A Law Firm’s Guide to LinkedIn Marketing

Guide for lawyers and law firms to scale up on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is used by many law firms as a component of their online marketing strategy. It's an excellent way for lawyers to drive traffic to their law firm’s website, establish authority, and generate leads. Some lawyers and firms, however, commit the mistake of not actively employing social networking sites such as LinkedIn.

Many law firms are unaware of what it takes to leverage LinkedIn properly, or they may miscalculate its return on investment potential. As a result, they miss out on brand awareness and growth while competitors gradually gain ground.

According to LinkedIn data, executives rank the platform as their top choice for professionally relevant content. LinkedIn generates a substantial number of social media leads in the B2B space. This is important information because it cements LinkedIn's position as an essential part of digital marketing for business service providers such as law firms. If your law firm or lawyers are not already employing LinkedIn or you are just getting started, this guide should help you on your way.

Improve your law firm's online profile for internal and external SEO

The process of optimizing pages and content for search engines such as Google is known as search engine optimization (SEO). Learn more about SEO for law firms through our article ‘Search Engine Optimization (SEO) marketing for law firms'. This improves website traffic, awareness, and brand recognition. SEO, on the other hand, does not only apply to websites. It is also applicable to social media profiles and through websites that offer the opportunity to create a profile to attract leads, such as lawzana.com. With Lawzana, you can list your law firm profile for free in a few minutes and start building up your law firm’s brand presence to earn potential clients’ trust.

Effective SEO will boost your firm's visibility on social platforms such as LinkedIn when potential clients search for lawyers and search terms related to legal services. When comparable queries are made through Google and other search engines, your profile will be ranked higher in the search results if your law firm has a robust SEO strategy.

On Google, the vast majority of the traffic goes to the first page of results. This means it is not good enough to be good at SEO; if you aim to compete with the best. If you want to grow your legal practice through digital marketing, optimizing your profile in all the right places is an excellent way to start.

The first step in being effective online, as with many other business situations, is having the right people find you. LinkedIn provides several ideas for optimizing for search, but one critical tactic is to include key phrases in your company profile and specialties description.

Once you have conducted some form of keyword research for your legal market, you should carefully insert these keywords into your content for search engine algorithms to find them. Natural variations of keywords can be used in a sentence, and algorithms will still be able to recognize them and rank your law firm consequently.

Choose keywords that have a balance of high volume and the least possible amount of competition. These search terms will be simpler to rank for on social media platforms as well as search engines such as Google.

Avoid generic profiles and descriptions

Lawyers and law firms frequently create cliched personal and firm pages. They enter basic information regarding themselves and their legal practice. However, this does not always result in the desired level of engagement and leads. The reason why is that this limited approach fails to communicate the benefits of doing business with you or how your law firm differs from competitors.

By utilizing the "About" section on LinkedIn, you can set your profile apart from the competition. Do not make the common mistake of writing a few lines of uninteresting or generic content.

Describe the benefits of your legal services. What does it entail, and which industries do you assist? Describe how this will improve the target client's situation.

Make sure that your profile explains a distinct value proposition. This is the aspect of your practice that distinguishes it from competitors. Giving potential clients an evident reason to work with your practice over another can increase the number of leads. It might be a specific area of expertise, your legal experience, excellent customer service, or something related.

Ensure that your lawyers include their career history in their profiles to highlight the expertise and proven track record they have attained throughout their careers.

Make contact with the relevant audience in your field

Attention is a critical component of social media and content marketing. On the other hand, your firm does not want to attract the attention of just anyone. You want to connect with and be seen by the right people, also known as your law firm's buyer personas. This model personifies your ideal customer profile or profile for potential partners.

Going through the exercise of creating buyer personas enables you to carry out highly targeted marketing campaigns. Alternatively, it is common for law firms and lawyers to target an overly broad audience. As a result, ROI, growth, and results from LinkedIn and other social channels suffer.

A buyer persona contains information such as demographics, psychographics, issues, abilities, and weaknesses.

Buyer personas can be formed visually or in a spreadsheet format. Choose the medium that is most useful for your law firm. To maximize performance, focus on ensuring that you and your marketing department refer to it whenever LinkedIn or other online platforms are used.

Plan the right content for the right audience

The most relevant content is tailored to your target audience. For example, you may wish to focus on sharing insights and expressing thought leadership.  Research papers, guidelines, how-to instructions, and corporate or legal updates are all beneficial to your audience and will entice them to follow you.

Optimizing your content appropriately is also important. According to LinkedIn, the use of images results in a 98 percent higher response rate, and posting YouTube video links results in a 75 percent increased share rate. The social media platform also recently introduced the feature to directly publish videos natively to LinkedIn, which is a more effective method when publishing video media content.

Use LinkedIn analytics to reach out to more potential clients

LinkedIn provides analytics for company pages that can help you understand what your followers are interested in. You can also make observations about what content performs best on your page, as well as who your visitors and followers are. From a content standpoint, you can determine which content generates the most click-throughs and level of engagement. These are good indicators of which topics your audience is interested in hearing about and which themes your potential and current clients require more information on. Assets such as what job function they perform and what industry they come from can be found in the “Followers” area of your page analytics.

A table with suggestions of companies to follow can also be found at the bottom of your analytics' Followers section. LinkedIn will display firms that are related to yours as well as a selection of their key metrics. Take some time to read through the pages to see what works and what you can apply to your own content.

Another thing you can do with the available data is to assess if there is an optimal posting time for your audience. The most difficult aspect of LinkedIn marketing for lawyers is determining what to post. After that, you can use actual data to decide when to post. Instead of adhering to global timing guidelines, you can discover what works best for your specific audience. Note the day and time each time you post, and look at how the posts perform. Then, depending on your objectives, dig into the company page analytics to determine the posts with the highest CTR or user engagement. Then look at the publication time of those posts to see if there is any pattern.

Finally, you can figure out the optimal number of posts for your audience using the data. According to LinkedIn, 20 posts per month can help you reach 60 percent of your target audience. Posting every weekday for a month results in 20 posts. However, you should analyze the data for your page and decide whether you need to expand and publish more content or even cut back.

Increase the reach of your content by asking employees to engage with and share your posts

Engagement on your posts expands your reach. Encourage the staff at your law firm to engage with and share your company's LinkedIn posts. This can be accomplished with the assistance of a social media employee advocacy program. Ensure that everyone in your firm is on the LinkedIn platform and that they fill out their company information with a detailed description of your law firm.

To boost your law firm's social proof, include client recommendations and testimonials

On LinkedIn and social media, social proof counts for a lot. It aids in the development of trust, the spread of word of mouth, and the generation of conversions. Many people consult online reviews during the decision-making process, which are often much more trusted than conventional marketing copy. You should utilize the recommendations section of your LinkedIn profile as a lawyer.

Request recommendations from clients, business partners, and others in your network. You can also recommend others to increase their chances of returning the favor.

Likewise, LinkedIn profiles have a "Skills & endorsements" section. You can select skills related to your law firm's services, which is advantageous for several reasons. For starters, it helps people find your personal and business profiles on LinkedIn when they look for relevant keywords.

The number next to each skill represents the number of people who have endorsed it. To keep the benefits of social proof compounding, invite clients and fellow colleagues to view your profile and recommend your skills.

Members can also ask for testimonials to be added to their Lawzana.com profile.

Build brand authority by displaying the awards your law firm has received

Have you or your firm won any awards? You can include these on your LinkedIn profile to demonstrate to potential clients that you are a reliable and well-known lawyer/law firm.

Click "Add profile section," then "Accomplishments" and "Honors and awards" to add honors and awards to your profile.

Enter the award's title, who it is affiliated with, the issuer, the date it was issued, and a summary. In the summary description, we recommend creating sales-focused content that describes why you won the award.

Drive traffic back to the website from LinkedIn to maintain a connection with engaged users

Some law firms are reluctant to invest time, resources, and financial assets into LinkedIn or other social media platforms because the return on investment (ROI) can be difficult to calculate. This is often due to it not being used correctly.

Essentially, some lawyers and law firms are responsible for only posting on a few random moments, with no consistency, and remaining largely inactive. As we have shared in this article, social media success is based on consistency, regularity, and quality.

It also necessitates that your company has a deeper understanding of marketing strategies that most people are unaware of. While it is true that some aspects of LinkedIn marketing may be challenging, there are some simple measures that can be actioned by lawyers themselves, as long as the appropriate time is allocated to the platform.

Going back to this principle, sending your social media audience back to the firm’s website is important to begin generating the ROI you are looking for from your LinkedIn activities. Suppose a visitor goes to a landing page and successfully completes a contact form on that page. 

Your client team can then contact these people by phone or email.  This is a perfect opportunity to discuss information, ask questions, and attempt to set up a free legal consultation.

This is one of the reasons why lawyers on LinkedIn should take measures to direct traffic to landing pages, as these web pages are optimized to collect potential clients' details to receive a free resource. This is frequently a newsletter subscription, document, guide, or something similar. It can also be a free legal consultation.

Indeed, LinkedIn is the highest-performing lead generation network among all the large social media platforms.

It has the best visit-to-lead conversion rate, which means that if you drive a number of potential clients to your law firm's website, you can expect your team to close a relatively high number of these leads. You can take this a step further by creating high-performing landing pages and optimizing; consider this approach as a starting point for your LinkedIn marketing. This is one of the reasons Lawzana.com works so well; it is a platform optimized for lead generation for law firms, which takes away the step of sending users to your website.

Establish clear key performance indicators and objectives

How do you know if LinkedIn and other social channels are performing well and assisting in the growth of your practice? This is accomplished by utilizing key performance indicators (KPIs). These are metrics that your law firm can use to determine whether or not you are growing sustainably on LinkedIn.

Which LinkedIn KPIs should lawyers monitor? Here are a few of the most important ones to think about:

Post engagement:

Comments, likes, and shares all contribute to the amount of engagement you receive per post. These are important to track individually and collectively because they indicate whether your contacts are appreciating and connecting with the content you share. The more engaged you are, the more likely the organic algorithm will be to share your content with new or more relevant audiences.

You can see how many likes, comments, and reactions you get on LinkedIn posts. Target a sustained compounding engagement growth. Focus on the various calls to action and legal content styles that receive the most engagement and publish more of these.

Views per post:

Following on from our previous point, the number of views on your publications is significant. This is due to the fact that it allows your law firm to evaluate how many users you are reaching via followers, LinkedIn's algorithm, and hashtags. Attempt to boost this amount on a regular basis. This metric can be found in the left sidebar of LinkedIn's key dashboard.

Company page views:

Would you like to know how many people have looked at your personal lawyer profile or law firm company page? This is a critical KPI to track because it helps to calculate brand awareness. If your personal or company page receives few views, potential clients will be less aware of your services and how you can assist them.

Look into LinkedIn advertising and paid LinkedIn plans

LinkedIn provides the following advertising options for law firms: sponsored content, sponsored InMail, and text ads. Advertising on LinkedIn may have an impact on your overall strategy, depending on your law firm's goals, and can be an effective, quicker way to reach a particular target audience. LinkedIn provides a detailed guide to help you learn more about the advertising programs available.

Similarly, you may wish to consider LinkedIn Premium for your lawyers to increase lead generation opportunities.

Here are some of the differences between LinkedIn's free and premium versions:

InMail: Premium LinkedIn Accounts provide additional "In Mail" messages, allowing you to contact people outside your network more efficiently. A free account only allows for three In Mail messages; premium accounts allow for more, depending on the subscription.

Who's Viewed Your Profile: LinkedIn Premium account subscribers obtain insights and access more details about the individuals who have viewed their profile than free account subscribers. With a  Premium account, you can also see who is looking at your profile on LinkedIn.

Search results: Equally, with a premium account, you will receive more results in your searches and will be able to see more profiles of individuals who show up in your search results - including third-level connections. However, with a well-thought-out search, the 100 results provided by a free account should be sufficient in many cases, especially if you are just getting started. If you find that you are struggling to locate or view information that is important to you after you begin actively using LinkedIn on a regular basis, you could always test the service by signing up for one of LinkedIn's premium subscription plans for free for 30 days.

Some of the premium plans, for instance, the Sales Navigator plan, also provide additional search filters to assist you in locating and saving leads.

Other advantages: Additional benefits include entry to courses via LinkedIn Learning and extra business insights about businesses on LinkedIn.

Summary

Law firms and companies across all industries are constantly testing approaches on LinkedIn, and we encourage law firms to follow suit. When it comes to legal marketing, the platform is undeniably powerful, so if you are not already on it, now is the time to start. 

LinkedIn is an effective social network for lawyers and law firms. It can be used to raise brand awareness, generate leads, and differentiate yourself from other legal practices. However, the majority of lawyers misuse it. As a result, they also do not produce the desired results.

There are many reasons why this happens.  The main reason stems from the fact that lawyers do not use the platforms properly or use them frequently enough to maintain consistency. Being consistent and applying the right strategies are the keys to LinkedIn success for lawyers and law firms.

 Hopefully, our law firm's guide to LinkedIn marketing has given you useful information upon which to expand.

If you have any questions related to law firm marketing or social media management, do not hesitate to contact our expert team at [email protected]