5 law firm marketing ideas to refresh your marketing strategy

Whether you're a newcomer to the marketing arena or a seasoned professional with years of experience within your law firm, the expectation to generate innovative marketing strategies will fall upon you.

In this post, we’ll revisit why refreshing your law firm’s marketing strategy is always worthwhile. We’ll then share a mix of law firm marketing ideas you can explore to keep propelling your practice forward.

Let’s dive in!

3 signs it’s time to update your law firm marketing strategy

Here are a few telling sights that your law firm marketing strategy needs some serious love. 

1. You’re not getting leads 

If your firm isn’t bringing in any new leads or client inquiries, it’s a sign that your audience isn’t aware of you in the market, or that they’re putting their trust in your competitors instead. It’s time to invest time and effort into getting your name out there again so you’re always top of mind.

2. No one engages with you on social media

In much of the same way, if no one ever likes your page or posts or engages in conversation with you online, it also means you’re falling behind on your online presence. You’ll have to find ways to share content that interests your audience. 

3. Your marketing assets look out of date

If you’ve had the same hero images on your law firm’s website for more years than you’d like to admit or start to notice that your branding aesthetic doesn’t look as modern or as appealing as other competitors in your space, it’s time to give your marketing materials a refresh. Refreshing key assets like your law firm’s website can help you stay relevant.

5 effective ways to refresh your law firm’s marketing strategy  

1. Revisit your firm’s Unique Selling Proposition 

Your Unique Selling Proposition (or USP) is what sets you apart from your competition, be that price, expertise, success rates, years of experience, or compassionate care. If you’re a law firm specializing in intellectual property law, for example, you might highlight your track record of successfully securing patents for clients. 

These are the things that make you stand out from others delivering similar services. 

It can be too easy to lose sight of your USP as you juggle plenty of marketing tasks day-to-day, but it’s always worthwhile to take some time to revisit this with your leadership team so that you’re fully aligned before you go ahead and develop any new marketing materials. 

Once you’re completely clear about the problem you solve, who you solve it for, and how you do it best, you can do a much better job at ensuring that all your marketing efforts clearly communicate how your firm delivers value in a way that resonates with your audience. 

2. Perform a website audit, and update it according to your findings  

Your website is your handshake and the most important asset your law firm has. Whatever state your law firm’s website is in, we can bet you there’s no shortage of work to be done or ways you can improve it, both from a content and a technical standpoint. 

Here are a few metrics and elements you can audit and update accordingly: 

Website metrics to review

• Website traffic
  Website traffic provides insight into the volume of visitors to the site and can indicate whether marketing efforts are effectively driving traffic.
  
• Bounce rate
  This measures the percentage of visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate may indicate that your website’s content or user experience needs improvement.
  
• Average session duration
  This is the average amount of time your visitors spend on your website. A longer average session duration suggests that visitors are engaging with your content, while a shorter duration may indicate that the content is not sufficiently engaging or relevant.
  
• Conversion rate
  This is the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action, such as filling out a contact form or scheduling a consultation with your firm. A low conversion rate may indicate that the website design or content needs optimization to encourage conversions.
  
• Click-through rate (CTR)
  This measures the percentage of users who click on a specific link or call-to-action on the website like a button to book a consultation. Analyzing your CTR helps you identify opportunities to improve engagement and conversions.
  
• Page load time
  This is the time it takes for a webpage to fully load in a browser. Slow load times can frustrate visitors and lead to higher bounce rates. Optimizing page load times can improve user experience and overall website performance.

Content effectiveness 

• Is who you are and what you do clear on your home page?
  Is your USP coming through clearly?
• Are you offering enough detail about what your services include?
• Are you speaking in a language that touches on the pain points of your audience?
• Are you using too much legal jargon for the average person to understand?
• Are you sharing any outdated information you need to get rid of?
• Do your pages answer the questions readers are looking for?
• Is your website accessible to people with disabilities? 

Usability issues  

• Is your website mobile-friendly? 
• Does your website take too long to load?
• Do you have a bunch of broken links you need to fix?
• Does your sitemap make sense?
• Do any of your pages have dead ends, where users don’t know where to go next?

A thorough review of all your website’s content and functionality is the best place to identify areas you can improve and start making adjustments that will enhance its effectiveness in attracting and converting prospective clients for your law firm. 

3. Re-work your social media marketing strategy

Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram are great places to experiment with creative marketing ideas that can build more brand awareness for your law firm.

Here are a just two different approaches you can take with your social media marketing efforts as a law firm:  

Humanize your law firm’s brand on personal pages 

A proven way to connect with prospective clients on LinkedIn is not to limit your posts to your law firm’s official page. Instead, you can work on training your lawyers and attorneys to start sharing their own success stories, experiences, and their professional insights on their personal pages, by writing their own LinkedIn articles, or by contributing to collaborative articles on topics that they consider themselves to be experts in. You never know who might be reading and who might just discover your law firm through personal interactions like this.

Create educational content 

Educational content like videos serve as a great means for delivering valuable insights to potential clients. By producing informative content that tackles common legal queries, demystifies complex legal topics, or offers practical advice for legal matters your audience might be struggling with, your firm positions itself as an authoritative source of information, fostering trust and attracting potential clients. 

Social media marketing is such a valuable marketing tool for law firms so this is one area that shouldn’t be overlooked. Just like you audit your website, you should also perform an audit of your social media presence and come up with a list of areas that need improvement. 

4. Enhance your customer experience with modern tools 

This may not sound like a marketing tactic off the bat, but providing exceptional service to your existing clients is the best way to get referrals for new business and build a positive reputation that can go far through word of mouth. 

Even if you’re offering pretty standard legal services to your clients, the way that you collaborate with your clients is what makes all the difference to their experience. Modern law firms that incorporate innovative tools that consider the clients are the ones seeing higher levels of client satisfaction and more referrals.

Let’s take the client onboarding process as an example. What does this currently look like for your law firm? Do your clients:

• Need to answer all your questions over email?
• Run into issues when sending you large documents needed for their case because of email file size limitations?
• Have to submit all their information to you in one sitting because the forms tool you use doesn’t save their information automatically?

One way to solve these struggles is to take your client onboarding process off email and switch to a data collection tool that’s designed with the client experience in mind already. 

Pro tip: use Content Snare 

Content Snare is one example of a tool you can use, and here are a few features it offers to make life easy for your clients: 

• Auto-saving form responses, so your client never loses the information then input
• A save and continue later option, so they can exit, return, and pick up where they left off
• Support for large file uploads, so they can upload long documents or high-quality images without any issues

Using Content Snare is just one example of how you can modernize processes like client intake to make working with your clients a breeze for both parties. Another thing you can do to ensure you have satisfied clients is look into incorporating tools like document automation tools that automate manual and time-consuming tasks like document preparation so you can free up your time to focus on the things that matter most to your clients. 

We cover more examples of these helpful tools in our post Apps and tools for lawyers.

5. Gather feedback as often as you can

Gathering feedback from both new and existing customers is a valuable opportunity to discover how your marketing tactics are performing and improve your service. There are so many different places where you can gather feedback too.

Send feedback surveys after service 

One effective method for gathering feedback is through post-service feedback forms you send to clients after working on their case. Utilizing a data collection tool for this process can streamline the feedback process, making it easy for you to collect, analyze and act on client feedback promptly. (PS - you can also use Content Snare as a feedback tool!)

If you’re a personal injury law firm, for example, you might use a data collection tool to send an automated survey after the case is resolved. You can ask them about their overall satisfaction with the legal services you provide, the responsiveness of your legal team, and any suggestions for how you can improve your service and offerings.

If multiple clients express dissatisfaction with your law firm's communication practices or responsiveness, you can then take proactive steps to address these issues, like implementing better systems for client communication or providing more frequent updates on case progress.  

Related: Best survey tools (free and paid)

Use poll features on your social media platforms

Once you start getting more engagement on social media, you can start using poll features on platforms like Linkedin and Facebook to gain invaluable insights into the needs, preferences, and pain points of your audience. You can take this information away to tailor your services more so that you can meet client expectations better. 

Here’s an example of a poll The University of Law ran on its LinkedIn page:

Ask for reviews on online review sites  

You can also ask your clients to leave you their feedback and reviews on platforms like Yelp or Google. Any negative reviews left on these public sites will inform you of some areas where you need to do better, and the positive reviews can be used as social proof of your firm’s expertise and reliability in helping people solve their legal matters. 

Final advice for marketing legal services

We hope these law firm marketing tactics have given you some inspiration for places you can start to breathe new life into your law firm marketing plan. Marketing is always evolving, so the key to staying competitive is to continuously benchmark your marketing efforts against your competitors and make it a point to refresh your strategy periodically. Don’t forget to keep gathering feedback wherever you can so you can continuously improve!