Every law firm has a common problem – they need more clients. Without clients, you have no business. So, what are you doing to maximize your prospecting?

Lawyers are legal experts, not marketing gurus. You spend years studying law, and keeping up with legal trends and caseloads demands most of your time. Spending hours learning effective marketing strategies isn't an option; you don't have the know-how or the experience to draft a marketing plan yourself.

However, marketing is an essential component of your law practice, and you know it. Marketing brings fresh leads to your firm, giving you the opportunity to pitch your services. So, how do you attract new clients?

Gone are the days of using traditional marketing methods like outdoor advertising. These legacy marketing systems are no longer valid in today's market. Billboard and radio advertising is dead. If you want to get the most out of your marketing budget, you need to take your campaigns online.

Internet marketing is the way the industry is moving. Why waste thousands of dollars on a billboard when everyone in the car is looking at their phone? Creating a digital marketing strategy for your law firm website is the best way to build your database.

In this post, we'll unpack how to acquire more clients for your law firm using an online marketing strategy that secures results.

Marketing Strategies and Tactics for Law Firms

When developing a high-quality law firm marketing strategy, it's vital that you start the exercise by examining your target audience. Your audience is the people visiting and viewing your site.

They might come to your site for various reasons, and not all of them will be legitimate traffic. Not every visitor will be looking for your legal services. Some of the traffic will be accidental clicks, causing the visitor to navigate away from your site.

However, you can create a marketing plan that drives traffic to your site from other web sources by understanding your audience. A marketing plan contains a strategy and tactics you'll use to capture more leads and boost traffic.

A marketing plan provides the framework for your strategy and tactics. The process outlines your plan's long-term objectives, providing tactics you'll use to achieve those goals. To simply; the strategy gives you a general approach, while tactics offer a targeted approach to your marketing efforts.

When defining your marketing plan, strategy, and tactics, you'll create clear targets with measurable outcomes. For example, you might set the goal of improving your website's SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

To achieve your target, you'll need to focus on tactics specific to enhancing your SEO efforts. For instance, you could pursue link-building tactics to increase your site's authority ranking with the search bots.

The strategy involves taking measurable steps towards building more links pointing back to your site. To make it work, you need to set actionable and achievable goals that are just out of reach.

So, if you typically build five external links each month, make it your goal to do seven this month. That's an achievable target, and it benefits your SEO.

It's important to note that your goals, strategy, and tactics evolve as your business grows. Therefore, you need a flexible marketing plan you can adjust to meet current market conditions.

What Marketing Tools Do I Need to Grow My Law Firm?

To improve lead generation to your website, you need marketing tools designed to reduce your marketing responsibilities. These tools offer you a way to delegate your marketing efforts while experiencing good results from your campaigns.

Your legal marketing toolkit contains a set of tactics to help you get more traffic to your site. Your legal industry marketing toolkit contains branding guidelines, client personas, sales funnels, and powerful website design.

Building a Brand for Your Law Firm

Marketing has many functions for your law firm. Branding is an essential component of your marketing campaigns, helping to get your company's logo and reputation into the limelight.

Your brand is your first tool in your digital marketing toolkit. Branding campaigns help to position your website and law firm in the market.

With a strong brand, you gain credibility in your client's eyes, positioning you as the top of mind choice when they need a legal firm.

Before you develop your campaign, ask yourself these questions.

How do you want prospects and clients to view your firm and website?

Do you know your law firm's brand?

What kind of interactive experience do you want to give prospects and clients with your brand?

Your brand needs to push out the image of trust, value, and quality. You need to clearly explain how your legal service will benefit their lives, and why your brand is the better choice over the competition.

You'll also need to consider your brand's style and image and the voice it has in the market. The biggest issue with branding campaigns is remaining consistent. Your prospects and clients want to see you're consistent in conveying your brand reputation and image.

The goal of branding campaigns is to create instant recognition of your company identity. It will help if you instill a positive feeling in your clients and prospects as they interact with your brand online and offline.

Create Your Client Persona

After establishing your law firm brand, it's time to assess your audience and do some segmentation. Your first function is to create the ideal "client profile," It acts to guide the rest of your marketing strategy and the types of tactics you'll use.

The client persona is your description of what you expect in the ideal client for your law practice. It's important to note that you can create several client personas under one umbrella, and all of them will fit your ideal client persona.

When building your client personas, ensure you're using the correct demographics, prospect background, pain-points, and challenges. It's also important to include your client goals and objectives in each persona.

Include Information Pages

When the traffic lands on your website, it needs to find what it's looking for right away. Creating a sleek, minimalist template for your home page ensures you don't overwhelm your prospect when they open your site. Your site needs responsive hosting with fast loading times and well-designed landing pages for the following categories.

• About Us
• Contact Us
• Attorney Listings with Bios and Headshots
• Service pages outlining each of your legal services

When people land on your site, they need to find the information they're looking for with one click. If you make it too hard for the prospect to find the related info, they will bounce back to the Google search results.

When designing your site, also look at including the following service pages.

• FAQs – Frequently asked questions
• Blog
• Case studies
• Client testimonials

These pages build relevance in your website in the search bots' eyes. If you have keywords integrated into your products and service pages, it will boost your search results.

To help you maximize the number of people visiting your site each day, we’ve curated several ways to generate viable leads.

Design Your Marketing and Sales Funnel and Build Your Lead Magnet

Your strategy and tactics serve to drive a flood of new prospects to your marketing and sales funnels. Part of your marketing services is constructing these platforms to accommodate the leads you get from your canvassing activities.

Inbound marketing funnels capture the awareness, evaluation, and conversion phases of your client experience. However, to get leads into your funnel, you'll have to design a lead magnet.

A lead magnet is an opt-in form featuring a value offer for the prospect. The value offer needs to be enticing enough to get the prospect to leave details in a contact form. An example of a value offer would be a free consultation or PDF guide your prospects can download in exchange for dropping their information.

All lead magnets contain a CTA (call-to-action), asking the client to click a button to fill out the contact form. One of the oldest tactics in sales when closing the deal – is to ask for the sale. The CTA achieves this task, enticing the prospect to take action.

After the prospect enters their details, the system automatically pulls the lead into your sales funnel. After entering the funnel, the prospect goes through a series of strategically designed emails designed to convert them from a prospect into a paying client.

**Learn more: **16 ways to promote your website, increase traffic, and gain clients

Tips for Creating a Marketing Plan for Your Law Firm

After setting up the other specifics in this post, it's time to start marketing your legal website. The promotion of your firm depends on the goals included in your marketing plan. Your marketing campaigns' primary focus needs to be to find client problems and resolve them in as short a time as possible.

Understanding your goals helps you build a targeted marketing plan designed to attract your client personas. Attracting the right prospect is key, and it's the basis of your analytics data covering your ROI and KPIs. Through this data, you'll find out if the marketing plan is working or if you need to make adjustments.

For instance, if you find your traffic is increasing, but your conversion is low, there could be a few reasons for this issue. However, the chances are that you're not tight enough on your client personas, and that's causing unqualified prospects to enter your sales funnels.

You'll need to tie each of your marketing goals to a metric. This strategy allows you to track the components' performance in your marketing plan. It shows you what's working and where you need to improve.

There are plenty of useful tools for tracking your performance. Google Analytics is a wealth of information on traffic sources and what your clients do when they get to your site. Use the analytics platform to check your total visits, views, and where your prospects exit on your site.

Other important metrics captured by Google Analytics include visitors' dwell time on your site and the downloads they take on your lead magnets and site content.

Most social media channels come with dedicated reporting inside each of the platforms. Using the onboard tools in Facebook ads manager, you can measure your engagement and manage campaigns.

CRM is another useful tool to implement on your website. A Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) ups your marketing game. It serves as a digital hub for the management of your business. A CRM can store client files, details, and it acts as the nerve-center for your marketing campaigns.

Low-cost options like HubSpot give you plenty of additional data you can't get through Google Analytics.

Outline Your SEO Strategy

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) encompasses a set of strategies designed to improve your site's ranking in search and SERP results. The process runs your site through a set of techniques designed for optimizing its function. These strategies work across all search engines, including Bing and Microsoft Edge.

For example, removing all the duplicate content and pages on your site speeds up performance. It also improves the content value of your website in the search bots' eyes. There are plenty of SEO strategies to keep your marketing efforts busy for months.

However, it's important to note that SEO tactics and strategies can take 6-months or longer to start showing results. During that time, you'll have to focus on other strategies and tactics to build traffic to your site.

Some of the critical law firm SEO tactics you can implement right away include adding keywords to your site content and service descriptions. Backlinking is an essential component of SEO. By leaving permanent links on authority sites, you create a network tracing back to your site, increasing your search ranking.

Metadata and local SEO considerations, like adding maps to your Contact Us page, improve your SEO strategy's efficacy. This tactic helps your site climb the search rankings on the results page.

Social Media Marketing

Every successful law firm relies on social media marketing. Today, social platforms give you the best value for your marketing dollar.

Facebook offers you the best marketing platform for your campaign budget. With the FB ad manager, you build custom advertising campaigns using your client personas. FB allows the laser-targeting of your client persona. Therefore, you have the opportunity to create retargeting campaigns for prospects that don't take you up on your offer.

Twitter is a great place to dish out free legal advice and engage with prospects. LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network. Posting short informational blogs on your LinkedIn profile can help build your reputation and your firm's credibility.

Social media marketing allows you to maximize your advertising budget. Platforms like Facebook ads give you plenty of reach on your ads, with a minimum ad spend.

Legal Directories

When some people look for legal advice, they turn to directories. Listing your law firm in local directories is a great way to improve your visibility and your SEO strategy. It's also a great way to push out your phone number.

Directory listing is another way of creating a link to your site, increasing your search bots' visibility. Some directories offer a free listing service, and you'll have to pay for listing in the best ones.

Google Business

Google Adwords is another way of promoting your site. However, if you want to increase your search rankings, we recommend you claim your Google Business Profile. There are thousands of people searching legal directories on Google.

Claiming your Google Business profile is a way to increase your SEO ranking without paying for Google Ads. One of the best ways to improve your search ranking is to get Google reviews on your legal service.

Google reviews are a high-priority ranking tool for the search bots. Try to incentivize your clients into leaving a Google review by offering them a discount on their next consultation.

Sure, it might seem like you're giving away your time with strategy. However, after 6-months of using this system, you'll notice a huge improvement in your SERP and search engine results.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the oldest and most-effective marketing strategies. However, to market to an email list, you need a list. That's where your lead magnet and value offer come to the table, bringing you a steady stream of leads to your sales funnels.

Email campaigns bring your law firm's website excellent results. However, you need to understand the right timing and content for your email campaign.

Spend some time evaluating the top companies, sign up to their email list to get an idea of the lead magnets they offer and the marketing strategy they use to push people through sales funnels.

Get B12 to Design Your Law Firm Website

Your website design is a critical component of your online marketing strategy. Whether you're practicing criminal or family law, your site's final design can influence how prospects and clients interact with it online.

B12 is a design team with a difference. They offer AI-powered web design services to bring you a functional and aesthetic site that's in line with your brand image. While B12 isn't a marketing agency, they offer you a suite of SEO tools to help you boost your online presence.

Visit B12 right now and find out how they can design a website that meets your marketing requirements.