Creating a law firm marketing plan can be daunting if you haven’t done it before or updated your strategy in recent years. The pace of digital marketing is fast, and best-practices for clients in the legal field evolve rapidly as well. Not only that, we’re assuming you didn’t start a law firm because you’re an expert at marketing, and many practices do not have an in-house team for advertising.
Thus, we put together a comprehensive guide to get you and your team started on creating or updating your legal marketing plan. Follow these steps to refining your process and you will likely get more leads and conversions in the future.
Need a new law firm digital marketing plan?
An integral part of any marketing plan is identifying the pillars of attracting leads and conversions. These can be content-based or calls to action, but they all require upkeep, evolution, and data-centric decision making. Here are our five most important fields to focus on for a rock-solid foundation:
- Website: Your online presence as a law firm begins and ends with your website. No matter what other forms of marketing you employ, the critical information to contact your practice for consultations and cases will run through your website. Similarly, all other forms of marketing will likely point to your website unless you have a robust phone system, which is becoming less common year-by-year.
This means that your website must look professional, easy to navigate, and have clear calls to action. Additionally, you must have savvy back-end support for it, whether it relates to SEO, security, or updating purposes. When building a marketing plan for your legal agency, do not qualitatively skimp on your website.
- Content: If the website is the backbone of your marketing plan, content is going to represent the rest of the skeleton. While categorically broad, content can be defined as the creative and information pieces that your lawyer marketing plan template will contain. This includes the copy writing on your website, blogs, social media posts, and all forms of customer outreach.
They say content is king, and this pertains to three different elements of it: The quality of it, the volume of it, and how well it ranks SEO-wise (in most circumstances). Each one of these traits is important to consider when creating content or hiring someone to produce it for you. Make every image, email, and post count, and you will see astonishing returns as an authoritative presence in your niche.
- SEO: Search engine optimization is likely the most complicated and competitive element of digital marketing. Though all websites inherently partake in it, internet marketing (especially for small law firms) is incredibly saturated, meaning you need to master SEO to succeed. The value of being the highest-ranked site for a critical key world is measurably valuable: over 34 percent of clicks go to the highest-ranked site in a search.
This means you have to be able to conduct frequent SEO audits of your site, follow best practices for security and compliance measures, and most of all, produce content in a manner that will help you rank. Often, individual attorney marketing plans contain plans for content that is full of wonderful information but is buried due to a misunderstanding of how SEO works. Make sure that when you are putting together your marketing dream team that you have an SEO expert on board.
- Email Marketing: Business-to-consumer leads are integral for acquiring high-value clients. One of the most reliable and replicable ways to achieve a good lead funnel is through email marketing. You want prospective clients to know that you can offer certain services in your niche should they need them. Similarly, email marketing is one of the most effective tools for recapturing the attention of prior clients.
In order to build a proper email marketing pinwheel, we recommend writing a newsletter and creating a recurring email list. You can combine this with more specific one-offs whenever you feel necessary to create an email content mill that will cast as wide a net as possible while still being able to hone in on your most valuable clients when the time is right.
- Social Media: When creating a legal services marketing plan, social media often gets overlooked initially. There can be apprehension because social media is often seen as a place for goofy content, or softer services that appeal to impulsive clicks. The reality is that there is efficient space for marketing all businesses on the correct social media platforms, you just have to know where to implement your content.
We recommend looking at narrow targets such as Facebook groups, or targeted ads that attach to search strings in your niche. Another underrated social media platform (that is often incorrectly not categorized as one) is Linkedin. Referrals are an enormous component of individual attorney marketing plans, and you can leverage quality Linkedin profiles and content into some great leads.
There is no such thing as a one-size-fits all lawyer marketing plan template, but if you make sure your plan covers these bases, we promise you’re off to a tremendous start. There’s still work to be done from there though, as marketing never rests.
Next Steps
Once you have come up with an initial plan to identify your needs, you’re going to need to put the right people in place. This can mean hiring one marketer, a full team, or more realistically, a legal marketing agency. Because every conversion holds such high lifetime value and the competition for clients is fierce, we have found it to be well-worth outsourcing to experts. Make sure to vet every marketing professional with your specific plan in mind, but be willing to listen to their opinions on how to grow your business as well. Ultimately, you should be working with them as a team, not just following blindly.
Grow Your Firm With Law Tigers
At Law Tigers, teamwork is at the core of our marketing ethos. We create authoritative content on all elements of our niche and help other law firms learn how to do the same. We’ve become leaders in our fields over the course of several decades, and have shared our growth with our partners.
If you’re looking to take the next steps in developing a legal firm marketing plan, consider the resources available on our site and a potential partnership. They just may be the rocket fuel your ship needs to launch.
