Pull is more a dialog.

Social Media Marketing for Lawyers goes into this topic in more detail

Summary

As you can see, digital marketing offers several ways to help you boost you practice today and over time. As you also likely notices is that this is a very complex and multifaceted discipline. While it may seem overwhelming at first, with the right guidance and help, it can be a very powerful tool in helping build awareness of your practice or firm and yield dividends in lead generation.

Social media for lawyers can be tricky. It’s a fine line to walk between educating and interacting and providing what the end user would perceive as legal advice.

Push and other materials where you have direct editorial control (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) are best. You can disclaim that it does not provide legal advice but rather educates others to stimulate interest in your services.

This can be a productive means to boost your credibility as an expert. As an attorney, you probably don’t need to be told, however, just to reiterate its importance, what is said in social media is public record. 

Stick to education and refrain from what could be considered advice and social media can help, especially when it comes to explaining the different types of law and what they do.