Law Firm Marketing Strategies: 12 Ways to Grow Your Legal Firm 

Have you developed a marketing strategy for your law firm? Even if you’ve already developed one, it’s a good idea to revisit and update it on an annual basis. To help your law firm thrive and become more successful, you need to attract new clients and foster new business. A great law firm marketing strategy and plan can help you develop your law practice by ensuring that all of your marketing efforts are as effective as they can be.

In this article, we’ll show you how to take your law practice to the next level by developing a marketing strategy and implementing an effective marketing plan based on your objectives.

Developing a Successful Law Firm Marketing Strategy

There are several steps you can take to develop a successful law firm marketing strategy and then implement it using a marketing plan. The basic steps are to set your business objectives, conduct market research, create a marketing plan, and finally implement it. The process requires time and patience, but we’re here to walk you through it—and help you do it effectively.

Importance of Marketing in A Law Firm

A consistent and manageable level of client activity is essential for maintaining a profitable firm. Marketing your law practice effectively may assist in attracting more attention to your company, resulting in additional opportunities to produce revenue. In short, you must have a sufficient number of clients to make money—and a solid marketing strategy will assist you in achieving this.

Difference Between Marketing Strategy and Marketing Plan

While the terms “law firm marketing strategy” and “marketing plan” may sound similar, understanding the differences is essential for optimising your marketing efforts. 

In simple terms, your Marketing Strategy outlines the whys and drives your company’s marketing efforts ahead. Your law firm marketing plan includes your company’s marketing objectives, target audience, services supplied, core message, and more.

On the other hand, your Marketing Plan outlines the particular steps you will take to carry out your strategy and achieve your marketing objectives. Your solicitor marketing plan will also specify the types of marketing strategies you will use for your organisation, including digital marketing and firm marketing strategies to grow. This covers social media marketing and search engine optimisation.

Marketing Strategies of a Law Firm

What is a law firm marketing strategy, and how do you develop one? The next section explains the many aspects that make up your marketing plan and what they mean:

Summarise Your Marketing Strategy

Summarise your entire marketing plan based on the sections below. Maintain clarity and conciseness. If one of your workers or another stakeholder wants to know more about your marketing plan, this brief piece should provide them with all the information they need. 

Define your Marketing Goals

Define your marketing goals and ensure they are in line with your company’s business objectives. Make sure the goals are realistic. For example, one of your company’s marketing objectives could be to raise your law firm newsletter open rate by 20% by the first half of the year. Ask yourself why you chose these goals and why they are important to your law firm. 

Know your Target Audience

This is one of the most critical aspects of a successful marketing strategy. Understanding and defining your target audience—including their personality characteristics, purchasing habits for legal services, and pain points—will help you execute a successful marketing strategy. 

Market Analysis

The term “market” refers to the people, corporations, and organisations who are your current and prospective clients. Consider the scale of the business opportunity for your law firm, taking into consideration your practice areas, geographical location, target audience, and so on. 

Competitive Analysis

A good marketing strategy will help you stand out from your competition and attract the clients your law practice needs. But first, you must learn how and what your competitors are doing. What qualities distinguish your competitors? What is their market share? How do they try to set themselves apart from other legal firms?

Type of Services Offered

Outline the types of legal services you will offer, your practice areas, and the types of clients you will serve. Are you offering legal assistance to those who have been injured in an accident? Or perhaps you offer legal assistance to families going through a painful divorce? What are the benefits of these services, and how will you deliver them?

Primary Message

Choose your firm’s key ethos, goals and values carefully. This is the primary message you want your target audience to understand about your law firm. Your primary message should go beyond telling your target clients what services you provide; it should address their legal and personal pain points and demands. 

Price and Promotion of Your Services

How would you set your prices and promote your services? What is your legal firm’s pricing plan, and what does each fee include? Which marketing channels will you use, and why have you picked them? 

Marketing Tactics of a Law Firm

Creating and implementing a detailed law firm marketing plan provides a clear roadmap to follow throughout the year. A comprehensive marketing plan can also help you save time, effort, and money in the long term. With a defined plan, it is obvious who on your team is responsible for what. This allows you to stay on track and complete your firm’s legal marketing obligations that would otherwise slip between the gaps.

Structure Plan

A good structure for your law firm’s marketing plan is just as essential as writing down your law firm’s business plan. This way, everyone in your company can be on the same page. Having a formal marketing plan allows you to monitor and track your development. 

In general, an effective law firm marketing plan involves three steps:

1. Determine your marketing objectives.
2. Make a plan for achieving your goals.
3. Put your plan into action. 

#1. Purpose of Your Legal Marketing Plan

What do you aim to accomplish with your legal marketing plan?

It is impossible to evaluate and analyse your law firm marketing success unless you have clear, quantitative goals in mind. If you’ve already developed a solid law firm business plan, the good news is that you don’t have to start from scratch. Examine the general marketing goals you set in your business plan and modify them if needed. 

Make sure the goals you set are logical and measurable. You should be able to create objectives and time frames for your marketing goals so that you can determine how effectively you’ve achieved them in the future.

Below are some examples of achievable marketing objectives:

• Grow your legal firm’s client base. For example, you could set a target of acquiring a specific number of new, active clients by the end of the quarter.
• Boosting firm pricing. You might want to establish a target of increasing the price of some of your legal services to a certain amount by the end of the year.
• Increase brand recognition for your law firm. More subjective goals, such as increased brand awareness, are more difficult to measure. However, one technique to evaluate brand awareness is to look at your firm’s organic web traffic—the number of people that came to your website from search results rather than paid advertising.

#2.  Components of your Marketing Plan

You’ll probably have more success with your law firm’s marketing plan if you keep it short. 

While your law firm’s marketing plan will be customised according to its specific objectives, it should include the following essential sections:

• Plan Overview –  Your plan should explain the how and why of your law firm’s marketing.
• A financial investment – What will the firm’s marketing budget be? 
• Marketing efforts – What specific marketing approaches, initiatives, and activities would you implement to reach your objectives? When outlining the exact marketing methods that your firm will use, be sure they align with one of your marketing objectives. For example, if your goal is to acquire five new clients each month and your approach is to do it through social media, your marketing activities could include a social media campaign using Facebook advertisements. 
• Measurement techniques – How will success be measured? Have a system to measure success for each of the above marketing activities, ensuring an effective way to gauge the growth of your legal practice. For example, a 20% increase in organic search traffic to your legal firm’s website could be considered a success measure for content marketing.

#3. Plan Execution

When creating or modifying your marketing strategy, assign tasks to individuals. Who does what? Don’t forget to think about who is going to manage the project—whether it will be up to the people assigned to it or someone else. 

Consider outsourcing to a law firm marketing agency, or skilled freelancers

When considering what needs to be done to reach your law firm marketing goals, be honest about your firm’s ability to achieve all of them internally. If managing marketing internally is not possible, consider outsourcing some (or all) of the marketing tasks to a digital marketing agency. You might hire a professional to help you with everything from SEO to content development, so don’t be hesitant to outsource when need. Denovo’s global network of Certified Consultants is a great place to start.

Example of a law firm’s marketing plan

Your law firm’s marketing plan should be tailored to your firm’s goals and approach, but here is an example of how one firm may create its marketing plan.

Law Firm Marketing Techniques

Today, there are many techniques to market your law firm. As a result, developing your legal marketing strategy can feel overwhelming. Remember to keep the objectives of your firm in mind and choose marketing methods that you can successfully implement in your marketing strategy.

Here are eight different types of legal marketing techniques to explore for your law firm:

1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Being easily accessible online is one of the most important marketing strategies for any law Firm. Search engine optimisation (SEO) can help with that. SEO methods can help your law firm website rank higher in search engine results pages (such as Google), bringing more visits to your site. 

2. Local SEO

SEO is necessary for ensuring that your legal firm shows up in internet searches, but general searches aren’t the primary method that clients will find you—especially if you’re a small law firm. To guarantee that nearby clients are able to find you online, as part of your law firm marketing plan, you should enhance your firm’s rating in local search results, often known as local SEO.

Local SEO Strategies

• Make sure your website uses local keywords. Adding local keyword data to your website can increase your law firm’s ranking in local searches. For example, if you are a divorce solicitor in Glasgow, you should include phrases like “Glasgow divorce solicitor” on your law firm’s website.  
• Maintain consistency in your NAP. To optimise your local SEO, your NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) should be displayed consistently wherever it appears online (such as your website, Facebook page, and so on).
• Gather backlinks. Backlinks from other reputable sites can help your law firm’s search rankings by increasing the credibility of your website online.
• Get reviews from clients. Positive feedback is essential to improving your law firm’s reputation. Good, reputable consumer feedback from sites like as Yelp and Avvo are an excellent local SEO marketing technique. 

3. Paid Online Search Advertising Campaigns

While SEO is an organic technique to promote traffic to your law firm’s website, you can also use paid online search advertising campaigns to attract potential clients. 

Search advertising campaigns include the following:

• Pay-per-click (PPC) – PPC advertising allows you to create an online advertising campaign in which you pay a set price each time an online visitor clicks on your ad. This can be an excellent technique for attracting people to your website, but each click costs money. Check guides to PPC advertising success for lawyers that discuss the model’s key components.
• Google ads – Depending on your practice area, a Google Ads pay-per-click campaign could be an effective technique to attract traffic to your law firm online.

4. Your Law Firm’s Website

If you’re investing in SEO, PPC, or both, your goal is to direct potential clients to your law firm’s website. Your law firm’s website is a powerful marketing tool on its own. 

Consider your law firm’s website to be its online real estate, and prioritise user friendliness. Your site must be:

• Simple and accessible. Images should be correctly scaled, and the text should be easy to read. Contact information should be easily accessible, a basic yet important aspect of law firm SEO.
• It is compatible with mobile devices. You want clients to be able to navigate your website from any device, and your website’s mobile-friendliness affects its search rating.
• SEO optimisation. Your website’s content should be clear, keyword-optimised, and consistent with your law firm’s identity, embodying effective law firm SEO strategies.

5. Social Media

When done properly, social media can be an excellent marketing tool for your legal business, allowing you to:

• Reach a wide audience with little or no cost. The majority of your firm’s potential clients now use social media, so having a social presence provides a tremendous opportunity to communicate with them. 
• Enhance community and brand authority. By posting high-quality material with your target audience on social media, you can organically strengthen your community ties and position yourself as an expert in your subject. A good social media presence can also help your firm reach new people and potential clients. 
• Provide your clients with another option to find your firm. Being online and on social media in a professional setting also makes it easier for clients to locate your law firm. 

6. Branding

How your law firm separates itself from competitors—also known as its branding—is an essential part of your legal marketing plan. Finding strategies to stand out to your target audience can also help you develop your law firm by attracting new, prospective clients. 

Establish your legal firm’s brand

Law firms must resonate with the right clients through effective digital marketing and specialized marketing for law firms. To establish your legal firm’s brand:

• Create a distinctive selling point. What separates your firm from the competition? Determine what differentiates your firm and what appeals to your target clients. Then highlight that element in your company’s marketing to create a distinct brand. Take Erin Levine’s startup, Hello Divorce. Erin founded Hello Divorce as a sister company to her established legal firm and focused it on a niche market: subscription-based divorce navigator services. Hello Divorce has a defined objective and brand, which translates into clear marketing from the start.
• Identify your target audience. Your target audience should be limited as much as possible. If you target everyone, only a few people will be interested, and you may turn off potential clients with weak messaging. To get started, consider what characteristics your best/favourite law firm clients share. Write these down and use them to create a profile of your law firm’s prospective client.
• Identify your core messaging. It is not enough to say, “We care and are good at what we do, so hire us.” Use concise, authentic, and original language to capture your audience’s attention. Have a brainstorming session with your team, and then focus on the essential messages that resonate with you.
• Create a strong first impression with the right logo. Your law firm logo is one of the most visible and often used visual representations of your firm, so make sure it is both professional and appealing. There are many free design tools available to help you develop and modify the perfect logo for your firm. Hubspot’s free logo maker is an excellent choice because it includes templates, so you don’t have to start from scratch.

7. Creating Quality Content

Content marketing involves creating high-quality content relating to your field of practice and publishing it online through various channels. It is a marketing strategy that can help you create your brand and establish expertise, provide value to potential clients, and attract more visitors to your website, essential for marketing for law firms. Content marketing can include blog entries, videos, infographics, and even podcasts.

Encourage thought leadership

Thought leadership is an important aspect of content marketing. To position your firm as a thought leader or subject matter expert for your target audience, consider creating and sharing authoritative and informative content such as videos, blog articles, or even replies on forums like Quora. 

8. Email Marketing

Email marketing for legal professionals is an online marketing method that produces a lot of bang for little work. Sending focused and consistent marketing emails to your network can help you grow your brand, establish your law firm’s expertise, and provide readers with value. Email marketing is also straightforward to track, with marketing systems providing metrics such as how many people open your emails. This allows you to see how well your marketing efforts are received. 

Sending out a law firm newsletter is an excellent email marketing tactic. 

9. Capability, authority, and credibility

A solid law firm marketing strategy should include both passive and active marketing initiatives. Passive marketing, for example, can be accomplished through good website copy and design, which can help your company gain reputation and authority. Showcasing your experience provides prospective clients with trust in your talents.

10. Client reviews and testimonials

As previously stated, positive reviews and testimonials are an excellent approach to immediately acquire the trust of clients seeking representation. Consider incorporating this into your email marketing approach by establishing an automated process that encourages satisfied customers to provide public, positive comments.

11. Showcasing case studies

Showcasing case studies and successful cases on your website indicates your level of knowledge while instilling confidence. If you arrange your case studies so that people can identify problems comparable to their own, it’s a great method to show them that you can help them.

12. Legal Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s)

Dedicating a part of your website to legal FAQs relevant to your area of practice can be an effective marketing strategy to grow your legal practice. It not only improves your content marketing approach, but it also benefits prospective clients who may require immediate advice. Knowing that your firm has the abilities and experience to deal with a specific issue rather than just a broad area of practice might mean the difference between winning and losing a customer, especially if they are unsure.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) for law firms

You’ve developed a focused law firm marketing strategy and are implementing an effective marketing plan to put it into action. What happens next? 

If you want to expand your law firm while maximising your marketing budget, you must monitor and evaluate your marketing key performance indicators (KPIs). 

Tracking your efforts is important for success and should not be disregarded. Without measurement, you won’t know what’s working, what isn’t, or which marketing activities are providing the best return on investment. When you have a comprehensive view of your results, you can make well-informed choices to improve and accelerate your marketing efforts.

How to assess and evaluate the success of your law firm’s marketing strategy, including digital marketing efforts.

• Ask for a review. “How did you hear about our firm?” is a basic question, but the answers can be quite useful. You could train your law firm’s assistant to ask and record the answer over the phone, or you could add a field to your client intake form to question new clients when they complete their forms.  
• Check the website analytics. If your law firm’s website is the primary point of contact for potential clients, checking at your website’s traffic analytics (you may install Google Analytics on your site to help gather this data) might provide information such as:

Referring domains – Knowing what website visitors were on before coming to your site will help you determine where your marketing efforts are performing and how effective your internet advertising is.

The bounce rate – How long do people stay on your website? If they leave or “bounce” quickly, it indicates that your website needs to be improved to increase new lead conversion.

Website Traffic – Examine the raw traffic to your website and compare it to the number of new clients who come in for a consultation; if there is a huge difference, it could indicate problems with marketing that are causing you trouble.

• Use your client onboarding software to collect data. Your firm’s client intake and onboarding software can also provide significant marketing insights. Denovo’s client intake insights software, for example, allows you to identify referral sources for new clients as well as develop unique lead source reports. This allows you to swiftly and simply determine where your marketing strategy has been successful and where it has not, especially in the context of digital marketing campaigns. 

Final thoughts on law firm strategies for marketing

A successful law firm relies heavily on new business. To win new business, you must make people aware that you exist—this is where your law firm marketing strategy and plan come into play. There are numerous ways to promote your law firm, but you’ll be most successful if you begin with a law firm marketing strategy and goals, which you can incorporate into a marketing plan for the firm. By following a planned marketing strategy and measuring the outcomes, you can assist potential clients reach you and expand your law firm.