Family Law Lead Generation: 10 Tactics For 2024

Need to generate leads for your family law practice? If you’re not getting the results you want with word-of-mouth and referrals for generating leads, then it’s time to shift towards digital lead generation. 

Today, potential clients use the web and search engines to look for businesses like law firms. This is why online marketing is necessary for family lawyers to generate quality leads and secure the success of their firm. 

In this article, we highlight some of the best digital marketing methods (paid and free) and some other offline ways of generating leads for family law firms. We’ll discuss how to keep getting a steady stream of legal leads with the right marketing strategy.

What is Lead Generation For Family Lawyers?

Lead generation for family lawyers is the process of getting visitors interested in their legal services and turning them into a “lead”. Leads are people who have shown interest in a product or service – in this case your family law firm – and have given their contact information such as their name, email, and/or phone number.

Two Ways To Generate Family Law Firm Leads

There are two ways you can generate leads with legal marketing: paid and organic. Paid methods mean you’ll need to invest money and organic means you don’t have to pay for getting leads.

Paid Methods

Paid methods for lead generation are often advantageous for family law firms because it delivers faster, measurable results. This includes paid advertising like Google Ads and Social Media ads, as well as other paid sponsorship options. While organic methods are great for long-term effectiveness, paid methods can help boost a family law firm’s visibility albeit with a limited time frame. 

Organic Methods

Organic lead generation methods do not involve payment or setting a budget for it to be implemented. This method uses search engine optimization (SEO), listing your law firm in online directories, optimizing your website, and content marketing.

These marketing campaigns often result in organic search traffic, which means your website appeared in search engine results pages (SERPs) naturally or organically without using ads.

5 Organic Lead Generation Strategies

Let’s look at a few organic ways to promote your legal practice and get leads. 

Avvo

Avvo is one the biggest legal directories online for people looking for lawyers. It is a large database that provides information about law firms and lawyers in most practice areas, including personal injury, family law, and criminal law. It includes attorney contact information, client reviews, and peer endorsements. 

Getting your family law firm listed on Avvo increases your online presence outside of your website and social media pages. It’s ideal for generating leads because you can link to your website, put your phone number, and a direct message link – all are great for getting prospective clients to reach out to you for legal help.

Other notable legal directories are Nolo, Lawyers.com, Justia, FindLaw, and Martindale. 

Local SEO

Local SEO is the practice of optimizing your law firm for local search. Law firms create a Google Business Profile to appear on location-based searches and rank in the local 3-pack, which is the prime real estate that consists of the top 3 businesses for a specific search term that mentions a location. The local 3-pack features the business’s location on Google Maps.

Below is the local 3-pack for the keyword “family lawyer in Miami”.

To improve your local SEO, you’ll need to ensure the following:

• Claim your Google Business Profile listing – Listing your family law firm on Google My Business is free. Make sure you fill in accurate information about your firm such as company name, address, phone number, and website. 

Here’s a listing for family law firm Beckerman & Granados, which shows up when searching for a family lawyer in Queens, New York.

• List your firm in local directories – As mentioned earlier, you’ll need to list your law firm in local directories to expand your reach online and build a trustworthy reputation.
• Start link building campaigns – Get other reputable websites to link to your site. This increases your search engine ranking and establishes your site as an authority in your space.
• Get more reviews – Reviews are important for building customer trust and increasing conversions. Create a review generation strategy for your law firm and make sure to reply to all reviews – including negative ones.

Dan Couvrette of Divorce Marketing Group has this to say about responding to negative reviews:

“You should always reply to negative reviews. Many lawyers do not want to reply. If they do reply, some say something negative in return. You have to reply in a very professional way: tell them you understand their issues and invite them to contact you. Tell your side of [the] story, but never make the other person wrong.”

You can also read our guide on family law SEO to learn how to scale your traffic and leads via your website besides local search.

Law Firm Website

Outside the cost of building a website (website domain, website hosting, web development, etc.), creating and publishing content on your site to generate new leads is free.

Here are some ways you can use your law firm website to generate qualified leads:

• Home page – The home page is the first page of your website. It should have a catchy headline and a compelling call-to-action (CTA), usually to schedule a call, learn more, or get a free consultation.

Nevada Family Law Group’s website is a great example of using effective CTAs on its home page.

• Service pages – Also known as practice area pages, service pages educate the target audience about a specific legal issue, such as child custody, with the CTA to get professional legal advice.

The New York Family Law Group’s service page features a contact form on the right side of the page to generate leads.

• Blog – The blog section of a family law firm website is where you publish useful content to your audience. The end of a blog post should always include a CTA with the goal of generating leads.

• FAQ pages – These pages are shorter versions of the blog page and service pages. It answers the most asked questions about a legal issue. You can include a CTA here that encourages the reader to contact your firm if they have more questions.

Here are some top family law attorney websites you can take inspiration from. Or you can also hire a law firm web design agency to take care of the design and development end-to-end.

Video Marketing 

Video marketing has grown in popularity over the years, and it’s a great way to educate your audience while increasing your leads. Using video content can help you show your personality as a family law attorney and make a deeper connection with your viewers.

You can hire a video marketing agency to help your firm post professional, strategic video content that strengthens your lead generation campaigns. 

Most law firms post Facebook live videos to get responses in real-time, while others use YouTube for in-depth discussions like the one below from Terri Herron Law. 

For shorter videos that you can post on a daily basis, you can use Instagram’s Stories or Reels.

No matter which video marketing platform you choose, always focus on sharing valuable content that helps people going through a legal family issue.

Social Media Marketing

You can leverage social media marketing without paying for ad campaigns. Create and publish shareable, engaging content regularly to attract and grow your following. 

Here are some social media post ideas you can do for your family law firm:

• Answer common questions about family law in a video post. 

The example below is from family lawyer Emily G. Johnston’s Instagram page.

• Promote your latest blog post
• Behind-the-scenes of your law firm’s events
• Testimonial from a previous client

Below is a client testimonial for San Diego-based family lawyer Garwood Reeves.

While not all these posts might result in a lead, having a social media strategy helps build trust with your audience. When people see how well you provide legal services to your clients, they are more likely to contact you and become a lead.

5 Paid Methods for Lead Generation

Now, let’s look at a few inorganic ways to get more leads for your firm.

Google Ads

Google Ads, also known as pay-per-click (PPC) ads, are used to attract prospective clients that look for businesses in search engines like Google. 

For instance, a person might type in “family lawyer in New York” and get search results. Google ads that are relevant to the query would show on top of the search results, making them visible to the searcher. Advertisers using PPC ads pay every time a person clicks on their ads.

Most businesses use Google Ads to bid on keywords related to their niche. Google Ads for family lawyers might target keywords like “family law firm”, “divorce lawyer”, and “child custody lawyer”, to name a few. 

To be successful in Google Ads, you’ll need to choose keywords that are relevant to your ads. It’s essential to do keyword research to know what search terms people are using when searching for your business. 

Optimizing your ads is not the end of your PPC efforts. You also need to create dedicated landing pages for your ads. Each landing page should have compelling copy and a call-to-action to get the best possible conversion rate. 

Social Media Advertising

Creating awareness about your brand and getting people to reach out to you can be done within the right social media platform. You can boost your engagement and visibility with social media ads. 

You’ll need to create a dedicated page or account for your law firm and create strategic content that will attract new clients who use social media to find information on businesses including law firms.

Facebook Ads

Facebook’s huge user base can be an advantage for your law firm to get leads. You can use Facebook’s Audience Insights to target people from a specific demographic like location, interests, and marital status.

Instagram Ads

Instagram, just like Facebook, allows advertisers to target specific groups of people. You’ll need visually compelling content on Instagram to stand out from your competition and you can leverage high-quality photos and engaging videos on this platform for great results.

LinkedIn Ads

If you already have a LinkedIn strategy in place, you might want to consider adding LinkedIn Ads. LinkedIn Ads allow advertisers to target a specific audience based on their profession, company, location, and industry. This platform is ideal for networking with professionals within the legal industry.

Pay-Per-Lead Services

Pay-per-lead services provide leads in exchange for payment. These services are more expensive than PPC ads, but they guarantee quality leads as compared to PPC ads which do not always convert to a lead. You may or may not get exclusive leads by paying for such services.

Google Local Service Ads

Google Local Service Ads (LSAs) work the same as Google Ads, but advertisers pay for leads instead of clicks. It’s also limited for search queries that include a specific location, so this method might not be for multi-location firms. 

In addition to getting leads instead of clicks, Google LSAs allow people to call a business directly from the ad, which speeds up the attorney lead generation process. Advertisers who sign up for Google LSAs also get a Google Guaranteed badge which shows on their ads.

Martindale Avvo

While it is primarily a free legal directory, Martindale’s network of legal platforms offer pay-per-lead services for law firms of any practice area. For a fee, this pay-per-lead company will send you vetted leads directly to your email or phone.

LegalMatch

LegalMatch provides daily leads to family lawyers using its network of potential legal clients. This company offers a membership guest pass which allows you to try their attorney lead generation services for free before signing up for the paid plan.

While pay-per-lead services can be extremely valuable, it can also be expensive, so it’s not a sustainable choice for family law firms on a budget. 

What’s important to note is that paid and free lead generation methods should work together to get results that meet your firm’s revenue goals.

Local Event Sponsorships

Your family law firm can sponsor an event that your target audience is likely to attend. Sports competitions, charity events, and local events are all great venues to market your firm and grow your leads. 

Some details you’ll want to include in your sponsorship marketing plan may include:

• The amount you’re paying the event
• Budget for marketing and promotional materials to give away during the event
• Budget for travel and accommodation for people attending the event
• How to capture leads during the event

Sponsorships are also great for community involvement and brand awareness on top of being able to generate leads.

Hire Family Law Lead Experts!

And the last strategy to achieve consistent results with your lead generation campaigns is — just hiring family law marketing experts. Instead of relying on guesswork to know what works and what doesn’t, leave it to professionals that know how to drive leads consistently for family lawyers.

Get in touch with us today and find out how we can help you via digital marketing to get a steady stream of high-quality leads (that grows your family law firm’s clientele and revenue).