Law Firm Marketing Strategy: 24 Tactics for 2024
Are you prepared to invest in a law firm marketing strategy and grow your firm in 2024? If so, this article is for you.
A recent study found that:
- 57% of consumers look for a lawyer independently, and many search online.
- 66% of solo attorneys/small law firms do their own marketing.
- Only 46% of law firms have a marketing budget.
- 13% of firms say “no one” is responsible for marketing in their firms.
It’s clear that law firm marketing is important, yet many law firms don’t have a strategy in place.
In this article, I’ll go over what law firm marketing is and why it’s important, talk a bit about budget, and show you the latest law firm marketing strategies and techniques you can incorporate into your 2024 marketing plan.
Let’s get started.
Want to dive straight into the 24 law firm marketing strategies? Click here.
Table of Contents
- 24 Marketing Strategies for Growing Your Law Firm
- What is Law Firm Marketing?
- How Much Should Law Firms Spend on Marketing?
- 1. Build a Well-Designed Law Firm Website
- 2. Start by Building a Brand Story
- 3. Demonstrate Credibility, Authority, and Capability
- 4. Run an SEO Campaign to Improve Visibility in Google’s Search Results
- 5. Write Blog Posts and Articles In Your Practice Areas
- 6. Create Promotional and Educational Video Content
- 7. Develop a Resource Center
- 8. Host Engaging Webinars
- 9. Develop Engaging Attorney Biographies
- 10. Create Practice Area Power Pages
- 11. Add Live Chat to Your Website
- 12. Leverage Social Media
- 13. Step Up Your Email Marketing Campaign
- 14. Create Inbound Marketing Campaigns with Gated Content
- 15. Enhance Your Local SEO
- 16. Run Optimized Google Ads and Local Service Ad Campaigns
- 17. Launch Facebook PPC Campaigns
- 18. Attract 5-star Reviews
- 19. “Win” Awards and Credentials
- 20. Maintain a Presence In the Legal Directories
- 21. Engage the Media (HARO) PR
- 22. Develop an Effective Sales and Intake Process
- 23. Create Custom Remarketing and Retargeting Campaigns
- 24. Provide a World-Class Customer Experience
- Conclusion
What is Law Firm Marketing?
Law firm marketing is a specialized area of marketing that focuses on promoting legal services and law practices. It involves implementing tactics and strategies to attract new clients, retain existing ones, and build a strong and reputable brand in the legal industry.
The legal industry has been slow to adopt digital marketing in favor of tried-and-true traditional marketing tactics like networking, print advertising, and radio advertising.
And while these tactics still have a place for many law firms, digital marketing is the new norm. This includes search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media marketing, content marketing, and email marketing.
Here’s a quick breakdown.
- SEO: This involves optimizing your law firm’s website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). This includes optimizing website content, meta titles, meta descriptions, and building high-quality backlinks.
- PPC Advertising: This involves running paid advertisements on search engines and other online platforms. PPC advertising can be a quick way to get your law firm in front of potential clients.
- Social Media Marketing: This involves using social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to connect with potential clients, build relationships, and share valuable content.
- Content Marketing: This involves creating and sharing valuable content that is relevant to your target audience. This can include blog posts, ebooks, whitepapers, videos, and webinars.
- Email Marketing: This involves sending emails to potential and existing clients to keep them informed about your law firm, share valuable information, and encourage them to take action.
Ultimately, law firm marketing aims to build awareness of your law firm, establish trust and credibility, and attract and retain clients. The best law firms use a mix of both traditional and digital marketing practices.
Why is Law Firm Marketing Important?
An effective marketing strategy is critical to the success of the modern law firm — it’s the only reliable way to attract a steady supply of leads.
If you were to search for your practice area and city, what law firms come up? Odds are the firms you see have invested in law firm marketing, specifically digital marketing.
The firms that invest in digital marketing have greater brand awareness, get their firms in front of more leads, and ultimately get more clients, leading to a greater ROI.
Why digital marketing specifically?
A 2021 study done by Justia found that 64.7% of law firms in the United States see a positive return on investment from their website.
And a 2020 study by Brandmuscle revealed that 79% of surveyed participants consider SEO (which goes hand-in-hand with your website) to be the most effective marketing channel.
FirstPageSage also found that the return on investment of SEO is massive. Take a look.
Despite that, the ABA found that only 57% of law firms have an annual marketing budget. None of the solo practitioners had a marketing budget, and only 29% of firms with 2-9 lawyers have one.
In contrast, 84% of law firms with 100 or more lawyers have a marketing budget, revealing why these large firms are able to grow at astonishing rates.
How Much Should Law Firms Spend on Marketing?
Law firms with dedicated marketing funds typically allocate between 2% and 20% of their total revenue for promotional activities.
How much should your specific law firm spend? It depends.
For instance, the U.S. Small Business Administration suggests allocating 7-8% of total revenue toward marketing. On the other hand, some experts in the legal sector advise limiting this budget to a mere 2-5%.
In a 2018 survey by the Legal Marketing Association alongside Bloomberg Law, it was revealed that firms, on average, dedicated 6.7% of their revenue to marketing. This means for a firm generating $100,000, they’d typically invest $6,700 in promotional activities.
But it’s essential to note that major firms with expansive budgets can skew this statistic. Empirical data suggests that many smaller entities usually dedicate closer to 2% of their revenue to marketing, which translates to $2,000 for every $100,000 generated.
Related – Law Firm Marketing Budget: A guide to setting your law firm’s marketing budget.
The exact percentage can be influenced by several variables, including:
- The firm’s specialization
- Geographical location
- Intensity of local and specialized competition
- The firm’s standing in the industry
- Long-term value derived from clients or potential leads
We’ve put together a budget calculator where you can calculate how many leads you could get with different budgets.
Marketing Tactics:
24 Law Firm Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Firm
1. Build a Well-Designed Law Firm Website
Most law firms are online — 94% — and use their website to promote their services.
Not only does a website provide potential clients with an easy way to learn about the firm’s services, but it also serves as a platform for attorneys to showcase their expertise and establish themselves as thought leaders in the legal industry.
It’s the starting point for many law firm marketing strategies we’ll discuss in this blog.
Related – 101 Best Law Firm Websites A list of the best law firm websites out there.
Make Sure Your Website is Easy to Navigate
Focus on user experience when you’re putting together your law firm’s website. Users should be able to find all of the information they need to decide whether or not to hire your services.
Have clear calls to action and a thought-out navigation bar/menu. Bonus points if you have a page for each of your services.
Organizing your pages into categories that make sense for your practice area and services is good practice for both user experience and search engine optimization.
Visual Aspects Help You Make a Good First Impression
Visual design is important for a law firm’s website as it can impact a user’s perception of your firm and influence their decision to hire you.
Start with high-resolution photos that reflect the professionalism and ethos of your practice. This includes pictures of your team and your offices.
Your law firm’s logo should be clear and positioned prominently. Remember that your branding, from colors to typography, needs to be consistent.
Use Content to Attract and Persuade
Creating persuasive content for your law firm’s website is crucial in convincing potential clients to choose your firm over competitors. Well-crafted content can help establish your firm’s expertise, authority, and credibility in your practice areas, making it easier for potential clients to trust and feel confident in your services.
Your website is often the first point of contact for potential clients, so your content should be informative, engaging, and easy to read.
We’ll touch on content in more detail later on, but here are the essentials for any law firm’s website.
- Attorney bio pages
- Contact page
- Blog
- Practice area pages
About This Marketing Tactic
Pros & Cons
- Increases visibility
- Communicates your value to customers
- Central hub of all marketing
- Upfront cost (and maintenance)
- Keeping it up to date is time consuming
Time to Complete
- 1–3 months on average
Budget
- $5,000+
Practice Areas
- All practice areas
Top Metrics
- Brand sentiment
2. Start by Building a Brand Story
Most law firm marketing sounds the same.
For example, do these sound familiar:
- Aggressive Representation. – Criminal Defense
- No win. No fee. – Personal Injury
- Caring and Compassionate. – Family Law
Your firm needs to stand out.
Define what makes your firm unique — your USP, or Unique Selling Proposition — and you can build an original brand story around it to stand out from the crowd.
It should be a specific, defensible trait that differentiates your law firm from competitors. And most importantly, it should be something your clients actually care about.
For example, Weisfuse & Weisfuse highlights that they’ve been in business for over 30 years to inspire confidence.
Once you work out what’s unique about your firm, build it into your entire value proposition to resonate with your target audience.
And you can use that information to build on your brand, including your law firm logo and website.
What’s Your Law Firm’s USP?
It’s easy to see what’s unique about Lisa Feldstein Family Law, for instance:
She specializes in helping families start families through third-party reproduction.
How Do You Differentiate Yourself from the Many Competing Law Firms?
Your brand can also be communicated through your tagline. Rather than a generic tagline such as “Attorneys at Law,” how about being a little more descriptive?
Here’s a good example from Dennis & King in Tennessee and Georgia:
Most law firms employ a dry, academic tone. The tone of your content will be reflected by your brand, and there is nothing to say that law firms must be overly formal with their clients.
Check out the language/tone used in this example from law firm Irigonegaray, Turney, & Revenaugh LLP. in Kansas:
Once you’ve established your branding and messaging, work it into all your marketing channels: website, social media, professional networks, offline literature, etc.
About This Marketing Tactic
Pros & Cons
- Differentiates your firm
- Communicates your value to customers
- Can be time-consuming
- Can lead to analysis paralysis
Time to Complete
- 2–6 weeks
- Between consultation with your team members, strategy calls with consultants, and integrating your new brand into your marketing, expect to invest a few weeks of your time
Budget
- DIY – Free (Low)
- $2,000 – $5,000 (Medium)
- $10,000 – $25,000 (High)
Practice Areas
- All practice areas
Top Metrics
- Brand sentiment
3. Demonstrate Credibility, Authority, and Capability
A solid law firm marketing strategy should involve both passive and active marketing activities.
A good example of passive marketing is your law firm website’s copywriting and design, which can help build credibility and authority for your firm.
Here’s a stellar example of how you can establish credibility immediately.
Chadi & Company demonstrates instant authority by showcasing their vast experience and reviews right on their homepage.
When there are so many law firms out there, you’ve got to show your expertise in the field front and center.
Let’s break down what potential clients want to see when they get to your law firm website.
Awards You’ve Received
Don’t be shy. Highlight any awards you’ve received to get instant credibility in your field.
Including text is fine (and great for SEO), but it’s even more visually effective if you can include logos or images of your awards.
Client Testimonials and Reviews
Showing off glowing testimonials and reviews given to you by past clients is almost mandatory in any solid law firm marketing plan.
Whether you choose to create a separate page for testimonials or showcase client reviews on your homepage, make sure they stand out and are easy to read.
Here’s an example from Chadi and Company:
If you want to take it a step further, we recommend creating a few video testimonials for your website. They’re seen as more reputable as they’re less likely to be manufactured, making them feel much more powerful and authentic.
Case Studies and Successful Cases to Demonstrate Expertise
Showing off the cases you’ve won is a good way to foster confidence.
Oykhman Criminal Defence Law has a comprehensive, up-to-date page highlighting every successful case they’ve handled.
And it’s organized, so clients can find cases similar to theirs.