Most law firms already have a website that features information about their firm and practice areas. But not all of them are optimized for conversions and search. Your website needs to be functional and easy to find, and it also needs to give potential clients an accurate representation of your firm.
Think your website passes the test? Even if you have a well-designed website that is user-friendly and optimized for search, you’re probably still looking to increase the number of leads you receive from digital marketing. The best way to accomplish that goal is to make sure your digital marketing plan includes three core tactics: content marketing, social media, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
Keep reading to learn more about these three digital marketing strategies and how they can benefit your law firm.
Content Marketing: Creating Quality Content
Content marketing is more than just publishing a blog occasionally and filling your website copy with keywords. The goal of content marketing is to provide relevant and useful information that will attract visitors to your site and demonstrate your level of expertise in your industry.
Key Benefits of Content Marketing
Content marketing helps you build trust, engagement, and relationships with potential clients. Posting informative content in a range of different topic areas and using a variety of different media (blogs, videos, infographics) will help your site rank for more keywords, which will make it easier for potential clients to find you. Including well-written website copy on landing and practice area pages also improves the overall functionality and appeal of your site.
Don’t Just Write Content Right Correctly, Write It Well
Yes, spelling and grammar are important, but there’s more to content marketing than just using correct grammar. There are many other factors to consider as well, including:
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- Writing style: The style of your web copy should match your firm’s branding, tone, and voice. For law firms, the writing style is typically formal, befitting the seriousness of the client’s situation. However, many lawyers overrate how much potential clients care that a firm’s web copy sounds “lawyerly.” Most potential legal clients want to know they’re dealing with a compassionate human who understands their situation. Even if you want to come across as a “fighter,” sounding stiff, wooden, and bookish in your web copy won’t help your cause. Try to keep your tone conversational, as if you were having a one-to-one consultation with the potential client and informing them about their legal issue.
- Relevance: Grammatically correct writing that fits your brand voice but provides no useful or new information to readers won’t perform well, either in search engines or among your website visitors. You need to create content that resonates with both your clients’ needs and their expectations when they click through to your site.
- Readability: Readability refers to how well readers can understand your content. This includes writing at visitors’ reading levels and using intuitive page and content structures that help readers scan the page for the information they require.
Use Social Media to Build Brand Awareness
Social media marketing involves using social media platforms to increase brand awareness and promote your business. Compared to personal social media pages, your law firm’s pages require a bit more strategy and maintenance.
Key Benefits of Social Media Marketing
If your law firm isn’t on social media, you’re missing out on a low-cost marketing platform — one that can help you reach younger demographics who will soon become your potential client base. Social media also allows you to interact with potential clients more informally, and you can use it to portray the relatable and personal side of your firm. As a bonus, social media pages can even improve your site’s performance in local search results on Google.
Let’s Get Social
Images and video content reign supreme on social media platforms, increasing click-through rates by almost 50% compared to text-only posts. But arbitrarily posting pictures onto your social media sites isn’t enough to build brand awareness and user engagement. A successful social media strategy involves plenty of planning and consideration.
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- Preparation: If you’re not posting content that your users want to see, you’re going to lose followers. Certain demographics use different social platforms, and they do so at different times of the day. Before you start posting, you’ll need to research your target audience to determine the best channels to use, what content to post, when to post, and how often to post.
- Rule of Thirds: A social media marketing principle called the rule of thirds can help you develop a posting plan that promotes your business, demonstrates industry knowledge, and adds a personal touch to your firm. According to the rule, you should allocate your posts evenly between three broad subjects: information about your business, industry news, and more relatable content like community engagement stories and office happenings.
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- Engagement: Social media is all about brand awareness and follower engagement. Just posting useful and interesting content won’t be enough to convert followers into leads. Your law firms need to engage with followers — not just users who reach out to you directly, but anyone who comments or reshares posts.
RELATED BLOG ARTICLE: Top 5 Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Law Firm’s Website
Pay-Per-Click Advertising Can Generate Additional Site Traffic and Leads
With pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, your firm can bid for placement in the ad section of online search results pages. Pay-per-click works exactly how it sounds: you pay a fee each time someone clicks on your ad.
Key Benefits of PPC Advertising
PPC advertising can provide a cost-effective way to bring leads directly to relevant landing pages on your website if done correctly. PPC platforms provide in-depth targeting and measuring capabilities for your campaigns, allowing you to determine which ads and keywords are performing best. Using these analytics, you can tweak and optimize campaigns as they run and develop future campaigns based on top-performing keywords and placements.
Testing, Testing, PPC
So where do you start? There are many technical factors involved in creating successful PPC campaigns, and we have a variety of articles about creating and optimizing PPC campaigns for law firms. Here, we’ll summarize three of the main elements to consider when developing PPC campaigns for your law firm.
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- Landing Pages: The purpose of PPC is to direct users in your target audience to landing pages that are specially created to meet their needs. Generally, PPC visitors don’t spend long browsing sites. By creating unique landing pages for each of your campaigns, you can make sure you capture visitors’ attention immediately and show them only content that’s relevant to them.
- Keywords: PPC success isn’t completely dependent on keywords, but they do play a major role in determining how your campaigns perform. Selecting keywords is how you get your ads to show up in front of users who are in your target audience. Research your keywords carefully and choose terms that match what your audience is searching for, such as “personal injury lawyer near me.”
- Testing: Testing and analytics are crucial for the success of your PPC campaigns. The best type of testing is A/B testing, in which you compare two different ads that are designed for the same audience and the same keywords, run them simultaneously, and see which performs better.
LaFleur: Brilliant Legal Marketing
At LaFleur, we have experience handling these three core strategies and much more for law firms across the country. When you work with LaFleur for your digital marketing needs, you’ll have access to our top-notch team of specialists. From content writers to PPC experts, our team has expertise in every area of digital marketing for law firms. We understand the nuances of the legal field and the challenges you face in a competitive market.
Want to learn more about how we can help your law firm get the most out of your digital marketing efforts? Contact us online or call us at (888) 222-1512.
References
Tamble, M. (2019, February 20). 7 tips for using visual content marketing. Social Media Today. Retrieved from https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/7-tips-for-using-visual-content-marketing/548660/