Knowing effective marketing tips for lawyers is as important as knowing the legal principles in various areas of law.
Why?
Because without sufficient knowledge of marketing tips, our careers as lawyers will suffer a great deal.
I understand how conservative the legal profession is. With all the rules and restrictions concerning soliciting and advertising, marketing for us, as lawyers, might seem like murky waters.
However, in this post, I’ll identify 7 ironclad tips that will shine the light on your practice and keep clients coming your way. More importantly, these tips are safe and won’t land you in any contests with the regulatory committee in your locality.
Let’s go!
1. Niche Down:
The riches are in the niches. This statement holds true even in the legal profession.
What ensures that the marketing scale tips in our favor is to decide on the kind of clients to target as lawyers. This step involves having a proper understanding of the legal market which, quite sadly, lots of lawyers lack.
Picking a niche trumps shooting your bullets sporadically. Since your resources are limited, running out of gas is one thing you don’t want to do. Also, niching down helps build and strengthen your brand.
To make this decision, you have to ask yourself a number of questions. The questions include:
- What area of the law matches your skills the most?
- In what area of the law do you want to build your career?
- Does your area of choice have a shining future?
- What are your financial goals? (Trust me, it’s all about the Benjamins)
- Can your clients really pay?
- Do issues that demand your services actually arise?
If you have good answers to these questions, thumbs up! You’ve made headway. This will save you from making the mistake of focusing on clients who do not realize the essence of a lawyer, or worse even, clients who are not willing to pay.
Another importance of niching down is that clients who seek out lawyers already have a specific challenge. They will most certainly choose an expert in that area instead of a generalist.
2. Create Quality Content:
Except you live under a rock, you must have heard about the concept of content marketing (a term which has kept the business world aflame in recent times).
Content marketing is a strategy that attracts, converts and retains customers by regularly providing informative content that educates the customers.
Such a strategy can prove useful because it will subtly market you as a lawyer. What you have to do is frequently provide educative content that answers the questions of your target audience.
Give it a thought. Lawyer A always says “I’m a corporate lawyer. Hire me”. But Lawyer B always churns out legal tips that help companies stay out of, and even handle legal problems.
Imagine that a company that knows the two of them finds itself in a legal battle. Which one of the lawyers do you think stands a higher chance of being hired?
If you said Lawyer B, then you know what’s up. This is due to the fact that problems gravitate towards their solutions.
As a lawyer, one sure way of producing content is by having a blog where you can share knowledge. Your law practice is a business, and every business needs a blog. I can’t overemphasize this.
Another way is by creating videos. These videos can feature you alone, or you and colleagues discussing legal issues. You can discuss frequently asked questions or trending matters in the legal field.
Such videos can be posted on YouTube.
You can also provide educative content to your audience through email. This works if people sign up for your newsletters.
3. Set up an Optimised Website:
A website is an effective marketing tool. Firstly, it clothes your law practice with a garment of professionalism. It also serves as a platform for you to share content.
Ultimately, it helps with lead generation and can convert your visitors into paying clients.
Optimization refers to the techniques that increase the site’s chances of attaining the goals you want to achieve with it. The different ways of optimizing a site include:
- SEO practices: These practices increase the visibility of your website to search engines. It takes a while to reap the benefits, but it is worth the effort.
- Mobile-friendliness: According to The Next Web 52% of Internet users are mobile users. Your website should be made to respond perfectly to phones and tablets because that’s what most of your visitors will be using.
- Call-to-Action: Your website should drive your visitors to do what you want them to do. In this case, it is smart to include an obvious button or form that triggers them to take action. Examples are a “Contact Us” button which leads to your contact page, a “Sign up for our newsletters” form, or a “download this template” button.
- Live Chat: This feature encourages visitors to shoot their questions instantly. It is a step towards conversion as it assumes a friendly tone and the response is immediate. According to 99 Firms, live chat has the highest consumer satisfaction rate at 92%.
4. Leverage Social Media and Larger Platforms:
It is easy to mistake social media for a mere playground used by people generally unserious about life. If this is your situation, you need to have a rethink.
Online visibility might be the most underrated of all marketing tips utilized by lawyers. As a lawyer, you need to be seen- in every sense of the expression. Social media does a great favor to your online visibility.
There are millions of social media users on a daily basis. Imagine getting your law practice in the face of a significant fraction of such a number.
KABOOM!
Social media is cost-effective and helps establish you as a thought-leader. Prime instances of social media platforms that you can get on include Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
You can share your content on these platforms to raise awareness and alert potential clients.
In addition to social media are platforms that can boost your visibility. Examples include LiveLaw and iPleaders which have a large audience. Posting on such platforms will bring you the exposure you so desire.
You can also utilize Avvo to spike your reputation by building your profile and scoring a high rating. The options are plenty.
5. Lend a Hand:
Another move that is proven to aid your marketing is doing public interest matters. That’s what I said. Think of it as your way of “giving back to the public”.
What if you take up matters to prevent the violation of people’s human rights? Imagine helping tons of persons who can’t afford a lawyer get bail. Handling pro bono cases (a fancy legal term meaning cases “for the public good”) occasionally can do your image a world of good.
Because word-of-mouth is a powerful thing. Persons who benefit from your selfless actions are sure to relate to others about how you came to their rescue when all hope seemed lost.
With that will also follow tales about how you are so good at what you do. That means more clients for you!
6. Don’t be an Island:
The smartest way to sabotage your marketing efforts is by underestimating the power of networking. As a lawyer, you need to socialize. Step out, form connections, and link up with big playas in the legal field.
To double your results, step out of the legal circle as well. The persons outside are equally if not more important. After all, they are the ones who turn out to be clients.
Join a club in the community and be reasonably active in it.
If there are events hosted in your locality, do well to attend.
Listen up! We, lawyers, are seen as some sort of extraterrestrial beings who are to be approached only in times of trouble.
It’s up to you to mingle and change that view.
Join that soccer team; show up every Wednesday for practice. And don’t forget the dinner next weekend at the Wilsons’. Tasting their stuffed turkey would be quite a treat.
Do these things often and see how people would warm up to you and demand your services.
You are in for a treat! And I’m not talking about a stuffed turkey this time.
7. Referrals and Testimonials:
Stories travel.
But to market yourself optimally as a lawyer, you need to kick it full throttle. You have to fan the flames so that word about you can spread like wildfire.
Keep going hard and giving your clients the best. They will definitely say something nice about you to the next person, but you can speed up the process.
After rendering your services to a client, slip him a questionnaire asking him what he thinks about your service. If he gives a positive report… CHA-CHING!
Do this with each one of your clients and you will rack up testimonials like a deck of cards before you can say “justice”.
Also, you can get familiar with the top dogs in the legal profession in your locality. Show them how diligent and resourceful you are.
When it feels comfortable, you can gently ask them to say some kind words. Also, let them know that if they happen to know a client who needs services in your area of practice (assuming they specialize in a different area, of course) you’d be happy to have them sent your way.
Honestly, marketing yourself using these tips suitable for lawyers is a full-time job. It isn’t something you should neglect. But while you do it, find a pace and balance to avoid burning out. Follow these steps and watch amazing results unfold.
You are welcome to speak your mind in the comments. Do share this post too!
