Employment Lawyer Marketing: Top 13 Strategies For 2024

Employment lawyer marketing only has one end goal: to help your law firm generate more clients. It is a multi-step strategy that involves analyzing your market, assessing the competition, and identifying opportunities that can bring potential clients to your doorstep.

Aside from attracting more business, check out some of the benefits that a winning employment lawyer marketing campaign can get you:

• Build up your law firm’s reputation
• Generate brand awareness across multiple touchpoints
• Get to know your target audience and competitors
• Maximize your return on investment from future promotion strategies
• Unlock more networking and partnership opportunities
• Build trust and loyalty

Start Your Marketing Here

Without further ado, let’s dive into the art of crafting a successful marketing strategy for employment attorneys:

1. Define Your Target Audience and Marketing Strategies

In legal marketing, casting a wide net may help you turn more heads. But that doesn’t mean you’ll end up with more clients. You must first develop a clear law firm marketing plan that includes a detailed profile of your ideal clients. This should itemize who they are, the challenges they face, and what they’re trying to achieve with your services.

Some of the proven ways to research your target audience are:

• Review the profiles of your past and current clients
• Read industry reports and case studies related to the employment law practice
• Investigate social media groups and online communities
• Check or run your own surveys

For example, IBISWorld conducts in-depth industry research across different market sectors. In their Employment Law Firms in the US report, you can tell a lot about your ideal clients by looking at the demand for specific employment law services in 2024.

As an employment lawyer, you should also look into demographic and firmographic factors that can guide your marketing decisions. This includes your target audience’s job title, gender, age, and location.

After getting to know your ideal clients, you should be able to select the best marketing channels to reach them. This could be social media, local events, online directories, or print ads.

2. Build Your Referral Network

Referrals have been a time-tested source of paying clients for law firms in different practice areas. By mapping out a more systemic referral marketing strategy, you can get more scalable and sustainable results.

Sending referral request emails to previous clients is a step in the right direction. Be sure to personalize each email and mention incentives to galvanize referral efforts.

You can borrow inspiration from the template below:

Also, don’t underestimate the value of traditional attorney networking strategies to gain more referral channels.

Some known tactics you should consider are:

• Become an active member at your local bar association
• Attend legal networking events
• Connect with other lawyers on social media
• Participate in legal forums and message boards
• Try cold emailing attorneys in other practice areas

3. Claim Your Google Business Profile

Getting your Google Business Profile—formerly “Google My Business”—listed is a low-risk, high-reward local SEO strategy that can quickly elevate your employment law firm’s online presence.

Remember, your Google Business Profile is more than just a listing to an online directory. It establishes your law firm’s discoverability on a couple of Google products, namely Google Search and Maps.

The good news is, creating and optimizing your Google Business Profile doesn’t require any technical skills whatsoever. You just need to ensure you put your business details correctly, upload high-quality images that best represent your law firm’s brand, write a compelling description, and follow the verification instructions provided. Also, be sure to select ‘Law firm’ as your primary category and ‘Employment attorney’ as an additional category.

4. Get Listed in Local Directories

In addition to Google Business Profile, you can spread your digital footprint and attract clients online by getting listed in local legal directories.

Start with your state bar association’s website, which should have a built-in directory that can promote your law firm to prospective clients. There are also several widely recognized legal directories in the US, namely:

• Lawyer.com
• Justia
• HG.org
• Avvo
• LawTally

To spruce up your online presence even further, look for online directories that are specific to employment lawyers, your business location, or both.

For example, if you’re based in San Diego, you should definitely get listed in the official San Diego Lawyer Directory.

Just remember to be consistent with your law firm’s NAP (name, address, and phone number) when submitting your listing to any directory.

5. Set Aside a Marketing Budget

At this point, you can relax—the strategies you learned thus far don’t need a hefty investment. You may have spent money to access market reports or get listed in paid legal directories. But you still don’t have a proper marketing budget to ensure ongoing growth.

A good starting point is to set aside at least 2% of your revenue as your minimum marketing budget. This minimizes the chances of your marketing efforts to compromise your law firm’s cash flow—regardless of your results.

The minimum marketing budget is useful while you’re exploring new strategies. However, the goal is to raise your budget as you identify strategies that generate positive results. According to the 2023 CallRail Marketing Outlook for Law Firms, the average marketing budget is 15% of the law firm’s revenue.

For example, if your firm’s annual revenue is $300,000, you can start with a marketing budget of $6,000. From there, you can incrementally increase your budget up to around 15% of your revenue, which would be $45,000.

That should suffice for a healthy mix of marketing strategies, which may include:

• Digital advertising
• Content marketing
• Traditional advertising
• Website creation and search engine optimization

Marketing Strategies to Scale Your Employment Firm

Next, let’s take a look at more aggressive strategies to accelerate your employment law firm marketing:

6. Sponsor Local Events

Small law firms can leverage local events to raise brand awareness even without a huge capital.

The easiest and most straightforward approach is to sponsor local events organized by another entity.

For example, the Equal Justice Works Career Fair is held annually for new graduates, employers, and public interest professionals. They also accept sponsors who can get a fair bit of exposure during the event.

A more resource-intensive strategy is to host your own event with a partner brand, giving you more control over your promotion strategies (e.g., branded merchandise, flyers, and business cards). By working with another local business, you can share the financial, logistical, and strategic responsibilities—as well as increase the amount of exposure you can get.

7. Get More Google Reviews

Going back to your Google Business Profile, another advantage of claiming your business is the ability to showcase positive client testimonials or reviews along with star ratings.

Reviews and star ratings automatically appear next to your profile in Google Search and Maps.

There are plenty of ways to encourage more clients to leave reviews, including:

• Share your Google review link with your previous employment law clients
• Turn your review link as a QR code with QR Code Generator and print them in marketing materials
• Invest in review generation tools like Birdeye

8. Create a User-Centric Employment Law Firm Website

An official law firm website is an important milestone that unlocks a plethora of new opportunities to bolster your digital marketing strategy.

You don’t need a huge budget to launch a functional website that can help with lead generation. The cost of an attorney website starts at around $100 per month if you do it yourself. That should be on the ballpark of the amount needed to cover the cost of a new domain registration, web hosting, and a professional theme.

But if you want a professional-looking website that’s effective in attracting website traffic and converting new clients, your best bet is to hire a digital marketing agency. Look for one with a verifiable portfolio of successful attorney websites.

Working with an agency can run you up to around $5,000 per month, depending on value-added services like:

• Drafting and executing a website content strategy about relevant topics
• Optimizing your website design for better user experience and higher conversions
• Performing on-page SEO (i.e., optimizing titles, internal links, and meta descriptions for keywords)
• Creating original visual assets (e.g., attorney portraits, background images, and logos)
• Tracking and reporting website performance metrics

We offer website design services for law firms (if you’re looking for a professional design and short of time!)

9. Optimize Your Employment Law Landing Pages

Employment law landing pages are web pages built to encourage website visitors to take a desired action, like submitting a contact form, booking a free consultation, or downloading a free resource.

Make sure to have a dedicated landing page for each legal service you offer. This allows you to tailor the content, Call-To-Action (CTA), and other optimization tactics to your audience’s specific needs—be it for employee sexual harassment, wrongful termination, and other employment law issues.

For example, The Myers Law Group has an exhaustive list of landing pages that are specific to issues in employment law and workers’ compensation.

Remember the following best practices when creating your law firm landing pages:

• Craft attention-grabbing headlines
• Build mobile-responsive landing pages
• Include client reviews
• Showcase real results from previous clients
• If possible, include introduction or interview videos covering relevant topics

10. Leverage Digital Media Advertising

Pay-Per-Click advertising can provide your employment law firm a quick boost in online visibility.

You can run PPC campaigns on social media, search, or display networks. This will allow you to gain instant visibility as long as your ad content and landing page align with the user’s search—or, if they fit the target audience persona you specified.

PPC campaigns are also scalable since you only pay whenever someone actually clicks on your ad.

Apart from regular PPC campaigns, you should also look into Local Service Ads or LSAs, which are available to law firms, real estate companies, and financial service providers. This bumps up your listing to the very top of search results alongside a credibility-boosting “Google Screened” badge next to your listing.

Learn more about Google Screened and LSAs here.

Long-Term Employment Marketing and Branding Strategies

Compared to the strategies above, the following online marketing tactics take longer to produce profitable results, but they lead to substantial, lasting gains in your employment law firm’s online presence.

11. Create a Sound Organic SEO Strategy

Organic, off-page SEO lets you generate website traffic from search engine results pages. It requires an elaborate, time-consuming strategy that involves multiple steps:

• Step 1: Conduct keyword research to find relevant search terms about employment law
• Step 2: Create content that satisfies the user intent behind keywords
• Step 3: Launch a link building campaign by submitting guest posts, publishing original studies, and being a source for journalists
• Step 4: Track your keyword rankings over time

To passively attract more backlinks, you can use social media marketing to spread your website content and get in the radar of potential link sources. And since employment lawyers target professionals, LinkedIn is a great social network to share your content, build connections, and promote events that can give you a PR boost.

12. Start a YouTube Channel

A growing number of lawyers invest in their own YouTube channels to reach a wider audience and establish their image as experts in their practice. This is the perfect opportunity for you to explore new content formats, be it an interview, podcast stream, or Q&A about relevant legal issues.

It may take some time for your viewership and subscriber count to pick up. Just remember to:

• Invest in a professional recording studio and equipment
• Communicate with your audience
• Promote your other marketing channels
• Track your channel analytics

Read our complete YouTube for lawyers guide for actionable steps and reference channels.

13. Promote Yourself Through Bar Association Events

Finally, remember that everything you do in bar association events will have compounding effects to your brand over time. It doesn’t matter if you’re speaking or just handing out business cards. Commit yourself to be a consistent presence in these events and people will remember you.

Here are additional tips that can help:

• Link up with other lawyers through social media
• Follow up with an email after the event
• Participate in panel discussions and workshops
• Check if an upcoming event accepts sponsorships

Parting Employment Lawyer Marketing Tips for Success

Before you go, here are a few bonus tips to get your marketing off to a good start:

• Leverage social proof like reviews, testimonials, ratings, and social media comments wherever it makes sense
• Define a consistent branding be it visually (e.g., fonts, colors, and design elements) or through your core messaging
• Track analytics with tools like Google Analytics to fine-tune your strategy over time
• Don’t forget about traditional marketing materials

Want to fast-track your employment law firm marketing?

Request a strategy consultation, and let’s talk marketing.