Whether you're a newcomer to the marketing arena or a seasoned professional with years of experience within your law firm, the expectation to generate innovative marketing strategies will fall upon you.
In this post, we’ll revisit why refreshing your law firm’s marketing strategy is always worthwhile. We’ll then share a mix of law firm marketing ideas you can explore to keep propelling your practice forward.
Let’s dive in!
Here are a few telling sights that your law firm marketing strategy needs some serious love.
If your firm isn’t bringing in any new leads or client inquiries, it’s a sign that your audience isn’t aware of you in the market, or that they’re putting their trust in your competitors instead. It’s time to invest time and effort into getting your name out there again so you’re always top of mind.
In much of the same way, if no one ever likes your page or posts or engages in conversation with you online, it also means you’re falling behind on your online presence. You’ll have to find ways to share content that interests your audience.
If you’ve had the same hero images on your law firm’s website for more years than you’d like to admit or start to notice that your branding aesthetic doesn’t look as modern or as appealing as other competitors in your space, it’s time to give your marketing materials a refresh. Refreshing key assets like your law firm’s website can help you stay relevant.
Your Unique Selling Proposition (or USP) is what sets you apart from your competition, be that price, expertise, success rates, years of experience, or compassionate care. If you’re a law firm specializing in intellectual property law, for example, you might highlight your track record of successfully securing patents for clients.
These are the things that make you stand out from others delivering similar services.
It can be too easy to lose sight of your USP as you juggle plenty of marketing tasks day-to-day, but it’s always worthwhile to take some time to revisit this with your leadership team so that you’re fully aligned before you go ahead and develop any new marketing materials.
Once you’re completely clear about the problem you solve, who you solve it for, and how you do it best, you can do a much better job at ensuring that all your marketing efforts clearly communicate how your firm delivers value in a way that resonates with your audience.
Your website is your handshake and the most important asset your law firm has. Whatever state your law firm’s website is in, we can bet you there’s no shortage of work to be done or ways you can improve it, both from a content and a technical standpoint.
Here are a few metrics and elements you can audit and update accordingly:
A thorough review of all your website’s content and functionality is the best place to identify areas you can improve and start making adjustments that will enhance its effectiveness in attracting and converting prospective clients for your law firm.
Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram are great places to experiment with creative marketing ideas that can build more brand awareness for your law firm.
Here are a just two different approaches you can take with your social media marketing efforts as a law firm:
A proven way to connect with prospective clients on LinkedIn is not to limit your posts to your law firm’s official page. Instead, you can work on training your lawyers and attorneys to start sharing their own success stories, experiences, and their professional insights on their personal pages, by writing their own LinkedIn articles, or by contributing to collaborative articles on topics that they consider themselves to be experts in. You never know who might be reading and who might just discover your law firm through personal interactions like this.
Educational content like videos serve as a great means for delivering valuable insights to potential clients. By producing informative content that tackles common legal queries, demystifies complex legal topics, or offers practical advice for legal matters your audience might be struggling with, your firm positions itself as an authoritative source of information, fostering trust and attracting potential clients.
Check out other legal resources like ConsumerShield that have plenty of educational content related to law that you can replicate for your business
Social media marketing is such a valuable marketing tool for law firms so this is one area that shouldn’t be overlooked. Just like you audit your website, you should also perform an audit of your social media presence and come up with a list of areas that need improvement.
This may not sound like a marketing tactic off the bat, but providing exceptional service to your existing clients is the best way to get referrals for new business and build a positive reputation that can go far through word of mouth.
Even if you’re offering pretty standard legal services to your clients, the way that you collaborate with your clients is what makes all the difference to their experience. Modern law firms that incorporate innovative tools that consider the clients are the ones seeing higher levels of client satisfaction and more referrals.
Let’s take the client onboarding process as an example. What does this currently look like for your law firm? Do your clients:
One way to solve these struggles is to take your client onboarding process off email and switch to a data collection tool that’s designed with the client experience in mind already.
Content Snare is one example of a tool you can use, and here are a few features it offers to make life easy for your clients:
Using Content Snare is just one example of how you can modernize processes like client intake to make working with your clients a breeze for both parties. Another thing you can do to ensure you have satisfied clients is look into incorporating tools like document automation tools that automate manual and time-consuming tasks like document preparation so you can free up your time to focus on the things that matter most to your clients.
We cover more examples of these helpful tools in our post Apps and tools for lawyers.
With our intuitive form-builder and ready-made templates, it’s never been easier to create powerful client intake forms to make your client’s lives easier, or feedback forms to help your law firm do better.
Gathering feedback from both new and existing customers is a valuable opportunity to discover how your marketing tactics are performing and improve your service. There are so many different places where you can gather feedback too.
One effective method for gathering feedback is through post-service feedback forms you send to clients after working on their case. Utilizing a data collection tool for this process can streamline the feedback process, making it easy for you to collect, analyze and act on client feedback promptly. (PS - you can also use Content Snare as a feedback tool!)
If you’re a personal injury law firm, for example, you might use a data collection tool to send an automated survey after the case is resolved. You can ask them about their overall satisfaction with the legal services you provide, the responsiveness of your legal team, and any suggestions for how you can improve your service and offerings.
If multiple clients express dissatisfaction with your law firm's communication practices or responsiveness, you can then take proactive steps to address these issues, like implementing better systems for client communication or providing more frequent updates on case progress.
Related: Best survey tools (free and paid)
Once you start getting more engagement on social media, you can start using poll features on platforms like Linkedin and Facebook to gain invaluable insights into the needs, preferences, and pain points of your audience. You can take this information away to tailor your services more so that you can meet client expectations better.
Here’s an example of a poll The University of Law ran on its LinkedIn page:
You can also ask your clients to leave you their feedback and reviews on platforms like Yelp or Google. Any negative reviews left on these public sites will inform you of some areas where you need to do better, and the positive reviews can be used as social proof of your firm’s expertise and reliability in helping people solve their legal matters.
We hope these law firm marketing tactics have given you some inspiration for places you can start to breathe new life into your law firm marketing plan. Marketing is always evolving, so the key to staying competitive is to continuously benchmark your marketing efforts against your competitors and make it a point to refresh your strategy periodically. Don’t forget to keep gathering feedback wherever you can so you can continuously improve!
