Marketing for law firms is a crucial step in achieving success. With well-thought-out and executed strategies, it is possible to achieve excellent results in attracting and retaining clients.
Law firm marketing is the name given to the technique used to strengthen the image of lawyers and law firms in the digital environment without violating the Code of Ethics and Discipline. The method is widely used to win new clients and highlight competitive advantages over the competition.
The practice of law firm marketing precedes planning and law firm marketing ideas. For results to be more effective, actions must be aligned with the firm’s objectives.
Why is legal marketing important?
The internet has revolutionized the way we conduct business, and these changes have also impacted the legal profession. Legal marketing is an example of this. This technique expands the firm’s reach, allowing it to deliver value to potential clients before they even close a deal. In addition to these, there are other benefits. Assistant for attorneys has listed some of them below, take a look:
1. Win more and better business
Word of mouth is still a very common practice in acquiring clients in the legal field, but it is far from the only one and may not be the best for your firm.
Implementing law firm marketing strategies allows you to reach more people and win over an audience that is more likely to close a deal. After all, your potential clients will already be familiar with your area of expertise and focus and understand how you and your firm communicate.
By getting the strategy right, you attract the profile of people who are most suited to the work model that you and your firm practice. So it is worth investing in building good legal marketing.
2. Improved customer relationships
Marketing for law firms is about relationships! And a good relationship is the most effective way to build customer loyalty. Implementing legal marketing actions brings your brand closer to your target audience and turns customers into admirers of your work.
Of course, to achieve the full potential of good legal marketing, you need to dedicate time and strategic thinking to planning and execution. But we’ll focus more on these topics in a moment.
In the meantime, here’s a tip for reading our special content on relationship marketing in the legal profession.
3. Achieving office goals and objectives
Investing in legal marketing is a way to accelerate your firm’s growth goals. By developing strategic planning for law firms based on your overall business objectives, you can implement routine actions that will bring you closer to your desired success.
The greater the alignment of business and legal marketing objectives, the more likely they are to be achieved.
4. Competitiveness in the market
A good indication of the success of legal marketing is when your audience prefers to trust your work rather than take risks when hiring a lawyer. The more you strategically work on your image and that of your office, the better your reputation will be among your clients and competitors.
How to do Marketing for law firms and where to start?
Theory is very important, but it is with practice that results happen, right? So, let’s get to know some tips to start your legal marketing.
1. Goal setting
Before taking action, it is essential to take a moment to outline your legal marketing objectives. What results do you want to achieve and in what time frame? To map out these numbers, use your firm’s financial and growth goals as a basis.
Breaking down annual goals into smaller cycles can help with tracking and team engagement. Acquiring 16 new clients per month seems much more achievable than closing 200 new deals in a year, right?
2. Target audience definition
The more information you know about your target audience, the easier it will be to define the ideal strategy to reach them. Start by analyzing information about your current customers and look for patterns.
What kind of job do they have? What activities do they do after work and on weekends? Do your clients communicate more by phone or WhatsApp messages? What is their marital status? Do they have children? How many and how old are they? Do they use computers frequently? How do they consume news and information?
Answering these questions will help you profile the people most likely to do business with your firm. This data will be very useful in choosing how, where and when to apply legal marketing.
3. Channel selection
SEO for lawyers, blog, email marketing, profile on all social networks and time to advocate and provide quality service. That’s the dream, right? But the reality is that not all available channels will attract your customers and your time must be used wisely. Therefore, analyze your audience and choose the channels they use most.
4. Action mapping
You understand your goals, you know your audience and you know which channels you will be working on. Now, you need to highlight seasonal and routine activities, define responsibilities and set deadlines for completing tasks. For legal marketing, consistency is important. Take this into account when planning
4 Legal Marketing Tips: The Top Strategies
With the information above, you will certainly be able to draw up a basic plan for your legal marketing. But we are sure that you want to go beyond the obvious and extract the maximum benefits from your daily practice, right?
In addition to agreeing with you and wanting you to achieve your goals, we will share some legal marketing tips to improve your strategy. Check it out:
1. Define your area of activity
Your business needs to have a focus. Otherwise, your strategy will be luck. And, well, counting on luck doesn’t seem very strategic, does it? The first step to establishing the focus of your legal marketing is to choose a region of operation. The second is to communicate it on your channels.
If your office’s operations are limited geographically, it is also important to define the region of the clients you wish to serve. This way, it is easier to know how to attract them, understand their behavior, and meet their needs.
2. Direct legal marketing to the core business
Law has several branches and areas of specialization. If you started serving several areas to build your client base, consider rethinking your advertising. If you are interested in segmenting your practice, try to address topics related to the area in which you want to develop your business. Don’t get good at something you don’t want to continue doing.
Focus your legal research and marketing efforts on your core business. This strategy will certainly be very effective in attracting the clients you want to serve. And if you want to position yourself as a full-service firm, work on your firm’s image so that your clients see your team’s ability to solve different types of problems. Create quality content for each of these areas!
3. Think of your website as a showcase for your office
Your firm’s official online address is the ideal environment to share information about your area of expertise, your work methods, your moral values, and to show your client how qualified and prepared you and your team are to serve them in the best possible way. After all, a good website for lawyers opens doors for clients to start a long-lasting relationship with your firm.
Invest in a responsive website (adaptable to different screen sizes), a good design and SEO techniques – from the Search Engine Optimization, nationally known as Website Optimization. All of this will make it easier for potential clients to find your work. If you can, look for a specialized company to create a website that is compatible with your legal marketing strategy.
4. Appearance matters
Legal marketing is an excellent tool for improving your reputation and that of your firm. But everything can go down the drain if your potential client’s in-person experience is completely different from what they experienced online. Therefore, it is essential that your online marketing reflects your firm’s daily activities. Don’t forget that retaining the ones you have already won over is more profitable than attracting new clients.
Try to use the same language online and offline, and never underestimate the power of training your team. Investing in quality at every stage of your work is taking another step ahead of the competition.
Legal Content Marketing
The main currency of exchange in legal content marketing is knowledge. Increasingly, law firms and independent lawyers see sharing content on blogs and social networks as an efficient strategy to attract more qualified clients (people more likely to close a deal).
To differentiate yourself from the competition, it is essential to invest in quality content and address topics in depth. Of course, always remembering that the client is not a lawyer and, therefore, needs the technical language to be translated.
To produce quality legal content, you need to define the objectives you want to achieve with your strategy. What do you intend to achieve with your legal content marketing strategy?
Relevance is also very important for your legal content marketing to bring results. Use your knowledge to educate your client about your market niche. Provide your audience with useful and important information. Take advantage of these spaces to demonstrate your interest in helping people.
In addition to taking care with language, a very important detail to engage your readers, establishing and respecting the publication frequency should also be on your radar when building your content planning.
1. How to produce quality content?
Much more than pretty words, catchy phrases, and striking images, good content speaks to the target audience. More than that, quality legal content is content that solves or points the way to solving real problems for your potential client.
It’s not very strategic to produce long articles, publish a post a day on social media, or send weekly emails to your contacts if this information isn’t useful to the target audience. Therefore, before planning or reevaluating your content strategy, consider the following points:
2. Clear objectives
To achieve good results with legal content marketing, you first need to define the objectives you want to achieve with the strategy. Otherwise, you will end up wasting time and resources (human and financial) for no purpose.
What do you intend to achieve with your content strategy? Which media and channels can be useful for you to achieve what you want? Reading the article on strategic planning for law firms can help you with this step.
3. Metrics tracking
You will only know how far you are from your goals if you measure the results. To do this, you need to set goals, set reference numbers for your actions, constantly monitor the results and modify your strategies whenever you notice the need.
4. Relevance
Is the content you publish on your firm’s online channels interesting to you or your audience? If your goal is to build relationships and convert readers and followers into clients, avoid producing shallow and generic content.
Use your knowledge to educate your audience about your niche market. Provide them with useful and important information. Use these opportunities to demonstrate your interest in helping people.
5. Language
How long did it take you to learn legal terms? Keep this in mind when subjecting your reader to technical language. Produce content that is focused on your potential client.
Try to express yourself clearly and easily, give examples to make it easier for him to understand, use everyday words and explain more complex statements to ensure that the message you want to convey is understood.
6. Periodicity
In addition to educating your audience about the days when you will have new content on your channels, defining a frequency for posts is also important so that you make a real commitment to your legal content marketing. Constant practice is the best way to learn and perfect techniques.
6. Time and priority
Success in any field is the result of focused work. The internet is a great way to promote your business, build relationships, and cultivate your reputation. However, legal content marketing will only have this effect if you dedicate time to it. Set aside a few hours a week to write articles, produce ebooks, record videos, answer questions and comments, post on social media, review strategies, and monitor results.
If you can count on the assistance of an agency specialized in digital marketing or legal marketing, take the time to align strategies and objectives with the company that will do this work for your office.
The secret to a good legal content marketing strategy is to realize that the success of each action starts with planning.
Practical tips for content production
Starting a relationship with your target audience through legal content marketing requires focus and dedication, but it’s not the hardest part.
You can do this by producing blog content, contributing to partner sites (always linking to your site), making informative ebooks available for download, recording videos with tips or interesting information for social media, and in many other ways.
The most challenging step in your strategy is actually converting part of your audience into customers. The ideal scenario would be to produce content so interesting that people would contact you through the available channels to find out how to hire your services. But the reality is not that simple.
To win clients through legal content marketing, you need to move beyond passivity and create active prospecting strategies. But, of course, without violating the code of ethics. To help you with this mission, we have put together some practical tips for you to promote your material and conduct your relationship with your potential clients. Check it out:
1. Answer customer questions on specialized websites
There are several websites that people are looking for to answer questions about legal matters. How about using your expertise to answer them in a qualified manner? Jusbrasil, HubJur and Fórum Jurídico are some options.
2. Build a base of potential customers
Create strategies to gather information about your target audience, such as a download page for an ebook, a page to sign up for a newsletter, etc. When providing online services, request this information and ask if you can add them to your email list so you can continue to keep in touch.
3. Be present in your customers’ lives
Send periodic emails to your current and potential customers. Recommend useful articles, share your latest content, and give them practical tips to help them in their daily lives.
4. Use social media to promote good content
Your online pages and profiles are not just for talking about your work or showing behind the scenes of your office. Give your potential clients legal tips, share news and legal decisions that will make a difference in their lives. Keep your audience interested in your area of expertise.
5. Do case studies
Take advantage of the stories that come through your office to create case studies that show your audience the importance of your work and how you are able to solve problems. Protect the names of the people and companies involved and focus on solving the problem presented.
6. Record short videos to share on social media
Diversify content formats to reach a larger number of people. Record short videos from your computer or cell phone to share on Facebook, create stories covering interesting topics.
You don’t need an elaborate production or a perfect setting, but make sure the environment is quiet, and your message will be heard perfectly.
7. Reply to comments and private messages
Never leave questions unanswered, and try to be kind and polite to your online audience. Never respond aggressively to a criticism or comment. Your engagement is essential to your online reputation.
Digital legal marketing
Digital legal marketing, legal marketing on the internet, or simply digital marketing. In practice, all these terms mean the same thing and give the name to legal marketing strategies and actions applied on the internet.
To help you with this, we will give you some tips for applying your marketing on the main social networks.
1. Facebook
Professional Facebook pages are a great way to promote your blog content and interact with your followers. They are also a great place to establish an online presence and establish direct contact with potential clients and partners.
An interesting tool for you to explore, there are reviews. Through them, your followers can give ratings from 1 to 5 stars and write comments or testimonials about your firm’s products and services. It’s a great referral system and a showcase for those who will get to know your firm’s brand on this social network.
2 Linkedin
LinkedIn is officially a social network for professional interactions. That’s why the conversation there is a little more serious. In addition to working on distributing content from your blog, LinkedIn encourages you to create exclusive content for the network.
It is also a great place to share important recognitions, notable achievements, awards, participation in events ,and other relevant content about your firm’s work. It is also a great place to follow professionals you admire and network.
3. Instagram
Instagram goes far beyond documenting your day-to-day life in photos, stories, and reels. It is, yes, a more relaxed and visual social network, but that doesn’t mean you can’t develop good legal marketing for it.
For example, you can share practical tips, share encouraging phrases, use stories to do live broadcasts, or answer frequently asked questions. This is the social network to make the most of what your creativity is capable of producing!
4. Threads
Threads, launched by Meta — the company responsible for Instagram and Facebook, is a social network that allows all users to share short texts of up to 500 characters, with links, photos, and videos.
Similar to Twitter, the tool can be an ally for your law firm’s legal marketing, as it allows you to communicate, inform, and interact with your target audience effectively.
Some tips on how to use Threads are:
- Promote your other channels: due to the great initial popularity, this is an opportunity to also share the other channels that you use in your legal marketing strategy.
- Interact with users: the social network allows interaction on a wide range of levels. Use this to your advantage and seek exchanges with your audience.
- Share achievements: Understand customer interests and share achievements with them, such as published articles, news, and market information.