There are many ways that you can help to generate more enquires for your law firm. Some of these approaches work better than others and some will require more time, effort and money. In this article we will consider the options and evaluate each one so that you can use this information to help make better decisions about where to invest your time, energy and money for your own law firm’s marketing strategy.
Why you cannot just rely on word of mouth for your law firm
Word of mouth marketing is the natural activity of your satisfied clients telling their family, friends and co-workers how great your law firm is and how positive their experience was when they used your legal services.
It is true that word of mouth marketing is the best because it works and it is usually free. For this reason, many solicitors make the assumption that all other forms of marketing are not worth the investment and that they will rely purely on this form of marketing which requires no additional effort or money.
However, the reality is that most of your clients will not want to talk to many people about how their sensitive legal issues were resolved. Often these matters are private and people wish for them to stay that way.
There is also a bigger problem with this strategy and that is that after awhile your clients might manage to widen the marketing audience for you through this approach but eventually a point will be reached where you notice a lack of enquires. This often happens to smaller law firms where the word of mouth approach works well at first as it reaches the local community but once these initial circles have been reached, the harder it is for this type of marketing to work for you on a continuous basis.
How to reignite the word of mouth marketing again for your law firm
The solution is to use other forms of marketing and not just word of mouth marketing for your law firm. This will help your firm to reach new audiences, so that you can widen your marketing circles. For example, you could use another form of marketing such as legal directories which would help your law firm to reach new audiences that are searching for legal services.
Once this new audience has been reached, the word of mouth approach can begin to work again for you within this new circle of people that you otherwise would never have reached by just relying on word of mouth alone.
So the legal directories would have a double benefit in the form of reaching the new initial clients but then these new clients could tell their family, friends and co-workers about your legal services and so the word of mouth cycle is able to begin again.
The solution is to keep reaching new clients and to provide the best legal service that you can to these clients. This will allow the word of mouth cycles to continue.
Different marketing approaches for your law firm
At this point we have already identified how important word of mouth marketing is, as well as considered how we can use other forms of marketing to reignite the word of mouth process. So now it is time to look at the other forms of marketing that can help to generate new enquires for your legal services.
Legal Directories
Legal directories help individuals and businesses to find solicitors in their local area. For this reason they are an obvious starting point for any law firm that wishes to reach new audiences that are searching for legal services. A good place to start is with a LawFirms.co.uk membership which includes 11 legal directories.
There are also many other benefits that legal directories can also provide for your law firm’s marketing efforts including enhancing your law firm’s online presence with reviews for your law firm and improving your law firm’s SEO strategy.
We have created a detailed article about how legal directories can help your law firm here.
Improving your law firm’s positions in Google is another great way to reach new audiences that are searching for legal services. You have probably already heard of Search engine optimisation or SEO as it is more commonly referred to as. SEO involves the optimisation of you firm’s website so that it performs better in the search engines such as Google. This is a highly complex topic so we have provided a specific article for this here. The article will cover the essential elements that your law firm will need in order to see better rankings in Google as well as provide details as to how you can go about obtaining and developing these necessary elements for your law firm.
Google also offers valuable business listings for law firms and so details of where you can update these have also been included in the above article. These business listings will also help to generate more enquires for your firm so they are definitely worth spending some time on.
Reviews
This might not seem like a direct marketing strategy for generating more enquires but these are essential. Improving the online reviews for your law firm is necessary if you want to win the trust of potential clients and convince them that your legal services are a good choice.
Not only this but improving your your law firm’s reviews can help to enhance your firm’s positions in legal directories and in Google searches as well. The previously referenced articles for Google positions and legal directories will provide lots more information on how you can achieve this for your law firm but you can also learn more about why your law firm needs reviews here.
Pay per click advertising
Pay per click (PPC) is basically where you pay a company such as Google money each time your adverts are clicked. So the more times people visit your website via clicks on these adverts, the more it will cost.
PPC is one of the most expensive forms of marketing but it does work when done correctly. It is unfortunately usually much more expensive for law firms than other types of businesses due to the competition for legal searches in the online advertising world.
That said, you can set a daily budget to keep these costs within the amounts you are happy to spend each day but these settings can be very complex for beginners so it is often better to get a marketing agency to manage these campaigns unless you have experience with online advertising.
Social media
Social media often works great for the creative industries but for solicitors such platforms are not so likely to generate lots of enquires. The main reason for this is due to the way that things are shared online. Creative works of art such as illustrations, art, design, music, cooking, fashion, literature, etc can easily gain large groups of followers and huge amounts of social shares.
Law firms provide a very different type of service though and so it is not realistic to expect the same results as other industries due to the different nature of them. The general public are unlikely to want to share information about a law firm as a new team member, certification, company ethos, change in a law, etc is usually not going to be as widely appreciated by the general public in the same way that something of a creative nature might be.
Obviously for large law firms covering high profile cases, social media does work as the public want to know about such news but for small to medium sized law firms the approach often has to be different.
Sharing client cases is also not something that would be appreciated by your clients so again this also goes against law firms when they are not able to share the details of the cases they have been working on.
This is not to say that social media does not have some benefits for law firms, as it does. It can help to strengthen a firm’s online presence and educate the public about the firm’s ethos or brand. This is useful but it is unlikely that social media will provide a steady stream of legal enquires for your law firm.
Email marketing
This is probably the worst approach for trying to get more enquires for your law firm. This often involves sending out a huge amount of emails to people that do not wish to receive them. Often this will result in the email being marked as spam which then means all future communications are at risk of being labelled as spam which usually results in such emails always being delivered to the spam / junk email box.
This is not to be confused with company newsletters which are a great way of keeping employees informed of changes but most of the time even these will be unwanted by your clients. Newsletters work much better for other types of businesses but for reasons similar to the social media points mentioned above, newsletters are probably not the best approach for generating more enquires.
Newspaper and magazine adverts
In the past newspaper and magazine adverts were popular as there were not so many options but there is one major issue with print based advertising and that is that you need to get the advert in front of the people that are looking for specific legal services at the exact right moment.
With print based advertising you are trying to reach clients instead of waiting for them to come to you. Online advertising such as legal directories, Google, PPC, etc all work the other way around as people search for the legal services they need and your firm is presented to them.
This means that with online marketing approaches your firm is placed in-front of individuals searching for specific legal services at the exact moment that they are looking for them. Print based advertising works on the hope that such people will happen to pick up a newspaper or magazine at the exact time that they need a legal service. For this reason print based advertising is usually much less effective for law firms. Print based advertising is also very expensive and so huge amounts of marketing budgets can be spent here which is often not the best approach when other marketing options are more likely to generate more enquires.
Conclusion of how to generate more legal enquiries for your law firm
From the above we have learned that there are a few key areas of marketing that are most likely to provide the best results for generating more enquires for your law firm.
These areas include getting your law firm listed in legal directories, gathering reviews from your clients and enhancing your firm’s Google positions with SEO.
We recommend that you also read the following articles which provide more details on these specific areas of marketing for law firms: