Every law firm wants to advertise so that new clients bring them revenue. The question is, how does one create good leads? It is a universal problem across the whole industry: a large portion of work does not bring lawyers any income. This article will focus on several strategies a law firm can apply to generate high-quality leads and increase the amount of billable work.
Before you start optimizing lead generation, here are several questions you need to ask yourself:
- How good is your website?
- Do you produce SEO-optimized content?
- What services can you offer for free?
- Do you have a good reputation?
What are leads, and how to make ones for a law firm?
A lead is a contact that is interested in your services. These individuals have already shared their personal data, like an email address or a phone number, for example, by filling in a form on your website. It is important to get the leads that will bring you business and actually receive paid services.
The process of generating leads may include these steps:
- Find your target audience or create a profile of your ideal client.
- Identify where you can find them and develop marketing strategies for these channels.
- Your potential clients will engage with your online resources, such as a website or social media networks.
- Call them to action: offer a product they can purchase or an attorney they can contact.
- Scale the process and grow your revenue.
Website development
Your website is the best tool to produce a good first impression. You may hire a company to redesign your website or use WordPress to improve it yourself. Pay attention to a color palette and to usability. Visitors should be able to get a good experience from surfing your website whether they access it from a computer or a mobile device.
PPC advertising
Online advertising is the quickest and most efficient way to attract customers to your website. Consequently, the prices in this sphere are quite high, especially for law firms. The most clickable keywords may be too expensive for your budget. Luckily, there is a way to bypass this challenge and use keywords with less competition. The main goal is to find a balance between the low cost of keywords and their ability to attract customers who are ready to pay.
Even better, create a new landing page for each product or service you are advertising. The clients must not face any hindrances between clicking the advert that caught their eye and buying the product. If they have to search for the thing that attracted them to your website, every additional click they have to make will drastically decrease the chance you will get their money.
Law firm SEO
Search engine optimization is a very effective strategy that helps to move your website to the first page of search results. This means your company is visible to clients that are actually typing in keywords and looking for a lawyer. There are very helpful tools to improve your content and beat the competition.
Here are some things you could optimize to attract more customers:
- Use certain keywords;
- Add some relevant links;
- Break down your content into paragraphs;
- Create a recommended number of headings;
- Add some pictures.
Free services
Giving potential customers the possibility to find your website is only part of the process of generating leads. You still need to provide something else to attract them to your company and not the competition. Offer a free consultation. This way, the visitors will get value from you even before paying anything.
Why is offering a free consultation a good strategy? Does it not create more free work for the attorneys? In a way, it does, but it also works to your advantage.
Consider two benefits of free services:
- First is the psychological aspect. Seeing words and pictures on a website does not produce such a strong impression on your prospects. However, after a pleasant experience of communicating with you in person, the clients are more likely to stay and buy your services.
- And second, you can evaluate the leads you are generating and use this data for further improvement. People will give you some information about their cases, and you will get an understanding of the current market needs and of the traffic your marketing strategies are attracting.
Word-of-mouth marketing
It goes without saying that your company must provide high-quality services. Personal recommendation is the best way of gaining new clients. A company with a great reputation will not even need to spend that much money on advertising. The customers will queue up to get your services. After you have provided amazing services and gained a lot of positive reviews, you may focus all your attention on legal work and stop spending time on other activities such as advertising and web design.
Collaborate with partners
Find companies with similar audiences to yours and create online content together. It should not be a competitor but a business providing another type of service in some way related to yours. For example, if your company is a law firm working with victims of road accidents, you may create a webinar or a session with doctors that provide medical care for such people.
To sum up, there are several strategies to generate better leads for your law firm. You can apply them yourself or approach marketing experts and let them handle these tasks for you.