Why Attorneys Need a Strong Online Marketing Strategy

If you’ve been in law for a while, you may have never considered online marketing to be essential for growth. In this day and age, digital marketing is a tool that, if used strategically, will not only benefit your law firm but also provide a great return on your investment. Unfortunately, it’s not easy. Digital marketing is complex with ever-changing rules and guidelines, and it’s hard to keep up, especially when it comes to social media.

What is now a widely used tool, social media originally held its drawbacks for certain professionals. However, with the growth of social media steadily increasing, law firms are taking advantage and embracing what social media has to offer. Social media can provide a competitive advantage for law firms over ones that haven’t yet embraced the digital marketing world. The internet provides an entirely new way for professionals to connect and interact with clients from diverse backgrounds.

It would seem that the benefits surely outweigh the negatives when it comes to using social media in a professional capacity. A strong attorney marketing strategy can create a positive impact for your entire organization. Here are some of the benefits of creating a strategic attorney marketing strategy:

Attract local business
As with any business, transparency is important if you want clients to be able to find your firm. Generations are growing up in a world that is much more technically sophisticated, and because of this, they rely heavily on the internet. Digital marketing is important in this digital world where everything is just a tap away. Having an online presence for your firm makes you much more available.

When someone types “law firms near me” into a search engine, you want your firm to pop up as one of the local locations on the first page of results. From there, prospective clients can navigate your website to find out more about your firm, its personnel, and the overall message your firm strives to achieve.

The advantage of using this kind of marketing is that it allows clients to search for your firm and find out more information about whom they potentially want to work with. This provides the client with a lot more choices, leaving them with a sense that they made the decision to choose the best professionals available to them.

Build awareness
The way to build a business is to instill trust between your firm and the client. The content you create for your firm’s website will be the foundation on which you build trust with clients who choose to research your firm digitally before making a commitment. The trusty method of treating clients with exceptional service and respect still holds true today. However, building trust to attract new customers comes down to your content.

The content on your website should have a significant influence on the people who visit it daily. Not only will this allow prospective clients to find out more about your firm, but it builds awareness for the firm itself, ultimately bringing in more clients. Blogging and various other forms of social media allow firms to display their employee expertise either through client testimonials or personal views written by the professionals themselves. This provides a personal touch so the client can see beyond the screen about whom they could potentially work with. Blogging, along with social media, allows a lawyer to display expertise in their field before they have a chance to engage the client. Being a seasoned attorney, you’ll want to showcase your expertise. There is no guidebook that says speaking at seminars can’t have the same effectiveness in an online platform.

Establish leadership
The benefits of creating a website for your law firm are lengthy, but that doesn’t mean you can just slap up a website and not update it. You’ll want to utilize social media to share valuable information that will aid your firm in featuring the expertise it possesses. Hopefully, this leads to new business and further career opportunities.

Generating new content is a great way to attract new clients. Content is key to establishing your firm as a leader in the field of law. Clients want to feel like you know what you’re doing and that you’ll be able to help them no matter what the case may entail. Content is a huge part of a good digital marketing strategy and shouldn’t be forgotten about in lieu of other items. Having unique content is what really makes digital marketing successful and what could ultimately make your firm successful.

What about marketing costs?
Now that you understand some of the benefits of having a good digital-marketing strategy for your law firm’s online presence, it’s time to discuss cost. A marketing budget can be one of the most important, yet fluid, budgets for a company. Being very strategic with marketing services you’re paying for is really important in order to ensure you are getting the most return for your investment. So, is paying for attorney marketing services worth the cost?

After discussing the benefits of a strategic marketing approach, you probably understand that failing to showcase your law firm online is one of the biggest marketing mistakes in today’s internet-based world. After all, the United States saw almost 300 million internet users in 2016 alone. These users now have access to more than a billion websites at the touch of a button. Furthermore, according to a study completed by LexisNexis, 76% of adult users go online at least once in their search for an attorney. This means that the competition for user traffic and engagement for any law website is very high.

This is why attorneys should hire professional marketing agencies that offer top-of-the-line digital-marketing services. They have the talent, experience, and scalability that is essential for growth. It’s never a good idea to juggle both your practice and marketing at the same time. Eventually, one or the other will fall short and in order to get the most out of your marketing investment, a professional is the key to success. Here are 5 reasons that hiring out your attorney marketing services is worth the cost:

1. Saves time
Hiring a digital marketing agency means you’re paying for expertise. These professionals know the online business and can develop personalized yet effective campaigns to generate leads. Plus, they have enough bandwidth to handle everything themselves so you can run your practice without having to wear multiple hats.

2. Experience
A lot of marketing companies have multi-industry experience, which means they bring more to the table than your in-house team. In-house teams can get too niche-focused while only reading industry related content, which hinders innovation. Digital marketing agencies with success in other industries will understand your key audience and can come up with new ways to capture their attention. They’re filled with creative minds that are eager to experiment and explore new solutions. For instance, perhaps your website doesn’t have blogs. An agency will know how important this is to online growth and will develop a great content strategy to get you started.

3. Strategy
Marketing is about the big picture. Attorneys typically focus on tasks and don’t have time to see the larger goals. Coming up with marketing campaigns takes time, creativity, brainstorming, research, testing, and measuring, which you probably don’t have time to accomplish. Hiring a knowledgeable marketing agency ensures your campaigns are organized and running at optimal levels. For example, maybe your website isn’t optimized enough. A digital marketing agency will create a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plan to get your website found by users.

4. Competitors
It’s easy to fall behind on industry trends, especially in the legal sphere. Marketing companies can stay ahead of the curve by checking out your competitors while conducting industry research about your audience. For instance, your audience might be more interested in learning more about a certain area of law. Your marketing company will suggest you write informative blogs on the website to keep users engaged and interested. Plus, you’ll be recognized as a legitimate source of legal information. Since digital marketing changes so often, they’ll help you keep your edge so you can stay in the game.

5. Goals
If you’ve been haphazardly throwing your marketing strategies around without thinking about results, then hiring a marketing service will be a great investment. They’re interested in working with you toward achieving goals like retaining current clients, bringing in different cases, attracting new clients, and increasing revenue. A marketing agency can give you a fresh perspective on these campaigns and will deliver results.

While it’s tempting to try and market your firm in-house, the benefits of outsourcing attorney marketing services are well worth the cost. Even if you have the best law firm and a beautiful website, it means nothing if no one can find you. Hire industry professionals to put you in front of users with the goal of turning them into clients.

If you have any questions about developing an attorney marketing strategy or the costs associated with marketing, please contact our team today.