Do you go directly to your clients with your offers, or do you prefer they come to you instead?
The latter is known as inbound marketing, and it's an excellent method for lawyers to use to build their client base. When your marketing attracts and engages your potential clients, they come to you informed and ready for your legal help.
There are several different inbound marketing tactics your firm can try. Here are some of the best ones you could add to your attorney marketing plan.
What is Inbound Marketing?
With inbound marketing, a business creates content that builds relationships with potential clients. They do so by providing valuable, targeted content for that audience. This approach can be very helpful for attorney marketing.
High-quality content that addresses potential clients' needs helps your audience develop trust in you. This enables you to nurture them through your lawyer marketing funnel. When done right, they come to you when they’re ready to hire someone for legal help.
Outbound marketing involves your company initiating a conversation with a prospect. You bring the offer to that audience. Inbound leads can cost as much as 62% less than outbound ones, too.
Inbound marketing is attractive for lawyers because they have fewer outbound options. Other businesses can do things like cold calling, while lawyers cannot.
The 3 Stages of Inbound Marketing
There are three main inbound marketing stages or goals to reach your target audience:
HubSpot refers to these as the "inbound marketing flywheel."
Your law firm's inbound marketing efforts attract and engage your followers. Some of them convert into customers, at which point it's your job to delight them after they hire you. After delivering a good experience, those clients are more likely to refer you or return. These former customers become promoters.
It might seem like these three stages map directly to the law firm marketing funnel. Your marketing flywheel is about the end-to-end process of converting a client and providing a good experience.
Your marketing funnel addresses the steps it takes for someone to find you, build trust with you, and learn enough to make a hiring decision. They make this decision at the end of a funnel, whereas your marketing flywheel carries through to the service delivery.
Inbound Marketing Tactics for Lawyers
There are several ways a law firm can use inbound marketing to attract new clients. Regardless of which options listed below you select, you need a website. This is true even if your primary channel for potential clients is social media.
Your website is owned and managed entirely by you. It's the central place for your target audience to learn more about you and reach out to you for consultations.
Social media platforms, for example, control what's allowed on their sites. Their algorithms also determine the factors that influence whether your target audience sees your posts or not.
You can optimize your law firm website with great content and maintain control over how that is published.
You can build your website traffic by using search engine optimization. These pages send specific signals to search engines while also addressing your potential readers' key queries and concerns. An optimized website accomplishes both, which means you can capture leads and work on converting these followers into clients.
Multiple tactics allow you to build your online presence and reach your new clients through inbound marketing. Once you have your website built and ready to accept inbound leads, use the tactics below to attract and engage your followers so they convert.
1. Blogging
Readers turn to blogs to solve their problems and answer questions. With law firm blogging, you can also share your unique value perspective as a firm while also talking about important subjects, questions, and myths related to your practice areas.
Creating informative, well-written, keyword-researched blog posts can attract your target clients to your site, help solve their problems, and build their trust in you and your legal services.
Start with keyword research for law firm blogs. This helps you understand what content people are already searching for so you can align that with your editorial calendar. Keyword research ensures people can find your content, and then you write with engagement in mind.
Blog posts that attract, engage, and convert take into account:
- Client needs
- Pain points
- Where this reader is at in their marketing funnel journey
When you write a good blog, your target reader connects with you on a deeper level. When you know their questions and concerns and match that with their awareness level of their problem and your solution, this increases the chances of conversion.
2. SEO-Optimized Service Pages
The content on your law firm website isn’t limited to blogs. Practice area and service pages are another important component.
Your service pages are usually keyword-driven explanations of your various practice area case types.
These pages are used to market to potential clients at the bottom of the funnel. These go hand in hand with blogging and may be linked directly to your blogs. For lawyers, service pages break down the typical process, issues involved, and questions from a potential client.
A personal injury lawyer might have service pages like:
- Dog bite injuries
- Medical malpractice
- Car accidents
- Truck accidents
- Bicycle accidents
- Slip and fall accidents
Writing and publishing these posts is only half the battle. People also need to be able to find these pages. Search engine optimization can help you make sure that the service pages not only answer people’s needs but also rank on search engines like Google.
3. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing for law firms can help you meet your clients where they spend time online.
With your blog posts and practice area pages, you're relying entirely on the client coming to your website.
That’s great for people who are actively searching for your services. It’s not so great for people at the very top of the marketing funnel. They may not yet be aware they have a problem or that their problem is solvable.
With social media, you bring the message to your clients. On social, it's best practice to post fun or informative content that your ideal client connects with rather than a hard sell on your services.
If you're interested in setting up social media profiles to reach new legal clients, you can check out our guides for different platforms, including:
4. Video Marketing
Video marketing allows you to connect with people in your audience who would rather view than read. If you like being on camera and resonate well with people when you meet them in person, video marketing could help you connect with your audience effectively.
Look at this law firm TikTok video for an example of how to market yourself as an attorney just by telling a story or explaining something without soliciting your services.
You can use other content from your online marketing and repurpose it into video and vice versa to get maximum mileage out of everything you create, too.
5. Podcasting
Podcasting can be a great way to market to prospective clients and can be used as fuel for your other digital marketing efforts. Podcasting is not suitable for every law firm because of the time-consuming nature of creating and publishing a podcast. It can be ideal when you have a target audience of potential listeners in your local area.
Starting a legal podcast is a good avenue for marketing to potential referral sources instead of clients, too.
6. Testimonials and Case Studies
Testimonials and case studies help you demonstrate your ability to help people who are exactly like your target audience.
People trust others who are just like them, and the power of word of mouth can drive business your way and even lead to repeatable referral endorsements. What you say about yourself is good for marketing your law firm, but it's even more likely to resonate when those same ideas come from satisfied clients.
When you get a testimonial from a client, distribute it as widely as possible. They can be repurposed into outbound advertising or organic social posts for inbound marketing, too.
7. Ads Focused on Demand Generation or Awareness
Not all ads you place are outbound marketing; what matters is the intention behind your ads. Brand ads, awareness campaigns, and more can qualify as inbound advertising. With outbound marketing, you're directly trying to make a sale to someone of a service or product.
Using inbound, you're educating and entertaining instead to build trust with the viewer. You can take the same approach with your ads. As an example, view the TikTok video mentioned above. You could take this video and turn it into an ad shared on social media.
8. Newsletters
While email newsletters are not always the best for marketing to law firm prospects, they can be useful for staying top of mind with previous clients and referral partners. Make sure that a newsletter fits well into your overall law firm marketing strategy before committing to the work and expense of sending one.
Getting Started with Inbound Marketing
There are many options for you to leverage in a law firm for inbound marketing (including some often overlooked ones). Together, these should all advance you toward your marketing goals. Using a website as the cornerstone of your marketing plan is key for drawing in traffic and making an impression with potential clients.
If you need help with a high-performing website and SEO strategy, look no further than our team here at Rankings.io. We've built our reputation on delivering quality content marketing strategies specifically for the legal industry. Contact us today, and let's get your inbound marketing efforts off the ground.
