Is Your Law Firm Making These Critical Marketing Mistakes?

Whether you manage a large law firm or practice as a solo attorney, creating a formidable marketing strategy is essential for facilitating the long-term growth of your firm. Even law firms with extensive histories and excellent reputations will inevitably need help engaging members of their target audience and converting them into clients. Unfortunately, many attorneys struggle with implementing the most effective marketing strategies, and sometimes even make serious mistakes that turn away potential clients, damage their reputation, or stunt the growth of their firm.

Critical Marketing Mistakes That Can Harm Your Law Firm

Making any of the marketing mistakes described below can significantly harm your law firm:

• You Fail to Utilize PPC Ads

Pay per click (PPC) ads are one of the most effective ways to generate leads for your law firm. In contrast with SEO, which implements a long-term strategy aimed at convincing potential clients to act, PPC works by increasing brand awareness and generating leads almost immediately after they are displayed. However, combining PPC and SEO offers the best results.

Because you target keywords with PPC by bidding on them, you can determine the conversion rate and profitability of these keywords before involving them in your SEO strategy. Using PPC to guide SEO gives you the chance to identify specific terminology, highlight selling points, and tailor your calls to action—then you can test these factors to see which are most successful. This tactic also increases your visibility on search engine results pages and builds trust in your brand among potential clients.

• You Focus Your Marketing Efforts on Your Homepage

Having a compelling and well-designed homepage is a critical part of maintaining an online presence and developing your firm’s brand. However, focusing your other marketing efforts solely on your homepage is a critical mistake. When web users search for specific keywords—such as a practice area in combination with a keyword—they want webpages with content that is both relevant to their query and provides value.

A homepage is not designed to fulfill these needs, but simply to capture the attention of users, briefly inform them of who you are and the services you provide and offer guidance for navigating your site to find the information they are seeking. Building links to only your homepage indicates to search engine bots that this is your most valuable resource and limits exposure to your more useful subpages, driving them further down search engine rankings. Instead, direct users to pages with valuable content, which can include offering tips and tricks, explaining processes, answering questions, or solving problems.

• You Have Too Broad or Too Narrow a Focus

Effectively targeting your audience is a delicate balancing act, and a focus that is too broad or too narrow can undermine the goals of your marketing campaign. Ideally, at the beginning of your campaign, you will begin with a broad audience to gather the maximum amount of information on the behavior and demographics of the clients you wish to target. Then, you will use this information to steadily narrow your audience and determine what strategies are most successful at resonating with them and achieving conversions.

Beginning with too narrow of an audience prevents you from gaining important insight while neglecting to narrow your focus later means you may miss your target in favor of reaching irrelevant users. Identifying and targeting a precise audience allows you to design content that is specific enough to engage your potential clients, meet their needs, and direct them through the conversion funnel.

• You Ignore Your Performance Metrics

Measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial to determine how effectively your firm’s marketing campaign is achieving your objectives and reaching your target audience. Without this insight, you are simply making changes to your website at random and hoping for more client traffic. By measuring KPIs, you gain the information you need to remove unprofitable elements of your strategy and improve the profitable elements, so they work even better.

KPIs must be SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. They should help you understand what components of your campaign are successful, provide objective proof of progress toward your goals, and inform better decision making regarding how to manage your campaign into the future. Some of the most important KPIs for your law firm’s campaign include cost per click, click through rate, bounce rate, keyword rankings, conversion rate, cost of customer acquisition, and return on investment.

• You Overlook the Importance of Reviews

Most people looking for any type of service or product consult online reviews before making any purchasing decisions—and your firm’s potential clients are no different. Ignoring the reviews your clients leave online can cause you to miss valuable engagement opportunities with satisfied clients and prevent you from mitigating negative reviews that may damage your reputation.

Online reviews give you the opportunity to discover how happy your clients are with your services as well as identify ways you can improve. Reviews also build client trust and drive your page to the top of search engine rankings. You should make sure clients know that reviews are a valuable part of your business and make it as simple as possible for them to leave reviews. In addition, you should have a strategy in place for responding to all reviews, both positive and negative.

• You Try to Do It All Yourself

Developing and implementing a successful marketing campaign for your law firm involves considering several complex, interrelated factors. You must create a comprehensive strategy that aids you in attracting new clients, retains and grows relationships with your existing clients, increases your brand awareness and recognition, and manages targeted, effective communication.

Law firms that try to handle their marketing without outside help are faced with time-consuming tasks that are incredibly prone to error. It takes experience and specialized expertise to ensure that your brand stands out among the competition and trying to navigate this on your own can waste time and burn through your budget only to fail in accomplishing your firm’s goals. The only way to guarantee the success of your digital marketing efforts is to bring in the experts.

Avoid These Mistakes by Hiring RizeUp to Handle Your Marketing Campaign

Few law firms have qualified marketing experts on staff and attempting to handle your marketing strategies alone rarely leads to a successful outcome. At RizeUp Media, our team of business, marketing, and technology specialists can create an innovative campaign, monitor your results, and make changes to improve client engagement and conversions.

If you want to improve your marketing campaign, contact us to enlist our team of experts. We can help you utilize a combination of PPC and SEO to drive traffic to your website, encourage potential clients to engage with you, and guide them along the conversion path. With our help, your firm will be prepared to meet the needs of your clients and stand out among the competition.