Whether you run a solo practice or a national firm, every law office needs a solid marketing plan. A marketing plan is a detailed blueprint or portfolio of marketing strategies which a law firm plans on using over the course of a year. Though marketing plans vary from law firm to law firm, there is one marketing strategy that every firm should utilize: digital marketing.

Why Every Attorney Should Use Digital Marketing

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, digital advertising revenue has outspent TV revenue every year since 2016, making it the industry leader in advertising. Unlike TV—and other traditional forms of advertising—digital marketing is scalable which means it can be profitable regardless of your firm’s size and budget. What’s even better is that digital marketing can be targeted towards users who have an interest in your area of law and are actively seeking legal help—something traditional forms of advertising cannot always do.

What Digital Marketing Strategies Should My Firm Use?

Depending on your time, budget, and goals, some marketing strategies are better than others. Below are three legal digital marketing strategies commonly utilized by lawyers:

• Search Engine Optimization: Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the suite of tactics marketers use to rank highly on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. There are many factors that search engines use to rank webpages, but four major factors include: the quality of content on a website, how frequently content is uploaded, links to your firm’s website from other domains, and the relevancy of your firm’s website content to what is being searched. Increasing the number of published articles on a firm’s legal blog is a common strategy lawyers use to increase unpaid web traffic. Search engine optimization is free, but requires lots of time, energy, and expertise to become successful.
• Paid Search and Display: Search engines like Google and Bing offer paid advertising on their search engine results pages (SERPs). These platforms give law firms the ability to craft text-based advertisements for SERPs. The factors that influence where on the SERP an ad appears include: search query, ad relevancy to a user’s search, your firm’s website speed, your ad’s relevancy to the user’s search, and how much you bid. Beyond paid search, advertisers like Google also represent a vast network of websites with which they sell image-based ad space. Law firms can create image-based ads, which are placed on different websites and apps within this network. All of these advertisements, text or image-based, are targeted and scalable, which means they can be profitable whether your monthly advertising budget is one-hundred dollars or one-hundred-thousand dollars.
• Social Media: There are two main ways to market your firm on social media: paid and unpaid. Paid social media, similar to paid display, enables advertisers to purchase digital ad-space on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. These paid advertisements are targeted through location, demographic information, and interests. Unpaid social, like search engine optimization, requires promoting high-quality and relevant content and building a large user base over time.

Picking the best suite of digital marketing strategies depends on your firm’s marketing budget and goals. Generally, image-based advertisements are better suited to brand awareness goals, while SEO and paid search strategies are better for lead generation. All of these strategies take time, some take money, and all have their merits. Regardless of a firm’s size or area of law, digital marketing should be included on every firm’s marketing plan.

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