Invariably, increasing leads is the priority for law firm partners and individual lawyers that we consult with. The hard truth however is that before you focus on bringing in more leads, you need to maximize the potential of the ones already coming in. It’s like putting a huge engine in a car with no brakes, it will perform but the end result will be disastrous. Let’s take a look at ways to maximize your lawyer marketing strategies to close more clients, starting with maximizing what you already have.
These shouldn’t be pie-in-the-sky dreams but actual realistic and attainable goals that can be measured. Some examples of this would be the following:
Identifying potential clients and how to reach them is different depending on what type of legal practice you have. Lawyer marketing is also much more complicated and competitive now than in the past.
A criminal defense lawyer may peruse arrest records, have alliances with bond companies, etc. In addition, they will find success publishing relative content as well as running targeted PPC ads for the cases that are high paying.
A divorce and family law firm will likely want to focus its marketing efforts on higher-paying divorce cases as opposed to child custody or post-modification cases.
A personal injury attorney will know from experience what types of injuries have the highest chance of a successful outcome and the highest payouts and will focus primarily on those.
All of these law firms will need different marketing approaches and will have different costs to obtain a paying client. In the case of criminal defense and family law, the client will have to pay the law firm out of pocket to obtain legal representation. The advertising costs for these areas of practice differ greatly. DUI keywords are often very expensive due to the higher cost incurred to get a favorable case outcome. For a family law firm, child custody keywords will be less expensive than high-net-worth divorce. Some of the most expensive are in personal injury where some keyword phrases can cost hundreds of dollars per click!
This is why you must know demographic data such as age, gender, and location to get the best possible results from your marketing investment. An experienced law firm marketing agency can assist you with this and help you get the best results for your budget.
Before scaling up your marketing budget to bring in more leads make sure that you are getting the most out of what you already have.
Do you have a solid intake process with someone that professionally and politely screens potential clients via email and phone and sets appointments when appropriate?
Do you have a 24-hour answering service so you don’t miss potential client calls after hours? This is especially important for personal injury and criminal defense law firms.
Do you have a solid follow-up system in place to stay in touch with clients that don’t have an immediate need but may be ready in several months?
Are you asking current and previous clients for referrals when appropriate?
Do you have the manpower or ability to scale should you see rapid growth?
Most businesses don’t plan to fail, they simply fail to plan. In regard to our conversation about law firm marketing, it is often the failure to have systems in place before setting a budget and spending money that causes issues.
Few attorneys have the advanced business skills required to run a 21st-century marketing campaign with all of the moving parts that exist. Even if one had some of the skills there wouldn’t be enough time to perform both successfully. This is why it is imperative to be able to delegate certain pieces of the marketing puzzle to others that have the specific experience needed.
There are many aspects of lawyer marketing that require specific areas of expertise as well as manpower to perform the tasks. Let’s take a look at some of these now.
The old saying that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression definitely applies here. In the old days of attorney marketing, corny Yellow Pages ads or cheap cable commercials would get some decent results. Now with nearly everyone having the equivalent of a computer in their hands that can find virtually anything, it’s much more competitive.
One of the first things you are going to be judged on is the appearance of your website. If you have an older outdated site it will not render correctly on a mobile device and a potential visitor will likely just move on to the next. This is why you must make sure you have an updated mobile-friendly attorney website before spending money trying to get people to it.
If you haven’t heard, everyone that is marketing a business online now is a publisher. Search engines exist to deliver the most accurate results to people using them to find what they are seeking. The search engines deploy “bots” commonly called spiders that search the internet looking for freshly updated content much like a real-world spider searches for fresh food. The more often you publish fresh and relevant content, the more often these spiders return which helps with indexing and ranking.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the field of expertise that endeavors to make sure website pages have the necessary components that search engine algorithms use to rank them. Among these components are keywords and phrases your visitors would be looking for, an accurate and relevant title, and a great META description with CTA. Internal links to other pages within the website as well as external links to reference sites such as legal statutes.
Every legitimate business has a free Google Business Profile page. Previously called “Google My Business”, these Google-provided pages are heavily favored when determining local search ranking. Other factors being equal, a law firm with a well-optimized GBP and good reviews will outrank another in the same area.
Google is also putting a lot of emphasis on proximity in relation to the location of the business and that of the searcher. This means that Google will show relevant businesses to what they are searching for that are closest to them first. Many of our law firm clients are seeing their Google Business Profiles receiving high traffic and engagement with some getting hundreds of calls just from their GBP.
It should be evident from reading this post that the areas of expertise needed to properly market a law firm are very specific. This is why we recommend leaving law firm marketing to experts with years of experience. We didn’t even go into things like PPC and social media in this post because I really wanted to focus on what needs to be done first. You can learn about PPC for lawyers and social media management in the linked text.
If you want to maximize your law firm’s marketing results, check out our attorney-client testimonials and call Forward Lawyer Marketing at (888) 590-9687.
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