What Is Legal Marketing (Best Guide: All You Need To Know)

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What Is Legal Marketing

Legal marketing is a broad topic that can refer to many different marketing strategies ranging from online advertising, cross-selling, and public relations.

The idea behind legal marketing is to increase your law firm’s visibility in the market.

Effective legal marketing strategies help create marketing channels where prospects looking for legal services can find you, contact you, and eventually mandate your firm.

Legal marketing is therefore the process of specifically tailoring your marketing efforts to target your ideal customers compelling them to do business with you.

For example, a corporate law firm will use different marketing strategies to attract corporate clients than a personal injury law firm.

The ultimate objective of legal marketing is to put the spotlight on your law firm, demonstrate why your firm is better than the competition, and how you can help resolve your client’s legal challenges.

Is Legal Marketing Worth It

Now that you know what legal marketing is all about, the next question that many lawyers and attorneys ask is whether or not legal marketing is worth it.

I don’t want to be biased here since I’m in the legal marketing business, but objectively speaking, the answer is a definite yes.

Think about it, in the United States, there are over 1.3 million attorneys and 100 million lawsuits filed every year.

If you want to stand out and attract new clients, consistently, you need to implement strategic legal marketing campaigns to target, attract, and convert your leads.

The legal industry is a highly competitive industry making legal marketing a niche area of expertise.

By finding the right marketing agency that understands your law firm, the legal business, and the legal marketing strategies, you are likely to see important returns on your marketing investment.

Take the time to find the right marketing agency so you get the biggest bang for your buck!

Legal Marketing Techniques

What are the legal marketing techniques that are the most effective for lawyers and law firms?

As you surely know, the legal business is not like what it used to be.

In the good old days, your legal marketing techniques consisted of opening an office somewhere, advertising in the newspaper, and letting people in the door who needed your services.

Today, it’s no longer that simple.

Today, law firms use more and more sophisticated methods in attracting new clients.

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, most law firms have heavily invested in technology and considering more innovative methods for getting their name out there.

More and more firms are using digital advertising techniques such as content marketing, social media marketing, and paid advertising to find their ideal clients.

Let’s look at some of the legal marketing techniques that are used today.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is one way law firms attract new clients.

In the United States, lawyers and law firms will typically use LinkedIn as their preferred platform to reach out to the market.

More than 57% of law firms effectively use LinkedIn for their social media marketing.

Other platforms are also used by lawyers and law firms such as Facebook (35%) and Twitter (21%).

Using social media platforms, law firms can directly engage with their prospects, their followers, and the public in general thereby creating brand recognition and establishing their online presence.

Law Firm Website

Another important legal marketing strategy is to have a user-friendly and relevant law firm website.

When prospects are searching for an attorney, in most cases, they will look up the law firm’s website to get an initial feel for the firm.

If your law firm’s website is user-friendly, informative, and relevant, you increase the chances of having that prospect reach out to you to engage your services.

Studies show that 70% of companies that have a website were able to get new clients through their website.

Also, 74% of those who visit a law firm’s website have indicated that they planned to contact the law firm or take some sort of action on the firm’s site.

There is no denying that you will need to invest to have a responsive, well-designed, and well-architectured website.

Online Paid Advertising

There are many ways law firms can leverage online paid advertising to target their target audience.

You can have paid advertising through major search engines like Google and Bing, social media paid advertising through LinkedIn, Facebook, or other platforms.

The advantage of paid online advertising is that you can be very specific about the type of audience you would want to advertise to.

For example, a mergers and acquisitions law firm in New York can specifically target individuals and companies in New York City who are looking for an M&A law firm by searching for specific keywords on Google or Bing.

Alternatively, they can broaden their paid advertising scope by targeting anyone looking for an M&A firm in the entire United States.

On Facebook, for instance, you can target your audience based on their age, location, profession, interests, and other characteristics. 

What you’ll need to keep in mind is that paid legal advertising online can get very expensive, very fast.

You’ll need to have a carefully planned strategy, well-defined budget, and closely monitor your results to see what works and what doesn’t.

Legal Content Marketing 

My favorite legal marketing technique is legal content marketing.

Content marketing is a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in your law firm and its services.

What’s truly amazing about content marketing is that you can invest your marketing dollars in such a way as to generate consistent and long-term traffic to your website attracting a specific type of audience.

The idea is for you to share content and information with your audience helping them solve a particular problem or provide them with truly helpful and relevant information.

For example, an entrepreneur may want to save money by trying to research a particular legal topic in an attempt to handle the matter himself or herself.

You’ll want to create content targeting entrepreneurs, provide checklists for their due diligence process, explain how they can incorporate a company, tell them about commercial contracts, or the risks of getting into different types of partnerships.

In this case, you are helping an entrepreneur answer a specific question or solve a particular problem.

Eventually, if the same entrepreneur will want to hire a business lawyer for his or her company, it’s very likely that your firm will be selected as you were already able to help them in the past, totally free.

I have to caution you that investing in content marketing should be a long-term project as it takes time and investment today for you to reap the benefits in the future.

You should use content marketing strategies to complement other types of legal marketing techniques to enhance the benefit.

Legal SEO

Another of my favorite content marketing strategy for law firms and lawyers is legal SEO.

SEO stands for “search engine optimization”.

SEO refers to the process of improving your website in such a way as to bring more visibility to your website when people search for products, services, or information on different search engines like Google, Bing, or others.

The higher you are able to rank on search engine results pages, the more you will generate free and organic traffic to your website.

For example, if you are a personal injury lawyer in Houston, you’ll want to rank as high as you can for the key phrase “Personal Injury Lawyer Houston” or “Personal Injury Law Firm Houston”.

This way, Google, Bing, and other search engines bring traffic to your website organically, consistently, and for the long term.

Every law firm or sole practitioner must have a good legal SEO strategy in addition to any other marketing initiatives.

Proper SEO activities include things like:

• The identification of relevant keywords valuable to your business
• The creation of high-quality content to help your audience or solve their problem
• A strategy to create relevant links from high-quality websites
• There is no doubt that in today’s business landscape, SEO is crucial to getting your business target and attracting prospects and leads online.

Be sure to read our post on what is SEO for a more in-depth overview of the topic.

Where to Invest In Legal Marketing

Global spending in digital marketing in 2022 is estimated to be $441 billion dollars and is expected to go up.

Canada and the United States account for more than 40% of global digital marketing spending.

More than 63% of small- and medium-sized businesses actively deploy digital marketing strategies to attract clients.

Back in 2014, only 28% of companies allocated a budget to their online marketing channels.

With the recent global pandemic, more companies have gone online and more are adopting digital marketing initiatives to attract clients who are also now more online.

Content marketing strategies are the most efficient means of attracting new clients with a success rate of approximately 20%.

These statistics include all businesses, including law firms.

As you can see, more and more companies and law firms are pumping money into their digital marketing initiatives.

If you want to remain competitive, you must have your own law firm’s digital marketing strategy and invest where you get the biggest return on your investment.

There is no doubt that you should invest in content marketing to tap into free, organic, and consistent traffic of qualified leads to your law firm’s website.

In addition to that, you will then need to assess where else you would want to invest, such as pay-per-click (or PPC) campaigns on search engines, social media advertising, email marketing, and so on.

You’ll need the support and guidance of qualified legal marketing professionals to help you determine the combination of different digital marketing techniques to produce the best ROI.

How Much To Invest In Legal Marketing

How should you determine the amount of money that you invest in your legal marketing strategies?

Here are a few ways law firms and attorneys tend to tackle the matter.

Sales Percentage Approach

For some law firms and lawyers, it makes sense to set the right level of legal marketing budget based on a percentage of their sales.

The idea is to assess the average revenue generated by the targetted client and then set the legal market budget as a percentage of that potential revenue.

For smaller law firms, this approach may be easier to manage and compute than for larger law firms, but it gives a reference point in relation to the potential revenues the firm expects to make.

Competitors’ Strategies

Another way you can decide how much to invest in your legal marketing is to see what your competitors are doing.

Assess the different types of strategies deployed by your competitors to estimate how much they may be spending on their legal marketing campaigns.

With this business intelligence, you will be in a position to mimic their successes and set a reasonable amount of marketing dollars to achieve the intended result.

Historical Examples

Another way of assessing your digital marketing spend is to consider your past expenditures and return on investment so you can make the proper allocations going forward.

This approach works best if you have spent money on legal marketing and you’ve somehow tracked your results.

If you’re able to identify the past and effective legal marketing campaigns, you may want to invest more in that channel to see if you get the same or better result.

Legal Marketing Takeaways 

So there you have it folks!

In a nutshell, legal marketing is a broad term that refers to advertising and other practices, such as client relations, public relations, networking, participation in professional organizations, and others.

Law firms and lawyers need to stay on top of their legal A-game but also ramp up their legal marketing efforts to enhance brand awareness, attract new leads, and convert them to paying clients.

I understand that, as a lawyer, you need to focus on the law so you can give the best legal service to your clients.

If you need legal marketing services, let the experts in the field support you so you can achieve a synergistic and symbiotic relationship.

Hey, I’m the founder of S4 Prestige Marketing, a marketing agency specializing in legal marketing for lawyers, attorneys, and the legal industry.

If you have any questions about legal marketing, content marketing, SEO, or other legal marketing questions, drop me a few lines!

Now that you know more about legal marketing, the next step is to define your legal marketing strategy and execute…good luck!

Be Sure To Reach Out

I’d love to hear from you.

Tell me about your company, your objectives, where you’d like to see yourself in a few years, and so on.

If you have any questions about content marketing services or just want to say hi, that’s all appreciated also!

You can reach out to me through my contact form or drop me a line at s4prestigemarketing @ gmail.com.

Looking forward to it!