Eight Marketing Trends Every Law Firm Should Know

Just like other businesses, your law firm must engage in marketing to reach potential clients—and as with other sectors, legal marketing has shifted mostly online. As a result, it’s no longer enough to rely on word-of-mouth advertising, billboards, or personal recommendations from satisfied clients—not when your competition is actively pursuing your potential clients in the online spaces they’re most comfortable using. Your status as a premier attorney in your practice area can mean very little if you’re virtually invisible to your most valuable client base.

How Can You Enhance Your Digital Marketing Efforts?

To help increase your law firm’s visibility online, it’s crucial to engage in the most up-to-date digital marketing tactics available, which means keeping abreast of the trends necessary to stay current. Why? If you’re unaware of the trends, you could be wasting your marketing budget on ineffective strategies while your competition happily connects with your clients on social media, building their client base in the process.

To help you start, we’ve compiled a list of some of the most important current marketing trends for law firms:

1. Search engine marketing. First things first—each year, it’s increasingly difficult to get by with the bare minimum when it comes to your law firm’s website. If you haven’t taken the time to address your website’s appearance, user interface, speed, mobile optimization, and search engine optimization, you’re selling yourself (and your law firm) short. It’s crucial to ensure that users can find your site when they search for keywords relevant to your services (organic SEO or PPC campaigns) and that they will have a great experience when they eventually access your website (technical SEO and web design).

2. Quality written content. One key component of any successful SEO or digital marketing campaign is providing digital content for users that meets the needs of the users it targets. In other words, when a potential client for your law firm searches for the answer to a legal question, you want to be the firm that provides it in the form of a blog, FAQ, or other written content. However, content should avoid sounding “sales-y” and remain high quality—that is, content that features an appropriate length for Google’s web crawlers is well written and more important, answers your user’s questions in a way that inspires them to utilize the services your firm offers.

3. Innovative video content. Aside from answering user questions, your digital content can help market your firm by encouraging users to share the content, and your firm’s brand messaging, with others. As video continues to outperform written content on most major platforms, including social media, firm websites, and even news sites, including video content, can be a great way to boost your firm’s marketing efforts. Video content can help provide a personal edge to your law firm’s content and garner views and shares from users who may not bother to read long-form blog content.

4. Along with video content, digital images are shared far more often than the written word. If you can develop quality, unique infographics to explain some of the most common legal questions that your law firm fields, you can increase your users’ chances of sharing your content by almost 4,000%. Best of all, if you add your firm’s logo to your content, your branding will travel just as far as your thought leadership.

5. Link-building. While link-building is a strategy that should be a part of any business’s search engine marketing campaign, law firms need to establish themselves as experts or authorities on legal matters. Developing relationships with local news outlets, legal information sites, legal industry experts, and even other bloggers can help you transform your firm from a “group of lawyers” to “legal thought leaders.” In addition, the quality content you provide on these external sites provides plenty of linkbacks to your website, boosting your organic traffic in the process.

6. Social media marketing. If you’re looking for a source of valuable website traffic, establishing a social media presence for your law firm can engage a vast network of decision-making adults. Over 70% of today’s adults have a Facebook page, and spend nearly three hours on social media each day. Take advantage of this rapt audience by developing your law firm’s brand on social media and sharing the same high-quality videos and written content you do on your blog—all with the appropriate linkbacks to your website.

7. Online reviews. Clients have long been able to review your law firm online—even if you didn’t have a dedicated social media page. Potential clients have been paying close attention; nearly 88% of people research online before making a purchase or major life decision. Most of those view online reviews as nearly as important as personal recommendations from friends and family. Take the time to optimize your law firm’s profiles on legal review sites, social media, and Google My Business—provide accurate contact information and interact with reviewers to ensure fair, accurate analysis.

8. Email marketing. When potential clients access your page for information but do not follow up by phone, you could be missing a valuable set of clients. Engaging in a well-developed email marketing campaign puts your law firm directly into the inbox of users who have already shown an interest in seeking legal help. Better yet, you can automate your responses to these potential leads, putting a personal touch on your interaction with them without the need to craft a unique response for each.

Seek the Advice of an Expert Digital Marketing Firm

While attention to the above digital marketing trends is an optimal way to stay current, you’ll likely find yourself stretched far too thin if you attempt to engage in each of them at once. It’s also crucial to approach each of these strategies carefully on the ethical and legal concerns unique to a law firm. Finally, you’ll need to balance your digital marketing efforts with the day-to-day responsibilities of operating a successful law firm.

If you find you need to re-develop your digital marketing strategy to keep your law firm fresh and relevant in the digital age, it’s time to work with a professional digital marketing firm. RizeUp’s team of legal digital marketing experts can help you maximize the above trends and assess your marketing strategy to find areas for improvement so you can increase your visibility to potential clients. For more information, contact us today.