Many times, law firms run into difficulties attracting new clients online simply because they didn’t have time to take the steps necessary in developing a campaign. With only a few hours a week, a lawyer can develop a respectable online presence in no time. Even a simple Facebook page can provide major benefits to your firm.
Whether you are considering starting your marketing in-house or hiring an agency, here are a few common strategies you will find in most successful law firm marketing campaigns. Some of these steps could be done by a lawyer in their free time while others may require a professional.
QUALITY WEBSITE DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT
Your website serves as the base of operations for your firm’s digital presence. A quality website is built for speed, built to work fluidly across all media devices and is built with quality content.
Providing a robust display of digital content serves both your prospective clients and the search engines. Since Google update “Fred” has taken effect, websites with infographics, YouTube videos, SlideShare and other forms of content have shown improvements in Google’s organic rankings.
Rankings aside, quality content is also necessary to inform and convert users by educating prospects on the legal process and your services. While educating your prospective clients it’s important to offer immediate assistance and consult either over the phone or via a live chat feature on the website. Offering assistance available when your prospects need you the most is a big part of lead generation.
If your first starting off it may be difficult to afford a website, one alternative is a Facebook page. Facebook will provide you with the platform you need to share content, collect reviews and if properly optimized they have been known to rank locally for the possibility of organic lead generation.
GOOGLE LOCAL OPTIMIZATION & DEVELOPMENT
Setting up and verifying your Google My Business is one of the first steps of any Local SEO campaign. This is because the Google My Business (GMB) profile you create will be broadcasted across all of Google’s Local services including Maps, Google Search, Google+, Apps & more.
Registering your GMB profile has many benefits and often times can be done by a lawyer in their free-time. It’s as simple as completing your profile, uploading a few images and verifying your phone number.
Pro-Tip: Develop your Google profiles by collecting reviews on your completed cases. Google listing with reviews generally gets more clicks than listings without.
Later an agency can build on your work by continuing to optimize your profiles and develop your rankings.
GUEST POST OUTREACH
Guest post outreach is the process of reaching out to other authoritative websites and writing a post to be published on their website.
So why would you want to provide free content to other websites? Aside from the added exposure for your firm, a major benefit to guest posting is the link you receive to your website for added SEO power. Other benefits include the opportunity to place yourself as an industry expert while giving yourself the opportunity to drive quality traffic from the readers of your guest post.
So get out and write. This is another step you can take on your own by creating profiles on the major law citation websites like HG.org and writing from your profile. Many times major law directories will have “Ask an Attorney” sections on their sites allowing you to talk with prospective clients directly. Just be safe not to invest your time into platforms that don’t produce leads.
ADWORDS AND PAID ADVERTISING
Paid advertising a great avenue to generate immediate qualified traffic that can be turned into case leads with the right steps. AdWords is the larger advertising platform reaching roughly 80% of all the users on the internet.
One of the benefits of paid advertising is the ability to immediately present social proof, build trust and capture a warm case lead quickly to follow-up with. If the user leaves the website without converting then you can retarget them with ads specific to what they viewed on your website increasing the rate of conversion.
A paid advertising campaign can be created by most anyone in their free time. Just be warned, some keywords can cost in excess of a $1000 per click so be careful when setting up your campaign.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Creating a social media profile allows you to connect with your current and prospective clients while providing a platform for them to leave reviews of your services.
When creating your social profiles be sure to complete as much of the profiles as possible while uploading images and linking to your website. A few simple updates to your social profiles can kick-off you social media campaign for major growth down the road.
Bonus Tip: Invite your current clients to follow you on social media and review your services. Collecting reviews now can pay-off in a big way later down the road.
When the time is to hire a professional social media service you can expect several updates to your campaign. Quality high-res graphics are a must, regular social updates, and interactions, content syndications from your website, advanced optimizations and more.
LOCAL SEO OPTIMIZATION & DEVELOPMENT
In addition to your Google My Business, it is important to develop your Local SEO beyond Google. It’s important to build signals and power to your campaign. These signals include geo signals from local interest like reviews, the use of your NAP (Name, Address & Phone) on other websites and many other signals Google looks for when considering your rankings.
Some steps taken to improve your local SEO include:
- Utilizing Schema and other data-markups
- The use of map embeds
- Developing citations on other websites
- Asking for reviews from clients
Taking the necessary steps to improve your local SEO will promote more appearances in the local results, improved rankings in Google Maps, additional structured data widgets in the results pages and more.
YOUTUBE MARKETING
Video marketing on YouTube is a great way for your law firm to capture the attention of prospective clients and drive traffic. Developing YouTube videos not only to represent your firm in a positive way but provides helpful information to prospective clients, which is a great way to build trust and position yourself as an industry authority.
Developing videos that target frequently asked questions can put you in front of your prospect when you are needed the most. A great way to structure your development process is to create your video templates and scripts that allow you to easily reproduce videos utilizing the same theme so you can develop multiple quality videos without blowing the budget.
CONTENT DEVELOPMENT & MARKETING
With law firms, many times blogging will be the center of your content strategy. This allows you to provide a variety of informative content to your users in the form of videos, infographics, SlideShares, ebooks, and newsletters.
One advantage to a diverse content strategy is the ability to appeal to a wide user base and on multiple media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google. Appearing in multiple media platforms increases your chances of being in-front of your potential client when they need you the most.
It’s worth mentioning the viral effect. Keeping ahead of content that is currently viral and incorporating that viral content into your strategy has shown to promote social sharing amongst users and generate quality traffic for your website.
INFOGRAPHICS & SLIDESHARES PROMOTION
Incorporating shareable content into your campaign can help build your SEO and promote quality organic traffic to your site. Infographics posted on your site will usually come with an embed code to promote embedding on other websites thus providing a backlink for a added SEO benefit.
SlideShares offer many of the same benefits but with the added feature of increased content and the ability to connect with businesses on LinkedIn, LinkedIn Pulse, and Slideshare.net.
REVIEWS
Collecting reviews from past cases and sharing your accolades have the benefit of providing social proof to prospective clients for increased conversions on the website and to assist in the sales process later.
Continuing to develop future accolades has several benefits but can take time so it is important to get the submission processes started right away.
Developing your digital marketing early on can be a huge benefit for when you decided to hire an agency to manage your campaign. When the day comes to hire a digital marketing agency – we’d love to provide you with a strategy that will grow your firm through digital marketing.
