Optimize your Law Firm Marketing for Lead Generation

In this article, we share our law firm marketing tips based on our own experience of capturing more leads for various law firm members on the Lawzana website.

Law firms are always searching for ways to grow their business by attracting new clients; as with all companies, law firms must generate a steady monthly cash flow through billable work, including from new clients. As your target clients continually move away from traditional marketing, such as business cards in exchange for LinkedIn and physical directories in exchange for online directories such as Lawzana, it is essential to bring your marketing plan up to speed in order to reach your target audience where they are already looking for legal services. 

Modern law firm marketing is about embracing digital transformation and taking advantage of the online tools available to law firms of all sizes. We understand the value of lead generation for law firms and believe in the power of automation to make this process as simple as possible for law firms. By optimizing your profile on Lawzana, including completing all the details and making a relatively small investment in a paid subscription, your leads will start to come in via our effective, novel, and high-traffic directory.

Today, the vast majority of your target audience is using online resources to look for legal services and support; this means that creating a robust digital marketing plan is of utmost importance. To stand out from your competitors in your locality and practice areas, you must focus on every angle to build your online presence and gain that competitive advantage.

Lead generation is essential to support your law firm's business growth and to bring in high-profile and interesting cases for your lawyers. This article will summarize some best practices to support lead generation in the most valuable and effective way. In this article, we will outline the details related to law firms' online marketing strategies that can connect you to a large number of your target clients and explore ways your law firm can leverage them to build its overall brand.

When you implement the below law firm marketing strategies, you can build up your lead generation to sustainably attract new clients.

Map out the user journey

Understanding the minds of clients can be challenging. New technology, consumer preferences, and purchasing trends evolve even if you have successfully accounted for their requirements and wish lists.

To build a constant flow of high-quality, relevant leads, you need to begin by mapping out your target clients' user journey starting from the first touchpoint and ending with their purchase decision, which will hopefully be signing the contract with your law firm for your legal services. It may take some time and a lot of careful thinking, but once you have this visualization, you can build a lead-generation process based on the map. Once you have done the hard work, regularly maintain by optimizing the sales funnel to continue evolving based on the changing needs and requirements of your client's journey.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engines are one of the best and most sustainable sources of lead generation for law firms. However, in order to generate relevant leads through search engines such as Google, you need to focus on building your search engine ranking position for your target keywords. These are the search terms that you have to be found for if you wish to be seen by your target clients. On average, the first search results page accounts for about 80% of all clicks, so if your firm is not on the first page for your search terms, you stand a much-reduced chance of even being seen.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing strategy that can help your law firm to be found through methods such as the following:

Conducting keyword research to discover the search terms that your law firm can rank for

Embedding these keywords strategically on your website's pages, blog posts, and all other pages

Gaining high-quality backlinks to your law firm's website from related websites

Keeping pages and older blog content updated

Ensuring your website continues to be optimized will support your site's discoverability on search engines such as Google and Bing. Below we explore some steps to consider when optimizing your law firm's website.

Optimize your website design and structure for lead generation

Once your law firm's website is optimized for search engines and traffic to your website starts to grow, you need to encourage visitors to stay on the site. Some of your target audience who visit your firm's site may be ready to make a decision, and website design and user experience can either reassure visitors to make contact or put them off if not executed properly.

It is important for the website design to support easy navigation and to be responsive to all devices, as many of your site's visitors will be browsing on mobile, along with desktops or tablets. Try to reduce the amount of text to make the message clear and concise and avoid clashing fonts or colors. With your design, consider featuring branded client case studies, reviews, and staff photos that support the legitimacy of your law firm.

Focus on ensuring the pages load quickly, within two to five seconds, as visitors do not expect to wait for pages to appear these days. If your pages take a long time to load, potential clients will likely lose their patience and exit the site. Moreover, competitors' websites that do not take long to load present a more user-friendly and professional option, which could result in lost business.

To test your site's speed, you can check out Google's online speed tester, PageSpeed Insights, and enter your website's URL to see how fast it loads. Google will give your site a score and recommendations to speed up and optimize the site.

Ensure your site is mobile-friendly by using Google's mobile testing tool, where again, you can enter your site's URL to get a score with some tips to improve the score. If your website is not mobile-friendly in 2024, you are almost certainly losing potential business to your competitors.

Part of your site's user experience is also about making it visually appealing. Your law firm's website is one of the first things your potential clients will see about your firm, so it is important to be visually appealing. Design is subjective, but some principles can help you here. Website design evolves, so it is a good idea to ensure your site is up to date with website design trends to reassure potential clients that your law firm is also up to speed. Your firm's website design should align with its brand, create a positive impression to potential clients, have a clean and simple design, and match the website's content. A professional website designer can support you, as even minor details can make a big difference in terms of design.

Here are some points to consider to understand if your website is ready or needs more design work:

• Is the website style aligned with my law firm's brand, including elements such as colors, mood, tone, use of graphics, etc.?
• Is there a consistent style across the website?
• Does the style match my target client market? Is it likely to attract them?
• What first impression does the website give? Concise or disorganized? Clear or messy? Approachable or serious? Most importantly, do these first impressions align with the vision for my law firm's brand?
• Is the use of images supporting my law firm's key message or distracting visitors?

Eliminate any design touches that do not match your law firm's brand, personality, or key messages. Ensure your firm's logo and website design complement one another. Always take into consideration your target client audience and use this to guide the style of your marketing.

Your website should be easy to navigate; however, before this, it should be easy to find.

Most law firms are two things: local (not national) and need-based (clients come to you). With this in mind, we can sum up the goal of your firm's website:

Attracting potential local clients and providing them with the information they are looking for to convert them into clients.

‍This leads us to another important aspect of any digital marketing strategy: content.

Content is the sum of your copy, video, images, and other content or media that contribute to your law firm's website. Content is the energy of your website; it is essentially the fuel that powers it. Suppose you are aiming for your firm to be on the first page of the search results (which you should be). In that case, you will need to provide website visitors with the information they are looking for concisely and attractively while ensuring that those pages are optimized for search so that the search engines rank your page highly in the search results. These are the fundamentals of SEO, essential in boosting your law firm's website visibility and online presence.

As a next step, you can begin developing a content marketing and local SEO program to implement some of these critical measures and monitor the progress. 

And perhaps more importantly, your website design must include clear calls to action (CTAs). Prospective clients can be encouraged to leave their contact details, book an appointment, or otherwise take action in a way that allows you to follow up.

Content marketing:

Creating new content is a great way to optimize your site and enhance your marketing efforts. This will help your web pages rank higher for new keywords while also engaging your readers and positioning you or your law firm as a leader in your practice area.

This law firm's marketing strategy is great for creating loyal customers out of your leads. This is because content marketing provides value to your potential and current customers beyond the legal services they pay for, inspiring them to stay with you in the long run.

Blogging is a great way to start your content marketing, but some law firms may also want to try creating video content.

Online review monitoring:

One referral will bring you one new client, but one good online survey will help you attract hundreds of leads on the web. Collect positive and negative reviews to highlight your law firm as a trusted business client.

Even though there are paid options to track and respond to reviews systematically, gathering and monitoring your firm's online lawyer testimonials can be done for free on Lawzana and this can additionally help your firm attract potential clients who are surveying the marketplace for suitable legal support. Legal sites that offer a space for client reviews may not be an obvious choice for your competitors, as some lawyers are wary of adding client reviews or unsure how to place them; therefore, they stand a good chance of attracting a significant amount of quality traffic, including from potential leads.

Social media marketing:

LinkedIn is a key platform in legal marketing today, with the majority of lawyers using the platform with good effect to network, reach potential clients, and also build the brand of the law firm they are representing. Sharing your content on LinkedIn, both on your personal profile and your company page can help you reach new followers and develop a dedicated audience.

Lawyers are also increasingly using Facebook as part of their law firm's marketing, and you can also use the platform's advanced ad creation and publishing tools to reach a very targeted audience.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising:

Google doesn't have to be your only source of leads. You can also launch a Google Ads campaign to make your PPC ad appear above search results for your desired keywords. Many law firms choose to connect with specific landing pages (for example, a landing page for a family lawyer if they are targeting the keyword "family lawyer Singapore") to make their ads more effective. You can also create a landing page customized for your target audience and then set your ads to reach locals in your area.

PPC advertising does come with a cost, as a single click can cost between $1 or $2, less or more, depending on your locality and the keywords you are targeting. Lawyers and attorneys often use marketing services firms to manage their advertising to get the best possible results from their investment. PPC ads can provide fast results, allowing law firms to turn leads into clients more quickly than with many other marketing strategies.

Email marketing:

For every proportion of spend on email marketing, law firms can look at a significant return on investment (ROI). However, to take advantage of the potential of email marketing, law firms should consider developing drip marketing email campaigns to bring leads through their firm's sales funnel which will improve their chances of converting prospects into clients, beginning with an opening welcome email.

One way to capture email addresses is to offer downloadable resources, such as whitepapers and slideshows, in exchange for an email. Another way to gather leads is to start an email newsletter and build subscribers. Email newsletters are also a great way to share more of your web content.

Optimize your law firm's online presence

Law firm SEO is not just about your firm's website. You need to consider your online presence on all platforms, which includes your website of course, along with other platforms such as your Google My Business profile, Lawzana, Avvo, Facebook, LinkedIn, FindLaw, and so on.

When searching for a business online, you will see the results of Google's "local pack or three-pack," which includes a map and a selection of local businesses that match your search query. Google considers various factors to assess which firms are placed in the sought-after high-ranking spots within this space, and one factor is their presence on websites such as directories and lawyer listing services.

To rank well in local packs, lawyers need to optimize many things, but claiming and filling out rented online space is a critical first step. If you haven't already, claim your Google My Business account and fill it out thoroughly with accurate, detailed information about your firm.

Monitor and evaluate your firm's digital marketing for ongoing improvement

You can easily waste money on marketing that doesn't work. That's why it is so important to measure and track your progress.

Tools like Google Analytics can be daunting, but measuring results is important to get the most from your marketing. To simplify this, start by focusing on a few data points and consider what you can track without a complex analytics tool.

Stay on top of your data by setting up weekly or monthly reports, which can be automated once set up. Once you are on the right track in terms of growth, you should begin to witness steady growth trends relating to your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Here are some KPI examples below; just remember that they are likely to be different for each firm, so consider what is important for your situation:

• Total new clients generated online
• Leads
• Revenue
• Return on marketing investment (ROMI)
• Lead-to-sale conversion rate
• Appointment bookings
• Cost per lead (CPL)

As a next step, you can set up a way to track your target KPIs and set up a schedule to monitor these metrics weekly or monthly.

Summary

With high competition among law firms, investing in building a comprehensive digital marketing strategy should be the first point of focus. It is very likely that much of your competition is already implementing digital marketing strategies, so now is the time to start closing the gap.

As your target market continues to use Google and other online resources to look for legal support, by not building a robust online marketing plan, your law firm will hand the advantage to your competitors.

Using the law firm lead generation strategies detailed in this article can support your team in generating more quality leads by attracting more clients from your target market. Online marketing may take some time to develop, particularly if your law firm is just starting out with digital marketing. Still, when you begin by building meaningful connections with relevant potential clients online, your firm will stand a good chance to acquire more of the type of leads that you are looking for in an efficient way.

As you start creating your law firm lead generation initiatives, make a checklist to ensure that you cover all the bases featured in this article. As your digital marketing strategies generate increased search traffic and an increase in potential clients, you can then begin to focus on how to convert your leads into clients.

If you have any questions related to law firm lead generation, do not hesitate to contact our expert team at [email protected]