An aspect of being a lawyer and running a law firm that is often overlooked and under taught in law school is the business side of a firm. To have success as a lawyer, various business needs such as client intake, bookkeeping, managing an office, and marketing, among many other things are required.

Marketing is one of the most important organs on the business side of your firm. It drives your firm’s image and attracts clients. Though intimidating to get into, you’ll find that you’ll be much better with the skill than if you avoided it. Alternatively, there’s plenty of options that enable you to outsource your marketing. A blended approach of outsourcing some aspects of the marketing such as paid ads while suggesting staff handle things like email marketing and blogging is the most common.

Marketing Approach

Marketing requires a critical, almost scientific brain. Your marketing strategy should be based on quantitative data and experiments. It also requires you to project forward towards a goal. From there you can break it down into short-term goals and long-term goals. This will force you to develop a strategy towards meeting those goals as a visualization exercise.

For example, your goal may be for your website to attract more visitors. From this long term goal you may decide that in the short term, you need to focus on search engine optimization, or having a link to your site more readily available. This creates clear and easy steps to generating your goal of more visitors to your website.

What Should Be In My Toolkit To Grow My Practice?

Before making any marketing plans however, you more or less need to “find yourself” and find what it is you are advertising. What is your brand? Who are your clients? What would make for a strong website? These three building blocks are essential for your marketing campaign.

What is your Brand?

o Your brand is the ‘what’ of what you’re marketing. Anyone can be a generic law firm, but you need something that makes your practice your practice. How should your law firm be conceptualized? As a law firm, your brand should at least demonstrate value, trust, quality, and dependability. Additionally, think about the style, image, and unique voice you want to convey. Your brand should generally be reflective of you, your practice area, and your personality.

· Client Personas

o Once you know your brand, you’ll want to think about who your brand will be important to. You should create a “general client” profile to guide your marketing efforts. You should have this general client for each service your firm provides so you can focus who you are attracting. Considerations can include: demographics, background, motivations and goals, and challenges or pain points.

· Your Law Firm Website

• Most of your first impressions for you and your firm will come from your website. So you want to make sure you put your best foot forward with it. Your website should include an “About Us” page explaining who you are what you do best. You should also add a practice area page that lists the services you offer, a page that lists your mission and values, client testimonials, a blog, case studies, or even a FAQ to your website, among other pages.
• For our guide on how to go about designing your website, see our blog post here!

How to Create a Marketing Plan

Once you have your marketing campaign building blocks set, you can now make your own marketing goals for you to reach! These goals should be framed around the client persona you layed out.

Once you’ve identified your goals, you must tie them to a specific and quantifiable metric such as website traffic numbers. There are many useful metric tools such as Google analytics, which help you see how many people have visited, viewed, downloaded, how long visitors stayed on your website, and other website engagement metrics. Social media channels also have their own reporting systems to measure engagement, though you can use social media management systems to consolidate those stats into a single source. There are also paid services that can take these metrics to the next level.

To get those metrics to measure, there are a number of online and offline ways to market your law firm and drive traffic to your website.

• Online
• SEO. SEO is the practice of making your website search engine friendly (“optimizing” your webpage) to help you rank higher on SERPs (search engine results pages).
• PPC “Pay per click”. These are online ads you pay for when people click on them. The most famous example of these is Google AdWords, which are the ads you see at the top of your Google search.
• Social Media. At this point, social media’s importance is obvious. If you’re not on social media or don’t at least have a Facebook page for your practice, you’re not taking advantage of a massive platform with a built-in audience. Social media can be used to engage with and learn more about your clients, colleagues, academics, or really anyone on a more genuine and personal level, whether organically or through ads. When it comes to social media for lawyers, we recommend that you at least be on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
• For Instagram, see a couple of samples from lawyers who we think are worth modelling after:
• https://www.instagram.com/diamond_lawyers/
• Check out their clear and to the point videos describing legal rules. Also notice their colour coordinated schemes and titles in their profile highlights.
• https://www.instagram.com/marcysegallaw/
• Notice the consistent colour scheme and helpful advice.
• https://www.instagram.com/svrfamilylaw/
• Notice how much they highlight their ability to speak from experience.
• https://www.instagram.com/welman.bloem/
• Take note of the consistent layout in all their posts.
• https://www.instagram.com/lawyer.zak/
• This account provides information and news. Also notice the eye-catching thumbnails.
• Legal Directories. One easy way to help increase your website’s SEO through link building is by listing your firm in legal directories.
• Google My Business. You should also claim your Google Business profile. Given the amount of people who search for attorneys through Google over legal directories, claiming your Google Business profile is an important way to get noticed online. It’s a way to get noticed without paying for ads. By keeping your profile updated, getting and responding to reviews for your firm, and adding a FAQ section to your listing can help boost your SEO, helping you get more visibility in SERPs.
• Email Marketing. Email marketing is a great way to generate new and repeat business. You can create ads, newsletters, notifications, and other emails to send to those on your (segmented) lists. Email marketing for lawyers, much like any other marketing effort, requires consistency and a regular revisit to your strategy.
• Offline
• Offline, or traditional, marketing can comprise of billboards, tv and radio ads, business cards, posters, or snail mail advertising.
• You shouldn’t rely only on digital or traditional marketing. You should have a mix of both in your marketing plan since only one or the other wouldn’t necessarily provide the growth you’re looking for.

Convert Visitors into Clients

Marketing is great but as Alec Baldwin says, “A-B-C. Always Be Closing”. Converting visitors into clients can be done by doing simple things like making a client intake form readily available and easily fillable.

All your marketing success is for nothing if you cannot close so it’s important to be just a step away from being there for your client who you’ve worked so hard to inform them of your existence.

Regarding available and intuitive client intake forms, or even client intake portals, it is worth briefly mentioning that you can better convert on your marketing efforts with other integrated legal software. Check out our page for lawyers on what kinds of software are available for you to outsource tasks and provide a better client experience!

Goodluck!

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