How Do Marketing Agencies Build Law Firm Marketing Strategies?How Do Marketing Agencies Build Law Firm Marketing Strategies?
The way most law firms buy marketing is broken.
Are you using a series of tactics or building a cohesive strategy?
If you cannot measure the performance of your legal marketing, then lawyers will always overpay for marketing campaigns.
Ready to make data-driven decisions and see a real return on your marketing investment?
Transforming your law firm’s marketing efforts begins with thinking strategically.
At Valve+Meter Performance Marketing our law firm marketing agency collaborates with your law practice to create sustainable digital marketing efforts.
How Do Your Market A Law Firm?
Performance marketing requires a shift in your perspective. The first step to creating better campaigns is to discard your law firm marketing budget.
Or rather, you need to stop thinking in the mindset of budgets driving decision making.
Without a doubt, legal marketing is not just an option; it’s a necessity. In a highly competitive industry, law firms need to reach prospective clients and stay engaged with past clients.
A conventional law firm marketing agency executes marketing initiatives including paid advertising, direct mail, billboards, and other digital efforts like law firm SEO.
If you reserve 2-5% of total revenue for a law firm marketing budget, then your perception of marketing is an expense.
When success is measured in clicks, phone calls, form fills, and search visibility, law firm marketing teams only see partial data.
What if you could measure each campaign’s performance in terms of revenue generated?
Performance marketing for law firms focuses on research and analytics to identify the most efficient tools to attract potential clients.
Law Firm Marketing Tactics Versus Strategy
Marketing tactics describe individual actions like Google Local Services Ads, video marketing, website design, and search engine optimization.
These activities are important, but they don’t operate in isolation.
A data-driven marketing campaign for lawyers considers how each activity impacts, balances, and supports the others.
Developing a strategic approach to your law firm marketing improves overall performance and reduces wasted advertising costs.
This mindset drives transformational growth.
What Is The Role Of Performance Marketing?
Think of marketing for your legal practice as water flowing through pipes. Marketing activities open valves, allowing high-quality leads to flow through and generate signed cases.
Performance marketing adds a meter to gauge the impact of each marketing campaign and channel.
In a rapidly evolving market, what worked for your law firm a year ago may no longer drive growth.
When all marketing channels work in a fluid strategy, pressure builds and your marketing campaigns achieve greater success. Performance marketing turns off underperforming channels, diverting marketing dollars to maximize your return on investment.
How To Build Effective Law Firm Marketing Campaigns
So how do you build a law firm marketing plan?
Your overall strategy should be tailored to your exacting needs.
Start with these 10 steps to identify your vision, your ideal clients, and the law firm marketing marketing efforts most likely to earn lasting results:
- Clear Objectives: Start with well-defined goals. Your marketing should align with your firm’s overall business vision.
- Target Audience: Your law practice shouldn’t try to be everything to everyone. Understanding your ideal clients – their demographics, location, and legal needs – is key to successful marketing.
- Branding: A strong brand identity resonates with your target audience and builds credibility in a competitive market.
- Content Strategy: Content encompasses the written and visual stories you share about your firm. Creating a written marketing strategy for content creation drives all marketing channels.
- Digital Presence: Optimize your online presence, including your website, social media profiles, and online directories, to attract, engage, and convert potential clients.
- SEO: Effective search engine optimization (SEO) techniques are essential for your law firm’s website to be found online. Investing in SEO lays the foundation for long-term success building momentum for your marketing campaigns.
- Paid Advertising: Choosing the right paid media channels and integrating your CRM with your law firm lead generation tools increases efficiency.
- Client Engagement: Fostering relationships with prospective, current, and past clients through innovative marketing automation improves engagement and frees your team to focus on active cases.
- Analytics: Accountability and performance tracking should focus on revenue-generating marketing efforts to enable informed decision-making.
- Continuous Improvement: Studying your performance enables your law firm marketing to adjust your strategy based on feedback and changing market conditions.
These fundamentals help shape your overall law firm marketing campaign.
Before we examine how to implement each step, let’s consider how law firm marketing campaigns have been transformed by the internet.
How Has Digital Law Firm Marketing Transformed Lead Generation?
The move beyond traditional methods like radio, print, and television is predicated on the idea of better targeting through analytics. Search engines like Google and Bing, along with social media platforms, offer exceptional insights into user behavior.
Whereas traditional marketing efforts build brand awareness to a broad audience, digital marketing pinpoints audiences within your preferred geographical location and demographics. Search engines and social media marketing can deliver different ads to prospective clients based on their interests and preferences.
Digital law firm marketing has revolutionized lead generation by empowering firms to move beyond the limitations of traditional advertising. Over 96% of people seek legal advice using a search engine.
Instead of broadcasting messages to a wide audience, digital tools use sophisticated analytics to understand user behavior.
This allows for highly targeted campaigns that focus on individuals most likely to need your legal services. The ability to refine audiences and tailor messaging makes digital marketing a powerful engine for generating high-quality leads.
And as technology continues to advance, law firms that embrace this transformation will have a significant advantage in attracting and converting clients.
Building Your Law Firm Marketing Plan
Law firms don’t have to execute their own marketing strategy. Partnering with a trusted agency gains access to a wide range of professionals with specialized expertise.
Imagine building an internal marketing team capable of designing your law firm website and landing pages, running your advertising, building organic content plans, and developing your website services.
That’s a lot of experts for even an enterprise law firm and simply unfeasible for smaller law firms.
Your leaders should be at the helm of your law firm marketing plan.
Let’s consider how these early steps guide your long-term growth.
Setting Clear Objectives
What is your current situation?
Where do you want to go?
The here to there story is unique for every law firm. You may want to grow your firm’s client base or you may simply want to improve the efficiency of your marketing.
Before diving into any marketing campaign, it’s crucial to set clear objectives.
Defining your goals upfront will guide your strategy and help you measure success.
Half of all small businesses do not have a marketing plan. Law firms that adopt a strategic mindset immediately stand out from half of your competitors.
It’s also important to ensure that your objectives are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This approach ensures that your goals are clear, trackable, and aligned with your law firm’s overall business objectives.
Understanding Your Target Audience
Who do you serve?
Why do your current and past clients love you?
Knowing your target audience is the foundation of any effective marketing campaign.
In a recent survey, 35% of respondents said the primary reason they chose their lawyer was a feeling of trust. Just 27% hired a lawyer they liked.
By understanding your audience, you can shape your designs, content, messaging, and marketing channels to resonate with them.
Analyzing your current client data, conducting market research, and creating buyer personas are all effective ways to gain insights into your target audience.
The more you know about your audience, the better you can connect with them, build credibility, and provide them essential legal services.
Developing a Strong Law Firm Brand
A distinct visual brand helps a law firm build a reputation with prospective clients.
Aligning all marketing from your law firm website to business cards and email signatures, creates a unique identity that resonates and is memorable.
A strong brand helps to build trust, establish credibility, and differentiate your firm from competitors.
Designing brand standards before developing your law firm’s marketing plan ensures content, design, and your overall law firm online identity is consistent.
Branding should reflect your firm’s values, expertise, and the type of legal services you provide. By investing in a strong brand, you can create a lasting impression that attracts and retains clients.
Utilizing Content Marketing Strategies
Content marketing is a powerful tool for law firms looking to attract and engage potential clients, but remains a significant challenge for many businesses.
According to one survey, 43%of marketers indicate creating consistently high-quality content is one the biggest hurdles.
Branding may help your law firm marketing efforts, but content marketing tells the complete story of why potential clients should choose your firm over competitors.
Law firm websites that use generic text and stock images lack authenticity.
By creating and sharing valuable content across your website, such as high-quality images, blog posts, articles, and videos, you can demonstrate your legal expertise and address the questions and concerns of your target audience.
This not only helps to build trust and credibility but also improves your website’s search engine rankings, making it more likely for prospective clients to find you online.
Effective content marketing can be used beyond your website in landing pages for ads, organic social media, and even newsletters.
By providing insightful and informative content, you can establish your firm as a thought leader in the legal industry and attract more clients to your practice.
Creating A Digital Presence With A Compelling Law Firm Website
Your law firm’s website is the cornerstone of your marketing efforts.
With your law firm’s marketing plan, it’s often the first point of contact between your firm and potential clients.
A well-designed website appeals to your target audience and showcases your law firm’s brand.
Content should clearly communicate your expertise and any legal services you offer.
To perform well in Google search and optimize conversions of new clients, it should be easy to navigate, with clear calls to action that guide visitors to take the next step.
Additionally, your law firm should own all your digital marketing assets, especially your website.
As your law firm marketing campaigns improve, your content grows in value and importance. By investing in a high-quality website, you can establish a strong online presence that attracts and converts prospective clients for years.
Implementing Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
How can website content drive law firm lead generation?
When your website is optimized your webpages are more likely to appear in Google search results.
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the practice of improving content and website structure for search engines.
By optimizing your website and content for relevant keywords, you can signal to Google and other search engines that you are relevant for legal services.
Law firm SEO involves both on-page optimizations, such as incorporating keywords into your website’s content and meta tags, and off-page optimizations, like building quality backlinks.
Local SEO for law firms is particularly important, as it helps your firm appear in local search results and attract clients in your geographic area.
By implementing effective SEO techniques, you can ensure that potential clients searching for legal services online easily find your firm.
Exploring Paid Advertising
Paid advertising offers law firms a fast and effective way to reach their target audience.
Platforms like Google Ads and social media advertising allow you to target specific demographics, interests, and even geographic locations.
Google Local Services Ads place your firm’s message directly in front of potential clients who are actively searching for legal services.
Many legal marketing agencies only prioritize ad copy and tracking leads.
In performance marketing, high-quality landing pages can increase conversion rates dramatically.
Additionally, the data collected from paid advertising campaigns provides valuable insights into your audience’s behavior, enabling you to refine your marketing strategies for even better results.
Growing Through Client Engagement
Within legal marketing, client engagement has traditionally required extensive effort and resources.
Fostering meaningful relationships with prospective, current, and past clients, cultivates repeat business, referrals, and earns online reviewers.
Performance marketing uses marketing automation to reduce effort and improve client experience.
This technology streamlines marketing processes, automating repetitive tasks such as email campaigns, social media posting, and lead nurturing.
By implementing marketing automation, law firms can deliver personalized content and timely responses to clients at scale, without overburdening their team.
For new clients, the initial interaction with a law firm is crucial. Marketing automation allows for the timely delivery of informative content, such as legal guides or case studies, tailored to the specific needs and interests of potential clients.
This not only helps in establishing the firm’s expertise but also keeps the firm top of mind as the prospect moves closer to making a hiring decision.
Former clients can be a valuable source of referrals and repeat business. Marketing automation can facilitate re-engagement through targeted campaigns, such as newsletters featuring legal updates relevant to their previous case, or special offers for legal services they may need in the future.
By automating routine marketing tasks, law firms can free up their team’s time to concentrate on active cases and high-value activities. This not only improves operational efficiency but also reduces excessive waste within your marketing budget.
Measuring and Analyzing Campaign Results
To gauge the success of your law firm’s marketing campaigns, it’s essential to measure and analyze the results.
Performance marketing integrates lead generation data with your CRM to measure how effective your strategies are for driving revenue.
Studying marketing tactics that are driving your success is key to thinking without a marketing budget mindset.
Continuous Improvement for Making Data-Driven Decisions
With the data gathered from analytics and tracking, you can make informed decisions to refine and enhance your marketing strategies.
Analyzing performance metrics will help you understand what is working and what needs adjustment.
This might mean changing your SEO keywords, modifying your ad targeting, or revising your content strategy.
By continuously assessing the results and making data-driven adjustments, you can improve the effectiveness of your law firm’s marketing campaigns and achieve better outcomes.
Conclusion
Building successful law firm marketing campaigns requires a strategic approach that includes setting clear objectives, understanding your target audience, developing a strong brand, and leveraging digital marketing channels.
Ultimately, law firm marketing experts do not rely on actions and tactics, but long-term strategy.
By researching and planning before spending any marketing dollars, law firms reduce risk. And through measuring and analyzing your campaign results, you can make data-driven decisions to refine your strategies and achieve even better outcomes.
Implementing these strategies can significantly contribute to your law firm’s growth, helping you attract more clients and establish your firm as a leader in the legal industry.
Take The Next Steps
Connect with Valve+Meter for a conversation with our legal marketing strategists and start crafting marketing campaigns that will set your law firm on the path to success.