Regardless of your business, a strategic marketing plan is crucial to increase visibility and foster growth. For law firms, it's even more critical. Legal services are not in constant demand, so it’s essential for legal firms to reach potential clients at the right time and place. This blog offers an in-depth look at law firm marketing plans that work, even providing concrete PDF examples that you can emulate and apply in your practice.
A marketing plan is your law firm's roadmap, indicating how you will reach and connect with potential clients.
When you invest time in creating a comprehensive marketing plan, it aligns with market trends, speaks to your target audience, and differentiates your services in this highly competitive industry. Being specific about your firm's objectives, KPIs, target audience, channels of engagement, marketing budget, and implementation resources will set the stage for a well-executed marketing plan, positioning your law firm for success.
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Injury Lawyer Marketing Plan:
Family Lawyer Marketing Plan:
DUI Lawyer Marketing Plan:
Business Plan vs. Marketing Plan
Lawyers should have both a business plan and a marketing plan.
The business plan is the big-picture document and strategy outlining several key components of how the company will function. This is typically broken down into seven sections:
- An executive summary
- A description of the firm
- Market analysis
- Organization and management of the firm
- Services offered
- Marketing plan
- Financial projections
A marketing plan is a physical document and a smaller component of a complete business plan, but it can also be pulled out and used as a separate document.
In some cases, the marketing plan provided in an initial business plan might be a condensed version of the living marketing plan the firm uses on a regular basis. In order to achieve growth, legal marketing requires thinking strategically about what goals the firm wants to use and how the firm will pursue those goals through various initiatives.
A law firm's marketing plan should clearly answer four questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- How do you position yourself in that audience?
- What are you going to sell?
- How will you tell you’ve hit your goals?
A legal marketing plan should always answer these questions. However, the answers will differ based on the approach, region, and practice areas.
Law Firm Marketing: Strategies vs. Plans
Marketing strategy and a marketing plan are two terms that are often used interchangeably yet represent different aspects of your marketing journey.
Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy defines your firm's overarching approach and direction toward achieving long-term goals.
Your law firm marketing strategy is your compass, founded on an understanding of your firm’s strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the market (SWOT analysis), and a clear depiction of your target audience. It's your broad vision statement that answers the 'why,' providing a long-term focus driving all marketing efforts.
Marketing Plan
In contrast, a marketing plan outlines the 'how.'
It is a detailed action plan that elaborates on the specific marketing activities your law firm will undertake to achieve its strategic goals. It explains what marketing channels will be utilized, when and how these activities will happen, who will be responsible, and how much budget will be allocated for each activity.
Your strategic marketing goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Examples of such goals may include growing your client base by a certain percentage, increasing website traffic, or improving client retention rates. Remember, your marketing strategy is a dynamic, evolving plan that should be revisited regularly to ensure that it remains aligned with your firm's objectives and the ever-changing marketing landscape.
While a marketing strategy sets the direction for your marketing endeavors, the marketing plan provides the roadmap to get there, detailing the specific steps that your law firm will follow to make that strategy a reality. Understanding this distinction will enable you to approach your marketing efforts more methodically, ensuring a cohesive, coordinated approach to growing your practice.
Essential Steps to Build an Attorney Marketing Plan
Creating an attorney marketing plan involves finding the answers to the four questions mentioned above.
It requires defining your target audience, finding the best marketing channels to connect with them, setting price points and budgets, and setting goals that you can measure against.
1. Define Your Target Audience
Regardless of your practice area, your potential client is not “everyone who might need business services” or “people thinking about divorce.”
Instead, you need to dig deeper to understand who you’re marketing to. This will help you establish every other aspect of your marketing plan, so it cannot be overlooked or left too general.
If you’re unsure how to start defining your potential clients, look at past and current clients to understand how they found and chose you.
Note that the words your clients use to describe your marketing, the firm’s unique aspects, and what they liked most about working with you might not be the same things you’d use to describe your firm.
Listen to your former clients, and when you hear a repeated theme, incorporate that into your messaging.
If you’re a new business or are pivoting away from past services into something new, you’ll need to hit the drawing board to determine your positioning. Find gaps in the market to stand out from your competition.
Additionally, think about the geographic scope of your ideal clients. Do you serve one large metropolitan area or several smaller locations with an emphasis on hyper-local SEO?
Create Your Unique Value Proposition
Once you know the gaps in the market, use this to inform your value proposition and an elevator pitch that explains what you do and who you do it for succinctly:
Your value proposition is what makes you different from other law firms providing similar services.
- Example: personalized service
- Example: Willingness to take on complex cases
A quick elevator pitch makes it clear who you serve.
Use this formula:
I help [Insert client type here] achieve [insert outcomes] through [insert firm value proposition].
Example: I help new startup founders protect their intellectual property through comprehensive IP legal strategies.
2. Find the Best Marketing Channels
Whether you’re making short-form content for social media marketing, investing in law firm SEO tactics, setting up your Google My Business page, or participating in marketing activities with local bar associations, you need to spend your time and money in those situations when you’re most likely to connect with your prospective clients (or ideal referral sources).
The most popular channels to call out in an attorney marketing plan are:
Don’t just select a channel because you know your competition is thriving there. What works for one firm in one market or practice area doesn’t always work as well for another. Make data-driven decisions about why you suspect a particular channel will work for your marketing, and then be sure to set goals so you can check in on those efforts.
3. Establish Price Points & Budget
This budget can include ad spending, pay for marketing department employees and contractors, and all other marketing-related expenses.
When setting a budget, it’s also helpful to create metrics like “customer acquisition cost” (CAC) and “cost per conversion.”
Since the cost of acquiring a new follower, intake caller, or email subscriber is not necessarily the same as the cost of acquiring a brand-new client, calculate both numbers. This can help you adjust your budget.
When thinking about your marketing budget, list out:
- All expected monthly spend items, including those that might increase at certain periods or scale up throughout the year
- One-time costs, such as sponsoring dinners, annual gifts for referral sources, specific ad placements, or special events
- Investments in marketing have additional costs, such as events when a firm owner or other lawyers have to dedicate a great deal of their time (like networking events).
4. Determine How You’ll Measure Results
Running a successful marketing campaign requires setting goals and measuring against them. Too many lawyers say things like, “I’m not getting as many clients as I want,” or “it feels like we’re throwing spaghetti at the wall” because they haven’t defined what success looks like.
With vague goals like “get more clients,” there’s no way to tell for sure whether a marketing tactic or channel is working or not. When these tasks are handed off to a firm's marketing director, the goals should always be clearly outlined and documented.
Some key performance indicators to track include:
- Website traffic
- Leads from ad spend
- Traffic visits to calls
- Intake calls to signed clients
- Average fees per client
- Number of referrals sent per referral source
- Number of client reviews on places like Avvo or a firm Facebook page
Together, these data points can help lawyers evaluate how marketing efforts are working so that adjustments can be made as needed to both tactics and budget.
Elements of a Marketing Plan
A marketing plan is more than just what you hope to do to get more clients. Sadly, too many marketing strategies look like that (if they exist at all).
A marketing plan is the documented strategy for how your team will execute your goals over a specific period.
A good marketing strategy that helps you grow your law firm should include multiple elements, including:
- Executive Summary
- Mission Statement
- Marketing Objectives
- Standards of Performance
- SWOT Analysis
- Market Research
- Market Strategy
- Budget
1. Executive Summary
An executive summary for a law firm marketing plan or a business plan includes an overview of how you'll reach your target clients and drive conversions from that audience.
To achieve this, you must know who your target audience is, and the answer can't be a generic or broad one like “people who need a child custody lawyer.”
Within each practice area, there are many potential types of clients. Recognizing who you serve along that spectrum is vital for communicating to this audience and showcasing that you're the right firm for them. Consider the example above. A broad range of people need a child custody lawyer, but all have different backgrounds, such as:
- A parent moving out of state who wants to protect their rights to visitation
- A parent who wants to resolve things in mediation outside of court
- A parent going through a second divorce who lost custody the first time
- A parent with limited resources
- A parent who has been the victim of domestic violence
All those parents bring different perspectives and beliefs about what is most important when hiring a family lawyer. Make sure you know exactly who you're talking to, as this will impact not just the executive summary but the entirety of your law firm marketing strategy.
An executive summary section of your marketing plan should include:
- A description of your law firm and team
- An overview of market factors and trends in your industry
- An explanation of your customer base
- A brief statement of your financial planning for marketing
- A summary of your overall goals and objectives
- A brief statement of your law firm's strategic planning
See the examples below for more inspiration for your law firm.
2. Mission Statement
The mission statement of your law firm breaks down into three simple concepts:
- The purpose of your law firm
- What are you bringing to the table for your clients
- How do you achieve outcomes for your clients
One common mistake in drafting a law firm's mission statement is focusing too much on the firm's future instead of clients. A mission statement is client-specific.
As you brainstorm what to include in your mission statement, ask these questions:
- Why was I motivated to start or join this practice?
- What do we want our clients to experience and feel in working with us?
- What do we do beyond practicing law that makes us an optimal choice over our competitors?
3. Marketing Objectives
Marketing objectives are simply the outcomes your law firm wants to see from your marketing activities. Marketing objectives are different from marketing goals, but these two terms are often confused and improperly used interchangeably.
A marketing goal is a broad target you hope to hit, but a marketing objective is a specific short-term goal. Multiple objectives might be hit in the process of achieving one marketing goal.
Perhaps your marketing goal for the upcoming year is to increase new cases. The specific marketing objective to accomplish that might be to double down on your attorney SEO efforts to bring in five more new qualified cases per month in the next quarter.
You might shift objectives over the coming year, but all can be related to your underlying goal of acquiring more new cases.
4. Standards of Performance (KPIs)
Key performance indicators are the metrics you regularly measure to determine if you're meeting the objectives of your marketing strategy.
Focus on Fewer, Concentrated Goals
It's easy to go KPI crazy and track dozens of numbers, but resist the urge. It's far better to focus on a few core KPIs to track back to your marketing objectives.
Imagine, for example, that you're an estate planning law firm providing weekly email newsletters to prospective clients. Your email series of financial and retirement planning tips takes a lot of team time but gets good results in terms of driving planning strategy sessions booked. But that's decreased as of late because people aren't opening the emails. So, you set a goal to boost your email newsletter open rates for this quarter.
Likewise, a personal injury law firm might have a great referral network but sees potential in a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign that drives organic leads from the internet to their office for initial consults.
Use the Data to Make Decisions
A KPI to track that is the number of calls or intake contact form requests in which the user says they found the law firm online. Tracking this data helps the law firm make sure they're putting the right budget and emphasis on revenue drivers. This doesn't mean they forget their referral network, either, but instead focus on a KPI to help bring in additional cases, so the firm isn't entirely reliant on referral partners.
Stay Flexible
KPIs can always be changed, especially as you learn more about return on investment. Note that you can track many in your law firm, but you need to choose the ones most relevant to your overall online marketing goals.
Here are some common law firm KPIs:
- Traffic to your law firm's website
- Number of pages ranking on the first page of Google
- Landing page conversions
- Potential client calls vs. actual clients per month
- Average fees per client
- Client retention rates
5. SWOT Analysis
Drafting a SWOT analysis is the preliminary work for crafting the market research section of your strategy.
By looking at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT), you'll be better positioned to stand out from your competition.
Here are some questions to consider as you walk through your law firm's SWOT analysis:
- What do we do better than other law firms?
- What do clients say about us when we wrap up their cases?
- What feedback do we receive about what we could do better?
- What kinds of feedback do our competitors receive in online reviews in places like Google My Business or Avvo?
- How can we compensate for or overcome challenges?
- What modifications could we make to our legal services to better position ourselves? (I.e., offer flat fees or sliding scale pricing for DUI matters or simple divorces)
- What actions could threaten our standing in the market?
6. Market Research
Knowing who else is out there is important for defining what makes you unique. You don't want to or need to copy your competitors, but understanding the landscape and looking for gaps is helpful.
Recognizing legal marketing trends is also crucial for determining the best ways to stand out from other firms and capture the attention of more potential clients — especially in your content marketing and ad copy.
In this section of your marketing plan, consider your biggest competition and what they're doing well and what they're not doing well. This section can also be divided into three subsections.
This should include:
- An overview of your industry
- A competitive analysis
- A definition of your client persona/target market
There's no shortage of competition in any one practice area within the law. But no matter your practice area, other firms are out there snagging cases that could have been yours. Use the intel you gather during this phase to consider how you can beat these competitors or adopt a different marketing strategy to accomplish your goals.
For example, maybe the cost of PPC ads is sky-high in your area because the bigger personal injury law firms dedicate significant budgets to play there. If you'd rather make an organic play with content marketing, you can capture the traffic for some of those keywords with a great strategy in place. As a bonus, many readers trust organic search engine results more than ads anyway. This is an example of how looking at your competitors can help you develop a strategy that taps into market gaps.
7. Market Strategy
Your market strategy should cover each of the four Ps:
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
As you draft this section of your plan, the four Ps make up the “marketing mix.” Consider these questions as you write:
- What services do we offer? Are they defined clearly rather than generally?
- How do we charge for our services, and what do we charge (such as hourly retainer vs. flat fee divorce)?
- What region do we serve? Where do most of our clients come from?
- Which marketing channels do we think will best connect with our clients?
- What advertising and public relations tactics have worked best for us, or do we think will work the best for us?
As you consider these questions, think about how they might intersect with search engine optimization to improve your firm’s website to increase its visibility in search engine results for queries related to your services. The higher you appear in search engine rankings, the more likely it is that potential clients will visit your law firm's website and contact you.
You might also consider the role of social media marketing when figuring out which marketing channels are best suited to reaching your ideal potential clients.
Finally, considering how past clients have found you and what through mediums those interactions and conversions took place can lead to valuable insights.
8. Budget
You've got to know what you're willing to spend in order to achieve your marketing objectives. It's easy to create a long list of marketing objectives you'd like to achieve, but these efforts will likely fail if you're not ready to commit to the budget needed.
This is one of the most complex parts of a marketing plan to write because it's where the rubber meets the road. If you've overshot your marketing budget and realize you don't have the resources to execute well on all of them, you might have to revisit your objectives and KPIs. So, at this stage, go back and review all the other sections of your marketing plan with a fresh set of eyes.
Most law firms commit between 2-19% of their annual revenue toward marketing expenses. Start with 5% and total up all the potential costs. If you've got a mismatch, you need to either eliminate some marketing activities or scale up your budget to meet these priorities.
Ask yourself:
- Which activities are most likely to drive the outcomes we've outlined as most important to the firm?
- Which activities are ones we're still interested in but might need to be tabled for a few months and revisited as secondary priorities?
- What non-monetary contributions (team time, learning curve, etc.) should I consider as I evaluate these marketing activities?
Remember, your budget should include:
- Software/programs needed to execute (like an Ahrefs or SEMRush subscription to track keyword rankings)
- Outside expert fees, such as a consultant's retainer
- Actual ad spend (such as PPC, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads)
Create and Implement Your Law Firm Marketing Plan Today
Successful law firm marketing requires attention to many different details. Documenting your business goals and the methods you plan to use to accomplish them can greatly increase your chances of success. Strategies for law firms should always include every element of an effective marketing plan.
If you have already created a law firm marketing plan with a strong focus on SEO, know that you don’t have to do it alone. Rankings.io is a law firm marketing agency dedicated to elevating your law firm's brand and maximizing your potential. More than that, we're here to do the heavy lifting for your law firm SEO strategy so you can focus on serving your clients. Contact us today for a consultation about your next steps.
