It is the law firms that show up where their clients are, on the proper channels, and at the right moment. That is exactly what structured and personalized legal marketing helps them achieve.

Legal marketing for small law firms sits at the core of how to be visible to your potential clients. With 1/3 of clients starting their lawyer searches online and law firms spending over 65% of their budget on online marketing, legal marketing has become a significant part of any law firm.

If you run a small law firm and want to get your legal marketing off the ground, these seven tips will help you start right.

Optimized Local Search Pack

Imagine a client searches for “car accident lawyer Chicago,” and your law firm’s business profile, with name, address, phone number, and reviews, shows up in the top results; that’s the local search pack for you.

Local search packs help attract highly targeted traffic that is most likely to convert. Legal services are generally tied to a geographical area due to local laws and courts, which means that if someone is searching for “legal services near me,” they want a lawyer who is a legal expert in that area.

Hence, you must ensure that you are creating and optimizing your law firm’s Google My Business (GMB) profile with these three things:

1. NAP Consistency across the website and legal directories
2. High-quality photos and videos with your team members and clients
3. Client reviews and replying to those client reviews

Having a User-Friendly Digital Lobby (That’s Your Website)

Safe to say that your 99% legal marketing strategies require a well-optimized, user-friendly website. A website that loads faster, has clear navigation, and a good design. Think of your website as your digital identity, because that’s exactly how your clients see it.

If the website is sloppy, the visitor instantly judges the lawyer behind it. Hence, your website must be strategically designed to include:

Pages that highlight stronger trust signals.

Contact Options That Require Zero Effort to Find

A layout that lets clients reach key pages without getting lost on the website.

Consistent, Authentic, and SEO Optimized Content Creation

Now that you have the perfect law firm website, the next important thing is to develop thought leadership by creating helpful legal content that answers the target audience’s questions, guides them on what to do next, and, most importantly, creates awareness about your legal services. 

This is done through an effective content marketing strategy (a subpart of legal marketing), which includes creating various kinds of content like blog posts, newsletters, videos, podcasts, emails, and social media posts,  and then distributing them across channels. Among all legal marketing strategies, content marketing is most effective at building brand reach, awareness, and audience.

Research shows that content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less. So, not only does this position you as an expert in your field and enhance the audience’s confidence in you, but it also attracts the largest number of clients with much smaller budgets.

Further, content marketing complements other legal marketing tactics, such as local SEO, by using local and hyperlocal keywords in the content.

Seamless Client Intake and Follow-Up Process

Imagine you tick off all the major elements of good legal marketing required for your small law firm, a well-rounded website, a high-quality conversion-focused homepage, practice areas pages, and blogs that drive inquiries and win clients, but miss out on that one step that actually decides whether that visitor turns into your client, which is having a robust intake process.

Client intake for small law firms is the process of evaluating the client enquiries, collecting personal information, checking case viability, and bringing new clients to your firm. Law firms often ignore this part of the process and lose clients who were ready to hire them.

According to Law Technology Today, law firms take an average of 42% of the time to respond to a potential client. Further, 45% of the time, law firms fail to collect the potential client’s phone number on their initial call, and 86% fail to collect an email address.

If a firm takes too long to reply or misses basic details, people don’t wait. They move on. And that quiet slip is where most of the potential business disappears.

To have a seamless client intake and follow-up process, small law firms must:

• Set up an automatic email post-receiving of a query
• Have a simple CRM in place to track calls, messages, and emails
• Reach out as soon as the potential client reaches out
• Follow up with well-timed emails in case of no responses
• Send out reminders once the consultation is booked

Blending in With Traditional Marketing Ways

The world has gone digital now. Everything from the preliminary legal search to the final decision on choosing a lawyer is done online to a greater extent. But even in a digital-first world, traditional marketing remains as trusted as ever, because people rely on what they’ve personally seen, heard, and experienced.

Hence, it’s always a good idea to blend both online and offline channels to enhance the marketing efforts and reach a wider audience.

Offline legal marketing for small law firms can include:

• Print ads in local magazines, newspapers, etc.
• Referrals and word of mouth
• Workshops, seminars, and networking events.

Limit the Marketing Channels

In legal marketing, we often talk about what to do, but rarely about what not to do.

In the last point, we talked about the distribution of content across channels, and this is one of the steps where law firms go wrong. A lot of times, people stretch to too many channels, which results in incorrect brand messaging, low-quality leads, and burnt budget.

The smart approach is to find the channels/platforms where your potential clients spend the most time and define your content strategy based on what works on each platform. This way, you are working on a few selected platforms visible to the target audience at a lower marketing cost.

Contacting a Marketing Expert Who Understands Legal Business Model

Legal marketing is very different from other business marketing. It is highly regulated marketing with strict regulations on the types of claims that can be made and the permissible content.

Further, there’s no single approach or one-size-fits-all strategy. Meaning that the ideal marketing channels and target audience keep changing with different practice areas, and so do the legal marketing strategies.

Furthermore, the content in legal marketing plays a very important role. Unlike other marketing, legal content falls under the YMYL category, which is highly scrutinized by Google’s strict quality standards, ensuring that readers receive accurate and helpful legal content. Any mistakes in the legal information provided by you can not only lower your rankings on Google but also leave a wrong impression on your audience.

Hence, you must hire an expert legal marketing strategist who understands the legal business model and has a clear understanding of what can be said and marketed in accordance with the ABA model rules and state bar association guidelines. One who can also explain the complex laws in a language that laymen can understand.

And if you are looking for someone like that, then KPC Marketing is the place for you!

Schedule a free consultation with us today and find out how our proven legal marketing strategies can help your small law firm rank and grow your client base!