Sometimes it can feel like lawyers spend as much time marketing their services as they do providing their services. Every week, a new vendor has a new guaranteed offer for you, and every month, a new competitor appears to siphon more clients from you. Most attorneys are not born marketers, and it can be discouraging to be out there marketing and at the same time read news about how fake attorney listings are getting better results in search engines than real ones are.
When law schools don’t provide the marketing guidance needed by attorneys, and marketing vendors and companies have a vested interest in attorneys not understanding what marketers do, attorneys need another source of unbiased information and advice that they can rely on. That’s where a consulting service like the one that Brain Trust Legal provides can be a vital resource. Rather than spending time and money becoming an expert at great personal cost, attorneys can connect with consulting services to provide that expertise directly. Just a few examples of the kind of marketing experience and advice you can get from BTL consulting can be seen below.
In recent years, more attorneys have been moving into digital and online marketing because they like the versatility of connecting with a specific audience with targeting. Targeting is a powerful tool in law firm marketing, but so is television. The question is: is there a way to continue using the power of TV marketing while drilling down to make the audience more targeted?
The answer is yes, there are absolutely things you can focus on to make finding your audience more likely and more impactful. The first is to make sure you’re running your ads at a time and in a program that fits your ideal client. If you’re looking for people potentially in the hospital for injuries, it might make sense to run ads later at night on channels like HGTV and Animal Planet, the kind of programming that hospitals and patients play because they help lower stress and provide entertainment.
The second thing you can do to more effectively target your audience is to make sure you’re calling them out directly and specifically in your marketing. If you want truck accident cases or slip and fall cases or dog bite cases, you need to make sure you’re calling them out by name. If a potential client doesn’t hear you mention their situation by name, they won’t think to reach out to you.
The question of what type of marketing a law firm should focus on is sometimes difficult to get a clear answer on. Not because there isn’t an answer, but because most of the people with the expertise to answer it, like vendors and marketers, have a vested interest in giving one answer over another because their programs or companies focus on specific marketing tactics. The truth is that any marketing arena that brings in more revenue than it spends is a good one, but there are six primary methods that any law firm should spend their time and money on when possible.
Pay-Per-Click advertising is most well known as the primary type of Google ad but it is also available on other platforms such as Facebook. This type of advertising is ideal for attorneys because these are active searchers finding your ad. You choose keywords that will trigger your ad appearing to them, and you only pay for the times when someone actually clicks on the ad.
If you choose your keywords effectively, this can be one of the best marketing efforts because the turnaround time from beginning a campaign to getting leads is very quick. However, you want to make sure you have either a vendor or a skilled in-house person to run them for you, because these kinds of campaigns can get expensive when not properly optimized.
SEO is one of the tried and true methods of finding new clients by creating a website that appeals to search engines so they will organically recognize your site as authoritative and worth recommending to potential clients.
It’s important to remember, however, that SEO is long-term marketing. It can take months before you start to see results because it takes time for new or altered websites to be fully mapped and ranked on sites like Google. It is worth the time, though, to get your firm’s website to the top of Google where it will be the first website people see.
Out of Home is exactly what it sounds like: this is outdoor advertising, everything from billboards to posters on bus stops to signage on buses and cars, and even ads on benches.When used strategically in high-traffic places in areas that match your ideal demographic client, these can be highly effective.
Billboards have been the mainstay for many practicing attorneys since the 1970s, and in an age of online devices dividing the viewing populace for video advertising, Out of Home has a built-in advantage that everyone who uses a road or walks in an intersection sees the ads.
OTT advertising is one of the newer types of marketing along with social media, and it is an offshoot of TV advertising. Over-the-Top describes ads that play on devices that stream the internet. TV is broadcast and cable, while Over-the-Top is places like Hulu, Tubi, Amazon Prime, Roku, and many other channels and devices that provide streaming services and advertising opportunities.
These can be very effective for brand awareness because it allows you to target audiences according to geographics, demographics, and content interest in a way that standard TV ads are unable to do currently.
You need to meet your audience where they are, and most of your potential clients are on social media. Since building a thriving organic presence on social media is difficult for a law firm, doing paid social media advertising may be the way to go.
Social media is great for awareness and education. It used to be that an attorney had to go big with TV commercials and billboards for an extended period of time in order to get market awareness, but with social media, you can make a similar impact with a much smaller marketing spend.
Many lawyers think that email marketing doesn’t make sense for a law firm, but the truth is, you already have a great database of potential clients: former clients! A law firm that consistently remains in contact with former clients to provide value and build the Top of Mind Awareness (TOMA) will find they are seeing more repeat business and getting more referrals.
The key to effective email marketing is to do it at a reasonable frequency (about once a month), and to provide value and information so it doesn’t feel like a marketing email. Giveaways, safety tips, and invites to local interest events that the firm is sponsoring or participating in are all great subjects for emails that don’t feel salesy, but they still put your firm on their minds.
Depending on the size of the firm, it’s not always feasible to have all the marketing done in-house. Aside from the workload involved, there may be a gap in skill set between the marketing vendor who is an expert in SEO or PPC and the marketing team that would need to learn it all.
Most law firms do some kind of marketing in-house when they are first formed because their budget is tight, which is completely understandable. An ideal trajectory for marketing from this point would be to find vendors that can take on some of the more challenging and complicated marketing pushes that your firm is either not doing or not executing as well as they can be. Once they start performing to the level you need, you’ll start to see revenue grow in the firm. That’s when you can start devoting some dedicated marketing funds to bringing the services in-house one at a time, finding or training a team to perform the tasks so you now have a flexible, skilled marketing crew who knows everything a vendor knows but works only for you.
With marketing as the lifeblood of any law firm, there’s no doubt that lawyers need to have a clear strategy to find and connect with potential clients through multiple methods. The era of a law firm thriving using only the yellow pages and client recommendations is gone, and the new reality is challenging.
However, it can also be exciting if a law firm embraces the future and connects with a consulting company like Brain Trust Legal. Rather than spending time and resources stumbling through untested possibilities, BTL Consulting can provide effective solutions that are already in use in the successful law firms currently run by BTL’s founders, Rob Levine and Darryl Isaacs. If you’re ready to expand your marketing efforts, you can learn more about Brain Trust Legal Consulting here from anywhere nationwide, or you can call (855)743-1636 to speak with a member of the BTL team to learn more.
