9 Inbound Marketing Tactics For Law Firms

Inbound marketing is a great way for your law firm to attract new clients without relying on ads or paid marketing methods. With inbound marketing, clients are drawn to your content and might be more likely to hire you because they read a helpful blog post or watched an insightful video on your social media platforms. 

What Is Inbound Marketing For Law Firms?

Inbound marketing for law firms is a marketing strategy that uses content and useful information for prospective clients to discover and purchase a product or service. Law firms can adopt an inbound marketing plan to reach their target audience and grow their client base.

Types of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is done in many ways. Here are the most common types of inbound marketing:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Using keyword research and other optimization strategies to appear on the top of search engines results pages (SERPs) and improve online presence.
• Content marketing: Publishing articles, infographics, white papers, blog posts, FAQ pages, and case studies to inform and educate your target audience and generate leads.
• Social media marketing: Publishing high-quality content on your social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram can help build awareness of your brand and attract potential clients. Some examples of these are short-form videos, podcasts, and photos.
• Email marketing: Email marketing is a great way to send customized offers to a specific audience (or subscriber list), nurture existing clients, and generate high-converting leads.

Why Do Lawyers Need Inbound Marketing?

Lawyers and law firms need inbound marketing to ensure a steady flow of new cases and clients over time. 

Inbound internet marketing generally more cost-effective than outbound marketing methods like pay-per-click (PPC). Because of this, law firms without a huge marketing budget can still see results from their law firm marketing campaigns while getting a decent return on investment (ROI). 

Inbound marketing campaigns like content marketing and email marketing are also likely to produce quality leads and conversions because of how blogs and other content build trust with the audience. 

What Are The Different Steps and Stages of Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a process and doesn’t merely stop when a potential client converts. Below are the four stages of inbound marketing:

Let’s talk with each of the above steps in detail.

Stage 1: Attract

This is when a person discovers your law firm online. Some examples of ways to attract potential clients for your law firm is to publish informative blog posts, videos, and customer testimonials that compel your viewers to learn more about your firm.

Below is an example of a law firm website design that attracts prospects using a CTA to a free consultation:

Stage 2: Convert

This is when a potential client completes your call-to-action (CTA) such as filling out an inquiry form or scheduling a consultation. For this, your web page should have a way to capture leads like a contact form or a button that lets the user call or email your firm:

Stage 3: Close

Closing the deal with a new customer should be a smooth and reassuring experience. To ensure a great onboarding experience, you’ll need to invest in customer relationship management (CRM) tools like Lawmatics for a streamlined client intake process.

Stage 4: Delight

This is when you continue to nurture existing and past clients with exceptional customer service. Some examples of delighting law firm clients would be:

• Reliable, fast responses to a client’s questions/concerns
• A user-friendly system to manage legal documents and make payments
• Running customer satisfaction surveys to improve your services
• Following up with past clients through email

When clients feel valued and important, they are likely to recommend your firm to their family and friends, boosting your reputation and growing your revenue.

9 Ways to Start Inbound Marketing For Your Law Firm

There are many ways to get started with inbound marketing for your law firm. Whether you practice family law, personal injury law, or criminal defense, there is a method that best fits your practice area. 

Here’s how your law firm can engage and convert potential clients using inbound marketing methods:

1.  Create Optimized Legal Service Pages

One of the most common SEO strategies of law firms is to publish a dedicated web page for each case type covered by a law firm’s practice area. 

Legal service pages are specific pages in your law firm website that discusses a service in great detail. For instance, a personal injury law firm might have dedicated service pages for car accidents and another one for worker’s compensation and another one for wrongful death. 

Having a dedicated landing page for a niche topic can help tailor your content to a specific audience and increase lead generation and conversions.

Here’s an example from one of our clients, Caputo & Van Der Walde:

This practice also benefits your website’s SEO because it gives you the opportunity to target keywords that are more specific to a legal problem that your firm can help solve.

2. Start a Legal Blog To Educate Your Audience

There’s a reason that blogging is a popular digital marketing strategy for lawyers. In addition to being able to establish yourself as a thought leader in the legal industry, you offer added value to your audience with your legal advice.

Before you publish your first blog, make sure you have a content plan and be clear and intentional on publishing every piece of valuable content. Don’t forget to add a call-to-action at the end of each blog post to improve conversion rate.

3. Engage Prospects Through Video Marketing

Video content has been rising in popularity among internet users. To stay relevant, lawyers and law firms are using platforms like YouTube and TikTok to engage and attract clients more effectively. Videos have the power to make a deeper connection with an audience and show your personality.

Some examples of videos for law firm marketing are:

• Explainer videos – Talk about legal concepts and educate viewers
• Expert interviews – Share interviews of you talking to the media about a topic related to your practice
• Testimonials – Have your clients say something about your law firm
• “Day In A Life” Videos – Record what you do in a typical work day
• Short Form Videos – Videos under 3 minutes that share helpful tips and information on a legal topic

If your firm doesn’t have the resources or bandwidth to produce videos, you can hire a law firm marketing agency that specializes in video production. 

4. Interact With Your Audience On Social Media

To foster a relationship with your audience, social media engagement should be a part of your marketing efforts. It’s not enough to post content regularly – you should also be replying to comments and acknowledging your follower’s likes and shares.

Here’s an example of divorce lawyer Brent Bowyer who uses TikTok to respond to questions about divorce:

While it may seem like tedious work, interacting with your social media followers builds your credibility and establishes your sincerity in helping people with their legal issues.

You can opt for social media management tools or hire a social media management firm to handle these tasks for you. 

5. Post Client Testimonials And Reviews

A local consumer survey showed that 49% of consumers trust online reviews as much as referrals from friends and family. This is why positive client testimonials and reviews need to be proudly posted on your website and social media pages. 

If you don’t have a lot of reviews, then you’ll need to create a plan to get more customer reviews on platforms like Google. 

Some ways to get more reviews are:

• Provide exceptional client experience
• Ask happy/satisfied clients for reviews
• Include review requests in your email campaigns
• Encourage past clients to recommend your services 

6. Optimize Your Existing Content

If you’ve had a law firm website for a while but don’t appear on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) like Google, then it’s time to fix your SEO. 

The first thing to do is perform an site audit to assess your ranking and performance. You might need to hire an SEO digital marketing company for this process. 

Once the problems with your website content are identified, then you’ll need to correctly optimize your content with the right target keywords that are relevant to your law firm’s services.

Content optimization includes:

• Keyword research: Target keywords that ideally have high to medium search volume and low competition (like the example below), and with high buying intent. Phrase like “best”, “pricing”, and “hire” are some examples that users might use when they are ready to hire a lawyer.

• On-Page SEO: All content in your site (headings, subheadings, meta descriptions, image titles) should be optimized for search engines. Together with keyword research, on-page SEO ensures your content has high online visibility that attracts your key audience. 

7. Start an Email Newsletter

If you are already running a blog or managing a law firm website, then starting an email subscription for your audience is a good strategy to add. You can encourage website visitors to subscribe to your newsletter in exchange for a free e-book or free initial consultation. 

To get subscribers, you’ll need to offer something in return like an e-book or free consultation. You would also need to set up an email sign-up form on your website using an email marketing software like MailChimp or ConstantContact so users can enter their email and subscribe to your list.

As you grow your email list, it would make sense to plan what emails to send to different groups of subscribers. For instance, those who downloaded your Guide to Divorce e-book should be in a different mailing list from those who subscribed after watching a video about adoption. This process is called segmentation and most email management apps have this feature.

Email marketing is a great way to keep your audience informed about your law firm while nurturing leads that might convert in the future.

8. Run PPC Ads For Brand Awareness

Not all PPC ads are use for outbound marketing campaigns. You can run Brand Awareness campaigns using Google Ads. These campaigns are not designed to sell your services right away, but simply to get your law firm’s name known to potential customers. 

When creating your Google ad campaign, you’ll need to choose Awareness and consideration as your campaign objective. This creates your ads with a wide audience that fall under your specified demographics to achieve the said goal. 

Your ads should be more creative rather than sales-driven and be written in such a way that most people will remember your firm and what you offer. 

In the example above, the first ad is more likely to have name recall simply because it specified the lawyer’s name and added a catchy tagline, which is exactly what brand awareness ads should do. 

9. Optimize Your Law Website For Conversions

Your law firm website should have calls-to-action (CTAs) that are prominent on every page, especially the home page and all landing pages. CTAs push the website visitor into the next step in their customer journey. These are vital in turning clicks into conversions. 

One of our clients, personal injury lawyer Jorge Luis Flores, has many CTAs on his law firm website’s home page:

When you understand your audience, you should be able to create the right CTA on your web pages. Make it easy for them to take action and minimize distractions on your site. 

Hire an Agency to Start Your Inbound Marketing Today!

Let’s face it – inbound marketing is a lot of work. If you want to reap the benefits of inbound marketing but, at the same time, want to focus on your day-to-day tasks as a lawyer, then the best option is to hire a law firm marketing agency that understands legal marketing and how to create tailored inbound marketing campaigns that work for attorneys and law firms.

Contact us today and we’ll help you create a customized inbound marketing plan that fits your law firm’s needs.