In what seemed like an instant, the pandemic turned nearly every aspect of our lives upside down. The shift to a world of remote learning and telecommuting came easily for some, while others struggled with a sudden and difficult transition.
For family law practitioners, in particular, moving activities typically done in-person—like building trust with new clients, navigating extremely sensitive situations, and retaining strong connections with existing clients—to virtual interactions was full of challenges. However, many family law professionals adapted and found ways to provide critical services and support to clients.
Many are exploring new ways of operating and are embracing technology more fully than ever before—and are seeing the benefits. For practitioners who are open to further exploring the advantages of a digital-first mindset, now is the time to start down this truly transformative path.
In this article, we dive into the ins and outs of an increasingly popular digital strategy: digital marketing. Across industries, digital marketing is a proven, cost-effective way to generate new business while also strengthening relationships with an existing client base efficiently and at scale. Consistently investing in digital marketing can help grow your business by raising your profile in the community you serve and making it easier to connect with new clients.
Investing in digital marketing may sound daunting, but with just a few easy steps, you will be ready to go! To help you get started, we’ve pulled together a list of seven simple tips for family law practitioners with no prior marketing experience to jump-start their digital marketing.
The first step to effective digital marketing isn’t digital at all. You need to be able to succinctly yet powerfully answer the following three questions:
Your answers to these questions are critical because they will help you build a compelling and consistent message across all your efforts, making your digital—and traditional—marketing much more effective as a whole.
Measuring the results of your marketing efforts is not a nice-to-have. It is truly a need-to-have. Luckily, Google offers a free tool to make this easier: Google Analytics.
Google Analytics gives you insight into website performance, including the number of visitors to your site and the most frequently visited pages. It also helps you understand how visitors are arriving to your website (your sources of “website traffic”). The most common sources of website traffic include:
Luckily, Google Analytics is a very user-friendly tool and set up only takes a few clicks. To give you more confidence, here are some helpful resources:
This is perhaps the most important digital marketing tactic in modern local marketing: go to Google, type “lawyers near me,” and see which sites come back. Virtually every result is going to be a review site.
Take advantage of this by developing profiles on each of the top sites. Dedicate time to making your profiles strong and responding to customer feedback. It can be natural to dismiss these sites, especially if you see an unwarranted negative review of you or your practice, but let it motivate you! For every bad review you see, focus on securing an additional positive review from a happy client.
Google also provides a great free tool for local businesses called Google My Business (often shortened to GMB). GMB allows you to create and manage a local business listing that shows up in Google local search results.
GMB listings include basic information about your business, like hours of operation, as well as reviews, photos, and more. The reason your listing is so important is that GMB results are often the first results that show up when a user does a local search.
To get started with GMB, run a Google search for your business.Your business listing will most likely show up on the right-hand side of the search results. On that listing, there will be a “Claim Listing” link which will allow you to request management access to the listing. They will verify your business either by a phone call or postcard. Once you are verified, take the time to update your listing to really put your best foot forward.
As we indicated earlier, when someone searches for a term or information on a search engine like Google or Bing, it is called organic search. Google is by far the largest search engine, so we will provide specific tips for Google, but the same advice applies to the other search engines as well.
Google decides what content to show and in what order for each search that is done on its site. Google considers a variety of factors, including the authority of your brand (which is tied to website traffic) and the quality of the content on your website, which is reflected by the amount of time the average visitor spends on your site. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of updating your website and the content on it to maximize your company or brand’s organic search visibility.
Here are a few highly impactful SEO tips that are also easy to implement:
While it takes some effort to update your website, it is well worth it. The visitors you get via organic search will be high quality and the traffic you receive from here on out will not have any cost. Here are some additional resources to help you with your SEO efforts:
People relatively new to digital marketing are often surprised that one of the top things they can do to improve the effectiveness of digital marketing efforts is to produce new content. Content consists of items like blog posts, videos, white papers, and guides.
You might hear marketers say, “The currency of the Internet these days is content.” This means that, more than anything else, search engines like Google consider the consistency and quality of content to determine what search results to return.
The hardest part about producing content is figuring out what to write about, but the answer is easier than you may think: just write about what you know well! For example, as an attorney, you could provide an overview of the divorce process and what clients should expect along the way.
Another example is writing up a deep dive of all relevant and important documentation that your clients will need for their case. There are SEO tactics to make Google like your content even more, but do not worry too much about that at the onset. Just start writing and posting fresh content to your website.
Once you have created some content, engage with the community via social media channels to create awareness about your firm and build trust in your authority. Share relevant news, statistics, and content (i.e., guides resources, quizzes, blog posts, etc.) that your prospects would find interesting. Be wary of overtly selling via these channels! Social media should feel like a natural conversation with your users, not a pushy sales call.
Digital advertising is perhaps the most misunderstood digital marketing tactic. Depending on who you ask, it can be presented as a silver bullet for your marketing success or the biggest waste of money for a company.
Let us assure you: it is neither, but it is an important component of your digital marketing success. It is one of the few channels you can control directly and measure performance closely. Plus, more importantly, the well-coordinated digital marketing strategy will work as a flywheel, helping all of the channels work more efficiently in growing your business.
We recommend setting aside a few hundred dollars per month to put towards digital advertising. If you or someone in your practice is fairly adept with online tools, then you should be able to tackle it yourself. If not, you may want to look for a local digital marketing agency to help you with the initial setup. If you are looking to get started yourself here are some great resources:
Your clients are already going through a difficult and stressful time, so make it as simple as possible for them to find you and the information they may be seeking. Remember, your website is the first impression new clients will have of you and your firm. Give them a good experience by making it easy to find answers to basic but important questions like:
Generally, it is a good idea to make all of this information accessible via the main navigation menu on the homepage. We suggest that you include these items in your main menu:
This may seem like a lot at first blush, but once you get started, digital marketing will become part of your natural business workflow—just like answering the phone or email. The technical knowledge to embrace digital marketing is actually very low, and the tools will even guide you through most of the work. The best part is that once you get going, you get to see your practice grow!