Law Firm Marketing Strategies: 8 Tactics for 2021
In this article, I’ll show you the latest law firm marketing strategies and techniques you can incorporate into your 2021 marketing plan.
It includes a collection of law firm marketing ideas you can leverage to start attracting a steady stream of customers to your firm fast.
Imagine being at the top of Google for your keywords; receiving high-quality, qualified traffic; growing your client base, and increasing profits. This is all within reach.
Is 2021 the year that you finally take control of your law firm’s marketing strategy?
If so, then let’s get started…
1. Start by building a brand
Branding is not just about having expensive letterheads and business cards and winning marketing awards.
If you want to shape a marketing strategy, you need the right message. It should be based on some fundamentals of the image that you want your law firm to project.
For someone filing for bankruptcy, a friendly law firm (when the rest of the world is aggressively hounding you for money) is a message that has proven to resonate with customers.
What’s your value proposition – why should anyone listen to you?
Another firm, The Levoritz Law Group, is very clear about why his target audience (fathers going through a divorce or child custody battle) should hire his firm. Trust me, this landing page converts like crazy.
What do you consistently do better than the rest – how do you differentiate yourself from the many competing law firms?
Branding doesn’t have to be complicated. Focus on the needs of your customers and keep it simple.
Once you’ve established your messaging, work it into all your marketing channels: website, social media, professional networks, offline literature, etc.
2. Demonstrate credibility & authority
A solid law firm marketing strategy should involve both passive and active marketing activities.
A good example of passive marketing is your website copy that helps build credibility and authority around your firm.
Reviews from your clients
Instant credibility is also provided by reviews and testimonials from past clients. Dunham & Jones features a page of testimonials for each practice area, with case results detailed too.
3. Demonstrate capability in all your practice areas
Another important area of branding is to communicate the full extent of what you do and your capability to deliver.
4. Run an SEO campaign to improve visibility in Google’s search results
First up, every law firm must pay attention to SEO at all times, not just in 2021. Here’s why:
- 75% of people never go past the first page of Google. – Source
- 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. – Source
Bottom line: you need to be seen in the search engine results pages to get clicks and traffic.
Certain aspects of law firm SEO, such as good keyword research, having professionally written titles and descriptions, optimizing images, maintaining a logical website architecture, and using a fast and secure hosting platform like WPengine are simply best-practices for SEO at all times.
Some other key SEO aspects to pay special attention to in 2021 include:
- Increasing the length of time visitors spend on your web pages and on your site in general
- Reducing the bounce rate by making titles/descriptions clear and your pages highly relevant to your chosen keywords
- Focusing on long-form content marketing (or what we call Practice Area Power Pages), in recent years, has outperformed shorter form content and is also shared more frequently
- Using schema mark up for your law firm to detail page contents for the search engines
- Making it mobile-friendly; you will be penalized if your website displays poorly on mobile devices – keep it clean and uncluttered.
- Link-building with authority sites
- Citation building and review solicitation
Additionally, many law firms target clients from the local area. This requires good local SEO, with Google My Business accounts fully optimized.
5. Run an optimized Google AdWords campaign
Paid search is still a valuable way to attract new leads for your law firm.
Ads are covering as much as 85% of the space above the fold on the results page.
A well-planned and optimized Google AdWords campaign can send large volumes of highly qualified traffic to your website to convert into paying clients.
If you haven’t had the results you’d hoped for in the past from AdWords, I’ll bet that it’s because of one or more of these reasons:
- You’ve been trying to compete for ultra-competitive keywords (terms like “lawyer” and “attorney” are among the most expensive keywords you’ll find).
- You haven’t put enough time into research or hired the right professional who can manage your campaign
- You never optimized your AdWords campaign
Make 2021 the year when you take AdWords more seriously and start getting the results you deserve from it.
6. Build and optimize landing pages
Make landing pages a priority in your law firm marketing strategy in 2021. They are one of the main differences between merely getting more traffic and actually getting more paying clients.
This is where your leads “arrive” and where you start the process of converting them.
To be effective, your landing pages should be:
- Professionally written and inspire a specific action
- Optimized for specific action-related keywords such as “child custody laws for fathers in New York” or “legal advice for DUI in Seattle” (or whatever the AdWords phrase or search term you are targeting is)
Unique for each specific service you are promoting
7. Increase your presence in the legal directories
Whatever your thoughts about the legal directories, being featured in the main ones like FindLaw can help boost your traffic and provide a citation and hyperlink for your website.
8. Build AMP pages and a mobile-first marketing strategy
If you didn’t make 2019 the year that you went mobile-first with your website and law firm marketing, you’re already trailing on that.
Don’t miss it in 2021.
Put simply, if your website performs poorly on mobile, you’re damaging the relationship with potential clients AND damaging your relationship with Google.
Google’s mobile-first index suggests as much.
According to MarginMedia, 48 percent of users say that if a website doesn’t work well on mobile, it indicates a lack of care from the business.
It’s relatively easy to create a mobile-first website these days and many successful law firms are doing just that.
To learn more or get started call us at 760.452.0856, email us at [email protected] or contact us here.
