If you have been in law for a long time, you may never have envisioned having to pay attention to digital marketing to help your practice grow. But the good news is, law firm marketing can benefit tremendously from digital marketing techniques, and there are many you can put into place yourself, without major investment.
The key to succeeding in digital law firm marketing is commitment and consistency. You shouldn’t try to tackle everything at once, because you may be overwhelmed. If you have never done any digital marketing, your first step will be to map out a strategy that’s reasonable for your level of time and resources.
Document a Content Marketing Strategy
A 2014 survey on digital content marketing found that companies that actually write down a content marketing strategy are more effective than those that either have a verbal-only strategy or no strategy at all. Documenting your content marketing strategy helps ensure that all participants are on the same page, so to speak, helps you to remember the tasks you set out for your team, and gives you a baseline document you can use to help you determine the effectiveness of the various digital marketing strategies you use. A documented strategy sets the tone and the pace.
Phase in Social Media Marketing
You might think writing a few Tweets per day, or updating your firm’s Facebook page is a trivial activity. However, consistency is essential for successful social media marketing. Too often, businesses start out with a blitz of social media content that they are unable to maintain, and this can detract from their brand. Quality is more important than quantity. Start small, perhaps on one social media site, ramp up your social media posts, and learn to use the site’s built-in analytics. Once you get into a consistent posting schedule and can use analytics to learn what is and isn’t effective, you can branch out to other social media platforms.
Ensure that mobile users can learn about your law firm on the go.
Ensure Mobile Friendliness
Digital marketing today must be mobile-friendly, particularly for local businesses like law firms. There are a number of ways to use mobile platforms for law firm marketing. You can develop a mobile website or an app, for example. People have mobile devices with them around the clock, so if you can reach people on their mobile devices, you have many more opportunities than if you rely solely on them finding your website on their desktop. Thirty-one percent of traffic to law websites is from mobile devices. You don’t want to ignore an audience of that size.
Blogging Can Benefit Law Firm Marketing Significantly
Blogging, like social media marketing, requires commitment. Fortunately, you can outsource blogging to ensure your blog has a steady drumbeat of fresh content. Again, quality trumps quantity, so don’t rush to add a lot of content to your blog without ensuring it is timely, relevant to your practice, and well written. Topics for law blogs can come from any number of places, including government statistics, news stories, and even popular culture. As your blog grows, so does your credibility as an authority source, something that will inspire confidence in those who hire your firm.
Non-Text Content Broadens Your Reach
Digital law firm marketing doesn’t have to consist solely of text content. Visual elements can take digital marketing to a higher level and make a measurable impact. You can add visual content in many ways, such as creating a video holiday card for your clients and business partners, creating captivating infographics (using free sites like piktochart), or hosting online webinars that you publicize on your blog and social media. If you create a YouTube channel for video content, create a Google+ profile as well to help boost your content in Google results.
Don’t be afraid of digital marketing for your law firm. With the ability to target audiences on social media and take your content to a potentially huge audience, digital is the future of law firm marketing. You need a defined strategy, commitment to maintaining it, and the ability to use web analytics to determine what works best.
