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This blog post originally appeared on the Exposure Ninja blog - 3 Digital Marketing Strategies for Solicitors
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Struggling to find your place in the online law space?
This guide covers everything you need to know about creating a digital marketing strategy as a solicitor.
A survey from 2020 showed that law firms valued their websites, social media, LinkedIn and email marketing highly as part of their overall marketing strategy.
Image source – LawNext
The survey also showed that law firms that implement a digital marketing strategy see a greater competitive advantage over those that don’t.
Image source – LawNext
Every solicitor is different, so you might find some of these marketing tactics suit you better than others. That said, make sure that you give each marketing strategy time to work before giving up on it.
These digital marketing strategies will help both law firms and solicitors. These are great best practices to follow and will help influence your wider marketing strategy.
As a solicitor, you may think that the traditional digital marketing channels aren’t a good fit for you, but we expect you’ll be surprised at how many options you have.
Keep in mind that your clients are normal people who check their emails, Google their questions and spend time on social media. There are many places you can reach your clients, you just need a good idea of who you want to reach.
Identify your target clients
The foundation of any good marketing strategy is to know exactly who you are speaking to. This will determine your tone of voice, the way your website looks, where you place PPC ads, which social media channels you use and more.
When you’re starting out as a lawyer, it may be tempting to try and target anyone who might need your services, but there’s power in niching down.
There are several questions you can ask to find out who your target audience is.
Set your goals
Once you’ve identified your ideal client, you next want to identify your digital marketing goals.
Having clear goals gives you something to work towards, as well as giving you the ability to measure your progress. You’ll also be able to see which marketing strategy is working best for your law firm and focus on those areas. If you don’t hit your goals, you might want to rethink your strategy and focus on different areas.
At Exposure Ninja, we prefer to focus on setting SMART goals. These are goals which are:
Good goals for a solicitor may be:
Setting goals helps guide the rest of your marketing strategy. If you want to get more leads, you’ll want to focus on optimising your online sales funnel. If you want to get more traffic to your site, you’ll want to improve your on-site content and search engine ranking.
Once you have your audience and goals in place, you can look at which marketing channels will help your law firm achieve your goals.
These channels will also be more or less effective depending on the stage of the sales funnel your potential client is at.
If your potential client is at the awareness stage, they’ll benefit more from:
If they’re at the interest stage, the type of content that will work best for your law firm will be:
If they’re at the desire stage, they’re likely to be moved further along the funnel by:
The best social media platforms for solicitors
You might think that law forms only belong on platforms like LinkedIn, but you may be surprised.
Firstly, your clients are normal people who likely use social media in their spare time
Secondly, thinking outside the box could potentially help you connect with an audience on a platform where your competitors aren’t spending as much time.
Take a look at this list and compare these demographics to your ideal target customer. Once you’ve chosen one or two platforms that you want to focus on to start with, spend some time on them and see what type of content performs well for other solicitors, but also large accounts in any niche.
Facebook
Largest Age Group: 25-34
Gender Split: 43% female, 57% Male
Instagram
Largest Age Group: 25-34
Gender Split: 48% female, 52% Male
TikTok
Largest Age Group: 10-19
Gender Split: 61% female, 39% Male
Twitter
Largest Age Group: 18-29
Gender Split: 38% female, 62% Male
LinkedIn
Largest Age Group: 25-34
Gender Split: 48% female, 52% Male
Pinterest
Largest Age Group: 50-64
Gender Split: 78% female, 22% Male
YouTube
Largest Age Group: 15-35
Gender Split: 46% female, 54% Male
It’s likely that your goals involve getting more traffic to your website, and converting that traffic once they arrive. It’s important to have a solid website in place before you start to send more people there.
Your website is like a 24/7 lawyer who is on hand to give advice, as well as offer your services. You want to ensure that you have a good amount of educational content on your site, as well as making it easy for anyone to start the conversion process, even if it’s in the middle of the night.
Many people lay awake at night worrying about their legal situation when it comes to family law, commercial law, personal law and more, so your website must be working for you at all hours of the day and night.
To make sure your website is working to bring you new clients, there are some areas you need to take into consideration:
If you don’t have a website yet, or you need help updating your website, why not get in touch with our web development team?
Optimise your heading
Your heading is often the first thing a visitor’s eyes will be drawn to when they visit your website. It’s important that this heading is clear and succinct – tell your visitor exactly what you do.
Good Website Headings for Solicitors
Bad Website Headings for Solicitors
It’s important that visitors know what your business is about when they visit your homepage. If they land on your page and can’t tell you’re a solicitor, they may well bounce back to Google and look for a different law firm.
Improve your CTA
A good call to action can be the key to increasing leads.
Start by thinking about what you could potentially offer for free. Do you offer free consultations? Make sure you include that in your CTA, and multiple places on your homepage.
Get in the shoes of your potential client and think about the next step they will want to take, and the next step you want them to take.
Some visitors to your site know that they are in the market for legal advice, and will want a consultation right away.
Others may be unsure if they are at the stage of needing legal advice, and a colder CTA may work better for them, such as “learn more”, or “find out how we can help”.
Good CTA’s for Solicitors
Bad CTA’s for Solicitors
Take a look at your existing CTA and ask yourself if you would click on it. Do you understand what the next step is? Is your CTA asking for too much commitment right away?
We often recommend to our clients that they include two CTA’s, one for visitors who want to get legal advice right now, and one for those who aren’t sure if they need a lawyer but are starting to think about it.
Reviews and testimonials
When it comes to legal services, often your clients are putting a big part of their lives into your hands.
By including reviews and testimonials on your homepage, you’re building some trust with them before they get in touch with you.
Good reviews and testimonials from previous clients could be what sets you apart from your competitors, especially if your potential client has found you through a Google search and only has your website to go off, rather than being recommended by word of mouth.
Don’t worry if your reviews aren’t all 5-stars, having just under 5-stars looks more legitimate. It’s rare for a business to have all 5-star reviews. If you don’t have many reviews, reach out to previous clients and ask them to leave you a review. If you ask them personally, they’re more likely to leave a review than if you send a generic email.
Create an SEO strategy
Search engine optimisation is the main way you’ll get organic traffic through search engines.
By creating content focused on the topics your ideal clients are searching for, you will get more traffic, and in turn, more clients.
Assess your SEO
If you already have a website, start by assessing your SEO. We’d suggest using a tool like Semrush, (which you can try for free with our link, thankyouninjas.com), to see which searches you are ranking for, and how highly you rank.
Using Slater and Gordon as an example, we can see they are ranking highly for searches such as “employment lawyer” and “no win no fee costs”
They are also ranking highly for some other searches that could serve those who are trying to avoid breaking the law, those who want to see if they are in the right in a case, or those who may need legal services for a court case.
Those searching for “is cycling on the pavement illegal?” could be looking for:
Good keyword research is the foundation of any good SEO strategy. It also helps you write content about the things your audience is searching for, rather than the topics you think you should be writing about. Further down this guide, we’ll cover how you can make great content for your law firm’s website.
Check out our guide if you want to dive deeper into keyword research.
Local SEO
Being a law firm, you’re likely to be serving your local area more than you’ll be serving national clients. You must optimise your local SEO to make sure you aren’t missing out on local searchers.
Google is smarter than ever and can use location data to show results local to the searcher. Even if they just type in “family solicitor”, or “lawyer near me”, Google will serve them local results if they have their location turned on.
Ensure your Google Business profile is fully set up to give you a better chance at appearing in the map packs on Google.
Think about the type of searches your ideal clients are making related to your area, and create content for them. This could be in the form of service pages, such as “Family Lawyer in Nottingham”, or blog content relating to your local area.
SEO Competitor Analysis
Competitor SEO analysis works similarly to your keyword research.
Input your competitor’s web address into your SEO tool and you’ll get a list of keywords they are ranking for. It doesn’t end there though.
One of the main benefits of competitor SEO analysis is looking at which pages on their site are ranking highly for those keywords.
Let’s say you want to reach more clients who are looking for family law services. By looking at competitors who are doing well in this sector, you may see that they have a great service page ranking for “family law near me”, with good text, useful photos and videos, and maybe even a downloadable guide for those unsure if they need to contact a lawyer.
You might also see that they have some blog content ranking for terms such as “Do I need a family lawyer?” or “How much does a family lawyer cost?”
Identifying what is working well for your competitors means that you can create something better.
SEO Competitor Analysis – Step-by-Step
Step 1 – Identify your target keywords. You can start this process with a single keyword.
Step 2 – Benchmarking. Use an SEO tool to see which keywords you are currently ranking for, and which pages on your site are ranking for these words. Are the right pages ranking?
Step 3 – Identify your online competitors. Use an SEO tool to see which keywords they are ranking for.
Step 4 – Competitor SEO overview. Use an SEO tool to take a closer look at your competitor’s SEO. See how many backlinks they have and who is linking to them, take a look at the keywords they are ranking for and which content they are ranking for.
Step 5 – Competitor content analysis. Once you know which content your competitors are using to rank for keywords you want to target, think about how you can take inspiration from their content and make something better. Have they created video content to embed in their blogs? Do they use infographics in their content to illustrate their point? Do they use videos on their product or service pages?
Step 6 – Backlinking. Use an SEO tool to identify who is linking back to your competitor and see why that content is link worthy. Create something better – more up to date, easier to understand and overall higher value content. Reach out to the sites linking to your competitor and ask if they’d like to link to your article instead.
You can follow this process in more detail in our guide, How To Do SEO Competitor Analysis.
Now we’ve discussed how content helps SEO, it’s time to create a content strategy.
Not only is it a good idea to optimise the content on your website, but you should also be thinking about how you can make the best content for your social media channels and email marketing too.
Again, it’s great to look at what your successful competitors are coming out with, and take inspiration from that but do it better. If you have other solicitors that you look up to but aren’t your direct competitors, it’s still worth looking at their content marketing strategy and taking inspiration from them as well.
Depending on the stage of the sales funnel your potential client is at, you can use different types of content to bring them closer to converting.
We covered a lot of the content types you can use above, but here’s a handy cheat sheet below that you can save.
Create video content
YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine, and many of its users head to the platform to look for “How-to” content.
You can answer questions your clients may have, similar to what you will be writing in your blog posts for your website. You can use the blog posts as a script or guide for your videos.
For example, someone searching YouTube for how to measure their property boundary could either be in the market for a solicitor to help them with selling their house or be in dispute over their property boundary with a neighbour and need legal advice.
Some of these viewers may not be looking for legal advice, but there’s a likelihood that they could be. YouTube is a search engine in its own right and can be used to drive more traffic to your website if you do it well. Check out our guide on how businesses like yours should be using YouTube.
YouTube is also good for solicitors who are working alone, as it helps build your personal brand online.
An example of a channel who does this well is Legal Eagle. This channel shares legal “edutainment” content – his videos cover real legal problems and offer legal advice, but often use pop culture to do so, such as identifying the laws broken in a film or debunking Reddit posts spreading false information.
Email Marketing for Law Firms
Email marketing is slightly different compared to other industries, as hiring a lawyer is something people look for when they need it, rather than hiring one because there’s a 50% off summer sale on legal advice. That said, email marketing can be very effective.
Senior Content Marketer and Ninja Hannah shared her top tips for email marketing as part of your law firm’s digital marketing strategy.
When potential clients begin looking for a lawyer, they’ll spend a lot of time researching firms. This is your opportunity to collect the email addresses of website visitors and begin to send them targeted information about what they’re interested in.
For example, if you’re a personal injury lawyer and an individual lands on your car accidents page, consider offering them a guide — in exchange for their email address — that explains what they need to know about the claims process or questions they should consider when choosing a law firm.
You can then drip content to their inbox to establish your expertise and build trust, such as the benefits of hiring your specific firm or what documents and receipts people should hold onto that can support their claim.
This keeps you at the front of a prospect’s mind. It may take several emails until a prospect is ready to get in touch, but you’re much more likely to convert a lead if you’re in regular contact with them, instead of relying on them to immediately get in touch after visiting your website for the first time.”
If you are a solo lawyer who doesn’t work as part of a larger law firm, personal branding could be a fantastic asset for you. This can also work for larger law firms if your lawyers want to work on their personal branding.
Putting yourself out there is important – people want to see who they will be speaking to and handling their case.
Great channels for building your personal brand are:
Jessica T. Ornsby is an example of a lawyer who uses her platform to offer free advice on all things family law. She also uses her platform to share some of her personal life, giving her the chance to deepen the connection with her audience and as she is a family lawyer, she often shares stories about her life as a mum.
Let’s recap the three digital marketing strategies for solicitors we covered above.
Implementing any of these strategies will help your law firm flourish. Once you increase traffic to your website, you’ll get more leads and clients and smash your business goals.
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