Just because you are a law firm, it doesn’t mean you can’t show off your firm’s personality through your marketing efforts. Marketing is a great place to build customer trust, familiarity and establish your authority by showing your expertise in your area.
There are loads of law firms and legal marketers out there creating some great content. Read on for nine top tips so your firm can be one of those too…
1. Be Authentic
Making sure your marketing materials are authentic is a great way to stand out from your competitors, no-one wants to see the same LinkedIn poll over and over. With that, it’s also important that your content is not only authentic but also offers value to a potential client.
Original content is sure to get more interaction than the same old social media posts and website copy. And one of the best ways to create original content is to get input from your staff. This way, you get multiple viewpoints and tones of voice on things that can help your firm to build a personality and showcase its human side.
Whether it’s a new take on a social media trend, an opinion piece about new legislation or a ‘day in the life' video, there are lots of ways you can utilise your staff and their voices and create original and engaging content that your competitors aren’t doing.
2. Keep your branding consistent
Creating a strong brand is another way to stand out from your competitors and one of the ways you can do this through creating a consistent brand. This includes your website, social media profiles, Google My Business Page, internal and external documents, printed materials and more. So, make sure you are using the same logo, the correct fonts and brand colours in imagery.
As you might know, strong brand awareness in the form of all things orange is something we are very passionate about! You’ll even find us wearing orange at events and being noticed at our local.
3. Embrace social media
With an estimated 3.96 billion users on social media, it’s definitely somewhere your firm should be and is a great way to engage and share valuable information with your clients. But to stand out from your competitors, you need to be offering something new. This means, don’t just post about the company. Start conversations, answer questions, showcase your employees and have fun! Social media is a great way to start building your firm’s personality.
It's also important to ensure you know who has access to your firm’s social media profiles and that you are keeping them secure. Not everyone can pull off an (apparent) profile picture faux pas.
4. Make sure your website is up to date
In the digital age, a website is often your client's first impression of your firm. A well-designed, responsive website that answers a client’s question is key. To do this, your website needs to be up to date with technology so it’s easy to navigate, with your staff members' expertise so it shows your law firm is well-run and with content that shows off the areas of law your firm specialises in.
In addition, you need to ensure that your website meets the new price transparency rules established by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) in 2018 and uses high-quality pictures and styling that looks modern, which helps to show your website is up to date.
Is your website up to date? Head of Design Tracey Stock points out eight ways to tell.
5. Utilise reviews
Reviews, particularly on Google, can help a law firm rank higher in online search results and you’re your firm to establish trust in the market. Once you have got a strategy in place to gain review, you can utilise them in many ways. We recommend connecting your Google reviews to your Google My Business page, sharing reviews on social media, adding them to your website and putting them in your newsletters.
6. Add blogs to your website
Blogs are essential for showing off your firm’s credibility, and give you, as a marketer, additional content to use on other platforms. As well as this, regular blog posts are good for SEO, attract users to your website and provides answers to prospective clients’ questions which can all generate new leads.
Not sure where to start blogging? Read our top tips. (link?)
7. Use links on your website
Not only is link building beneficial because it can help contribute towards improved rankings and traffic from organic search, but it also has a range of other advantages including building relationships, sending referral traffic and brand building.
Google can crawl hundreds of links per page, so there is no harm in adding some internal links to your website. Internal linking opportunities can be found by checking your analytics and finding pages that currently rank and linking them to similar pages of content, such as
8. Use Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
You can grow the authority of your website, improve the relevance of the traffic coming to your website and appear higher up in Google but using relevant keywords and investing time in SEO. In simple terms, keywords or phrases are the things people are typing into Google and these should be in key places on your website.
Writing copy for SEO isn’t much different than writing for any audience, it just takes more research and planning to make sure Google can read and understand what your content is about.
9. Track your Return on Investment (ROI)
As a marketer, you love an Excel spreadsheet (or another spreadsheet provider), right? Well, Excel and tracking your ROI are key to finding out what’s working and what isn’t. We’ve even got an ROI calculator that might be useful for you if you don’t know where to start.
In addition, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is another helpful tool when tracking the success of your activities. For each marketing campaign, think about what success looks like and how you will monitor this, for example, with a blog you could include a call to action with the aim of generating leads, so you could monitor how much traffic you get to your blog and how many hits converted.
You can also use tracking software that looks at phone numbers and emails, Google Analytics 4 to track website users and behaviours and more.
The bottom line is, make sure you have a marketing campaign tracking spreadsheet.
Want more law firm marketing top tips and law firm marketing materials?
If you want to find out more marketing top tips specific to law firms from our team, sign up for our upcoming Conscious Conversations. Each month one of our specialists will be hosting a conversation giving advice, practical information and answering your questions. And, if you need help with your law firm's marketing materials, contact our team on 0117 325 0200 or sales@conscious.co.uk