Running a successful legal practice while simultaneously managing effective marketing strategies can be a challenge…
How do you scale?
Can you cut costs without losing business?
Which processes can be made more efficient?
Luckily for you, we’ve gathered some insider info from marketing agencies who specialize in serving law firms to provide their thoughts on common mistakes, best practices, and possible upcoming trends in the law firm marketing space in 2024.
1) What is a common mistake that attorneys typically make with their websites or their marketing?
Most often, law firms will look at their largest competitors and attempt to mimic their brand and style because they assume “they’re big and successful.” Standing out, or differentiating your brand in a crowded marketplace is critical.
Key mistakes I have observed with websites would be minimizing your team diversity on your homepage and across all important pages on your site. A way to counter this is through a wide range of custom imagery/photography as well as video.
Furthermore, identify your top 3 differentiators (i.e., ask yourself, why do people hire your law firm?), or unique selling advantages and showcase those on your homepage, along with social proof elements like testimonials or case studies that further highlight those unique strengths.
– Tanner Jones, consultwebs.com
Many law firms have one page of their website that lists all of the areas they practice with a one or two sentence snippet about that practice. Without a well optimized practice page, a law firm will have no chance of appearing in Google search results for a search for that practice.
Google wants to deliver informative, helpful and comprehensive information to people looking for a lawyer; a sentence that says your firm practices criminal defense and a subsequent list of charges that you defend will not be enough information to compete against other comprehensive websites.
– Doug Bradley, everestlegalmarketing.com
Overlooking content marketing. Google prioritizes and rewards websites that offer valuable, high-quality content. Therefore, if a law firm’s digital marketing strategy lacks a robust content marketing component, you will likely not see the desired results over time.
It is essential to maintain consistent production of top-tier content across various mediums, including but not limited to your law firm’s blog, social media, video & infographics. Creating and regularly updating high-quality content has the potential to yield benefits such as increasing the number of backlinks to your website, which Google views as votes of confidence and helps your organic rankings.
Ultimately, creating high quality content on a consistent basis will result in increased organic exposure and ultimately inbound leads & retained clients.
– Matt Stark, fwd-lawyermarketing.com
2) What’s the #1 piece of advice you’d give to law firms about their marketing?
Get professional help. It will get you much better results and save you a ton of money.
It’s much better for the lawyers to spend their time billing at a high hourly rate than to take a huge amount of time to try to learn complex marketing or to build their own website. Also – and critically – just because your receptionist is active on Instagram does not mean that he should be your marketing department.
– Jeff Lantz, esquireinteractive.com
The plain Jane response is: “The most successful marketing plans oftentimes are those with an integrated marketing mix.”
In today’s day and age, it requires multiple touch points to turn an everyday person into a client.
Although our primary focus is in online marketing for lawyers, we always encourage clients to consider both traditional and digital channels to develop their marketing strategy. Each channel on its own can generate some business, but our clients that are doing it all are by far the most successful.
The saucy answer: “You need to trust your marketing team!” So many clients come to us after being burned by other companies that promise them the world, but have little to no results to back it up.
For solo attorneys and small firms, the amount they pay for marketing services can be significant and unfortunately they shy away from SEO, Google Ads, Social Media Marketing because “it doesn’t work.”
The fact is, it does work! They just need a marketing team that is going to put in the time, the research, the planning, the implementation, the testing and tracking. They need someone reporting to them that cares about the success of their law firm and that will report to them honestly no matter what.
– Erin Ricchiazzi, themodernfirm.com
Often, challenges firms encounter in having a steady stream of new clients doesn’t stem from a shortage of leads from digital marketing efforts, but rather form inadequacies within their intake and lead follow-up processes.
When a firm commits significant resources to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC), or any other marketing initiative, missing even a single opportunity is costly.
We encourage all of our clients to maintain round-the-clock, year-round coverage which is easily attained by hiring a call answering service to handle any calls that may come before or after business hours.
This proactive measure ensures that you seize every chance to engage with potential clients and maximize your return on marketing investment.
– Matt Stark, fwd-lawyermarketing.com
3) What specific strategy or tactic is working well for law firms right now?
Writing well-crafted FAQ blog posts for SEO and client development. Great FAQ posts can generate a huge number of potential clients from Google for searches like “how long does a car accident case take?” These users are thinking about hiring a lawyer; they just haven’t done a Google search for that yet.
Example – We’ve written single blog posts that have received over 10,000 views from Google over a 4 year time period.
The keys – write to questions frequently asked by clients, and the blog posts have to be really well written to get high rankings on Google (low quality junk posts that are a couple of paragraphs long won’t get high rankings).
– Jeff Lantz, esquireinteractive.com
Marketing is more than just getting more traffic. It’s also about what happens when they arrive. A professionally written, story-style executive biography that establishes trust, authority, and empathy dramatically increases a website’s conversion rate 100% of the time.
It’s the most unexpected yet valuable service we offer with the highest ROI.
– Megan Hargroder, conversationsdigital.com
Make sure you prune out old blog posts that no longer apply, or are no longer relevant. Were you chosen for Super Lawyers in 2014? That’s great, but the article announcing that either needs to be overhauled & updated or deleted.
There’s a ton of opportunity to update or delete old content, especially if you have hundreds of blog articles. This takes time and patience, but Google is likely not even delivering those old articles in search results anyway.
Also, make sure to check Google Analytics to make sure you’re not haphazardly deleting articles that are getting a lot of traffic.
– Doug Bradley, everestlegalmarketing.com
4) What marketing tool should law firms use to help improve their online marketing, and why?
You may laugh, but I am going to say Google Analytics. If your website team configures your GA4 account properly, you can learn so much from a simple dashboard that will help you make data informed decisions on where you need to invest your online marketing efforts.
Making the decision on where to invest time and resources is the first step to improving online marketing for law firms. SO many people are trying to find the next best thing, and if a law firm wants to learn and understand their digital marketing environment the website analytics is where they need to start.
For our agency and many others, we use multiple marketing tools since each has their individual pros and cons. My personal favorites are SEMRush and Agency Analytics, but most law firms should not be DIY-ing online marketing, they should be hiring experts that can leverage the most effective tools to generate business, so lawyers can do what they do best…lawyering!
– Erin Ricchiazzi, themodernfirm.com
The most important marketing tool I would recommend to a law firm would be taking control of, and improving their Google Business Profile.
We see many law firms that have their Primary Category on their Google Business Profile set up as “Law Firm” or “Legal Services” instead of their core practice area, which is detrimental to how they appear when people are looking for a local law firm.
Law firms should optimize and update their Google Business Profile with accurate service categories, attorney & office photos, a great description and detailed services.
Google uses this information to deliver your profile in Google Maps when people search for what you do (non-branded searches), which is critical to being found by non-referral potential clients.
– Doug Bradley, everestlegalmarketing.com
An indispensable asset we use when optimizing our clients’ online presence is a comprehensive SEO software known as Ahrefs.com.
This powerful tool gives critical insights into a given website, benchmarks their performance against local competitors, and ultimately guides the formulation of data-driven strategies aimed at achieving online marketing success.
Ahrefs enables us to unlock the full potential of our digital marketing efforts for each client we work with, and can also be a valuable resource for individual law firms and/or your in-house marketing specialist.
– Matt Stark, fwd-lawyermarketing.com
5) Should law firms be using ChatGPT / generative AI for their marketing? Why or why not?
Consultwebs has been actively testing and experimenting with ChatGPT since its public release. Not only have we tested producing substantive content, our team has been building best practices for properly optimized web pages and having ChatGPT produce content outlines with on-page optimization suggestions.
We are not bullish on using ChatGPT to produce original content as a standalone tool. Rather, use this generative AI software to inform content strategies and future topics, along with optimization suggestions.
If using it to produce content, we strongly recommend the content is run through a plagiarism checker, then an AI fingerprint detector, then have it reviewed and edited by a trusted legal professional and writer.
– Tanner Jones, consultwebs.com
We are using ChatGPT cautiously at this time on live client websites. ChatGPT is a great tool to help supplement well written content and for idea generation.
We have instructed our writing team to use ChatGPT sparingly and to validate and fact check accordingly.
Law firm websites are driven based on Google’s E-E-A-T Search Quality Rater Guidelines and we want to ensure that we are delivering accurate and well cited information to people looking for critical legal information.
– Doug Bradley, everestlegalmarketing.com
We love ChatGPT, but are careful not to rely too heavily on it. It’s great for turning outlines into first drafts, And I also like to use it to check content for errors.
(Tip: always ask it to list the errors it found and corrected at the bottom – just in case.)
– Megan Hargroder, conversationsdigital.com
6) Looking to 2024, what trend in digital marketing will have the biggest impact on law firms, and why?
Lawyers who embrace video and social media and build a following online will win the Internet in 2024. It’s not enough to have a website for your law firm today. Each attorney, even if you’re working for a large firm, should consider their own personal branding approach online.
Producing content in any form with the intention of offering value and establishing trust in your community is an integral way lawyers will further establish their Expertise, Authority, and Trust in the digital communities.
– Tanner Jones, consultwebs.com
In my opinion, everything is trending toward tools, systems and strategies that allow lawyers to work remotely from anywhere.
The pandemic gave a lot of firms a taste of this for the very first time, and many solos don’t want to go back to putting on a suit every day, dealing with traffic, looking for parking, and sitting in a boring office all day.
– Megan Hargroder, conversationsdigital.com
2024 will be the year of AI implementation for digital marketing.
Many AI tools are currently being developed or in their infancy and will start to really be capitalized on in 2024. As an industry, marketers and law firms have only begun to scratch the surface of ad implementation tools, data interpretation and planning tools based on AI technology.
Be prepared to not just adopt the first shiny thing, but also keep yourself aware of things that will genuinely help your marketing, or intake process.
– Doug Bradley, everestlegalmarketing.com
