Top Practices To Boost Your Law Firm Leads

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1 Top Practices To Boost Your Law Firm Leads

2 Boost Your Leads It doesn t matter the legal field you specialize in personal injury, bankruptcy, real estate, family law you probably don t have the time to focus on clients, the daily operations of your practice, and grow your business at the same time. To maintain a local business, you continually need to search for new business leads while still providing the best service to your clients and still find some time to sleep at night. This guide is here to help you boost your online lead generation with simple-to-execute solutions and best practices. The Digital Lead Like any other business today, law firms are expanding their advertising efforts to include online media. Potential clients are searching with comfort, and enjoy the anonymity, as they seek information on who offers the right legal representation for them. We can t emphasize this enough: Your future clients are online, searching for local law firms. So how do you connect with them? What are the most cost-effective services to reach new leads online? And what are the best practices, and what are the easiest solutions you can add to your current advertising efforts? The Top 4 Cost-Effective Digital Solutions SEO PPC/Paid Media Mobile Social Media 2

3 SEO #1 Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page on search engine sites like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. This process refers to the un-paid or organic search results that return automatically when someone enters a search query like: local law firms or best rated lawyers. The higher ranked on the search results page your website is, and the more frequently it appears in a search result list, the more visitors you attract. This means if your business is returning in relevant searches, more leads will visit your site and connect to your business. According to Google, 34,000 searches are preformed every second on their site alone, and 75 percent of Internet users never scroll past the first page! - HubSpot, 2012 As a strategy, SEO takes account for how search engines crawl for relevant content. Google, for example, scans website looking for the actual terms or keywords people typed into the search bar, focusing on the most relevant and recent information it finds. Currently, one of the most important ways to rank highly on the search engine results page is to provide relevant, steady content on your website that connects to key terms. This is done effectively by maintaining a blog featuring those terms or updating your site with new information. However, this is only one part of moving a website up the search engine ladder. Increasing SEO ranking can be extremely difficult to manipulate for the average Internet user and requires more time than the average business owner has available after a day full of regular business operations. It requires constant upkeep and someone must also monitor changes created by the popular search engines to make sure the strategy keeps working. The amount of technical knowledge necessary for an optimized SEO strategy is not a one-time learning experience. However, SEO targets clients who are searching locally and for your specialized practice. It is the number one lead generation tool online. It s a competitive solution that a digital marketing agency can manage cost effectively with easy to illustrate return on investment. 3

4 #2 PAID MEDIA PPC (Pay-Per-Click) and paid media strategies involve placing targeted text, image, video, and mobile ads on search engines, social networking sites and web pages to drive people to your business. These ads generate leads and direct traffic to your landing pages and website by targeting specific, relevant search terms and audiences associated with your business. Paid search and social media advertisements are designed to highlight your most sought-after services and special offers, by directing ideal clients to these features. It s highly adaptable and an immediate way to get your practice to the forefront of clients. For example, a family law practice may opt to focus a campaign on terms like custody or divorce while a firm specializing in bankruptcy aid may opt to focus on terms such as mortgage or refinancing. According to emarketer, a research and analysis company, 40 percent of Internet users click on paid links that appear on the top and right side of search engine pages. Integrating Paid Media into any advertising gives you the benefits of an SEO campaign, but with easier execution. Paid Media also provides a user-friendly platform and up-to-the-minute analytics of your campaigns. Customizable options and the ability to adapt new offers or adjust the advertisements are additional benefits. Paid Media has a higher level of versatility for people who may not be able to compete with SEO experts. However, it does boost your organic search results, allowing you to compete alongside them. Further benefits can be seen when combining a Paid Media campaign with a SEO campaign, ensuring new and current clients connect to your law firm when they seek legal information online. 4

5 MOBILE #3 We live in an increasingly mobile world. According to KPCB s Internet Trends 2013 report, mobile traffic now accounts for 15% of all Internet traffic. Mobile Marketing strategies reach local client prospects when they search while away from the casual desktop computer environment. Mobile users include the casual Internet browser, but also the person looking for immediate results the person who needs directions, who wants reviews of the restaurant they re considering, or the number of the law firm they were just recommended by a friend or colleague. People won t always remember a business name by the time they get home. That s why it is now more important than ever to make sure your practice is available on mobile devices by optimizing your website, claiming and updating your contact information on map sites such as Google, and making sure you have single click contact options within your site. So, when clients locate you on their smartphone or tablet, they can contact and find you immediately. The increase of smart phones, tablets, and mobile devices also makes mobile marketing a necessity for any local business. According to JiWire, a mobile insights company, 80 percent of mobile users prefer locally relevant advertising. Mobile ads not only effectively drive leads, but they re an affordable way to reach local clients. Furthermore when those relevant client leads land on your site while on their mobile devices, it is important you offer them an engaging, optimized experience. Everyone with a smartphone has gone to a site where they can barely read the font, hyperlinks are impossible to activate, or phone numbers lack a click-to-call feature. Optimizing your site for mobile is an easy way to avoid losing clients due to a bad mobile experience. It also helps you beat your competition. According to Latitude s Next Gen Retail Study, 61% of consumers have a more favorable opinion of brands when they offer a good mobile experience. With the fast, immediate, and locally relevant results, mobile marketing is quickly moving up the list of the most valuable digital marketing services for businesses to engage. 5

6 #4 SOCIAL Your current and future clients are using Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms. These adults are actively sharing information about their lives including information that can be used to market and advertise your services in a direct, timely, and relevant way. Social media is both a listening tool that offers insights about client needs and interests, and also a valuable platform to reach them with advertising. Furthermore, it helps build a positive reputation for your business by offering an contact point where many clients are sharing information about their lives and engaging businesses they trust. A Pew Research poll in 2011 found that 65% of adults in the United States are currently active on at least one social network such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Social media provides businesses the opportunity to advertise services directly to individuals whose online activity indicates that they may be in-need or interested in that business. For example, a persona marketing campaign can allow a law firm to promote its services to a key client audience based on thoroughly researched demographic information. Ads can then drive those locally targeted individuals to a custom social landing page where they can learn more about your legal expertise. Whether you are looking for additional participants in a class action lawsuit or can help someone navigate taking out a second mortgage, social media provides you with an excellent platform to find and reach local clients. While advertising your services on social networks is a vital tool in attracting new clients to your business, social media provides attorneys so much more. Social media is where people tell their friends and family about their lives and the things they love. According to the online magazine Tech Crunch, Twitter users now send more than 340 million tweets each day. Through active social listening, business can see who in their community, or across the country, are in need of their services. This also allows businesses like your law firm to better hone what they offer and advertise more effectively. 6

7 Best Online Practices The most valuable effort online is to ensure you are visible and easily found by the client who is searching for your business. Your efforts must be targeted and locally relevant. They have to not only direct a potential client to call or you, but each one of your approaches must be analyzed so you understand the value of the media you re investing in. Know Your Campaigns Effectiveness Digital marketing and advertising services allow you to look deeper into each advertising approach you choose for your law firm. Whether you are running a Paid Media (Pay-Per-Click ad) campaign, implementing an SEO rich website, optimizing a mobile site, or engaging with clients and prospects on social media platforms, you have to collect and analyze the data for each solution to know how it s performing. One of the biggest differences between today s digital advertising campaigns and traditional television and print campaigns is the ability to fine-tune your message, offers and ads. With digital advertising you can also track how often potential clients click an ad, visit a site, how often your practice is found, and how accessible you are to the lead. This very specific information can help you create more effective advertising and most importantly, drive more business. Don t let all that information go to waste. Whether you choose to use a digital marketing agency or tackle digital advertising yourself, the solutions you choose should have a detailed platform for you to evaluated the effectiveness of your efforts. 7

8 Pin-Point and Connect to Your Ideal Client Best digital marketing practices say you should test, adjust, test and keep adjusting your efforts so you can pin-point your ideal client(s). Your digital marketing efforts should target the exact client you want to walk into your office or call you on the phone. Billboards, print ads and commercials are good for speaking to a broad audience, but they lack the ability to target the right client at the right time. As the various methods we explained earlier demonstrate, digital marketing allows you to put the right message and the right ad directly in front of the client you want. Your digital marketing best practices should include: Detailed keyword research for your ideal client Strategic ad placement Website or landing page(s) with very clear call to actions (call us now, contact us, fill out this form, etc.) placed at the top of the page Mobile optimized web design for your website Your office s address, phone number and contact information is correct on Google Map services Easy-to-understand and access analytics and data tools for your campaigns Engaging and transparent social media presence 8

9 Employ an Integrated Approach Integrating multiple digital marketing services into the traditional advertising solutions you re currently using allows businesses to learn more about their ideal client and about how effective their marketing is. An efficient digital marketing agency can take all of your online marketing efforts and attribute the value of each channel as well as help you target potential leads. Digital marketing inherently provides detailed data which is necessary information to understand how effective your entire marketing solutions are and what leads a client to you. Again, don t let those insights go to waste by ignoring them or working with a service that does not help you understand and put them to use. To stay ahead of your competition in the constantly changing digital world, you need to understand which marketing tools work best for your practice and how they can work together. Integrating your marketing tactics helps Target, Engage and Convert new and existing business opportunities. Integrated Marketing is a data-driven approach focusing on understanding client insights so that you can develop a more effective ad strategy. It allows you to create the right mix of online and offline efforts and create stronger client relationships. This strategy takes a wide range of marketing solutions like building solid organic traffic with search engine optimization, participating in online paid media advertisements, incentivizing clients through marketing, and using traditional offline marketing efforts for further brand exposure and by deploying them together attract new leads with measurable results while retaining existing clients. By integrating multiple digital services with your current advertising efforts, you can easily boost new leads because you are reaching those individuals in both the online and offline world. It is the most strategic and comprehensive approach you can take to grow your practice. 9

10 Be Found. Get Connected. Stay Engaged. See Results. At G/O Digital, we understand the power of digital marketing and the specific marketing needs of the legal community. With over 100 years of media and marketing solutions, Gannett Media Corporation has experience in driving growth through traditional channels. The world is quickly becoming digital and becoming more social; it s time for your practice to catch up. G/O Digital provides a number of marketing services that can help your practice target and acquire new clients. Since our start, we have strengthened our relationships with an existing portfolio of clients and forged new relationships with companies seeking to increase their local business. We bring digital solutions to the Gannett Media portfolio of products. We have built a team of talented, digital industry leaders dedicated to delivering best-in-class local outcomes and results. At our core, we understand how to connect your practice to a more demanding, fast moving and ever-changing client. Contact a digital legal strategist today, about how you can boost leads, retain clients and grow your practice, or call us at