What is Law Firm Marketing?

Law firm marketing involves promoting your firm’s services to attract potential clients. Generally it begins with laying down a marketing plan with details such as your strategy, channels, budget, and target audience. Some digital marketing tactics attorneys use are paid advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, and social media marketing.

Marketing Strategy Vs. Marketing Plan for Lawyers

A strategy is “the why” behind all your marketing that acts as a compass for all of your marketing. It can include choosing your target audience, creating a unique selling proposition (USP) or the messaging that appeals to your customers, and a long-term vision.

A marketing plan documents how you plan to implement your strategy and who will take care of it. A plan can include several marketing tactics like paid advertising, SEO, content marketing, or even traditional marketing. But they all need to align with your overall strategy.

Why Do Law Firms Need Marketing?

Whether you’re a small law firm or a national firm, you need marketing to:

Attract new clients
Create brand awareness
Establish authority
Build customer trust and loyalty
Improve online reputation
Gather data to improve your marketing strategy’s performance

These are just some of the many benefits of law firm marketing, on top of attracting potential clients.

13 Simple Tactics to Start Legal Marketing in 2025

There are many effective ways of promoting your legal services to your target audience. Whether you’re a solo lawyer, a small firm, or a multi-location firm, you start with these law firm marketing steps.

1. Settle Upon a Marketing Budget

In general, law firms invest 49% of their yearly budget on marketing. A good technique in creating a budget for your law firm is the 70-20-10 rule: 70% for proven tactics, 20% for exploring new avenues, and 10% for experimentations. This allows you to achieve results from trusted and proven methods while being innovative at the same time.

Your budget will depend ultimately on your business goals and your firm’s existing reputation. Being in competitive practice areas like personal injury and family law are more competitive, so may need a higher percentage of your revenue toward marketing—especially if you’re a fairly new firm.

2. Create a Marketing Plan

A marketing plan is your guide on what needs to be done to start your law firm marketing journey. It should include:

Specific marketing goals
Details on your target audience
A list of marketing methods you’re going to use (SEO, PPC, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, etc.)
Your budget
An established timeline and designated professionals accountable for different marketing activities
A method of measuring performance in all marketing channels

When you have this all listed, then you can be organized, focused, and efficient when executing your new business strategy.

3. Get a Professionally Designed Law Firm Website

It’s worth investing in a professionally designed law firm website to ensure it looks great, reflects your key message, and is optimized for SEO. This means your site should be:

Responsive – looks great in any device
Secure – safe for web visitors to use
Fast – loads in less than three seconds
Easy to navigate – has a web design layout that lets your readers easily find your contact information

Your website is the default home of your online presence, so spend some time taking inspiration from top attorney websites for crafting it. Or hire design experts.

4. Claim Your Free Online Listings

Listing your law practice in online directories is the first step to kick off your local SEO efforts. It builds your presence in your primary geographical area when your listings show up for people looking for legal assistance. Law firm directories like Avvo and Lawyers.com are niche legal ones you can also get on. But start with Google Business Profile as it’s the default place to collect client reviews.

5. Get Your Firm on Social Media

Your law firm’s presence on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn is another fundamental part of online marketing.

Once your social media profiles are created, you need to create and implement a social media content strategy that aligns with your law firm marketing plan.

Some examples of social media posts include:

Firm updates and achievements
Featured lawyers
Case studies
Behind-the-scenes
Q&A sessions
Podcasts
Interviews
Testimonials
Webinars

Being active in social media helps your law firm show its brand and connect with the audience on a more personal level. It’s a great way to stay top of mind with potential clients and earn their trust.

We would caution you though that we have not seen a lot of direct business coming out of social media platforms in the legal industry. After all, someone looking for a divorce is unlikely to engage with you over social media. Certain practice areas may have a more casual tone and get a few clients.

6. Promote Yourself And Build Your E-E-A-T

As a law firm, one of the most effective ways to stand out in SERPs is by focusing on improving your E-E-A-T, a criteria (it’s become a part of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines).

E-E-A-T stands for:

E- Experience

E – Expertise

A – Authoritativeness

T – Trustworthiness

One way to meet this standard is to create an author profile for your blog posts and make sure that it shows at the bottom of each post. An author profile should provide information about the author and what makes them an expert in the topic they are writing about. For instance, a trusts and estates lawyer is qualified to write a guide on estate planning, so it should fit the E-E-A-T standard.

But remember it’s more important to promote yourself and establish your thought leadership through offline channels such as speaking gigs at Network Bar Associations, offering free legal workshops for your community, and the like. Google algorithms can separate experts from amateurs based on such signals.

7. Encourage More Online Reviews

Getting positive online reviews for your law office can be a highly effective way to convince prospective clients to contact you. They can also help your firm’s visibility in the local-3 pack in your primary service area.

There’s no formula or shortcut to getting positive online reviews. Focus on providing an impressive client experience and nudge past clients to write positive reviews. Remember there should be no reward or incentives offered to your clients in exchange for such reviews, as per a lawyer advertising rules by the American Bar Association (ABA).

8. Start Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is worth your time and effort if you’re willing to spend $3k to $5k per month for at least 6 months before you see leads rolling in. The efforts from organic search compound over a timeframe of years—not months.

But generally speaking the cost of new leads from SEO comes down to a quarter of paid marketing and traditional marketing. We highly recommend it if you want to rank nationally, and harbor ambitions of scaling your law firm across multiple locations.

You can of course hire a law firm SEO agency if you’re short of time. Otherwise you can slowly build a team inhouse and outsource some functions of SEO such as link building or legal content creation.

9. Get Leads With Paid Marketing

Digital advertising tactics such as Google Ads and Local Service Ads (LSA) are nice to add into the mix to get some leads within a week. They target relevant keywords to your practice that your audience is searching for, and interject their buying journey.

While some practice areas such as criminal defense and injury may have expensive clicks going into hundreds of dollars, they can lend you some high-quality leads. If you can, then allocate dedicated budgets for both SEO and PPC.

10. Business Development and Networking Aren’t Optional

Word-of-mouth or referrals continue to be a reliable source of leads for most law firms. It’s important to remain active in advocating for your firm offline. Network and stay connected with your peers, past clients, and other even other local businesses who might have a similar target audience to yours.

Some ways to nurture your leads with networking include:

Volunteering in or sponsoring community events
Hosting legal seminars
Speak at industry events
Do pro bono work
Join bar associations

Doing these things creates awareness for your firm and can even help with lead generation.

11. Always Keep Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) in Mind

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a detailed description of the perfect client. Having an ICP in mind helps guide your marketing campaigns, from the content you create for your social media page to the strategy you take when writing ads or blog posts.

When your campaigns focus on meeting the needs of your ideal customer, you are more likely to generate quality leads and improve conversion rates.

12. Measure Your Marketing Efforts and Iterate

As mentioned before, part of your marketing plan should include how to measure the performance of your marketing projects, from website traffic to your ad conversion rates.

If you don’t have a marketing team and you hired a digital marketing agency, make sure to ask for progress reports to track how your campaigns are performing and whether you’re close to achieving your marketing goal.

You can also track and measure performance on your own. For instance, you can use Google Analytics to learn about your website’s performance like number of visits, engagement, and bounce rate. For tracking ads, you can use the Google Ads dashboard to see your ad’s conversion rate and ROI.

13. Be Mindful of Lawyer Advertising Rules

The American Bar Association has specific rules on advertising legal services. It’s your utmost responsibility to learn this by heart and avoid practices that violate these rules.

Some of these rules say that lawyers should:

Never claim to be certified unless there is proof
Not make false claims
Not use superlatives in their communication (best, most, lowest, highest, etc.)
Not pay people in exchange for referrals or recommendations

These advertising rules are enforced strictly and should be followed to maintain your good standing as a lawyer. Note that specific states like Florida have additional rules for lawyers in the said state.

Pro Tip: Leverage AI Tools to Improve Your Marketing

Using artificial intelligence as a marketing tool can help you save time and implement your strategy efficiently.

Some examples of using AI include:

AI content writing tools – create blog posts and write social media copy
AI-powered SEO – suggest how to optimize content
Chatbots and virtual assistants – these are tools you can install for your website to address common questions, acquire leads, get contact information, and even schedule appointments

With AI, you can streamline your processes while still adding a human touch with your potential customers.

Law Firm Marketing Glossary

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO is the practice of optimizing content (such as a website) to improve its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Keyword

A keyword or keywords is a word or set of words that people use to search for something on a search engine (like Google).

PPC

PPC (pay-per-click) is a paid advertising method where an advertiser pays when someone clicks on their ad. PPC is usually offered by Google Ads and allows businesses to show up on top of SERPs.

Backlinks

Backlinks, also called inbound links, are links to your website from another website. They are valuable as they can improve your website’s authority and search engine ranking.

CTA

CTA (call-to-action) refers to a line that tells a reader what to do next. Most CTAs in marketing campaigns encourage a person to buy a product, schedule a consultation, or sign up for a service.

ROI

ROI (Return On Investment) is a way to measure the profit gained by an initial investment. An ROI is calculated by:

Net income/Cost of investment x 100

Conversion rate

A conversion rate is an important metric that measures how effective your CTA is. It is a percentage of how many people (who saw your ad) took action versus how many people saw your ad. The formula for conversion rate is:

Number of conversions / Number of Clicks x 100

Traffic

Traffic refers to how many people view or click on a website or piece of online content.

Leads

Leads refer to people who have shown interest in your business.

Google Local Pack

Google Local Pack, also called 3-Pack, is the top 3 business listings that appear on location-based search queries in Google Search.

Final Thoughts

Law firm marketing need not be a complicated maze to navigate. With a strong strategy and detailed plan, you should be able to implement solid campaigns that help you reach your goal.

However, you do have the option to hire a law firm digital marketing agency to ensure you get better results. On The Map Marketing has provided high-performing marketing services to law firms from SEO to web design and beyond.

Contact us today to get started with creating a tailored marketing plan for your firm.

Continue reading our next chapter on how to create a marketing budget for your firm.

Attorney Marketing: Ultimate 2025 Growth Guide