You don’t need to be a marketing pro to build a solid digital marketing strategy. You just need to leverage your own expertise and be willing to use this information in new ways.

We’ll help you get started by defining the key components of successful law firm marketing. These components will help you consistently find new clients — because you have made it easy for them to find you.

Follow our simple framework in this guide to quickly target new clients and start generating case inquiries.

Define and Document Your Audience

You probably know your customers inside and out. You know exactly the type of person and circumstance that generates a viable case for your firm. But, in most situations, you will have multiple people involved in your law firm marketing planning and execution process.

How do you make sure your entire marketing team understands your customers the way you do? You define and document your audience. This will become a clear guide for all involved, so you can ensure consistent marketing outcomes.

Your guide will help the team produce content that matches your targets, without needing constant guidance and clarification from you on what makes sense. It also will make sure everyone stays on the same page.

Establish Your Positioning

Here is the biggest question to help you define your position in the marketplace: What makes you different from the competition?

Positioning is an essential yet under-discussed element to a successful digital marketing strategy. With positioning, you are defining what makes you unique, and how customers should perceive and connect with you. It’s essentially your image or identity.

Ask yourself what clients can expect from you, and what makes their experience with you unique. Here are two example statements we will break down below:

1. “Over $1 Billion Won for our Clients — No Fees Until We Win.” (Mike Morse Law Firm)
2. “Three generations of lawyers fighting and winning for Michigan personal injury clients. We are family.” (Sam Bernstein Law Firm)

The first statement is focusing its position on results, and the team’s firm dedication to winning their cases. The second touts the firm’s legacy and expertise.

Depending on your unique history, background, personality, and ultimate goals, you can craft confident positioning statements focused on what’s most important to communicate to your clients. 

This might be a focus on empathy if you specialize in cases that are more life-changing and sensitive, results-driven like the example above, high profile cases, or your own one-of-a-kind flair.

Maybe you’re wondering if digital marketing is worth it. Read: Do Law Firms Even Need an Online Presence?

Improve Your Web Design

Your website should be a clean, attractive, and straightforward representation of who you are and what you do. There are plenty of examples on the web of what not to do when it comes to law firm marketing, and a lot of it has to do with web presence.

Websites should be designed based on the customer’s experience, not functionality. Kaleidico’s process, for example, blends extensive collaboration and a focus on organizational and user goals. Your input is essential to ensuring your business goals are met.

Here are some key elements to focus on as you design your website. 

Design pages for practice areas and attorney profiles

Create pages for each of your practice areas. On each page, define the case type and point out your experience in this area. Then, explain how you can help and how the prospective client should move forward in contacting you.

You also need to create a page that lists all attorneys and their basic contact information, then link to each personal profile page. Here, you can include their photo, background, and experience, linking out to relevant case type pages. 

Make sure contact information is always clearly displayed so prospective clients can easily call or email the team member.

Provide informative content that encourages clients to make a case inquiry

The engaging, informative content produced for your website will be search engine optimized (more on that later) and help draw new clients to your page.

This content, which might include articles, videos, ebooks, and more, gives you the opportunity to provide background on your case types, explain various scenarios, and share commentary on related cases.

While you provide valuable information and explanations, you also encourage prospective clients to make a case inquiry. Ideally, they found your page by searching for your name or case types, so make sure you seal the deal by giving them everything they need to reach out.

Use progressive forms to begin the case intake process

Progressive forms are embedded on relevant web pages to prompt the case intake process. These forms serve as an initial interview for you to preview the client’s situation.

Once a prospective client has perused your website and found they may have a case, they can simply move over to the form, which is clearly displayed on the page, and “progressively” answer the prompts you are requesting. 

This series of prompts gradually collects client information one or two questions at a time, including their experience, case type, and a brief explanation. At the start or end of the form, depending on your setup, they can enter their name and contact information.

Use PPC (Google Ads) Campaigns

PPC, or Pay-Per-Click ads, involve advertisers paying each time someone clicks on their online ad. Google Ads is one of the most popular platforms for this type of advertising.

PPC is based on keywords, so the ads will appear in Google searches when someone searches a keyword you’re using. Since keywords are essential for this type of model, someone skilled in researching and analyzing keywords needs to run these campaigns. 

Strongly consider hiring an experienced PPC manager for this role, because keyword competition can make it difficult for you to rank. A good PPC manager has the skills to:

• Research keywords and industry trends
• Enhance your landing page design with keywords
• Examine SEO trends and outsmart Google’s algorithms

While it takes time to build a robust campaign, that doesn’t mean you can’t jump into the marketplace and start generating leads now. Google Ads has simple setup instructions to help you put together your first ad and gain some initial traffic.

Then, you can tweak or redesign your website and content over time to create higher search rankings.

Build SEO and Content Marketing Efforts

Simply put, SEO is used to maximize your visibility on search engines such as Google. To compete in your industry, you need to understand what your future clients are searching for — so you can meet them where they are. If not, you’ll just be handing your leads to the competitors.

In our SEO guide for law firm marketing, we explain that your referrals almost always come from word-of-mouth. Someone asks for a recommendation from friends or family based on a case type, and they’re provided with a lawyer’s name. This means you need to appropriately pack your pages with this information and relevant keywords.

Your SEO strategy, in turn, is carried by your content. You need to create a consistent and sustainable publishing process, and write and publish in a way that generates leads.

What’s a sustainable and effective publishing process?

The most important part of your publishing process is to just keep creating, whether that’s articles, videos, ebooks, etc.

Making it sustainable means your publishing goals are realistic so you can maintain consistency. If your content is what’s drawing in leads, you have to keep it flowing — and it needs to be optimized or it’s not leading anyone anywhere.

Consistently write articles that provide explanation and include relatable scenarios. Embed videos to make it more personal. All content needs to include relevant keywords in the titles, subtitles, and body so it will show up in searches.

Take advantage of social media to share your published articles and videos. Consistent posting is essential on social media to build credibility. If you haven’t posted in a year, people will be less likely to follow your page. An active page will grab an audience and result in more sharing and linking opportunities, which means more leads.

Start Email Marketing

Marketing has come a long way — is using email still a thing? Yep, even with social media and sophisticated chat tools, email marketing is a successful strategy to connect, follow up, and share information.

Based on your own email inbox, you probably already know the good news: Most people don’t do email marketing well. Doing it right means you’re already way ahead of the competition. 

The best part about email marketing is that it’s not subject to algorithms. You are in control of these connections. Most of the contacts you have will come from the progressive forms on your case pages, which gives you the opportunity to create outreach email sequences to follow up and schedule appointments.

Harness the power of referrals

Since referrals are the most essential part of your business, you can harness that power through email marketing by creating lead nurturing campaigns for referral partners. Through these partnerships you’ll gain access to high-quality leads, so your content will need to match this level.

Establish relationships in this campaign with education and awareness by providing these types of content:

• Videos
• Newsletters
• Ebooks
• Guides
• Infographics
• Client reviews
• Links to articles and featured profiles

It’s all about building trust by sharing valuable information, rather than promoting your firm outright.

Law firm marketing for Consistent Case Lead Generation

This law firm marketing guide is a basic framework you can personalize to create your own strategy. All the components work together to create a consistent and sustainable lead generation program.

If you need assistance building a successful program, Kaleidico would love to help. We have almost two decades of experience in generating online leads, and we’re excited to share what we can do for you.

Contact us today to tell us about your project.