Marketing Your Law Firm Online: The Complete Guide

A lot of attorneys I talk to today are coming around to the idea that they may need to be a bit more active than the classic “wait-for-referrals” business model. They buy in to the idea that marketing their practice online could help keep the client pipeline full and level out the crazy ups & downs that referral business takes.

Marketing Your Law Firm Online

The problem is, their Web marketing strategy, such as it is, looks like this:

Create a Web site.
???
Get clients!

(Maybe I exaggerate a bit… but not much!)

There’s a better way—a way that doesn’t rely on luck to turn Joe Visitor into a paying client.

I want to show you how I approach marketing my clients’ law firms. Our goal here is to make sure we’re doing everything we can to:

grab visitors’ attention and keep them from hitting the Back button,
show them what makes our firm different (and thus uniquely qualified to help them), and ultimately
build the kind of trust that leads to them becoming a client.

This isn’t easy—it goes way beyond just “having a Web site”—but as you’ve probably discovered, a Web site is necessary to get business online, but it’s far from sufficient. What follows is everything else you need to put in place to be successful, broken down into five (ish) steps:

Find your ideal clients, and really get to know them.
Get your Web site in line.
Plan & implement your content strategy.
Test, improve, & repeat.
Pour fuel on the fire.

(Note: This guide isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s massive, and super comprehensive. If you’d like me to break this process down into small, easy-to-digest pieces.

Know your goals.

Begin with the end in mind.

— Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

I call this “Step 0” because having a clear picture of your firms’ marketing goals is important… but those goals are often self-evident.

For most of the firms I work with, the goal is simply more clients (or maybe more clients, and less legwork on the part of the attorneys). On the Web, that means getting more visitors to the site, and turning more “window-shopper” visitors into clients.

Everything we talk about from here on out—from defining your target audience to creating the content and beyond—will have this same ultimate goal.

With that in mind, let’s dive in.

Start by finding your ideal clients, and really getting to know them.

How many times have you heard that breakfast is “the most important meal of the day”? Isn’t it amazing, though, how many people skip breakfast all the time?

It’s the same with knowing your ideal clients. I’m not exaggerating in the slightest when I say… Developing a laser-etched picture of your ideal client—who they are, what they want, what you can do for them, and so on—is far and away the most important piece of your marketing strategy.

It’s also the single most ignored piece of your strategy. If you aren’t clear about this, though, all your other efforts will be scattershot at best.

So, let’s do this right.

Your ideal client (knowing yourself)

First off… who are your best clients? Pick any definition of “best” you like—the ones that bring you the most revenue, the most referrals, the most enjoyment, whatever. You might consider who you’ve been most excited to work with, or who you have the most knowledge about. (For instance, I know an attorney who used to be a school teacher—he loves working with that group, and they connect with him really easily.)

With your idea of “best” in mind, can you pick out particular characteristics of your best and worst clients—things that made you either happy to work with the client, or dread their phone calls?

For me, it’s responsiveness. If a client of mine can’t get their act together, it makes for a miserable experience; on the other hand, when a client handles their responsibilities quickly, it’s a joy to work with them.

You may not be able to use your marketing to screen for all the important characteristics you might want, but there’s a good chance you can screen for some of them. For instance, because responsiveness is so important to me, in my email marketing, I never send an offer to work with a prospective client twice. If they can’t manage their email well enough to respond the first time, they wouldn’t be a good fit anyway.

At this point, it’s really helpful if you can get a mental image of your ideal client. Often, you won’t be able to pick out a single client who was perfect, but you could “mix and match” to get your model client. For instance, I might describe my ideal client as someone in Mr. Jones’ industry, facing the same problems he was, but with the responsiveness of Mrs. Brown—if such a person existed, they’d be a joy to work with, and I would be able to deliver incredible value for them.

You’ll be able to use this “picture” of a client in everything you create—you’ll be able to ask “Would this [Web site/article/video/etc.] appeal to Jane Dreamclient? Does it address her concerns, goals, or emotional state?”. If the answer’s yes, it will probably appeal to people like her as well, bringing you more ideal clients in the future.

Your ideal client’s needs (knowing your client)

Now, the million dollar question: what is it that your ideal client wants from you?

If you said “legal help,” you’ve only just scratched the surface.

For many of your clients, this will be their first foray into whatever area of law they need help with. They’re almost certainly confused, overwhelmed, and apprehensive about the outcome. There’s a whirlpool of emotions involved for the client in just about every area of law, from criminal prosecution (“This could change the course of my entire life!“) to new business formation (“What if I fail?“). They may not know it, but one of the biggest benefits of hiring your firm is relief from some of those emotions.

So, if you want more people to hire you, one of the most effective ways to get there is to deliver a sample of that emotional relief before the person is paying you.

How do you do that over the Web? The same way you do it in person—by educating the (prospective) client. When they understand what’s involved in, say, new business formation, they’ll at least have the comfort of feeling some degree of control over the situation.

(Want to take it a step further? Educate them about the most common mistakes people make in this situation. Whether you practice estate planning or class action law, you undoubtedly know of a laundry list of things people do wrong all the time!)

Notice I’m not talking about legal advice. Obviously there are myriad reasons why this isn’t appropriate over the Web (not the least of which is prohibitions from your bar association), but more to the point, these prospects aren’t even ready for it. When they visit your Web site, they’re likely still deciding whether to go forward with this at all.

For instance, consider The Rosenbaum Law Firm‘s blog. The firm helps companies with retirement plans, so they write about things like what to look for in hiring a retirement planner, tips for navigating the corporate politics associated with changing your company’s retirement plan, and so on—no legal advice, but plenty of valuable education for potential clients.

And here’s the thing: when you are the one providing people with this education, you’ll be building trust with them—the kind of trust that is instrumental in being hired.

Here’s what you need to do—your “action step,” if you will.

Make a list of the most common questions clients ask you, common points of confusion, or common mistakes. Also include any areas of apprehension where shedding a little light on the process might be valuable to your prospective clients.

If you’re short on ideas, set up a few client interviews for the coming week. Ask your best clients if they’d be willing to help make you a better attorney by sitting down with them over coffee. This will give you a chance to really get inside their heads—learning what they were concerned with when they hired you, and so on.

(If you can’t schedule interviews for some reason, pouring over your existing testimonials is a good alternative.)

Your client’s ideas here will form the bedrock of your content strategy (Step 3, later).

Why your ideal client should hire you—not your competition

At the same time you’re thinking about what you can provide your ideal clients—above & beyond legal counsel—consider why your clients hire you.

What is it about your firm or your services that makes them choose you instead of your competition?

Frankly, you probably have no idea—most attorneys (and most business owners in general) don’t know the answer to this question. Instead of spitballing some ideas, make this another part of the client interviews you’re scheduling. (Again, you can look through the reviews and testimonials you’ve accumulated if you absolutely can’t do interviews, but this won’t be nearly as powerful.)

When you’re listening to your clients’ thoughts on why they chose (and continue to choose) you over your competitors, pay attention to the words they use—those same words will connect with future prospective clients better than anything you can compose yourself.

Your clients’ answers here will inform every aspect of your messaging—they will shape the way you talk about your services, the way you describe your value to prospects, and so on. (Their answers also make great testimonials in themselves, so be sure to get permission to use them as such!)

What stages do people go through before becoming clients?

When Joe Normal first comes into contact with your firm—whether they meet an attorney in person or find your Web site—it’s unlikely that they’ll pick up the phone and schedule an appointment with you then & there.

What’s far more likely is that they’ll chat with you a bit (or, in the case of your Web site, poke around a little), maybe make a note to check back with you later, and then… what? Most likely, life will intervene and you’ll never hear from them again.

Unless, of course, you have a strategy in place for moving that person ever closer to becoming a client.

An in-your-face demand like “Call our office now!” will be ineffective this early in the game. Instead, you want to simply persuade them to take the next (tiny) step toward becoming a client.

Michael Port, author of Book Yourself Solid, imagines this journey of tiny steps as a spiral (the sales process “cycle”). The widest, outermost section of the spiral is where prospects first become aware of your firm in an impersonal way—your “first touch.” As prospects move successively closer to the center, they move closer to becoming a client because of the ever increasing relationship you have with them. When they reach the center, they become a client.

(Others visualize this process as a funnel, where you’re successively filtering out more people until all you’re left with are paying clients.)

Having a model for your own sales cycle “spiral” will help you create the marketing collateral—free content and other offers—that move people from each stage to the next. Each stage requires a little bit more commitment than the last, but that’s okay, because the prospect has a little bit stronger relationship with you than they did previously.

The stages of your spiral might look like this.

First contact—the prospect visits your Web site.
You get permission to follow-up via email.
The prospect engages with your follow-up and gets value out of it.
The prospect takes advantage of one of your value, low-barrier-to-entry offerings (such as a free consultation).
The person hires you for one of your core services.

That’s a relatively simplistic model—you could break many of those stages down further (and you should when it comes to your own business!).

What’s important, though, is that by having this model, you can begin to strategize about how you’ll get people to move to the next stage—and the smaller the stages, the easier it will be to come up with those strategies.

For instance, you might get people to Stage 1 (visiting your site) through:

advertising,
meeting them in person and handing them a business card,
connecting with them on social media,
writing blog posts that match common search phrases,
getting articles in the press,
staging a contest, etc.

(Any of the above could work for you, but you’ll probably find a small number that really appeal to you and your firm—who you are, and where your strengths lie.)

To get people to move from Stage 1 to Stage 2 in the above, you might offer people an educational email course based on the pages they visited on your site—many prospects would be happy to give you permission to email them in exchange for that course.

Regardless of the exact stages of the client sales cycle that you decide on, one thing should remain constant:

At some point in your sales cycle, you should be:

collecting the prospect’s contact information,
actively following up with them (most likely over email or a phone call—social media is awful for this!), and finally
converting them into clients.

To help you wrap your head around this, let’s look at a hypothetical law firm’s sales cycle.

StageAction we want the prospect to takeHow we will get them to take that action

1 Visit the Web site Articles on the Web site to attract search engine traffic, online ad campaigns

2 Sign up for an educational email course on “the 5 things you need to know before hiring a personal injury attorney” Offer a great, instant incentive for signing up on each Web page

3 Read the email course and develop rapport with our firm Use interesting or intriguing subject lines, write in a conversational way, encourage reader to respond to us directly with their thoughts or things we can help with

4 Solidify our great rapport Deliver something unexpected and valuable near the end of the course, like a free (print) book related to what they’re going through

5 Set up a free appointment to talk about hiring us Include a handwritten note with the book explaining why we think they should work with us, and email a few days after the book arrives offering 3 times we’re available for a free consult

6 Hire us for a core service At the free appointment, make it clear we’re available to help them now.

Now, imagine you were a prospective client—wouldn’t you be ready to hire them at the end of that cycle?!

Get your Web site in line.

Whew! If you’ve made it through the first major step in creating an effective online marketing strategy for your firm, take heart—it gets easier from here.

The next step is to overhaul your Web site. This is the center of your marketing universe—everything else, from articles you write, to posts on your social media sites, to emails you send will be aimed at bringing your reader back to the site.

For now, we’re just concerned with the main “marketing” part of the site—your home page, “About” page, and so on. (We’ll talk about your email/blogging/article-writing strategy later!)

Take a look at your messaging

The first thing to consider on your site is: does the messaging (the way you communicate what you do, who you help, etc.) match what you decided on in Step 1, when we were thinking about why people hire you, what value they derive from working with you, and so on?

The answer is almost certainly no—when you created your site initially, you were probably much more focused on you than on your ideal clients and their needs.

So, let’s fix that! Rewrite the key pages of your site to make sure they speak to what your clients need to hear. Wherever possible, use the exact language your clients used in your interviews—if that language made sense to a past ideal client, it will connect with ideal clients in the future as well.

Double-check that you have the basics covered.

Aside from the messaging, there are a few aspects of your Web site that we’ll want to make sure are in place before your marketing efforts really get underway.

At the bare minimum, your site needs to tell who you are as a firm, why you’re valuable to your clients, and how people can get in touch with you.

Your contact information (name, address, and phone number) should be easy to find—either prominently at the top of the page, or in the footer. (Bonus points if you also include a Google Maps view of your location.)

Other critical information for your site: areas of practice, attorney bios, and so on. This is all stuff you’ve probably already implemented, but we just want to be sure!

One other forehead-slapping mistake I see firms make is to have “under construction” pages. If you haven’t gotten around to creating a page yet… don’t create it! Any page that says “under construction” just tells the world “we’re amateurs!”

Not very professional looking. Don’t like the cheesy graphics.

— Respondent in a study on the effect of design on perceived credibility

Also, I’m sure I don’t need to say it, but I will anyway… if your site is ugly, if your design stinks, you need to get it taken care of before shifting your marketing into Drive. Studies show that 46.1% of consumers will make judgments about your credibility based on your site’s design… not good if you’re trying to persuade those people to hire you!

Remember… if you think your design stinks, your visitors do too.

Plan & implement your content strategy.

At this point, you should have a laser-targeted picture of your ideal client, and your Web site should be, for our purposes, good to go.

Now we’re going to dive in to your firm’s content strategy—your plan for creating content such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, or whatever else your prospective clients might be interested in—as a way of getting your prospects’ attention, making your law firm stand out in their minds, and starting a relationship that will ultimately lead to a sale.

Let’s face it—no one is seeking out your firm’s standard “brochure” Web site. Sure, if they meet your attorneys face-to-face, they might check you out online as well, but you don’t want your firm’s marketing plan to rely on your attorney’s “boots on the ground.”

Instead, you can create things that prospective clients will seek out—relevant, original, valuable information on the topics they’re concerned about.

In a sense, then, your firm’s content can act as under-the-radar marketing. In the last couple decades, people’s built-in marketing detectors have gotten much more sensitive—if a prospect thinks they’re being sold to, they’ll often simply leave your Web site (or change the channel, ignore your billboard, etc.).

But, people do still seek out great content—information, education, entertainment, whatever—and they always will. If your law firm can provide that, you’ll bring prospective clients to you, and they won’t have their “salesman” guard up… meaning you can talk to them like a human being.

Diving in: What should your firm create?

You already know all about your ideal clients, so it should be a breeze to decide what you’re going to create.

There are two components to this—your subject matter and your medium.

First, the subject matter. What could you write about? Here are a few ideas:

Answer common client questions. Your clients are undoubtedly confused about lots of aspects of what you do. They’ll probably find Q & A-style videos, articles, and blog posts to be quite valuable.
Address questions from Ask a Lawyer. This site is a wealth of ideas for topics you could cover on your own Web site, because all its questions come from people just like your prospective clients.One thing to consider in choosing topics here: prefer topics that have general relevance over super specific ones. For instance, if you were browsing the questions about accounting, you should prefer “I owe the IRS $80,000. Can I sue my accountant for malpractice?” over “For a trust (or an estate opened) in New York State, does the trustee (or PR) have to file accounting of the assets?“.
Debunk myths in your areas of practice. This one’s easy. You almost certainly talk to people all the time who have heard the craziest things “from a friend.” From myths about how you collect your fees to people who think they can handle their issues on their own, you probably have an endless supply of myths to “bust.”
Show “how the sausage is made.” Give readers a behind-the-scenes look at how you handle a case—from the research stage, all the way through signing papers or handling litigation. (Bonus points for having lots of pictures of the process.) This gives prospects an opportunity to get to know you, and to get comfortable with what it would be like to work with you.
Use Google’s Keyword Planner for inspiration (requires a free AdWords account). If all else fails, the Keyword Planner can take either keyword ideas you already have, or an analysis of your existing Web pages to generate a large number of possible topics for you to cover.

In any case, you want to focus on content that will be “evergreen.” That is, to get the most out of your marketing investment, the content you create should be just as valuable to your readers 3 or 5 years in the future as it is today. For that reason, I advise avoiding a content strategy that focuses heavily on news.

Now, what about the medium? Should you create blog posts, white papers, videos, or something else?

My advice: blog posts (however you want to refer to them—“articles,” “Q & A,” etc.) should form the bedrock of your firm’s content plan. Those posts are fantastic at getting attention in the search engines (that is, letting people know you exist!), and at beginning the trust-building process.

Blog posts, though, aren’t the best at selling. That’s why I recommend pairing them with educational email courses. The best way to do this is to have opt-in forms on your blog posts that are relevant to the content the person is reading.

For instance, if you have a post on, say, “the top 5 questions to ask your divorce attorney,” you might offer a free email course at the bottom of the post called “The complete guide to navigating your divorce.” Your visitors will find this very attractive—in my experience, about 30% of the people who read to the bottom of your post will sign up. From there, you can follow up with 6 to 8 emails over the next few weeks, educating them, building trust, and ultimately scheduling an appointment.

Email is simply the best way to move prospects through the middle-to-late stages of your sales cycle (as we discussed in Step 1 above).

So, bottom line: use blog posts and email courses as the core of your strategy. Over time, you can experiment with more content types if you like.

The question on everyone’s mind

Q: “How long should my articles/blog posts/videos be?”

A: Long enough to cover your topic. (Bet you didn’t see that coming!)

Seriously, though… you want the stuff you create to be “meaty” and definitive, a complete guide to the (narrow) topic you’ve chosen for this piece of content. Nobody gets value out of a post on what you had for breakfast, and nobody wants to waste their time reading a 200-word summary of the most important things to do in preparation for a lawsuit.

(For reference, the bulleted list above is is nearly 300 words.)

Your readers (and the search engines, incidentally) prefer content that is authoritative, that gives complete coverage of its topic. That almost always means written content longer than 1,000 words (there’s virtually no topic that you can do justice in less than 1,000 words), but it might go longer than that… even way longer.

(For reference, the average word count for pages in the top 10 results in Google is over 2,000 words. Just saying…)

At the end of the day, though, it’s all about the quality. People (and Google) want high-quality coverage of a topic—and high-quality pages are often long and in-depth.

When it comes to video, people’s attention spans are shorter—the 3 to 5 minute mark is usually optimal. Same goes for email. I’ve found that the emails people engage the most with take 5 minutes or less to read.

That means your content should be at most about 1200 words, with a goal of between 500 and 800 words. Using educational emails is just very different from a blog post—keep is short and sweet, and provide links to other content (preferably on your Web site) for a deeper look.

Plan out the next few months

At this point, take a half hour to brainstorm what you’ll be creating. I like to establish an “editorial calendar” 3 months at a time, and plan everything I’m going to create in that timeframe in advance.

As you’re thinking of topics and content ideas, make sure you have a clear idea of how each piece of content will contribute to reaching your goal—more visitors (“Is this something people are searching for?“) and a higher percentage of visitors becoming clients (“Is this something that will help establish me as an expert or trusted professional?“). Not all of your content will hit on both goals, but each should bring you closer to one.

Get creating!

From there, it’s time to actually create your content.

It’s very easy to be gung-ho at the start. I see people all the time who dive head-first into marketing via their blog. They crank out five or six posts the first month, but they get discouraged after that—in Month 2, there’s only one or two posts. By the time Month 3 rolls around, there’s tumbleweed rolling across the Web site.

Here’s the thing: this online marketing stuff is a marathon, not a sprint. The majority of my clients don’t see much in terms of results in the first couple months (that’s why the Marketing Automation for Law Firms program offers the first 3 months risk-free).

But! If you keep at it, things start to snowball. What was one kinda-sorta-interested prospective client the first month becomes three or four ready-to-go prospects in the third month—and things keep growing from there.

So do yourself a favor: commit to creating all the content in your 3-month plan, and see if, by the end of that time, you aren’t seeing the returns you want.

Test, improve, repeat.

After your first month or so of content has been released into the wild, it’s time to start iterating.

You want to become the Toyota of law firm marketing. Toyota’s success is can be largely attributed to their practice of kaizen (Japanese for “continuous improvement”).

Every day, every hour, Toyota engineers make tiny changes to the production system—sometimes to increase efficiency, sometimes to correct errors. After the new changes go into effect, they measure the results. If the changes resulted in a positive gain, those changes are standardized across the entire operation. If not, the idea was still worth trying out, and things go back to the way they were.

This same idea can apply to your marketing efforts.

In the first month, you had ideas about what content would attract visitors, what would build trust with them, and so on. You had some number of visitors to your site and some number of those signed up for an email course, became a client, and so on. (Note that you can measure all this on your site using Google Analytics.)

Now, your goal is to come up with ideas for how to improve this process. You might start with troubleshooting: Where did you not get the results you hoped for, or where did people fail to take the next step in your sales cycle?

Another type of improvement you can make is simply in efficiency. Where could you get more clients for the same amount of time spent? Did a few pieces of content produce the majority of your results?

When you find something that works, do it some more!

If you find that a blog post on a particular topic brought in a lot of good traffic, try writing about something else closely related. If you found that one particular medium (posts, videos, graphics, etc.) got a big response, double down on it.

(It always baffles me when I hear people say “Man, that one piece of content worked really well. What on earth could I do to get those kinds of results next month?”. My thought is… don’t reinvent the wheel!)

In any case, at this point, you can brainstorm ways to correct issues or increase efficiency, and modify the coming month’s plans accordingly.

At the end of next month, you’ll be able to see the effects of your efforts. This “test” won’t be statistically validated or 99%-confident or anything like that, but for our purposes, when combined with your gut instinct, it’s enough to give you a green light to “standardize” your change.

As time goes on, you’ll refine your process. You’ll know exactly how many posts/videos/etc. you need to create each month to get the amount of business you want. You’ll also be able to experiment with paid acquisition—buying ads in Google, for instance, to get more traffic.

Pour fuel on the fire.

That refined marketing plan of yours has benefits beyond just being efficient.

When you’ve gotten a laser-sharp focus on the type of content that drives business, you can kick it into overdrive.

Imagine you know that the 1500–2000 word blog posts you write on topics related to starting a business typically bring you one to two new clients. If those clients are each worth an average of $500 in profit to the firm, you can happily hire someone to write those posts for $250 each.

Congratulations! You’ve just built a marketing system that functions like a magic money machine. Put in $1, and it spits out $2.

I call this the “fuel on the fire” stage, because when you have a machine like that for your firm, it only makes sense to pump as much money into the machine as possible… so that you get the most money out of it.

All of that is only possible, though, when you’ve done everything right leading up to the “magic money machine” stage.

You have to begin with the end in mind, and really get to know your clients needs & desires. You have to get your Web site in line and ready to convert visitors into clients. You have to plan your content strategy out in advance, and be committed to implementing it. Then, you have to start practicing kaizen and improving that strategy as you go.

(With that in mind, the money machine doesn’t seem very magical, does it? Sounds more like a lot of careful planning & hard work!)

So, how about it? Have you gotten started yet? Drop me a line at tyler@conversioninsights.net (or leave a comment below) and let me know how things are going. Better yet, let me know your #1 challenge and I’ll see if I can help you solve it!

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No-BS strategies for getting more clients

If you’re ready to start getting more clients from your Web site—clients that don’t require hours of legwork on your part to bring in—sign up for our free email course, Supercharge Your Firm’s Lead Generation.

Then, over the course of the next couple weeks, we’ll show you the exact techniques we use to build a well-oiled marketing machine that brings in clients while you & your firm sleep.

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