A crucial component of lawyer marketing is obtaining a steady stream of clients for your law firm. But when your law office is busy with so many daily legal and administrative tasks, it can be more challenging to keep the flow of leads and new clients coming. That is why it is so critical to have a detailed strategy to find ideal legal clients and stick to it daily.
The tips below can help you find and retain ideal clients for your law firm. However, if you are ready to have marketing professionals shoulder some of the burden,
Forward Lawyer Marketing can help you with various law firm marketing services, including SEO, content writing, and web design.
You will only know how to get where you are going if you set a destination first. So, you need to know what you want to achieve regarding revenue and clients when you create a business plan.
For instance, if you want your law firm to gross a certain amount of revenue in a year, you should determine how many legal clients you need for that period and work backward. You may need 75 legal clients to hit your revenue goals, meaning you need approximately 6-7 clients per month. Then, you need to consider the marketing steps to take to hit that client goal.
Adding six or seven clients per month sounds more reasonable than 75. You should keep sight of the big picture, but breaking down your long-term goal into smaller chunks will push you to keep going forward to achieve your goals.
Now that you have seen your client acquisition goals, you should determine who your target legal market is. Your target market or target audience refers to the types of clients you want your firm to attract. Attracting certain kinds of clients leads to much work without enough revenue, so you may want to avoid those. For instance, some personal injury attorneys handle lawsuits against government entities, but others may not because of the time and effort involved with suing the state or local government.
That said, just because a prospective client is not in your target market does not mean you should turn down the work in every case. Your target market is your ideal client to spend the most time and effort attracting. Determining your target market begins by understanding what your legal clients are searching for.
For example, if you practice Maryland family law, you may want to focus initially on marriage-related work that is fast, easy, and relatively high reward for your office. You could focus part of your family law marketing efforts on young couples with means who want to have a prenuptial agreement before they marry.
There are many ways you can market online for legal client acquisition, and all of them can be effective, especially when leveraged together:
In today’s market, there is rarely any way to get around using social media to find clients. If you want to stay in touch with your audience, your law firm will benefit immensely by engaging with potential and current clients on social media channels. Research shows that regularly engaging on social media helps with client acquisition. For example, the 2018 ABA Survey reported that 35% of those asked said social media had gotten them clients. With small law firms, 42% of those surveyed said engaging on social media channels had won them clients.
Social media engagement gives potential clients another way to find you among all the competitors. For example, the journey from seeing your law firm on social media to hiring you could go something like this:
There are many effective platforms to leverage PPC ads for legal marketing. One of the most popular is Google Ads, but determining the budget can take time and effort. Every time someone clicks an ad, you pay Google, and the fees for ads vary widely based on how competitive the keywords are. You will tell Google how much you want to speed per day or click for specific keywords, and the ads run automatically.
Be careful if you decide to handle your Google Ad campaign yourself; it is easy to accidentally spend hundreds of dollars daily if you make any mistakes when managing your account. Forward Lawyer Marketing can assist you if you prefer having marketing professionals handle your PPC campaigns.
Promoting your law firm on every marketing channel can be expensive, so many law firms starting out may focus on three or four channels. To continue the example above, think about the target audience of young couples with means who want to sign a prenuptial agreement. What would be the best marketing channels to reach them?
Many young, educated people use social media daily, such as Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Perhaps focusing on social media interaction and advertising could reach those legal prospects most effectively.
For many lawyers, a practical, SEO-focused website is the cornerstone of their digital marketing efforts. Unlike social media profiles or legal directory listings, your legal website is digital real estate you own and control, and it is a huge part of your professional credibility. A client looking for a personal injury attorney but only sees your directory listing and a mediocre or non-existent website may choose someone else.
Your legal website is the key to effectively branding yourself and your law firm. Your website is where potential legal clients will locate information about your expertise, past success, achievements, credentials, and the services you provide.
Effective SEO is an essential part of your website for driving Google traffic to your firm. Legal digital marketing is a competitive niche, and entire agencies often focus only on SEO for the legal industry. As you design and build your website, remember the following SEO principles:
You can add to the excellent work being done on your website by posting positive client reviews. Make it easy for satisfied clients to give you a positive review by sending them email or text reminders at the end of the case.
As you design and update your website, another way to obtain legal marketing clients is to create local landing pages for your core legal services. For example, suppose you have a Google Ad campaign to market your Atlanta truck accident legal services. The old way would be simply linking the ad to your truck accident services page.
A better way to attract and retain that legal lead is to write a landing page specifically for that ad. For example, you could title the landing page as ‘The Best Truck Accident Settlements in Atlanta.’ Then, the page could highlight the basics of Atlanta truck accidents, how to file a claim, common problems with handling a claim independently, and your law firm’s expertise and settlements and verdicts in recent truck accidents.
Tailoring a landing page specifically for a particular ad is an excellent way to sell the potential client and get them to contact you. Ensure the landing page has a strong call to action and expresses the need to act urgently. The landing page should not scrimp on content; the days of 200 or 300 words on a page are over. Offer 1,000 words or more of detailed content on each landing page. Long landing pages with plenty of information impress prospects, and it helps boost SEO, too.
Attorneys need a marketing plan and follow-through to attract new legal clients.
If you follow the advice in this article, you will be well on your way to finding more high-quality clients for your law firm. Remember to watch how much money you spend and which parts of the campaign work best.
However, managing a full-time legal marketing campaign as an attorney is difficult. Many attorneys would instead hand their client acquisition to a proven marketing company so they can focus on their clients. Forward Lawyer Marketing can devise a law firm marketing strategy that fits your needs and budget, so contact our law firm marketing experts today for a consultation at (888) 590-9687.
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