4 Marketing Improvements For Law Firms

Law firms and other professionals have been some of the last to embrace and implement digital marketing best practices over the last few years, although there are certainly many examples of legal services websites out there where that is not the case.

Even if you take marketing seriously, there is a good chance that there are many things you could be doing much better. With that in mind, below are 4 marketing improvements that all law firms can make starting right now.

Marketing Automation 

Marketing automation in law firms is something that many have been slow to adopt but makes all the difference when streamlining your marketing processes, particularly tedious manual ones like emails and client onboarding, and ultimately makes it easier to attract and engage with your clients. From case intake to drip email marketing using customized templates to accurate and actionable market segmentation, having a powerful automation software underpinning your marketing efforts is a vital part of growing your firm’s reputation and business in the digital era.

Up Your Social Media Game

Good social media engagement is crucial for law firms in the digital era because so much of your brand is how you present yourself and engage with the public online. Upping your social media game includes developing a consistent content posting schedule, responding quickly to comments and queries across all social media platforms, and engaging with trending stories and topics that allow you to showcase your expertise and experience. 

Leverage Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are another crucial component of improving your marketing this year, in recognition of the fact that online reviews and comments from strangers, whether about products or services, are taken as seriously as comments from friends and family. Not only that, but making sure that you keep on top of your reviews and attempt to put out PR firestorms before they occur is equally important. People often perform a localized search on Google, where a law firm’s Google reviews are one of the first results on the search engine results page, and then navigate to the firm’s Facebook page to get a better feel for the firm. 

Better Keyword Research

If you want to improve organic website traffic, you need to make keyword research the foundation of your SEO approach. Many, if not most law firms now have website blogs that form the basis of their SEO strategy, but it is common to see articles that are poorly optimized for relevant keywords that they stand a reasonable chance of ranking highly for.

SEO neophytes often make the mistake of getting excited about great keyword ideas without doing their due diligence, which is to say, using a keyword tool to find long and short-tail keywords that are sufficiently localized, with high enough search volume to justify spending the time and effort required to build content around them, and for which other firms that were quicker to the draw haven’t already ranked for beyond all hope of competition. Law firms should consider, at the very least, incorporating free keywords research tools into their marketing or, if budgets permit, investing in paid tools that back keyword choices up with a range of solid analytics, including competitor analysis.

Conclusion

While marketing might seem ancillary to legal work and many law firms, especially well-established ones, continue to get by on reputation and word of mouth alone, marketing has come to play a much larger role in firm success during the internet era.

How you manage your social media, the automation tools and processes you have in place, how you utilize and showcase your customer reviews and the research that goes into your SEO practices all impact your visibility online and overall growth trajectory. Keep the above considerations in mind and take your firm’s marketing to the next level.

Adam Hansen
 

Adam is a part time journalist, entrepreneur, investor and father.