Do you dream of doubling or even tripling your law firm’s revenue this year? Inbound marketing may be the key to your success.
Research shows that nearly 75% of organizations globally depend on the inbound marketing approach to promote their brands and generate leads.
How does inbound marketing work for law firms? Let’s explore the ins and outs of inbound marketing, as well as how a quality provider of inbound marketing services can help.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
The inbound marketing strategy is a client-centered marketing approach. Your goal with inbound marketing is to create valuable experiences and content that attract, delight, and engage potential clients.
Inbound marketing is different from outbound marketing, which relies on interruptive strategies. These include traditional advertising and cold calling.
With inbound marketing, your goal is to build long-term connections with your law firm clients. You can do this by giving them information that can help them solve their problems.
Importance of Inbound Marketing Strategy
This marketing strategy is invaluable for multiple reasons. First, it can make reaching your law firm’s target audience more cost-effective.
If you create top-tier content your audience appreciates, you can draw visitors to your site without spending a large percentage of your budget on advertising.
Second, inbound marketing can help you sustainably generate leads. As we mentioned earlier, inbound marketing isn’t focused on interrupting your potential clients’ attention. Instead, it’s focused on building credibility and trust with potential clients.
By giving prospective clients valuable solutions, you demonstrate to them your authority in the legal field. This will help you earn your potential clients’ loyalty long-term.
Attracting the Proper Audience
Drawing the right law firm audience is an important part of the inbound marketing process. To accomplish this, you’ll have to define your law firm’s target audience. Then, you can create online content that targets their pain points and needs.
Review your previous clients’ data to determine their demographics, behaviors, and interests. If you’re a criminal lawyer, perhaps you have mostly represented young adults. If you run a divorce law firm, you might mostly serve clients with children.
After you’ve narrowed down your law firm’s target audience, it’s time to start creating online content they’ll find valuable (more on content creation later).
Generating and Nurturing Website Leads
Let’s say you’ve drawn the proper audience and earned their trust through quality content. You’re now ready to start converting visitors to your law firm website into leads.
You can do this by creating compelling CTAs, or calls to action.
These phrases are designed to encourage visitors to your website to perform a certain action. This may include completing your website’s contact form. Another action may include joining your law firm’s email list.
You can test various CTAs to determine which phrases are most effective for turning visitors to your website into leads.
Keep in mind that the best CTAs speak to your audience’s pain points and motivations. For instance, use “Get a free quote” to target car accident victims who may be concerned about legal fees.
After you have generated leads through your law firm’s website, you can start nurturing these leads.
For instance, create a targeted email campaign that will give your prospective clients access to the latest content you’ve produced. Your goal during the nurturing phase is to entice website visitors to hire you to handle their legal matters.
Inbound Content Marketing
Content creation can be an excellent way to draw clients to your law firm. The content you create may include social media platform posts and videos. Videos are especially a wonderful way to give your audience a more interactive and engaging experience.
You could also create podcasts as well as blog posts with infographics for your website. These content pieces can help position your law firm as an industry thought leader.
Infographics are particularly handy, as they are highly shareable. In addition, they can attract backlinks, where people link to your infographic on their sites. Infographics can generate engagement on social media as well.
In addition, you can create thought leadership content pieces, expert interviews, and eBooks. eBooks can give your audience more in-depth details about certain legal topics. An example of a topic is the costs clients should expect when going through a divorce.
You may also develop case studies and how-to guide pieces on your website to build your clients’ trust in you. For instance, you can post how-to articles related to filing for divorce or filing for bankruptcy depending on your practice area.
Planning Your Content
An easy way to start planning your content is to create an online content calendar.
This calendar should outline the various kinds of content you plan to create. It should also spell out when you will create this content and who’ll be developing it.
Measuring Content’s ROI
After you have developed online content, you’ll need to measure your content’s return on investment, or ROI. This will help you determine how effective your content is.
For instance, you can look at the amount of traffic your content is generating on your website. You can also look at how many people are interacting with your content. For instance, how many individuals are viewing your videos on Facebook?
Other metrics that can be used to measure your content’s ROI include the number of leads your content is generating. Your law firm’s revenue numbers may also help with this.
Over time, you may identify the most effective type of content for your law firm. Then, you can adjust your firm’s content strategy as needed to yield the best results.
Inbound Marketing SEO
Another important aspect of the inbound marketing process is search engine optimization, or SEO. This process involves optimizing your site to achieve a higher ranking on search engine result pages for the keywords your law firm’s audience members are using in their searches.
Let’s take a look at three aspects of inbound marketing SEO worth mastering.
Link-Building Outside of Your Website
You can perform link-building outside of your website to draw more people to your law firm online. This is called off-page SEO.
This practice involves building quality backlinks from reputable sites to your law firm’s website. You can do this by asking clients to add links to your site in their social media posts, comments, or feeds.
In addition, you can add backlinks in online legal directories, like Justia or FindLaw. These backlinks may be added to press releases, blog comment signatures, or legal forums as well.
The link-building process can be challenging and time-consuming. However, it is an important part of a successful law firm SEO strategy. This is why you may want to hire an inbound marketing agency to handle this task for you.
When done correctly, link building can improve your site’s visibility and authority on search engine result pages.
Website Optimization
In addition to using backlinks for SEO, you should focus on optimizing your law firm’s web pages.
This means including relevant keywords in your pages’ titles and meta descriptions. It also means inserting these keywords into your content and header tags.
An inbound marketing agency can help you choose keywords that your audience members are using when searching for legal services in your area. These keywords may be “law firm near San Diego” or “divorce attorney near me.”
A reputable marketing agency will make sure you use the right number of keywords in your content. This is important because keyword stuffing, where you use a large number of keywords, isn’t effective for SEO. Instead, you should include each keyword organically and naturally in your content.
Another way to optimize your firm’s website is to make sure your site is simple to navigate and loads quickly. As we mentioned earlier, make sure the site also offers information that prospective clients will find useful.
Inbound Marketing With Social Media
Social media is another important arm of a strong law firm’s inbound marketing strategy. Social media can help you to reach a bigger audience. You can also engage with prospective clients in a personalized way.
With social media platforms, you can promote your website’s content. For instance, you can share links to your newest website blog posts, infographics, or videos in a Facebook or Instagram post.
You can even post a short introductory video to one of your website’s videos on Instagram. In the video, encourage readers to visit your website for the full video.
Building Your Following
Another important part of social media inbound marketing involves building a strong following. The more you grow your following, the more you increase your law firm’s reach. You’ll also be able to engage with prospective clients more effectively.
To build a strong following, be sure to respond to users’ direct messages and comments.
You can also share content that users have generated. This may include a testimonial video or even a user’s tweet that is relevant to your service. Doing this can give your law firm greater exposure and help you form deeper relationships with potential clients.
Inbound Marketing With Email
Another inbound marketing strategy to tap into is email marketing. This can be a powerful way to cultivate relationships with prospective clients and nurture your leads. Let’s explore how to implement email inbound marketing for your law firm.
Email List Building
To maximize email marketing, you’ll first need to build a subscriber list. These are people who have agreed to get content from you. You can build this list in the following ways:
- Adding an opt-in form to your law firm’s blog and website
- Running a social media campaign to drive people to this form
- Providing lead magnets, like webinars or eBooks
An inbound marketing agency can make sure you’re following General Data Protection Regulation guidelines when building your subscriber list.
Creating a Targeted Email Campaign
After you have generated a list of people to email, you can create a targeted email campaign that provides value to each subscriber.
For instance, consider sending newsletters featuring legal updates and news related to your practice area. For instance, if you’re a tax lawyer, your newsletter could highlight recent changes in tax law.
You may also provide exclusive promotions, like free hours of legal work.
Measuring Email Marketing ROI
Your inbound marketing agency can help you track various metrics to measure your email marketing campaign’s success. These metrics include conversion rates, open rates, and click-through rates.
By analyzing these metrics, you can tell how well your marketing campaigns are performing over time.
Automating Your Inbound Marketing
To save you time, consider introducing automation to your inbound marketing process.
Your inbound marketing agency can use various software to automate tasks like email marketing and posting on social media. They can also automate lead nurturing. This is where you send your leads targeted content according to their behavior and interests.
How We Can Help With Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing can be an effective way to broaden your law firm’s reach. A good inbound marketing strategy includes content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing.
Hiring an inbound marketing agency can help you draw the right prospective clients to your firm and free you up to focus on running your business.
At Venn Digital Marketing, we offer quality marketing services. We can help your law firm in the areas of sales, lead generation, SEO, and email marketing.
Get in touch with us to learn how we can take your law firm’s reach and revenue to the next level!