Your law firm’s marketing strategy must address several key areas to ensure success:
- Define your firm’s identity,
- Identify your target audience
- Outline the services and capabilities your firm offers
- Set SMART marketing goals
- Optimize your marketing channels
- Partner with a law firm marketing agency
Completing all of these steps methodically and strategically will strengthen your marketing efforts to outshine competitors, gain more clients, and further increase your business.
Let’s dive into the specifics on each point. When thinking about your marketing strategy, it’s important to know:
1.Who You Are (Define Your Law Firm)
Before you can create an effective, impactful marketing strategy for your law firm, you have to first be able to say with certainty who you are as a law firm to ideal clients in your service area. Otherwise, your audience will not be able to distinguish you from similar firms that focus on the same practice areas and serve the same types of clients. After all, if you and other members of your firm are unable to define who you are, you can’t expect your clients or target audience to be able to do so, too.
Regardless of the type(s) of law your firm specializes in, you have competition to outshine. Depending on the type(s) of law your firm specializes in, you are likely to have a ton of competition to outshine. Outshining your competition can feel like a daunting task, especially since your firm, for the most part, offers the exact same service as the other guys—legal counsel.
It’s challenging to promote your firm in a unique way that separates you from competing firms, especially if you do not have a clear definition of who you are. This makes it crucial to define your brand yourself so that audiences can identify your brand on your terms.
Branding Services to Define Your Law Firm’s Brand
Well-planned branding for your law firm can help establish a strong, recognizable identity that connects you to positive attributes like quality, trust, and expertise. It differentiates you from your competition and feeds your audience the traits you want them to associate with your firm.
Some key branding services your law firm can benefit from include:
- Logo Design—The color, font, and overall design of your logo should serve as a unique visual that exudes characteristics like professionalism, experience, and trustworthiness.
- Brand Style Guide—A style guide ensures that your branding elements are used consistently across all marketing collateral. The fonts and colors that appear in your logo should appear in your print pieces, digital designs, social media ads and posts, and more to create uniformity and cohesion across all your marketing channels.
- Brand Messaging—Your mission statement, vision statement, value propositions, and tagline should all work together to define who you are, how you are uniquely different from competing firms, and how you can serve potential clients better than other firms.
2. Who You Serve (Define Your Target Audience)
Once you have a detailed definition and understanding of your firm, it’s crucial to know who your target audience is. After all, in order to craft a strong, successful marketing strategy, you have to understand, in detail, the type(s) of clients you want to attract to your firm.
Defining your target audience may sound simple enough, but it requires a lot of thought to really zero in on those in your audience who are most likely to need your firm’s services and who you most want to serve. For example, if your firm practices family law, you may feel inclined to say your audience is anyone unhappily married, anyone with children, or anyone planning for marriage and seeking a prenup.
But there’s more to your desired client than that. Does your desired client have a certain level of income? Do they live in a specific part of your service area? Does their case involve complex finances that will require specialized legal skills in areas like property division?
The more specific you can be in defining your ideal client, the more tailored your marketing efforts can be to reach those audience members and convert them into clients.
Marketing Services to Define Your Client
When you know who you want to market to, you can strengthen your messages and optimize the marketing channels you use to reach the right people.
Some key marketing services to help you understand and define your target audience include:
- Focus Groups—Focus groups give you the opportunity to hear direct feedback about your firm from groups like current clients, former clients, and potential clients. They are more limited in size but open the door for people to bounce thoughts off each other and give you unexpected yet helpful feedback. The feedback each group provides can help you identify ways to shape your message and reach the people you want to be reaching.
- Surveys—Similar to focus groups, a survey lets you hear from the people you want to hear from, including current, former, or ideal clients. Surveys offer the opportunity to hear from a lot more people. Even though those surveyed do not have other participants to engage with and think deeper with, their responses to your prompts can help you understand more about the demographics and psychographics of your target audience for more optimized marketing.
3. What You Offer (Clarify Your Services and Capabilities)
When it comes to shaping your marketing strategy for your law firm, defining your services or capabilities is probably the easiest thing to address in your strategy. It can be challenging to define, with detail, who you are and who you serve, but you know exactly what services you can offer.
As we mentioned earlier, you could simply define your offerings as “legal counsel” for your clients, but you know that it’s more than that. If you’re in family law, it’s helping spouses, parents, children, guardians, and others in need of family law services achieve the most favorable outcomes possible. If you’re in criminal law, it’s defending a client’s innocence, lessening a client’s sentence, negotiating deals on behalf of a client, etc. If you’re in personal injury law, it’s helping those injured by others’ negligence get the compensation they need and deserve to move forward with life.
No matter what practice you’re in, knowing what you do and how you should tell your audience what you do are essential to optimizing your marketing strategy. As we said, it’s often the most straightforward aspect of the strategy for you to define.
4. What You Want (Shape Your Marking Goals)
Every marketing strategy should include a goal to strive for. A great way to start defining goals is to ask yourself, “Where do I want my firm to be in 12 months?” (Or however long you want your strategy to last.)
Maybe the answer is “a 20% increase in new clients served.” Or “A 20% increase in revenue.” Clearly define whatever your goals are that you want to achieve by the end of the strategy, and be sure they are each SMART:
- Specific—“Increase our client count” is a goal, but it’s not a specific one. “Increase our client count by 20%” is. It’s important for your goals to be specific because the more defined they are, the stronger your team’s effort will be to reach them.
- Measurable—You should be able to measure your goal and track the progress made toward reaching it. With a goal of “increasing sales by 20%,” you can measure your efforts along the way and see if you’re on track to reach or not.
- Attainable—Every goal should be challenging to accomplish but not impossible. A goal that is too far out there (let’s say, “Increase our client count by 150%”) will discourage you and your firm when you inevitably do not achieve your goal, regardless of how much effort you put in.
- Relevant—Every goal in your marketing plan should be relevant to your firm’s current needs to grow. “Buy new office chairs” may be a good internal goal to work on, but it’s definitely not relevant to include in your marketing strategy.
- Timely—Every goal should come with an end date for effective tracking, measuring, and evaluating. Planning to “increase clients by 20%” without an end date takes away the ability to measure the goal and assess progress. Plus, it can cause your team to continuously push the goal to the side because “we can work on it later.” But with an end date in place, your team can appropriately plan out their goal-related workload, check in on progress, and determine whether the goal was reached or not.
5. Where You Should Market (Optimize Your Marketing Channels)
So, you’ve defined who you are, who you serve, what you do, and what you want to achieve. With all that on paper, it’s time to address your marketing options to reach the right people. There are plenty of marketing channels to choose from and tons of directions you can take your strategy.
The marketing channels you incorporate into your strategy should coincide with the goals of your marketing strategy, and each channel should generally fit the audience you are aiming to target. For example, if your firm wants to earn more business from white-collar professionals or business-minded professionals, a decent portion of your strategy should focus on LinkedIn ads and profile management.
Before you can optimize your marketing channels, you have to know which ones you can and should pursue first:
- Digital Advertising—Digital ads, such as Google ads, Bing ads, YouTube ads, and geofencing ads, are all effective at reaching high-quality targets in your audience and boosting brand awareness, lead generation, and conversion.
- Social Media Advertising—Regardless of your practice area(s), chances are that your target audiences or their loved ones are on at least one social media platform, such as Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. By utilizing Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and LinkedIn ads, you can reach your targets right where they are, scrolling through their feeds.
- Social Media Management—In addition to ads on social media, regularly updating your page(s) with engaging, informative, conversation-starting content is a great way to reach audiences and add value to your online presence. It shows potential users that you care to engage with them right where they are, that you are active beyond your regular office work, and that you are here to help by producing beneficial, informative info related to your area(s) of practice.
- Email Marketing—Just about everyone has email, and email marketing is a simple and cost-effective way to reach those interested in hearing from you.
- Digital Content Marketing—From blog articles to infographics, reels, long-form videos for YouTube or your webpage, and more, your content can help educate your audience and establish your firm as a voice of authority in your areas of practice. This not only helps increase brand recognition but also boosts your efforts to improve SEO and strengthen your reputation among audiences.
- Listings and Reputation Management—Listing management ensures your audience receives the right information about your law firm whenever it appears in a search or on a relevant directory or platform. Associated with that is reputation management, where reviews, both good and bad, are monitored and addressed professionally and respectfully. Well-planned responses to both positive and negative reviews can speak volumes to potential clients considering your firm for their legal needs.
- Traditional Marketing—Print isn’t dead, and neither is traditional marketing. Through TV ads, radio ads, billboards, magazine ads, flyers, rack cards, and other types of print pieces, you can connect with your audience effectively and more tangibly, increasing brand recognition and encouraging conversions.
6. How You Should Market (Partner With a Team That Knows Law Firm Marketing)
Once it comes time to create your marketing strategy and put it to work, there is one definite way to ensure it is as optimized as possible, and that’s by partnering with a marketing agency that knows law firm marketing.
At M&R Marketing, we work with numerous law firms throughout Georgia to create highly effective, impactful marketing plans that are goal-oriented and well-optimized.
At M&R, our in-house team of digital strategists, designers, web developers, copywriters, and service experts are all:
- Full-service and fully engaged: We’re your firm’s innovative partner, offering comprehensive solutions in an ever-changing industry.
- Exceptionally creative: Our entire team has the capacity, experience, and drive to think outside of the box to reach your audience.
- Results-driven: We obtain a deep understanding of your brand and firm, create strategic solutions to meet your goals, follow best practices, track our progress, and pivot whenever necessary to optimize your marketing efforts further.
Create an Effective Marketing Strategy With Help From Your Law Firm Marketing Pros at M&R: 478-621-4491
M&R Marketing knows law firm marketing. With nearly 200 years of collective marketing experience under our belts and more than 17 years of experience serving clients like you, M&R is your source for impactful, effective marketing strategy creation and implementation. Rely on us for all forms of marketing, including:
- Branding
- Search engine marketing (SEM)
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Traditional advertising
- Photo and video marketing
- Marketing strategy creation
- Digital advertising
Are you ready to see how you can elevate your marketing for your law firm? Call 478-621-4491 to speak with one of our business development managers today!
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