Marketing for attorneys can be a tricky business. Behaviors fluctuate, trends come and go, and before you know it there’s a dip in clients and nobody to represent. Success ultimately relies on your adaptability, investing time to understand what you’re doing wrong and correcting those mistakes.

Of course, there are universal tactics that work in all manner of marketing backgrounds, especially in the legal sphere. The flexibility these tactics employ enables your firm to grow and find the clients who need you regardless of market uncertainty. This article will talk about these tactics ranging from human connection to educational content and ultimately how you can implement them into your practice to garner a greater yield of clients.

  1. Establish a Human Connection

    The basis of all marketing tactics where success isn’t possible unless this is implemented in some way. Potential clients are in a volatile state, reaching out to anyone and everyone capable of providing aid. How you show them you’re the most qualified candidate is to empathize with them. Apply a name and face to your firm and paint the practice in a more trustworthy light.

    This can be done in a multitude of ways. A simple phone call to the client directly is the easiest of the options at your disposal. But if you want to further that connection as much as possible, an in-person meeting is a substantial step forward establishing the relationship between you and the client. While the former option shows your professional standing in recognizing the client as a person rather than another case, the latter reinforces the importance their case has at your firm.

    By either account, these approaches offer the additional benefit of word-of-mouth marketing. A potential client may not be proper for your practice, but they will still go out and report on how you treated them. This builds brand trust with the community and makes more people aware of the services you provide.

  2. Generate a Local SEO Campaign

    This has everything to do with playing with the algorithm. Google is the most popular search engine in the world, a car speeding down the Internet highway with doors welcoming any and all willing to jump in. However, this is a double-edged sword: on one end is the ability to connect hundreds if not thousands of potential clients a day–on the other are potential clients who have the ability to look for anyone and anything to the point they only see you in the rearview mirror.

    This is why running a local SEO campaign is so important. Keeping your presence in the mindset of these local potential clients is paramount to both maintaining clients and bringing in new ones. Creating a Google My Business account is an excellent way to do this. This will allow you to keep your information up-to-date at all times for potential clients researching your practice. Another avenue is encouraging your clients to write reviews of your firm online.

    The purpose of the SEO Campaign and the options presented is to farm interactions as much as possible. These play with the aforementioned algorithm which in turn favors your firm much more with search terms. Now, you not only reach the immediate public surrounding your firm, but now branch out to a larger audience. The strategy from then on is all about keeping those interactions going. But how do you do that?

  3. Produce Educational Content

    Educational content discussing the current happenings of the legal world or blogs such as this are excellent avenues of furthering your SEO campaign and playing the algorithm. An example could be a machine was recalled–something about the production has been found faulty and it’s injuring a not-so insignificant number of people who use it. A potential client could still be using this product, completely unaware of the recall. They do some research on their symptoms and come across an article on your firm’s website detailing the recall, the injuries this machine is likely to cause, and how victims may qualify for legal compensation. Suddenly, this potential client is contacting your firm because of the information you’ve provided.

    This development serves two purposes: the first is you have a new case under your belt, the second is this interaction on your article makes the algorithm push it to more people who use those search terms. As stated, it furthers your SEO campaign and plays the algorithm, furthering your firm’s reach both throughout the community and to people beyond that immediate audience. But the ultimate bonus of this content is your reputation among readers, portraying your practice as a trustworthy source for both information and legal representation.

  4. Craft an Easy User Experience on Your Website

    A clean, intuitive website remains one of the biggest proponents of your firm’s image and, more importantly, its first impression. Before a potential client even decides to meet anyone at your firm or attempt to read your educational content, they’ll likely survey your website first. If they find navigating the official site is a confusing, arduous chore, any positive information they glean from it is colored by an overall negative experience. Any positive reviews, personal referrals, and winning landmark cases mean nothing if the initial contact is such a troublesome approach. In addition, that would be your firm’s first impression to hundreds of people a day.

    A clunky website portrays your practice as chaotic, lacking organization, and unable to provide the care a potential client needs. Streamlining the user experience shows you understand what you’re doing and secures a potential client’s cooperation before they ever see a face that works there. That is why this is such an important factor in marketing.

    While you can certainly achieve this within your firm, the best move is to contact a web development company specializing in UX. Having experts in your corner who understand how a website is meant to function is an unrivaled necessity. However, this step can only go so far unless you know what you want to communicate, both on your site for your firm’s identity and with the specialists working with you. This is a team effort between your firm and the contracted company, both with skill sets needed to accomplish what you’ve set out to do. Cooperation is key here and the closer you work together the quicker you’ll have a website capable of catching more potential clients.

  5. Establish Your Brand Identity

    These steps are part of the all-encompassing nature of your marketing: your brand identity. The human connection, SEO campaigns, educational content, and everything your firm does and will do contributes to the identity of your practice. However, the most integral part of making all these strategies work and seeing the success you want is how these all flow together.

    The best image of this process is with an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail and ever-flowing by doing so. If the head of the snake is the brand your firm wants to portray, then the body is the marketing you’ve built to feed into that image. If the body is lacking, the snake is malnourished, whether that’s due to your strategies simply not working as implemented or the brand image is wrong. But if everything flows and works well, the snake continues to live on beyond the initial campaign.

    Every action you take reflects upon your practice and informs the brand associated with it. An unprofessional meeting with a potential client, a cluterous website, a lacking SEO campaign, all these mirror who you are to potential clients. The only real way to complete this step is understanding who your firm is and what their ideals are, keeping those in mind in every move going forward, letting your brand identity guide you decision making.

    That is the ultimate objective of marketing: sustain and grow your firm by integrating strategies to reach more and more people in need of the services on offer. Your brand is your livelihood and every action you take contributes to how it is seen by people.

    At Broughton Partners, we can help bridge the gap between you and these potential clients. Even as you’re working on your marketing, we can connect your practice with potential clients looking for representation, reducing risk while you build your law practice marketing strategies.