Law Firm Marketing.
The Definitive Guide.

The vast majority of law firm marketing has 3 things in common:

1. No differentiating value proposition
2. The messaging is poor or non-existent
3. The visual design is lacking

So if you’re ready to buck the trend and grow your law firm, this guide is for you.

Let’s jump right in.

Contents

1. SEO For Law Firms
2. Geofencing For Law Firms
3. PPC For Law Firms
4. Local Service Ads for Law Firms
5. Email Marketing For Law Firms
6. Social Media For Law Firms
7. Conversion Tracking for Law Firms

Your Law Firm Needs to Stand Out

Saying that your law firm helps people dealing with auto accidents is a sure-fire way to blend into the ocean of other firms using the exact same approach. Your law firm's marketing strategy needs to clearly communicate why a customer should select your law firm over a competitor. Here are some examples of digital marketing that helped law firms stand out.

Create Legal Tools That Are Useful

When working with a local criminal defense attorney, we needed a content marketing strategy that would get attention. Since many clients are potentially facing jail and prison, we created a felony calculator. This piece of content is helpful across multiple marketing channels. It gives us a great stand-alone blog for search engines, filled with lots of industry-specific keywords. The felony calculator also gives us great content for social and email marketing. This helps the law firm provide a unique and useful resource for their potential clients.

Digital Marketing For Law Firms

When creating a digital marketing strategy for your law firm, you need to break it down based on your legal services. This is especially true for law firms that practice various legal areas (criminal defense, personal injury, family law, etc.). Each potential legal client will have needs specific to their legal matter, and your law firm's marketing needs to be in alignment with the client's needs.

SEO For Law Firms

Search engine optimization has become one of the largest marketing channels for driving traffic and legal leads over the last few years. From our internal data on our law firm campaigns, SEO accounts for around 40% of all website traffic. Successful law firms know that SEO and content based on keyword research is a competitive advantage.

SEO Checklist for Law Firms

When creating an SEO and content marketing plan for your law firm, it should include some of the below items:

1. SEO keyword research
2. Inbound link building
3. Internal link building
4. Schema markup
5. Content calendar based on research
6. Audit existing and new meta copy
7. Publishing & promotion process

Depending on a law firm's budget and resources, the amount invested into SEO will be different. Regardless, SEO cannot be excluded from a law firm's digital marketing strategy as it is one of the largest sources of traffic and leads.

Geofencing For Law Firms

Geofencing provides law firms with the capacity to target people who frequent certain locations at the address level. An example of a targeted geofencing campaign would be for a personal injury lawyer looking for auto accident leads. We can target people who visit auto repair shops within 15 miles of the law firm.

Let's take a look at another example of a geofencing campaign for a criminal defense attorney. The attorney wants to promote DUI legal services, so we can geotarget bars and clubs within a 10-mile radius of the law firm. This will keep the law firm top of mind for all patrons of those local establishments.

Additional Geofencing Strategies

Geofencing also gives us the ability to target potential clients within specific times & dates. For example, we can target people at the bars & nightclubs between the hours of 10 PM - 3 AM and only have the campaign active from Thursday - Saturday.

Another geofencing strategy is to target a location based on frequency. This gives our campaigns the ability to target based on how frequently a person is at the location. Let's take a look at a campaign targeting auto repair shops for injury attorneys. We would not want to target the auto repair workers since they are not our target customers. We would adjust our frequency parameter to non-frequent. This would target people who go to the auto repair shop but not frequently.

PPC For Law Firms

Paid search and display ads are one of the best ways to get your law firm in front of the right customer at the right moment. PPC or paid search ads on Google offer an unmatched way to align your services with your customer's intent. Another benefit is you only pay when your search ad is clicked.

What About Fraudulent Clicks?

One thing we hear on a weekly basis is that law firms are concerned that their competitors are clicking their ads. This is a common and understandable concern. After all, this would waste and exhaust a firm's paid search budget. Any professionally managed PPC campaign will include fraudulent click prevention. This campaign monitoring software tracks and blocks clicks from repetitive clicks over a very short time period, as well as clicks coming from VPNs or bots. Then each quarter the report is shared with Google Ads and a credit is issued to the account.

What are Bid Adjustments?

In Google Ads, you have the ability to adjust your bids based on many factors. This allows you to increase or decrease our bid from 1%-100% for certain criteria. For example, we may want to increase my bid for the keyword "DUI Lawyer" by 50% on mobile phones between 8 pm -10 pm.

Types of Bid Adjustments

• Locations 
• Keywords 
• Devices 
• Audiences
• Times
• Income

Local Service Ads For Law Firms

What are Local Service Ads? Local Service Ads (LSAs) are a new ad format that Google has introduced to advertisers. They are the first positioned ad in SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

How Do I Start Using Local Service Ads?

LSAs are unique in that the advertiser is only charged per lead instead of pay per click. Google will verify each phone call, and you are also able to review every phone call in your Local Service Ad dashboard. To be eligible for Local Service Ads, you must become "Google Screened" and go through an in-depth application process that requires a background check, license numbers, and certified reviews.

Local Service Ads are also only eligible for certain professional services and are only available in specific markets. Local Service Ads are an excellent tool for creating leads in a law-firm marketing campaign as you are only charged per verified phone call & showing your brand in the first position in Google. 

Email Marketing For Law Firms

Email marketing continues to be the most underrated marketing channel. Law firms are often willing to toss thousands of dollars at social media, SEO, and PPC while being hesitant to invest in email marketing. This is a huge mistake that is costing your law firm money. Email marketing will increase the LTV lifetime value of each legal client. When done correctly.

Email marketing gives your law firm the ability to communicate and have an ongoing conversation with former clients who have at one point in time paid you for legal services. We suggest creating a monthly newsletter that highlights new hires, services, interesting content, legal resources, awards, and press. Make it useful, entertaining, and consistent.

Email Drip Campaigns

Drip campaigns are a type of email marketing campaign that is automated and sent to specific people in your audience based on certain actions. This can help in a law firm marketing campaign as you may only want to send a batch of emails to an audience after they have made a certain action in your campaign

Examples of Drip Campaign Triggers:

1. Signing up for your newsletter
2. Someone in your audience’s birthday
3. Sending an offer 14 days after joining newsletter

Social Media For Law Firms

Okay, time for some real talk. Out of all of the marketing channels for law firms, based on our internal data, social media tends to be the worst for creating leads and traffic. So let's look at an example of one of our larger law firm's digital marketing campaigns over the last 30 days. In Google Analytics, we track conversions when someone clicks the law firm's phone number. Over the last 30 days, the phone has been clicked 1,232 times. Guess how many came from social media? Drum roll ... 17 phone calls. That is less than 2% of phone calls coming from social media.

When people are on Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms, they are not looking for legal services. Instead, they are looking at friends' proposals and baby announcements. While social media is a great marketing channel for staying top of mind, our data does not support it being great at driving traffic and leads for law firms.

Conversion Tracking for Law Firms

Regardless of which marketing channels you decide to use, you need to make sure that you are tracking and analyzing conversions across your campaign channels. Conversion tracking will help you understand how well your digital marketing campaigns perform.

What is conversion tracking?

Great question. Using Google Analytics 4, your marketing team can set up all kinds of conversions on your website. The most common conversion tracking metrics for law firms and many service-based businesses are:

1. Phone call clicks
2. Direction requests
3. Lead form completions

After you have collected an adequate amount of data, it is best to compare the cost per conversion across your different marketing channels. This will help you make an informed marketing decision based on your campaign's conversion data.

All of our digital marketing campaigns include access to a real-time marketing dashboard. This helps businesses understand in real-time how their marketing campaigns are performing and make the needed adjustments.