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.
To be successful, the marketing strategy of any legal organisation should have two very important and distinct strands, which complement each other. These are:
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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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Name | Job Title
Pe litatis dolutat ureraturio. Usa quam hilibus estis rest aliatiur? Qui ut uta que exerfereped expe nos nectus, quibea dolore magnatus, ut minulparum ut as cor simporectore velles explatur, coreprae reritatisque dit quatum et eic te nis qui beatiatet des eiur? Vellique rero te dolore ped qui remo est dolloria quibus eosanda natem autem venitatem venditemquam aspe rem dus repere et unt. Oviducium volupta am veniasit estrum esequi ut ut qui raepuda volupid untiosam es eaqui aut a iur.
Name | Job Title
Liverpool (Head Office)
Clockwise Offices,
Edward Pavillion,
Liverpool,
L3 4AF
London
Kemp House
152 - 160 City Road
London
EC1V 2NX