The key to any successful marketing strategy starts with understanding your target audience. From there, you can set marketing goals that align with the wider business’s objectives and start creating compelling content your audience will actually care about. Sounds easy enough, right?
A good understanding of how your audience thinks and clear marketing objectives are two of the most important components of a marketing growth strategy, but they’re not the only ones. There are hundreds of different marketing strategies and techniques you can use to grow and promote your business, and choosing the right ones can be tricky. Some businesses hire in-house marketing teams that typically cover a broad range of marketing and growth strategies, from lead generation to copywriting. Others will choose to outsource their marketing to an agency or freelance professionals who usually specialise in a few specific areas of marketing.
The approach and strategies you choose to use in your marketing plan will depend on your budget, audience, and business objectives. In this article, we will discuss the marketing tips that any legal practice can use for business growth.
Growing Your Legal Practice with Marketing
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and represents a bundle of marketing activities that aim to improve a website’s visibility on Google or any other search engine. SEO focuses on improving website rankings organically, and shouldn’t be confused with Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing, which, in contrast, works like an advertisement where businesses pay and bid for the top spot on search engine result pages. SEO is a highly recommended strategy for legal practices in particular because the majority of people looking for legal services and advice will search their options online. SEO is also a great long-term growth strategy because, over time, consistent SEO will dramatically improve your website’s visibility, ensuring it ranks highly when someone searches for legal support.
Although successful SEO strategies are beneficial to any legal firm if they apply them correctly, SEO tactics will look slightly different depending on the area of legal expertise you specialise in. Family law firms will typically see customers spending significantly more time considering their options before contacting a solicitor. Their SEO strategy should be focused on creating and optimising educational content like guides, and would likely be targeting location-specific keywords that are local to the areas they work in.
On the other hand, a law firm that specialises in personal injury and multiple injury claims would use high-intent keywords and phrases which have a high conversion potential. Along with local and national search visibility, they will be able to target audiences who are looking for legal support immediately and may even make a booking on their first website visit.
Social Media
Social media isn’t always at the top of the list of marketing strategies for legal firms, usually because they expect it to be for more typically ‘social’ brands in the ecommerce and hospitality industries. Both organic and paid social media marketing techniques can be extremely beneficial to increasing brand awareness for law firms of any size.
Something that audiences of law firms look for when they first explore a business’s online presence is its credibility. Social media can be a time-efficient and affordable way to showcase your firm’s credibility, which can be done through a number of different content forms. Short-form video is particularly popular with audiences because it’s easy to digest large amounts of information quickly.
Law firms can use short-form video to share legal advice, expert commentary or discuss industry news. Social media marketing, if done correctly, can improve website traffic by directing audiences to blog posts and guides. For the most success at bringing social media traffic to your website, create valuable content in the form of video and carousel posts that encourage audiences to visit your site for additional information or support.
Conversion Rate Optimisation
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is a tactic used by marketers working towards specific growth and new business objectives. CRO is most commonly used to improve a website or a landing page, but can also be used to improve conversion potential in other marketing activities, like email marketing. Conversion Rate Optimisation tactics aim to improve the percentage of users or viewers who complete the desired outcome. For a law firm using CRO techniques, their desired outcome is likely to be making a call to the business, booking a meeting with a lawyer or simply filling out a form on their website.
Popular conversion rate optimisation methods include optimising page speed and improving page design so that they’re quicker and easier to navigate. A non-negotiable in CRO is adding strong calls to action across the site, which are keywords and phrases that encourage users to take the next step. Conversion Rate Optimisation is particularly useful for law firms, as audiences need to trust your business and site in order to even consider it. Websites and pages that are poorly designed, hard to navigate or have slow page speeds immediately appear unprofessional.