How are your marketing campaigns going? If not too well, maybe it is it time to get back to the drawing board with your law firm marketing strategy.
If you think a strategy is not important, that is where you are wrong. It is crucial and you should always have one no matter the situation of your business.
Even if your law firm is at the top, slowing down on your marketing strategies can pull it down. When you are at the bottom, the right marketing strategy can make all the difference.
Need we say more? It is time to create the law firm marketing strategy that is right for you. To do that, keep in mind all the tips you are going to read in this article.
Table of Contents
Everything is Going Online
You need not be told this, but everyone is on the internet. Printed and physical ads are no longer as effective as they were before. Everybody is looking at the internet for answers and influences for their decisions.
It has been like that for quite a while now. The question is, why?
The answer is not as complicated as you seem. People like to have control over their decisions. They do not like to get fed unnecessary information. Instead, they want to search and find out things by themselves, and the internet allows for that.
As a matter of fact, 97% of people now go to Google for answers instead of heading to the yellow pages. Factor in the 70% that would rather get their questions answered via articles than knowing about your business through ads, you are looking at a community that is dependent on quality online resources.
The answer is before your eyes; it is time to get on the internet. We’re not just talking about social media pages and a website, but rather, invest extensively on it.
Your Law Firm Marketing Strategy Should Invest on Content Marketing and SEO
These two words may come as foreign to you, especially if you have no marketing background. However, they should be the corner stones for your law firm marketing strategy.
Online marketing doesn’t mean you have to pay YouTube, Google, and the likes to get your ads shown. If you really want to be effective, content marketing is one of the ways you should go.
As mentioned earlier, people don’t want to be fed with too much unsolicited ideas. Instead, they want to find answers for themselves. That is how people think now and you should cater to that need.
You can create articles, videos, blogs, and everything else that is helpful content. It can be giving advice, steps on how to deal with legal disputes, and many more. In the world of legal counsel, there are a lot of things people are asking.
Now, is content marketing enough? Is creating and publishing your content enough? Unfortunately, no. They are only as good as how many times they are found and read. In an online community that has tens of thousands of content contributors, it is a really competitive market.
This is where SEO gets in the picture. The goal of SEO is to make sure that when people search for answers, yours come up as on top of the list. If you are on the first page of Google’s results, you are likely going to be clicked and read.
For someone like you who is in law, you might have no idea how any of this works. So, the next step is to know how you can make your content SEO friendly.
How to Make Your Content SEO Friendly for Your Law Firm Marketing Strategy
SEO is not as easy as it seems. One of the greatest challenges is the rate search engines update their ranking algorithms. Tips that may have served effective a year ago, may no longer be true today. However, generally, there are consistent concepts to keep in mind.
1. Do Your Keyword Research
Look for the most commonly searched words in search engines and create content around them. When you create content that is likely going to be searched, the more visitors you are going to have.
Even if your content answers a common inquiry, if it doesn’t hold the words that people commonly search for, it is not going to come out as a result. In turn, it makes it hard to find which means lesser visits.
2. Give Your Title Attention
What stands out the most with your content is the title. Your audience gets an idea of what it contains and whether or not it’s what they need. So, a catchy one can set the difference between getting read or not.
However, it also plays a role in search engine algorithms to give your content the ranking it deserves. So, keep in mind these SEO title practices.
- Put target keyword at the beginning
- Keep titles less than 60 characters
- Use words related to the content
3. Use Small Paragraphs
Google evaluates the value of the content you make. Longer and wordier paragraphs are ranked less compared to shorter sentences and smaller paragraph sizes. So, stir away from wordiness and practice getting straight to the point.
4. Add in Links
No man is an island. The same concept applies to content. No article can stand on its own.
You need to put in a few links here and there. Relevant ones. It helps search engines associate your content with the ones you are linking to, giving it a better understanding on what it’s all about.
The better Google understands what type of content you have, the easier for it to categorize it and make it a top result for certain keywords and searches.
How to Make a Law Firm Marketing Plan
So, you now know where to put your money and effort at: online and content marketing. The question now is, how do you make a plan to make sure those mediums are used effectively?
Despite the effectiveness of online and content marketing, if you don’t approach it systematically, it won’t bring in great results. Instead, you need a marketing strategy in order to target the right market and bring in quality leads.
Don’t just do marketing when you feel like it. Create one that is known to be effective and give your money’s worth.
1. Identify Your Target Clients
The first part to every marketing strategy is knowing who your target market is.
- What kind of lawyer are you and what do you specialize in?
- How are your potential clients likely going to reach you?
- What are their age range?
- What common questions will they be bringing in?
Having the answers to all those questions can result in one thing; creating an effective marketing approach. If you know your target audience, it is easier to level with them and talk to them in a way that would make them more comfortable and susceptible to acquire your service.
2. Your Law Firm Marketing Strategy Should Have Specific Goals
Marketing is not just about getting the name of your law firm out there. You need to have much more specific goals. How many more leads do you intend to generate at the end of the quarter? How much more revenue growth do you want to make? And many more.
The purpose of setting goals is to know when to start and end. Unless you have goals, you will keep on randomly enacting marketing campaigns. Without any specific structure, you never know whether you are being effective or not.
Therefore, your goals should be ambitious but at the same time, achievable. It will keep you stay on track and treat your marketing as a pursuit, instead of a side task. And at this point, you should already know that marketing is never a side task.
3. Know Your Budget
Like it or not, marketing is an operational expense. You cannot do it for free because you need essential resources and manpower. So, you need to set a law firm budget and stick to that.
It would be easier if you can have all the money you can use. However, in the real world, it isn’t like that. Spend too much and you might be losing money instead of making any. Invest too little and you might be looking at ineffective campaigns
You need to spend just enough. According to a survey, the average budget that law firms allot for marketing is 7%. That can be the sweet spot for you, but if it isn’t, you can go higher or lower, depending on your situation. The general consensus for marketing budget is around 2% to 12%.
It is important to know your budget beforehand. You can’t come up with your strategies if you don’t know how much you can spend. You will be constantly questioning whether you can afford one thing or should you just spend on another much cheaper approach.
4. Outline Needed Resources and Manpower
You now know your target audience and budget, so what’s next? It is time to come up with everything you need to implement your marketing strategy.
If you are planning to enact strong content marketing approaches, you are going to need writers. Need a great website? Hire a web developer and IT expert. How about the marketing experts? Get them too.
When you are doing marketing, you also need key tools. You need SEO software, analytics, and many more that will make everything easier and more effective. None of which are going to be free.
Outlining the needed resources and manpower helps you come up with your fixed costs. This will then give you the available budget you have left for other things.
Also, knowing the manpower and skillset you will be acquiring, you have a better understanding of the resources at your disposal. You can then make the best out of them given the conditions surrounding you. For example, your IT expert that was hired to build a website? You can use him to make graphic material for your marketing campaigns as well.
5. Track Results
Tracking your marketing campaign performance is not part of creating a plan, but it does make it more effective. With the help of analytics, you can better optimize your strategies.
The first time is always the worst. No matter how much planning goes into marketing, it is not going to perform at its best. It can have great results, but never the best. And that is considering that it doesn’t fail, which is still a very possible outcome.
The point is, there will always be room for improvement. So, while tracking may be the end step for a marketing campaign, it can also be the starting point for your next one.
Having an understanding of the things that went wrong will pave the way for a much better and more effective marketing campaign. It also makes sure that you start allocating your budget on the things that actually matter.
Is Your Law Firm Marketing Strategy Ready?
Is anybody ever ready? The problem with marketing is that it is always based on how the market reacts. You can anticipate things that could go wrong, but you cannot have oversight of everything.
Does this mean that you are bound to fail? No. It only dictates that you should set your expectations.
Marketing is a constant trial-and-error effort. You can only decrease your chances of failure, not guarantee the chances of success. And the tips and steps mentioned here helps you do just that.
However, we do understand that not everybody has the time and effort to do all of these. Business itself is not easy, so marketing is an additional burden that can be hard to juggle. Chances are, you want to outsource the responsibility to reliable and competent people who know what they are doing.
If so, you need the assistance of the best digital marketing agencies. Contact us today for a free strategy consultation.
