Do you have a law firm marketing strategy? Even if you’ve created one in the past, it’s always a good idea to revisit and update it annually. To grow your law firm so that it’s thriving and more profitable, you need to attract new clients and cultivate new business. Having a solid law firm marketing strategy and plan helps you grow your law firm by ensuring your firm’s marketing efforts will be as effective as possible.
In this post, we’ll walk you through how to grow your law firm to the next level by creating a law firm marketing strategy and execute an effective marketing plan based on your goals.
There are multiple steps that you can take to create a successful law firm marketing strategy, and to then enact the strategy with a marketing plan. The main steps are to define your business goals, undertake some market analysis, craft your marketing strategy, and then execute it. The process takes time and patience, but we’re here to talk you through how to do it—and how to do it well.
The key to running a profitable business is a steady, manageable level of client activity. Marketing your law firm correctly can help to put more eyes on your business, leading to increased opportunities to generate income. Put simply, you need a decent amount of clients to make money—and a proper marketing strategy will help you get there.
While the terms law firm marketing strategy and marketing plan may sound similar, understanding the difference between the two is important for streamlining your marketing efforts.
Essentially, your marketing strategy explains the whys behind your firm’s marketing and drives your marketing efforts forward. Your law firm marketing strategy captures your firm’s marketing goals, target audience, services offered, core message, and more.
In contrast, your marketing plan defines the specific actions you will take to execute your strategy and achieve your marketing goals. Your attorney marketing plan will also outline the types of marketing you’ll use for your firm. This includes social media marketing or search engine optimization.
What goes into a law firm marketing strategy and how do you create one? The section below outlines the different pieces you need in your marketing strategy, and what they mean:
Summarize your overall marketing strategy based on the following sections. Keep it clear and concise. If one of your employees or another stakeholder wanted the lowdown of your marketing strategy, this brief section should tell them what they need to know.
Define your marketing goals and make sure they align with your firm’s business goals. Make sure they are SMART goals . For example, one of your firm’s marketing goals could be to increase your law firm newsletter open rate by 20% by the first half of the year. Ask yourself: Why have you decided on these goals and why are they important to your law firm?
This is one of the most important foundations of a good marketing strategy. Understanding and defining your target audience—including their characteristics, purchasing habits when it comes to legal services, and pain points—will go a long way in helping you execute an effective marketing plan.
“Market” here refers to the people, businesses, and organizations that are your actual and prospective clients. Think about the size of the business opportunity your law firm has, based on your practice area(s), geographical location, target audience, etc.
A good marketing plan helps you stand out from your competitors and get the clients your law firm needs. But first, you need to understand how and what your competitors are doing. What are the characteristics of your competitors? What is their market share? How do they try to differentiate themselves from other law firms?
Outline what type of legal services you will offer, in what practice area(s), and what type of clients do you offer these services to. Are you providing legal help to individuals with accident injuries ? Or maybe you provide legal help to families going through difficult divorces ? What are the benefits of those services and how will you provide those services?
This is the key message you want your target audience to know about your law firm. Your core message should go beyond letting your ideal clients know what services you offer—it should speak deeper to their legal and personal pain points and needs.
How will you price and promote your services? What is your law firm pricing model and what do the different prices include? What marketing channels will you utilize and why have you chosen them?
Taking the time to create and execute a detailed law firm marketing plan gives you a clear roadmap to refer to throughout the year. A detailed marketing plan can also save you time, effort, and marketing budget in the long run. By having a defined plan, it becomes clear who on your team is responsible for what. This helps you stay on track and accomplish your firm’s legal marketing tasks that might otherwise fall through the cracks.
Just as you would write down your law firm business plan , having a good structure for your law firm marketing plan is important. This way, everyone at your firm can be on the same page. Having an official marketing plan also lets you measure and track your progress.
Overall, a successful law firm marketing plan means three steps:
What do you want your legal marketing plan to achieve?
Without set, quantifiable goals for your law firm marketing, it’s impossible to track and measure your success. If you’ve already created a solid law firm business plan , the good news is that you aren’t starting from scratch. Look at the overall marketing goals you laid out within your business plan, and modify them if needed.
Make sure that any goals you set are SMART and measurable. You should be able to set an objective and a time frame for your marketing goals, so you can reasonably measure how well you’ve achieved them in the future.
Examples of achievable marketing goals include:
When it comes to putting your law firm’s marketing plan to paper, keep in mind that you’ll likely have more success if you keep it concise.
While the details of your law firm’s marketing plan will be customized to your specific goals, it should include the following general sections:
When planning or updating your marketing plan, assign individuals to roles. Who does what? Don’t forget to consider who will project manage—if it’s up to the individuals assigned, or if another person will be responsible for it.
When you’re looking at what needs to be done to achieve your law firm marketing goals, be honest about whether your firm can achieve all your goals internally. If handling marketing internally isn’t feasible, consider outsourcing some (or even most) of the marketing tasks. You can hire an expert to help with everything from SEO to content creation—so don’t be afraid to outsource where you need it. Clio’s global network of Certified Consultants is a good place to start.
Your law firm marketing plan should be tailored to your firm’s goals and strategy (more on law firm marketing strategies below), but here is an example of how one firm may write out its marketing plan.
Today, there are so many ways to market your law firm. Because of this, creating your legal marketing plan can feel overwhelming. Remember to keep your firm’s goals in mind, and choose marketing tactics that you can successfully execute in your marketing plan.
Here are eight types of legal marketing tactics to consider for your law firm:
Being easy to find online is one of the most critical marketing strategies for any law firm. Search engine optimization (SEO), can help with just that. SEO strategies can increase your law firm website’s position in search engine results pages (like Google) to drive more visitors to your website. Learn more by reading our lawyer’s guide to SEO.
SEO is important for ensuring your law firm shows up in online searches, but general searches aren’t the primary way potential clients will find you—especially if you’re a small law firm. To ensure nearby clients can find you online, you also want to optimize your firm’s ranking in local search results, aka local SEO, as part of your law firm marketing strategy.
While SEO is an organic way to drive visitors to your law firm’s website, you can also employ a paid online search advertising campaign to help bring potential clients to your website.
Examples of search advertising strategies include:
If you’re investing in SEO strategies, PPC strategies, or both, your goal is to drive potential clients to your law firm website. Your law firm website is a powerful marketing tool in itself.
Think of your law firm website as your law firm’s online real estate, and prioritize its user-friendliness (this how-to guide for law firm website design can help). Your website must be:
When done right, social media can be a powerful marketing tool for your law firm, helping your firm:
Combining social media marketing on platforms like Facebook with paid advertisements can help you reach new clients for a relatively low cost. As Barry Walker, Managing Partner at Walker Law notes , “Social media marketing is the future for lawyers. Most people perform research on their smartphones. I get one to two significant cases per year from paid marketing efforts on Facebook for a minimal investment.”
Read our guide for more tips on social media for law firms.
Finally, how your law firm differentiates itself from competitors—or your law firm’s branding—is an important element of your legal marketing strategy. Finding ways to differentiate your firm to your target audience can also help you grow your law firm by gaining new, ideal clients.
As Katy Goshtasbi of Puris Consulting writes , it’s essential for law firms to resonate with the right clients. To develop your law firm’s brand:
Content marketing involves creating quality content related to your field of practice and sharing it online via multiple mediums. It is a marketing tactic that can help build your brand and establish expertise, offer value to potential clients, and help drive more people to your website. Content marketing could include content like blog posts, videos, infographics, or even podcasts .
Matthew J. Tuller, Principal Attorney and Owner at the Law Office of Matthew J. Tuller, explains how this strategy works at his firm: “For our law firm, we have found that we gain the most traction through writing timely educational articles about estate planning-related issues. While we post these articles to our firm’s website and social media sites, we have found the most immediate results from posting to LinkedIn.”
Thought leadership is a big part of content marketing. To establish your firm as a thought leader or subject matter expert for your target audience, your firm could create and share authoritative and educational content like videos (here’s a guide to law firm video marketing ), blog posts, or even answers on forums like Quora.
Email marketing for lawyers is an online marketing strategy that offers a lot of bang for minimal effort (especially if you use tools like Mailchimp to help). Sending out targeted and consistent marketing emails to your network can help you build your brand, establish your law firm’s expertise, and bring value to readers. Email marketing is also easy to measure, with marketing platforms offering analytics like how many people open your email. This way, you will know how well your marketing efforts are received.
Sending out a law firm newsletter can be an effective use of an email marketing strategy. Here are tips for how to start an email newsletter at your law firm.
A solid law firm marketing plan should involve both passive and active marketing activities. For example, passive marketing can be achieved in the form of professional website copy and design that can help to build credibility and authority for your firm. Showcasing your expertise gives potential clients confidence in your capabilities.
As previously mentioned, positive client reviews and testimonials are an excellent way to gain the trust of clients looking for representation right off the bat. Consider implementing this into your email marketing strategy by setting up an automated process that encourages happy clients to leave public, positive feedback.
Showcasing case studies and successful cases on your website demonstrates your level of expertise whilst also fostering confidence. If you organize your case studies so that people can find situations similar to their own, it’s a fantastic way to let them know that you are capable of helping them.
Dedicating a section of your website to legal FAQs that are pertinent to your area of practice can be a winning marketing tool. As well as bolstering your content marketing strategy, it is helpful for prospective clients who may need quick advice. Knowing that your firm has the skills and knowledge to deal with a specific concern as opposed to just a general area of practice can be the difference between winning and losing a client—especially if they are feeling unsure.
You’ve created a targeted law firm marketing strategy and you’re executing a killer marketing plan to bring that strategy to fruition. What’s next?
If you want to grow your law firm while maximizing your marketing budget, you must monitor and measure your marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) .
Tracking your efforts is critical to success and can’t be overlooked. Without measuring, you won’t know what’s working, what’s not working, or what marketing efforts are giving you the best return on investment . When you have a clear picture of your results, conversely, you can make informed, data-driven decisions for better, faster marketing results.
New business is key to a thriving law firm. To get new business, you need to let people know that you’re out there—this is where your law firm marketing strategy and plan come in. There are many ways to market your law firm, but you’ll have the most success if you start with a law firm marketing strategy and SMART goals, which you can put into a marketing plan for your law firm. By executing marketing according to a structured plan—and measuring the results—you can help potential clients reach you and help grow your law firm.
We published this blog post in January 2021. Last updated: July 9, 2024 .
