Marketing activity in the legal sector has undergone a huge digital transformation. Digital marketing is now the most important strand of lawyer marketing activity. With COVID-19 having a huge impact on ‘real-world’ marketing such as events, networking and exhibitions, it’s more important than ever that law firms ensure that their digital positioning is correct.
When it comes to reaching potential new clients, law firms need to understand the needs of their target audience and how they can meet these with their digital presence and communications. While some traditional marketing tactics are still very valid for the legal sector, having a firm digital foundation is vital to future business growth.
Law Firm Marketing vs Lawyer Marketing
To be successful, the marketing strategy of any legal organisation should have two very important and distinct strands, which complement each other. These are:
Marketing the legal business
Positioning the law firm as an expert in your field of law is vital for assuring potential new clients that you provide the best possible legal services. Highlighting the reasons why a client should choose your law firm is a important, as is increasing brand awareness and getting your organisation in front of as many relevant people as possible. Ultimately, this strand of marketing strategy needs to increase your inbound leads, and is likely to include tactics like SEO, paid media, email marketing, social media, PR and content marketing.
Marketing the Lawyers
This strand is often a neglected part of many law firms’ marketing strategy but can be pivotal in the generation of new quality leads for your business. In an industry like this, where people do often move on fairly regularly, it can seem counter-intuitive to invest time building their profile in relation to your firm, but the reality is that people make the difference in any business. Positioning your key people as experts in their field helps to differentiate them and you from other law firms and can make a world of difference to turning website visitors into quality leads.
Why is lawyer marketing important?
When you position your key people as experts, the organisation as a whole benefits too. Being able to put a face to a name is important in the legal sector and clients understandably want the ‘best’ individuals to work with them. Your key professionals are an asset that can also help to get a law firm featured and gain coverage in third party channels like trade press, on legal forums and platforms like LinkedIn.
Seven ways to improve lawyer marketing
Bearing this in mind, how can law firms step up their lawyer marketing in a range of ways to help maximise the return on investment for the business?
1. Educate
Educating key partners (i.e. both stakeholders and the key lawyers themselves) about the benefits and opportunities for digital marketing is one of the biggest challenges to overcome before a strategy can be given the resource required to be most effective. The activities that might form part of a campaign to drive awareness of digital marketing includes:
- How potential customers use digital channels
- Why content is important
- How Google ranks websites
- What good content looks like
- How to utilise LinkedIn
- Why lawyer marketing is good for the individual and the wider business
- Who in the industry is doing a good job that you can emulate and build upon?
2. Blogs
Encouraging the lawyers within your business to write blogs is an essential part of positioning them as specialists in their particular field. However, this doesn’t always come naturally to them and you can take steps that will help set them up for success in this area, such as:
- Give them example headlines that include terms with a good search engine volume already
- Prepare a brief for them which includes relevant statistics that you’ve already researched, other resources and good examples of what you’re looking for
- Give realistic deadlines for the turnaround of blogs – it’s not going to be their top priority, but a deadline can help ensure it gets done
- Dedicate a profile page on your website to each key individual and use this as a platform to publish the posts and carry out any relevant PR activity
3. Content marketing
Whilst most posts of this type will usually be text content, developing creative supporting assets which complement the post and add interest can make a real difference to readership and even help you gain links back to the law firm website for additional benefit to SEO for solicitors. These could include:
- Whitepapers
- Infographics
- Imagery
- Video content
Prepare a timetable for when individual blogs will be published and a plan for amplifying the content across channels e.g. social media posts and digital PR.
4. Guest posts
Start a conversation with trade press or publications and relevant websites about the kinds of content they would like to receive. This can be used to help plan things like the topics of blog posts and the format in which they are most likely to work well.
Essentially, the law firm marketing team need to act as public relations for the key people as well as the wider business. People want to hear their opinions on industry news or their take on new legislation; the demand is there.
This is also a great way to generate links that assist with the wider SEO strategy for the website.
5. Social media amplification
People often underestimate the importance of engaging with their employer’s social media posts and other marketing activity, but it can make a really significant difference to the visibility of the content and awareness of the brand. You can stress the importance to your key people of things like:
- Why sharing social posts published by the firm can help them as individuals as well as the business as a whole
- How ‘liking’ social posts can get them in front of a much wider organic audience at no extra cost to the business
- How commenting on other posts and getting their opinion out there on social platforms can increase the audience size and brand awareness
- How joining (and contributing to) groups and forums extends their networks and reaches new people
6. Webinars
Where content is successful, a great way to further extend its influence and take things to a much more qualified level is to deliver a webinar on the subject and invite interested parties. Not only does this benefit those potential news clients who can watch or engage with the webinar when live, but it also creates useful video content that can be used on sites like YouTube, Vimeo and social platforms to show potential clients more of your firm’s expertise in the weeks, months and years ahead too. Webinars can be a great addition to any legal digital marketing strategy to gain further benefit from content that essentially already exists.
7. Measurement
Accurately measuring how your lawyer marketing strategy is performing is key to both gaining the necessary support in future from stakeholders and lawyers themselves, and to making sure your efforts are getting the results they should – and changing what you do if not. You can measure things like:
- Audience levels to the lawyer posts on your site via Google Analytics
- Engagement on your social media channels
- Changes in google results rankings for key phrases included in the lawyer content and the site visitors this change in visibility has generated
- The lawyers’ own social media growth and reach with the content they have created and shared
- Coverage in the press, media or third party websites, including any referral traffic that brings, links that are generated and any leads that come from this
- Your stats in comparison to other law firms operating in the same space as you
How to make lawyer marketing more effective
With expert assistance, your lawyer marketing efforts can be even more effective. At Hitsearch, we have 15 years of experience in helping legal sector businesses to transform their online presence and we can help both with law firm marketing and lawyer marketing. View our case studies to see how we have helped some of our clients in this space.
We offer a free, no obligation 15-minute consultation with one of our legal marketing experts, who will use that time to offer valuable insights into your current strategy and highlight opportunities for marketing both your wider law firm and the key individuals within it. Call 0800 011 9715 to arrange your digital marketing agency consultation today.
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