Gaining brand awareness and building trust with future clients is key to growing a business.
Before investing in any marketing, you’ll need to craft the right message for your firm, so you can communicate effectively with your potential customers. This is how you develop a strong and lasting brand.
Branding isn’t just about creating fancy letterheads and business cards. It’s about establishing the image you want for your law firm. It doesn’t have to be complicated. All you need to do is focus on the needs of your customers and articulate how your firm can solve those needs.
Once you’ve laid the foundation with a solid message, here are 4 low-cost ways you can start marketing your firm.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an online feature designed to optimize your firm’s visibility to those who are interested in obtaining legal representation now or in the future. They may have already decided that they need legal services, but they may not be sure who is the best choice.
SEO ensures that your web content contains the most sought-after keywords that prospective clients type into a search engine like Google, Yahoo! or Bing. The keywords will depend on your practice areas and location, and may include words and phrases like “personal injury,” “medical malpractice attorney,” “plaintiff lawyer Los Angeles, CA” and more.
An SEO specialist can help you determine what words your potential clients are using frequently and demonstrate how they should be included in your firm’s website, landing pages or online advertisements. Effective SEO will improve your organic search results, placing you higher in the results than your competitors.
While you may believe you can maximize your firm’s online visibility on your own, a successful SEO brings more clients to you, and can be well worth the investment.
One way to get prospective clients to visit your website is by offering them interesting and informative content. This will not only help draw people to your website and keep them engaged, but will also enhance your firm’s credibility.
Closely related to SEO, content marketing demonstrates your expertise and authority in your field. You can create content marketing by posting regularly to blogs, shooting videos, designing infographics or writing articles on topics that’ll be perceive as valuable to your client base.
Creating a publishing calendar to go along with your content marketing strategy is also a good idea—this will help you plan your content in advance and keep your marketing fresh to consumers.
Keep in mind that infographics, like videos, can be powerful tools to communicate information and data about complex issues in a more easy to understand format. There are plenty of free online infographic makers that can help you create your own in under an hour.
Potential clients often look for information related to their legal issue prior to securing an attorney. Anticipating their questions and proactively providing answers for them can be beneficial to your firm. When you position yourself as an expert, it improves the chances clients will contact you when they get ready to make a decision.
At minimum, you, and those working at your firm, should have a LinkedIn profile to showcase your educational and career achievements. This ensures at least your basic information is available online for potential clients.
In addition to encouraging your employees to become active on social media, it’s a good idea for the firm to have accounts on the most popular social media platforms: Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
Social media is a great way to connect online with consumers and other industry professionals. It’s also a very effective way of sharing your marketing content.
Make sure you are available for questions and referrals that may come through social media. You may want to keep a professional social media page separately from your personal page, as well as consult your state or local bar to make sure your up-to-date on ethical rules pertaining to social media.
As stated previously, video content is a great way to reach clients. YouTube is the second largest search engine and it’s owned by Google, which means videos receive attention from Google searches. That’s why it’s a good idea to devote some resources into creating a videos that can be posted on your website and shared via YouTube.
What used to involve expensive audio and video equipment can now be accomplished on a cellphone or laptop. You can generate short, one to two-minute videos, that provide answers to most commonly asked legal questions in your field and build a YouTube Channel. Commonly, attorney videos feature lawyers discussing various situations in which have assisted clients. These videos help potential clients feel more of a connection to their counsel because they are able to get to know you.
Keep your productions simple with basic graphics in an office setting with just you and the camera. Talk directly to the camera and don’t forget to smile. Answer questions you most frequently get asked about on the telephone or online.
The foregoing are simple, budget-friendly ways you can start an effective marketing campaign. More expensive options are also available, but what is best for your firm will depend on who you want to reach, where they are located, how expansive you want your campaign to be and the amount of capital you have available to invest into marketing. Television spots, radio ads, and extensive online marketing can cost a small fortune, but is often worth the investment. If you need financing for growth and don’t know where to start, read about your options here.