The Best Ways to Market A Law Firm

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You have an excellent team of attorneys, legal assistants, secretaries, clerks, and paralegals. You win cases and you have the respect of the legal community. Your office is a tight ship, run with precision and efficiency. And yet, your calendar has more empty spaces than you would like. You need to explore marketing options, and increase your client base.

Online Presence

The chances of gaining thousands of followers simply by setting up a Facebook page for your law firm are extremely low. Not many Facebook viewers think to themselves, “I wonder which law office I’ll follow today.” They need a reason to look at your online presence, so give them one. Your marketing team should be generating an endless supply of social media entries that show a picture or a quick video, with the message, “We won a $20,000 settlement for Marla today!” And, “We’re fighting for Brian’s injury settlement!”

Get viewers to hashtag your firm in order to win prizes, or to have donations to charity made in their name. Give them bragging rights and celebrity by association. “I follow Jones Legal Services because I want to keep up on this civil liberties thing” makes a great conversation starter.

On video platforms such as YouTube, it is possible to present pre-roll ads. These run before a video starts playing. They are available in one variety that allows the viewer to click out of the ad after 5 seconds, or in another type that requires the whole ad to play through before the desired video starts. If your ad is well executed, viewers will let it play through, just for the interesting experience.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization can put your firm at the top of everyone’s search for legal advice. An expert SEO specialist can take steps to make that search engines funnel clients to your website. It takes expertise, continuous monitoring, and fine tuning. But your company name can be the first one anybody sees when they look for representation.

Billboards

When your new client phones your office to schedule a first meeting, they will not be looking at your billboard. Billboards are not a point-of-sale strategy. A properly executed billboard campaign lays the supportive groundwork of name recognition, credibility, and confidence. In some cases, it can even add the layer of celebrity.

With one well designed billboard in a given metropolitan area, your company gets a certain amount of usable publicity. The traffic near that billboard has now seen the name of your firm. With two billboards, you get more than twice the effectiveness. That’s because as soon as a potential client recognizes your second billboard, psychologically, they assign more credibility to your company. With 50 billboards, your company gains more than just 50 times the viewership of the first one, it also gains an exponentially rising curve of recognition and credibility. And if your billboards feature images of your chief legal officer or partners, they become instant local celebrities. 

When someone needs representation, there’s a good chance they’ll wonder, “Who was that car accident lawyer on that billboard? I want them.” In Southern California in the Inland Empire there are some predominant billboard campaigns by lawyers like The Accident Guys and Larry H. Parker.

Radio And TV

Hardly anybody is going to hunt down your Instagram or Twitter feed without some encouragement. Make that encouragement in the form of radio and TV ads. TV viewers are less likely to mute ads than online users, and radio listeners are almost certainly in their car, which means they probably just let the ads play through. And remember, nobody has to see or hear the whole ad for there to be an effect. If your company name and service is presented in the first five seconds, it’s an automatic victory.

Teamwork

Remember that these areas of marketing are not mutually exclusive. They interact and support each other. As you evaluate the effectiveness of each facet of your marketing campaign, remember to consider the beneficial relationship of these separate components, which can add up to a result greater than the sum of its parts.

When your new client calls you for their initial consultation, will it be because they randomly choose your firm out of a Google search? Or will it be because, in that moment when they realized they needed legal counsel, they remembered your name from your well executed marketing campaign? The answer should be “both,” because all business is good business. Good marketing can make that happen.