What’s the purpose of your law firm’s marketing?
It might seem to be a silly question, but the answer you provide will ultimately translate to not only what key objectives you’re wanting, but also how you’re going to both manage and measure those objectives.
For example, most law firms will list the key objective of their firm’s website as primarily to generate new clients, and that’s it. So, they’ll embark on an online marketing campaign, launch their new website with the solitary goal of getting new clients and then, three months later wonder why the strategy hasn’t delivered.
The far better approach is to consider your firm’s marketing strategy, including the website with a broader view of:
- engaging with current and past clients;
- attracting new potential clients;
- lead managing new potential clients;
- converting potential clients into clients.
In relation to engaging with current and past clients, great law firm marketing content always emanates from the experiences of your current and past clients. Writing content that you know would be of interest to them is a great spring board in preparing content for potential new clients as well. For example, if you’re a family law practitioner, you know that for particularly women, following separation, often the first thing in their mind, is how does all this impact upon the children. To this end, preparing content that answers this concern, is a great way to tap into a content strategy that will always be relevant to your web visitors who are experiencing a relationship breakdown when there are kids concerned. Notwithstanding this, this content may also be useful to other existing clients if you’re a diverse practice law firm and you’re actively executing email and social media marketing to segmented lists of existing and past clients.
Attracting new potential clients to your website and introducing them to your firm is an obvious key objective, but in of itself will always let you down if your firm hasn’t adopted some lead magnets and management processes of turning these visitors into clients. What I mean is if there is nothing on your firm’s website that engages a web visitor and then encourages them to download or sign up for something, then your perennial issue rattling forever in your brain will be why your firm’s website draws great traffic, but minimal client conversions. Having lead magnets spread throughout your firm’s website will provide strong opportunities of taking your web visitor to the next level of becoming a potential client. One of the easiest, yet powerful lead magnets, are downloadable guides. For example, take the woman who has recently separated, writing content for her particularly with respect to the children is great, but even better, is a downloadable guide that you encourage her to download for further information. We recently deployed this strategy for a small, regional practice while re-building their website and this tactic alone has led to an exponential increase of quality leads and grown the business.
Surprisingly, you would think that once a firm has put in the effort of writing guides and having us design and execute them strategically throughout their website, that they would effectively manage these leads through a lead management framework. From our experience, it rarely happens. In other words, once a person has downloaded a guide, a podcast or a webinar, their details are readily available to the firm, yet they fail to follow up.
The follow up can happen using a variety of methods:
1. Email from the relevant partner asking the potential client if the guide was useful and whether they had any questions he or she could answer.
2. Email Drip Campaign, of which a succession of emails that follow are automated through a third party email platform like Drip.
3. A phone call from the relevant partner, asking them if they found the guide useful and if there were any questions for him or her.
The follow up method that your firm adopts you obviously need to feel comfortable with. The method of course will largely be informed by the practice area. You may consider it a little too intrusive to call a potential family law client for example.
How your firm converts ultimately potential clients into clients from your lead management platform is again up to you, but grading your leads based upon your initial feedback you garner from the above methods is a great first step.
For example, the potential Wills & Estates client you contacted was receptive to your call, but isn’t at this stage ready to make a decision. In this circumstance, you may mark this lead as “warm” and place her on your Wills & Estates email list similarly titled, “warm” and activate a drip email campaign over a period of time that keeps her engaged. What you contain is this drip campaign is very important and we’ll deal it with it in a future article.
Being very clear and focused on the objectives of your firm’s website in the context of lead generation and management can be a transformative experience. What you should do now is review your firm’s website and identify all the opportunities you’re offering a web visitor to go to the next level of becoming a potential client for your law firm. I suspect if you’re like most law firms there won’t be too many, hence the great opportunity you have now!