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People spend their lives not really being prepared for the possibility of having to hire a lawyer. Despite this there are a whole range of techniques lawyers can employ to get their services out there and market themselves as being the best firm around in the event that people do need legal help. As always with digital marketing, a solid strategy and a lot of research is required to both bring in new customers and make engagement with existing ones as streamlined and smooth as possible.

Digital advertising is also a good way to bring in more customers. It also represents a primary source of data, often in real time. This can be extremely valuable as a commodity within your business. It all starts at a very low cost, but over time you’ll see small returns of information with advert results, and even increased interest in your firm. Reviewing these results lets your marketing team decide which search terms, demographics and areas they can target next.

For lawyers there’s also the added bonus of being able to highlight the legal processes your firm is best at dealing with – whether it’s family law, corporate law, or another area of the trade. Marketing your firm in this way can give you an edge on search engines. Playing to your firm’s specialities helps people find you on Google by using the appropriate keywords when they search for help or advice on a particular topic.

The most talked about methods of digital marketing today are search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click adverts (PPC). These two have become the most accepted methods of digital marketing – even making it into the mainstream news in the Telegraph. For professional industries and individuals, there is no better place to start for your firm than reading up on both practices.

Getting Your Name Out There

Alongside your traditional print or billboard advertising legal firms should very much be aware of search engine optimisation, or SEO. The key thing here is making sure your pages are well made, links to other pages and are linked back from other places, and contain a good amount of keywords that people might search for on Google. If your legal firm is in say, Hull, you’d want enough information on your site for people searching for something like ‘legal advice Hull’ to be directed to your page.

But the best thing about SEO is how you are able to strategise in ways that’ll pick up the more advanced searches. That search above might be more specific – say someone searches for ‘family legal advice Hull’ – your page should be equipped to drive consumer interest straight to your door, and a good SEO strategy can ensure this is the case. If your firm has speciality aims and interests, pages explaining those interests which include a lot of links can get people to your site much more quickly and easily.

Engaging With Customers

Your website is your firm’s hub for connecting with customers, so your priority here is getting it looking as attractive and professional as possible. Upgrading the site’s look is a good place to start, but there are some handy features you can install, which we’ll talk about in a moment. For now though, the site should be designed with showing off your firm’s best features in mind. It can be tweaked and designed all around letting your customers know what your specialities are, the type of legal work you have done in the past, and what kind of service they can expect.

Features on the site are also very important – such as a live chat box. Previously live chat has been thought of simply as a tool for technical support to help guide people through certain processes, but interestingly it’s become a must-have in the last few years. Customers love talking to real people and with a legal firm this can be a really good point of engagement to help people work out whether you are in the best position to help them or not. In the chat you can provide explanations of legal terms, or guide people through the services available.

Speaking of education, videos uploaded onto YouTube are another way to drive up client engagement, appear professional, and even provide a service which can help people in other ways and get your business some notoriety. You can make, edit and upload videos on more complicated legal topics and this can then link through to your site, and be embedded there for people to watch. Video creates engagement in a unique way – and businesses are using it more and more. According to Hubspot, in 2017 63% of businesses were using video to help market their site. In 2019, the number has increased to 87%.

Other Marketing Platforms

Now your site has been upgraded and populated with content, it’s a good idea to branch out to other places and outlets where you can show off your amazing firm and how good you are at doing your job. LinkedIn is a great place for professionals to congregate, advertise their services, and talk about the things they are doing and have done. You can even advertise here if you want to – paid adverts are a great way to bring in business clients.

The lion’s share of advertising is done on other platforms, such as Google, Amazon and Facebook. All of these ad spaces offer their own pros and cons, but mainly the best features of these is the fact you can target certain demographics that are relevant to your digital marketing strategy. Lawyers specialising in family affairs might choose to target an older generation of people – and if you’re in the business of compiling last will and testament you might want to pick the oldest demographics possible.

Advertising payment models on these sites vary, but the main two methods are pay-per-click advertising and running an ad for a cost per day for a short amount of time. Pay-per-click is as it sounds – you run the ad, target it to a search term, bid for the search term, and then when it’s clicked you pay a small fee to the advertiser. With Facebook ads it’s slightly different – you would simply put the ad up and it is guaranteed to reach a certain number of people in the target demographic.

PPC is a rapidly growing tool, with lots of tricks to learn. It has some advantages over Facebook advertising for a few specific reasons, namely that during the process you tend to bid a certain amount of money per click based on the keywords being searched. If you wanted to target a search such as ‘law firms in Edinburgh’, you may be vying for a spot at the top of Google against other firms, so to get on the top spot you may have to pay more money. Some terms might be more expensive, others are cheaper. A mixed strategy of SEO and PPC is probably the most useful in the case of lawyers, but getting people familiar with PPC, as well as what terms to target, can be somewhat of a fine art.

What Will You Do Next?

There’s so much going on recently in digital marketing, in fact it’s starting to control a majority share of advertising in some cases, and companies are more and more aware of the impact and methods of deployment they can choose from. But it’s up to you to decide how much or how little you want to participate. It can start small, and cheap, but in some cases firms spend a lot of time and money on their strategy.

For more information on digital marketing for lawyers, look up some more in depth articles on our site, where we discuss these topics in much greater detail. You can also take a look at the companion book to our site on Amazon, Digital Marketing For Professionals by our very own Nick Bagga. We’re extremely confident that you will be able to improve your firm’s service and reach online with our help. Start today!