What is the best marketing strategy for lawyers?
- What works in advertising if you provide legal services?
- How do you reach the people who need you?
If you are a lawyer, or provide legal services, how do you know what strategies you should use to reach potential clients? Practicing law can come with a number of challenges. When you are a lawyer who needs to acquire clients, through advertising or marketing efforts, you won’t have an immense amount of time to dedicate to your own campaigns or creative efforts.
After all, the time you spend advising clients is where your money comes from. In order to guarantee a steady flow of new clients, you have to put time toward your marketing. But if you don’t spend the right amount of time toward billable hours, then your revenue streams drop. It can be a tough balancing act for a small firm.
Even if you have a larger practice, you will either need to find an agency to help handle your work or train a new hire at your own business who will handle your marketing (and likely some filing and organizational services since a full-time marketing hire can be costly).
In all of these scenarios, you do have to make specific decisions on your approach. Who will handle the marketing primarily? What budget do you have either for outsourcing, or ad placements? There are a lot of considerations you have to make. No matter what route you go, one thing will remain in all of these scenarios: what are the different types of marketing tactics do you undertake? And what will work best?
What are the different types of marketing?
The two broadest categories of marketing are digital and traditional. Digital is anything you can use or see on a screen or mobile device. Traditional marketing falls outside the digital realm.
Digital can include:
- streaming content
- websites
- social media
- digital ads
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- and more
The amount businesses are spending in the digital category continues to grow. With more and more smart devices in everyone’s homes and at businesses, that ratio has seen exponential growth and shows no signs of stopping.
Traditional marketing can be items such as
- radio
- television
- other non-digital forms of media.
The mediums can sometimes blend together, because you can create traditional television, but then use it for digital ads or streaming with pre-rolls on platforms such as YouTube or Hulu. Same with radio. You can produce standard radio, but with a well-made spot, you can also promote the audio production pieces you made on streaming services and apps as well.
Which marketing is useful?
If you find yourself wondering “is marketing useful?”, the answer is yes, if it’s the right approach.
The wrong marketing tactics can cause your marketing or advertising efforts to get lost in the shuffle. There’s a sea of marketing content launched every hour. If you don’t have the right strategy in place, you’ll become just another drop of water in that sea and blend in with the rest.
As a lawyer, or a legal firm practicing services in your area, there are several routes you can take to make your marketing more effective and drive your new client numbers toward a new level of success.
The first thing is determining your area. If you are only licensed to practice within certain states, you can do what Is called geo-fencing or location targeting. This is specific to digital marketing, mostly. However, you can also choose print or traditional media that is within the area you can provide council or services to. You’ve likely seen either realtors or fellow lawyers go the traditional route of putting ads on grocery carts at their local stores. This is a perfect example of traditional location-targeting.
Digitally, you can get remarkably specific. Our team of experts have some systems in place, like our hypertargeting systems, that can get digital placements served in a specific area with an accuracy of 3 feet. Which means if you have zip codes or neighborhoods with residents, or businesses, that you want to reach, it’s easy for us to create ads or placements that serve people who live in specific areas you know have a number of potential clients there. Even if there is a business that needs one of your services, our digital targeting can aim at a specific building to only reach those who work there and need your legal advice and services.
Another factor to consider is your website. Some lawyers have extensive websites with contact forms, or even the ability to make appointments through a calendar system directly during consulting hours. Others have less integrations and functionality. If there is a need for more direct onboarding or outreach through phone calls or physical appointments, it may make sense for your practice to keep the website simple. That’s fine if it works for you and your firm. But, since your website is not as optimized or interactive, it may be that more traditional routes can engage people better. But, improving your website can bring your legal practice to a new level and bring in new clients you wouldn’t be able to appeal to otherwise.
How do you plan which marketing tactics to use?
One of the first, and easiest, routes to take when it comes to deciding what marketing strategies, or tactics, to use is budget. Knowing what you can spend monthly, and annually, helps make the decisions easier.
Some larger firms love to do heavy spends for traditional television so when you think of a car accident, you think of that lawyer. It’s why there are often nicknames and easy-to-remember phone numbers or websites. The television ads repeat themselves over and over to get the notion in your head that once you are in a car accident, and need legal counsel, you call that lawyer.
This is called heavy impressions and saturation. This approach gets eyes and ears on the firm so many times, that it creates an association with what’s provided. The downside is television is expensive.
Pre-roll videos on services like YouTube can give you more specific measurement or ensure a certain amount of impressions that traditional television cannot always guarantee. But, surely you’ve hit “Skip Ads,” so unless your video reaches a client quickly and in a way that makes them interested in watching the full video, or click the ad call-to-action (CTA), then the ads have been lost.
Radio can have a similar impact. With a catchy nickname and enough repetition, then over time you can reach your audience in your area. However, it’s not as guaranteed as digital placements. That doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. It just means you won’t be able to see reporting with quite as many specifics regarding engagement.
Another marketing strategy that can be effective are keywords. By using SEO to focus on terms used within your sub-category of law, such as work settlements, criminal defense, or property disputes, you can increase how quickly people can find you via Google or other search engines. The better your SEO, the more prominent your results.
What tactic works then?
The truth is there isn’t one solution. As much as we’d all love a magic formula, it takes research and strategy to inform your decisions. Only then can you determine which tactics work with your budget, your timing, and where you are as a firm.
If you need a market analysis or dissection of competitors, that strategy approach is something our team of experts love to provide. Our first steps, relying heavily on strategy and research, help decide what routes may suite you based on your target demographic, what placements have worked for you, or competitors. Then we can then put into practice for you.
Whether it’s improving your website, increasing your SEO and content, or building a traditional campaign, our team of experts can build the ideal campaign for you and your firm.
If you want to dive into what marketing tactics, plans, and strategies work best for lawyers and firms providing legal services, be sure to reach out to us to get started. We can help you find your target demographic, and what you do to speak with them in a meaningful manner.