Employ these proven marketing techniques to attract more clients to your law firm
If you have a law firm, you know the challenges of having to build a law practice. Sure, once you get big enough you may be able to afford advertising on TV, like your well-established competitors, but that takes years and sometimes entire generations. Consider the following questions:
A copywriter for lawyers, someone who knows how to write marketing copy for law firms, could be an affordable and pragmatic ticket to growing your law practice.
Today’s lawyers face unprecedented competition. Lawyer density has increased in nearly every city. And the internet has also chipped away at the potential pool of clients with many people opting for DIY or low-cost legal services purchased online.
As a result, lawyers need to be more proactive in marketing and business development than ever before. You probably know you can’t rely on referrals and other word-of-mouth techniques as the sole means to attract clients. You won’t survive.
Law firm promotion begins with a quality website written by a professional copywriter for lawyers. It can help prospective clients find you. Even if they’ve been referred by a friend or one of your existing clients, they’re likely to look at your website first before picking up the phone and calling you for an appointment. If they don’t like what they see, you’ll never have an opportunity to win their business. So you want to get it right.
Take a look at your current website (assuming you have one) and ask yourself these five questions:
Unless you’re able to give a definitive “yes” to those questions, you’ll want to begin investing resources into improving your website to grow your law firm.
To be effective, your website needs to communicate what makes you unique and better than your competition. Website visitors must be able to get an accurate impression of your firm within a few seconds of landing on your site.
Your site can’t look unprofessional. First impressions count. And your message can’t be subtle or wishy-washy. It must quickly make the best case for your services and prove you offer value. That doesn’t mean stuff the page with random content.
A skilled U.S. legal copywriter can help you create a website that builds your brand, positions you well against the competition and converts visitors into qualified prospects for your services.
With the level of competition between lawyers continually rising, standing out in the crowd becomes a significant challenge. One proven strategy is to choose a specialty versus being a general practitioner.
You’ve certainly heard the expression, “You can’t be all things to all people.” Narrow your focus by choosing a niche within your branch of law.
Consider the following brief list of law firms that chose specialties:
Can you see how by choosing their specialty, these lawyers distinguish themselves from potential competitors? It’s a critical part of building your brand, the image you create for yourself/your law firm.
Once you’ve identified your specialty, your marketing can then be targeted to appeal specifically to the needs of your chosen market segment. Keep in mind, you can eventually grow your practice–and your marketing–to include multiple specialties and diverse services.
A skilled legal copywriter can help you focus your website around your specialty, build your online profile and position you as the authority in that space. You want everyone who comes to your website to immediately know your area(s) of expertise. And as a specialist, clients are more likely to seek you out because an expert in the field always trumps a generalist.
Beyond promoting your specialty, you need to also think geographically. Which competitive strategy do you think will be more effective for your law firm?
The obvious answer is #3. So all your marketing needs to be geo-targeted to your specific city (or the nearest large city if you happen to be located in a small town). That means your website, your ads and any other marketing materials should mention your city by name as your service area.
According to WordStream, which specializes in online advertising, “Geography is so important because the average law firm client is not going to travel further than they need to.”
While having a website about your law firm is a necessity, it isn’t the only marketing tool you can use to promote your specialty and build your brand. A copywriter for law firms can also help you create:
Your brand should drive everything that represents you. With consistency and repetition, it will gain traction.
By promoting your law firm’s services within your chosen specialty, prospective clients and referral sources, such as other attorneys, will get to know who you are and send business your way.
One of the newer forms of online marketing are landing pages, and they’re easily adapted to meet the needs of lawyers. They typically focus on a specific client problem that the lawyer offers to help resolve by providing information and guidance.
For example, if you’re looking to obtain clients for a class-action lawsuit against a pharmaceutical company, creating a narrowly focused landing page that gives important information about the pharmaceutical in question and the damage it might have caused patients can be extremely effective.
That lawyer landing page can offer additional information in the form of a free report or free personal consultation to persuade prospective clients to either provide their email address to get the free report or contact you. Those individuals then become qualified leads for you to pursue. Traffic can be driven to the landing page via pay-per-click (PPC) ads or other forms of promotion.
If you’re a personal injury lawyer, create an informative landing page for slip-and-fall injuries.
Or, if you’re a family practice attorney and want to attract clients seeking help with a child custody arrangement, have a copywriter for divorce lawyers create a landing page about your custody services.
RankToday, an SEO company, recommends creating “a landing page for each market segment you serve. For example, if you practice family law, then family law should be a top-level page, and you should have pages under it for divorce, child support, adoption and child custody.” For law firms with more than one office, RankToday recommends having landing pages for each location.
By choosing a tight niche on which to focus, your landing page is likely to rank high in the search engines and also appear to clients that the niche is one of your specialties.
Best of all, you don’t have to limit yourself to one landing page. If you find that strategy works for you, create multiple landing pages, one for every niche you serve. If you research some of the larger law firms in your state, you’ll see they’re likely using numerous landing pages to find clients.
Here’s one more trick of the trade. A law firm marketing strategies guide recommends doing A/B testing. Create two versions of the same web page (version A and version B). Change just one variable between them such as the headline, photos or color of the sign-up buttons.
Use a tool like Crazy Egg or Optimizely to send half of your visitors to version A and the other half to B. Then see which version performs better. This is an easy, definitive way to optimize your landing page for best results.
The most successful law firms are continually creating great content. They know clients today want information, and they want to become a resource for facts related to their specialty.
According to Marketing Insider Group, “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach to attract, engage and ultimately convert your target audience into customers through the valuable, relevant content you create and publish. So, imagine your firm was the top search result for ‘How to Find a Lawyer.’ More of your potential new clients would find out about your firm, see it as a trustworthy source, and they would be more likely to choose your firm if your specialties align with their legal needs.”
Working with a skilled copywriter for lawyers, you can use your everyday legal work for marketing purposes. Consider these examples of items you can publish on your website to attract clients and cases:
Once you get in the mindset of creating content, you’ll find a plethora of topics for you or your professional copywriter to write about.
Today most people start their search for a product or service with Google. If you don’t come up on search engines for your legal specialty or geographic area, then you won’t be found. And that means, you won’t have a chance to try to win the visitor’s business.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a necessity if you want your website to come up organically (as opposed to paid ads) in search results. According to Blue Corona, a marketing agency, your law firm needs to be on page one of Google or it may as well not be listed at all—55 percent of all clicks go to one of the first three organic search results.”
By writing and publishing valuable content, using the relevant keywords your prospective clients are searching for, you can improve your law firm’s website ranking in search engine results, which makes it easier for people to find your practice online.
Every page on your website should be optimized to rank for a careful selection of 1-3 keywords. Those words should then be skillfully woven throughout the content. Headers and subheads, incoming links among other variables all help determine whether Google shows your site some love.
A copywriter who understands SEO can write copy and employ proven techniques to help you rise in the rankings.
Finding out the ins and outs of what a potential client is thinking is paramount to a successful law firm website and marketing campaign.
“Addressing user intent has always yielded better sales numbers in the long-run,” explains Puya Turkiyan in his article, Advanced Law Firm Marketing Strategies and Guide. He says it’s “essential to make sure your post or page fits the search intent of your audience.”
Think of it this way. Behind every Google search, there is an intention. The searcher is trying to accomplish some goal. They may be looking for the answer to a problem, seeking a specific service, or trying to source a product they want to buy. If you want your law practice to be discovered by users on the web, your content should be optimized for user intent.
For lawyers, that means including informational articles on your website that provide answers to common legal problems that your law practice handles, such as bankruptcies, divorces or landlord-tenant disputes.
Although the likelihood for conversion at this point in the searcher’s journey is minimal, these are queries for which you want visibility.
“Having this sort of content on your website gives you the opportunity to put your brand or site in front of the users at the start of their journey,” according to Search Engine Land. “When you consistently rank for these types of queries, you are placing yourself where your competitors are not.”
With Google showing more featured snippets and answers to queries in its results, well-written, informative articles can increase your organic footprint while also serving your potential customers needs.
Of course, you should also have content on your website about your services. While the searcher may initially find one of your informational articles, once they’re convinced that you know your stuff, there’s a chance they’ll want to explore hiring you as their attorney.
Lawyers were once able to set up their office, put up a sign, and have business come in their door. For better or worse, those days are long gone.
Today’s most successful law firms are continually building their brand and promoting their services. They become the authorities in their space and use proven marketing tactics to gain visibility.
They don’t build a website and forget about it. They’re continually updating and adding to it with new information that their clients will find useful. And they don’t rely on just one form of marketing. They use multiple methods and media to attract a continual stream of new clients.
If your law firm is ready to grow, hoping prospective clients will find you is not a strategy. That’s like fishing without bait and hoping the fish will attach itself to your hook. Plan on being hungry.
Also, marketing shouldn’t be a one-and-done function. You can’t toss your line into the lake once and expect to get your fish. That’s just not how it works. To see the best results and eliminate the feast-or-famine cycle so many law firms experience, your marketing efforts need to be ongoing.
A copywriter with a marketing background can help you find opportunities to promote your law firm and position you as the leading attorney in your field.
Susan Greene
Professional Copywriter
Affordable Rates
Orlando, Florida
floridacopywriter@gmail.com
(407) 578-5528
