The average small law firm has something like only three employees. 

Which one of those three employees is the digital marketer? None of them, usually.

The thing is, digital marketing isn’t what’s being taught in law school — law is. 

But part of running a successful business is finding new ways to bring in new clients. 

Most law firms already know that legal marketing is necessary to bring in new business, but they’re busy handling other cases. Usually, the digital marketing work gets neglected, resulting in many missed opportunities for generating online case leads.

If you work for a law firm that’s understaffed or is in need of a drastic overhaul in your marketing efforts, read our complete guide to grow your practice. 

We’ll break down some of the intimidating jargon and give you concrete ideas for crafting a usable law firm marketing plan and attracting new leads to your business.

The Essential Components of a Legal Marketing Plan

Your law firm marketing strategy will be your roadmap detailing exactly what your aims and goals are for your new marketing venture.

Ideally, your marketing plan will address and answer these important issues:

• How many people do you want to attract to your website a month?
• How many case leads do you want to generate each month?
• Who are these people? What are their demographics? Where do they spend time online?
• Who is your competition?
• What’s the online competitive space like?
• What are your starting points for data that you wish to improve?
• What is the budget, both overall and monthly?
• What is your company’s current position? What positioning do you want after your marketing plan is complete?

Get very specific about where your company is now, and the goals you wish to achieve through your marketing plan. 

Build a Brand Story to Start

People respond well to stories. It’s a part of human nature. 

Storytelling is often the greatest tool marketers have when influencing new clients. In MRI scans, people’s brains often light up when listening or reading an interesting narrative.

Share interesting stories about the formation of your company, the high-profile cases you’ve worked on, or just share your motivation and passion for forming your company.

Often you’ll read in attorney bios on law firm websites that a lawyer got into the business because their parent or grandparent was a lawyer. Just sharing a simple story like that is enough to get people to care about you, and trust you. It makes people think of their own family and that sense of trust.

The idea is to connect on a human-to-human level in your website’s copy, your website’s design, and when you finally meet person-to-person with your new client. 

Stories build interest and trust. So tell a good brand story.

Design a Law Firm Website that’s Informative, Engaging, and Generates Case Leads

Your law firm’s website acts as the central hub for your online marketing efforts. 

Basically, every ad or new blog post that you release online is meant to attract people back to your website to fill out a form.

But once people get to your website, you need to retain them. This means giving them instant access to the relevant information they’re looking for.. 

In blog posts, this means writing a structured article using the proper header types that can quickly give answers to those who are quick readers or skimmers. 

It also means writing well-crafted copy that’s humanistic and compassionate, so people can trust your expertise and feel comfortable filling out the contact form on the side of the page, or following through with your call to action (CTA) to “contact us today.”

One way to keep people on your website is through linking old blog posts into your new blog posts. Halfway through reading a blog, a reader might click on a link opening up a new page and a new blog post to read, and so on. 

The longer you can keep them on the page, the more likely you are to get their lead contact info.

Another tip: create categorized content on your page based on specific scenarios related to your practice’s specialty. 

For medical malpractice sites, this means creating categories of blogs all about surgeon errors, delayed diagnosis, or birth injuries. 

If you can group together blog posts related to each of your key practice areas, you can improve your site’s navigation and improve your user’s site experience, which are other tactics to keep your visitors on your website for longer.

Generate SEO Content to Help Google Find You Perfect Clients

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a common term in the marketing world. It basically means “make my website or blog post really easy to find in a Google search.”

The way this works is Google tries to find certain phrases or keywords in a search that line up with the same keywords used in a website’s copy, whether these words are in the “About Us” page, or in a new blog post. 

The closer the matches are, the higher the search result will be on Google’s search engine results page (SERP).

The idea then is to research which terms, or keywords, get searched the most often, and find ways to put those keywords into your website in a legitimate way. I’ve said this before, you can’t just type “best law firms” a hundred times on your website and hope for the best. 

Google’s algorithm is constantly updating to better match search intent with a website’s copy, so you better learn the elements of SEO if you want your website to rank well.

Keyword planning is a subset of SEO, which is a skill in itself. Keyword planning is generally how you will decide which keywords to use in your website and which names to use in your blog posts so they can get the most traffic.

The crazy thing about the internet is that you can see what keywords your competitors are using on their websites and blog posts. You can even see the amount of traffic their websites are receiving, and which of their blog posts are generating the most interest. 

Look to your competitors to get a better idea of the competitive landscape, and which keywords to use or avoid to attract your ideal client.

Create Landing Pages for Your Core Case Types

Let’s say your law firm specializes in medical malpractice cases. 

Your core case types would then comprise of birth injuries, delayed diagnosis malpractice, hospital malpractice, surgical errors, etc.

Each one of these categories should have its own separate web page (a “landing page”) prominently displayed in your website’s navigation so people looking for “birth injuries” can quickly find the birth injuries page, and so on.

Creating landing pages for each of your core case types vastly improves your site’s navigation and user experience, with the added benefit of giving you more web pages to add attractive keywords throughout your website.

Also, it just makes good organizational sense. 

Use Google Ads (PPC) to Target Clients 

Content marketing (and blogging) can be thought of as a form of “organic” or earned advertising. 

You write a quality, keyword-rich article and naturally, it will rank high in Google’s search results. It’s mostly free, besides the cost of paying the blog writer and hosting your website. You can answer legal questions and write about other relevant topics to generate traffic and potential clients.

Then there are paid ads. These are completely different and charge you every time a person clicks on these ads, thus “pay-per-click.” 

If you’re not feeling patient enough to wait for your blogs to bring people in, then you can expedite the process by purchasing pay-per-click ads.

PPC ads are those little text-based ads you see on Google’s SERP page that sit above the organic search results. Next to the website’s domain name will be a little disclaimer saying “Ad” to let you know these posts aren’t part of the organic search results.

PPC ads are a whole other beast with a steep learning curve. To get started, you’ll need a Google Ads account, and will need to learn how to bid on the keywords that you’re targeting for your ads. 

As you can imagine, the keyword “lawyer” is the fourth most popular keyword in Google Ads, so you’ll need to do clever keyword research to find those untapped, or underused keywords that can snag you more clicks and visitors.

Run Google Ads and Facebook Remarketing Campaigns

Ever look at a company’s website, leave the website, and then see an ad for that company in the sidebar of another website later? 

If so, you’ve been targeted by remarketing ads.

Google Ads and Facebook’s Ads manager have the capabilities of tracking your web visitors across the internet so you can show them ads even after they’ve left your website.

These PPC platforms give you a snippet of code to put on your website, which adds a tracking cookie to your web visitor’s web browser. 

Sounds sneaky, I know. But they absolutely work for lawyers. Here’s why: Many people aren’t in need of a lawyer immediately. They may be in the exploratory phase, just reading blogs to see if they have a valid case or not.

However, after they’ve visited (and left) your website, it can be hard to get them to come back and fill out their contact info. 

But with remarketing ads, these ads can act as a gentle nudge to bring people back to your website. And because they’ve already interacted with you, they’re more likely to recognize these ads and click on them.

Local SEO: Claim and Optimize Google Business Profile

Want your business to show up in Google Maps? Then set up your Google’s Business profile (formerly Google My Business).

In addition to placing a big red place marker on Google Maps, you also get control over your business fronts’ information in Google. This way you can update your company phone number, office hours, address, and more information.

The biggest benefit is that when people search for your law firm’s name, instead of finding it on a long list of results, there’s a big, official display of your company on the right-hand side of Google. Thus making your company more legitimate, and easier to find in Google searches.

Design Email Marketing Campaigns for Lead Nurturing

Marketing law firms is just as much about cultivating your existing relationships as it is about generating new leads. Your past clients and leads will serve as the foundation for your email marketing campaign.

The cost of sending mass emails is pennies. The value is often hundreds or thousands of dollars in referrals and new clients.

Direct mailers, and much of traditional marketing methods, are dead. They’re too expensive anyway! 

With email marketing, you also get instant feedback and live-time data generation. 

Most email marketing platforms tell you when an email has been opened (legal emails have an open rate of 22%), the location the email was opened at, and how often the email has been opened. You can’t get this data from direct mail pieces!

As we said before, not everybody needs a lawyer right away who comes to a law firm website. However, just like remarketing ads, email marketing is another way to keep in touch with people who aren’t actively engaging with your website anymore.

Looking for ideas of emails to send out? Why not send out a mass email to your list every time a new blog is published? If you really want to stand out as a thought leader in your field, pen an opinion piece about a relevant news topic and let your opinion be heard. You never know who on your email list might forward an email to a friend in need of a lawyer.

Each one of these emails sent to your contacts can be seen as a “touchpoint.” In sales, it often takes multiple touchpoints before closing a deal. So be sure to send out an email every so often to stay in touch.

Create Videos and Host Webinars on Legal Topics

Social media marketing is just as viable of a lead generator than content marketing and other efforts. Posting video content on different social media channels can attract the attention of new prospective clients.

Your social media presence will also help legitimize your firm with an active Facebook page.

I don’t think people realize that YouTube is a search engine. A video website, yeah, of course, but it’s also the second largest search engine after Google!

Using this analogy, you could think of videos as visual blogs, and YouTube as Google.

So, create an official page for your law firm on YouTube and start publishing videos! Keywords, SEO, all that stuff applies to YouTube just like your law firm website.

A well-produced video can get thousands of views, perhaps even millions, and these videos don’t disappear either. They’re a form of evergreen content, attracting viewers for years to come.

Another thing you can do is host a webinar, which is a virtual seminar. There are plenty of platforms that let you do this for free. Host weekly or monthly webinars that are free to attend. You’re likely to attract new clients and leads, and the data gathered alone from webinars make them worth it. 

You’ll be able to interact with real people in real-time, using their feedback and questions to improve your brand’s messaging and approach.

Old webinars can also be repurposed to write new blog posts, or come up with new strategies based on your audience’s feedback.

Include Your Law Firm in Popular Legal Directories

Popular legal directories, such as FindLaw, Avvo, Super Lawyers, and Nolo get millions of visitors each month!

These sites are basically search engines, but only for helping people find lawyers.

Why not capitalize on all the traffic these websites are getting? Each of these sites makes it relatively straightforward for attorneys and law firms to set up their user profiles. 

Create a Lead Magnet Around Your Firm’s Area of Expertise

Ever read a helpful blog and reach the bottom of the page and it says “Enter your email to download our free eBook?” That’s a lead magnet. 

It’s something that attracts people to enter their contact information in exchange for something free and valuable.

In your case, you can create free eBooks or guides related to your law firm’s area of expertise.

If you’re a defense attorney, why not create a free guide called “Secrets to Winning DUI Cases.” Or if you’re a divorce attorney, create a free guide called “Steps to Winning a Divorce Case.”

The idea is to make the title of the lead magnet enticing. Of course, people want to win their DUI case. Of course, people want to win their divorce case. And in return for this helpful information, they’ll gladly submit their name and email address in exchange for it.

Demonstrate Legal Credibility, Authority, and Capability

A lawyer must demonstrate professionalism and capability to win over their prospective clients. 

It’s why they show their diplomas in their offices and adhere to a strict dress code. It’s about projecting an image of professionalism and competence.

Content marketing and web design are an extension of this professionalism into the digital space.

Having an attractive and functional website shows your law firm is contemporary and up-to-date. Maintaining an active blog shows people that your company is still in business and working on new cases. 

Measure Your Success

A new legal marketing plan cannot be assessed if there’s no starting point to compare against.

In the beginning, you’ll need to collect existing traffic data so you know where you currently stand and can realistically project achievable goals. 

You’ll need to determine important metrics such as:

• Your current monthly traffic
• Number of online leads generated
• Cost per lead acquisition
• Amount spent on biddable keywords
• Click through rate
• Backlinks
• Email open rates
• Monthly paid ad budget
• Traffic being brought in by each blog post
• Time spent on website
• Bounce rate

Once you know this information, you’ll have concrete goals and tactics to follow to improve each of these metrics on a monthly and yearly rate.

Generate More Leads from Your Website with Kaleidico

Kaleidico is a lead generation agency for law firms and mortgage lenders.

We understand the online legal landscape and can help you generate more leads for your growing law firm.

We combine content marketing, branding, web design, email marketing, PPC, and SEO to expand law firms’ online presence and win them more clients through online lead generation.

We’d love to work with your company.

Download our free 90-Day Law Firm Marketing Plan and reach out to schedule a discovery session to see how we can help your business grow.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels