Want to be highly effective at digital marketing? Stephen Covey advises that we should “begin with the end in mind.” This is great advice for law firms struggling with how to present themselves online. If you have never considered what your law firm marketing goals are, you should. Your goals should drive your entire digital marketing strategy.
Marketing is the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service. If you’re not marketing your legal services, you’re losing out on potential new clients and the revenue that comes with them.
What is worse than not marketing your services? Wasting time and money on a strategy that fails to reach your law firm marketing goals!
What Are Common Law Firm Marketing Goals?
Marketing goals in their simplest form are designed to generate income. In terms of attorney marketing goals, this equates to generating clients, a lawyer’s primary source of income.
Ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve with marketing. Common law firm marketing goals fall into categories like these:
- Establishing a focused brand;
- Developing your professional reputation;
- Growing your expertise and establishing yourself as a thought leader;
- Providing a community service;
- Building relationships with potential referral sources such as other attorneys; and
- Drawing in new business.
Goals like these are important for any law firm. Still, many firms never consider what they’re trying to achieve, and without goals, there’s no way to know whether you’re meeting your own mark. Don’t fall into the trap of throwing money at the issues without knowing whether your strategy will help you progress toward articulated goals.
Establishing Law Firm Marketing Goals around a Focused Brand
Establishing a focused brand, or expertise, is your opportunity to choose what you want to do. What kind of law do you want to practice? What kind of clients do you want to attract? Choose your practice specialization, and then develop your law firm brand and marketing plan, targeting your ideal clients in those areas.
Already getting plenty of divorce clients but want to shift toward more lucrative personal injury cases? Remember that you don’t have to market to every possible client. Instead, put your marketing spend toward the practice areas you want to nurture—those that are most lucrative or that you enjoy. As they say, “Choose a job that you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” Once you have focus, develop your law firm online marketing goals and content around that focused brand.
Develop Your Professional Reputation and Expertise
You’ve chosen your brand and worked hard to develop expertise in your desired practice areas. Now you need to let people know what you do and how well you do it.
Use your law firm digital marketing efforts to establish yourself as a go-to resource in your field. Online content is your opportunity to shine.
Your law firm digital marketing goals should include a variety of blogs, announcements, and highlights of your successes, including discussions of legal developments and news as well as common questions that arise in your desired practice areas.
Establishing law firm expertise in your brand should provide clarity as to why clients should hire your law firm. Your law firm’s online content should provide the answers to questions potential clients would typically seek. It should also demonstrate to other attorneys—potential referral sources—that your skills are top-notch.
Provide a Community Service
Many firms want to serve as true resources for their communities independently of their desire to build relationships that lead directly to new business. If this sounds like you, choose this as one of your firm’s marketing goals.
To meet this goal, build part of your content around topics of importance in your community. You might publish a series of FAQ resources, for example, or you might provide how-to guides for basic legal processes that are often handled on a DIY basis. And, of course, volunteer for leadership and frontline roles in community service organizations that are important to you. Many nonprofit organizations welcome licensed attorneys into leadership positions.
Build Relationships with Other Attorneys
If you publish regularly online and do it well, you will begin to develop relationships with others, including attorneys and other potential referral sources.
Building relationships with other attorneys is essential to developing expertise in your brand. Your law firm marketing goals should include deepening ties with lawyers and other professionals such as accountants, financial planners, and others who have natural horizontal relationships with your practice areas. Why? Because developing relationships with other professionals serves these important marketing goals:
- Networking is crucial for meeting your attorney-to-attorney marketing goals.
- Sharing your expertise with others in the legal field allows for greater referral resources and strategic marketing.
- Developing these two-way relationships gives your firm the opportunity to cross-market with other attorneys and professionals.
Use Your Law Firm Online Marketing Strategy to Draw in New Business
Drawing in new business is at the heart of most firms’ marketing goals, and this is typically done by enhancing your online visibility.
Increasingly, people are turning to the Internet not just to check out lawyers before making a final hiring decision but also to find them. This often happens when potential clients conduct searches about a specific legal topic or about a lawyer who practices in a certain geographical area.
If you want to be found online, it’s imperative that you build useful content that is structured to be found by Google and other search engines and that is relevant to user inquiries. Aside from using paid ads, the only way a person will find your firm online is if your result shows up in their online search engine result preview page.
How Can I Reach My Law Firm Marketing Goals?
Many attorneys find it difficult to step into the proverbial shoes of potential clients. It’s hard to step back and imagine how people search online and what’s important to them.
The truth is that you can develop pristine content, make announcements, or draft blogs, but if you are doing all of this without knowing what potential clients are trying to find, you’re flying blind.
Fortunately, search engine optimization (SEO) can help. Part of what SEO specialists do is begin with the end in mind: determine what people want before you create content, which is vital to getting potential new clients to your website. And once they are there, accurate, relevant content keeps them there to learn about you and your firm. Both SEO and great content are necessary for turning potential new clients into existing clients and thereby achieving your law firm marketing goals.
At TOPDOG Legal Marketing, we help attorneys identify and reach their law firm marketing goals. We can help you optimize the content that’s already on your website or create new content based on proven SEO strategies. Contact us today to get started on your firm’s premium content marketing plan: (844) HEY-TDOG (439-8364) or (480) 744-7331.
