Legal Marketers - is your marketing strategy letting you down?

How can you tackle the challenges faced in the legal sector head on, and create a kick ass marketing plan...

Marketing in the legal sector can be a challenging task, but it is essential for the growth and success of the business. With the increasing competition, it’s crucial to stand out and reach the right clients.?

By understanding the challenges being faced, and developing a strong and strategic marketing plan, legal marketers can overcome these obstacles and effectively market their firm in a highly competitive industry.?

Challenges facing legal marketers?

• SRA Restrictions?
• Competitive Landscapes
• Low ROI
• Measuring Marketing Activity?

SRA Restrictions?

The SRA released new regulations in Dec 2019 limiting how law firms can advertise to customers. The regulations prohibit the legal sector from unsolicited approaches to advertise legal services unless to current or previous clients. As all legal marketers know, failure to comply with these regulations can result in severe consequences, so it is ultra important to abide by them.?

Competitive Landscape?

With more law firms than ever before, and existing law firms diversifying their once stagnant offering, it is now much harder to gain the competitive edge in this complicated market.?

BUT, understanding the true ROI of your marketing can catapult your business to the correct audiences. Having a deep understanding of the legal services you offer and the ability to communicate this information in an easily digestible format, will help you to stand out in this highly competitive sector.?

Low ROI (Return on Investment)?

Competition on digital platforms has grown with the growing number of law firms.

58% of all traffic is generated by Paid Search although only resulting in a 1.8% conversion rate.

Source - Ruler Analytics (Conversion Benchmark Report for Legal).

It is often too true for law firms to fall into the trap of chasing results on old campaign types, just by adding more budgets. But results won’t improve until you move focus to which campaigns, ads and keywords are driving conversions. Understanding the value of keywords can be so valuable.?

With most in the legal sector having limited marketing budgets, it’s important to invest well following thorough research in your target audiences. Marketers must be creative and strategic in their efforts to maximise their budget and reach.?

Measuring Marketing Activity?

Tracking offline conversations is usually unheard of in the legal sector as attributing them to a certain activity can become complicated. Both Paid and Organic Search can result in inbound calls as opposed to online form submissions. Although it’s not easy to ask every prospect where they heard of you or your business, it is important to report in some way where the lead came from. Measuring the effectiveness of these efforts requires the use of metrics and analytics to track the results of marketing campaigns, enabling you to make informed decisions about future marketing.?

Understanding how users interact with content is essential to prioritising the correct channels in your marketing strategy. Organic search has a conversion rate of over 4% in the legal sector, which is significantly higher than the average of 2.6% across all channels. Email marketing though, came out on top with a 4.5% conversion rate.?

How can legal firms increase leads from marketing activity?

There are multiple platforms out there that are perfect for legal marketing professionals to implement into their strategies.

Firstly, you should consider whether or not your buyer’s journey and is your brand is actually at the forefront of that journey and visible to your target audience?

Understanding their touchpoints within the user journey will help depict which channels, and content will work best to engage audiences. Each channel and piece of content plays a different role no matter whether the goal is to drive brand awareness, showcasing your product or pushing for the final conversion.

Is your website up to scratch? We’re here to help if it’s not ;)

If the user experience on your website is poor, you will see less conversions and ultimately, a high conversion rate is the goal. A website with a great user journey, combined with strong call to action points, will improve the user experience, resulting in more conversions.?

An integral part of any marketing, although especially in the legal sector, is to understand your audience, particularly for Paid Media. How will you know how to target your ads, if you do not know who your audience is??

Start by creating your perfect client personas. Using this demographic data, you can find trends amongst your current clients which can be used to test your paid marketing activity. These personas can also help you to understand what questions your audience are asking.

You should start by answering these questions:

• What are my target audience typing into their preferred search engine when looking for a law firm??
• What do they do in their spare time?
• What stereotype do they fall into??

The answers to these questions will help you to narrow down your specific target audience.?

Is your personal branding a priority??

Users are much more invested in the people behind the company, especially if it is selling a service.?

70% of consumers feel more connected to brands with CEOs that are active on social - sproutsocial #BrandsGetReal: What consumers want from brands in a divided society Study?

By creating a strong personal brand, consumers feel you and your service are more approachable and ‘real’, in an ever growing world of ‘trying to sell’.?

Create a strategy using your insights

Knowing your Target Audience: Understanding your target audience is crucial to creating a successful marketing strategy. This includes identifying the demographics, needs and preferences of your ideal clients. Understanding these factors will help you create targeted and effective marketing campaigns that will resonate.

Develop a Strong Online Presence: This is crucial to the success of your business. Having a professional and informative website, with great user experience and easy to see call-to-actions, will set you above the rest. Teamed with a robust SEO strategy, your website will provide potential clients with information about your services, your team, and your experience.?

Utilising Content Marketing: Content marketing is often overlooked, but it’s an effective way to educate potential clients about your services and establish your first as a thought leader in the legal sector. This can include blog posts, articles, videos, and infographics that provide valuable information to your target audience. By providing useful information, you can build trust with your audience and establish yourself as an expert in your field.?

Networking and Referral Marketing: These come hand-in-hand and are essential for building relationships and attracting new clients. Attend industry events, join professional organisations, and build relationships with other professionals in your industry. Encourage satisfied clients to refer their friends and family to your firm, and offer incentives for these.?

Partnerships: Collaborating with other businesses within your sector, can be a valuable way to reach new clients. By partnering with established businesses, you can tap into their network of clients and expand your reach.?

Invest in Advertising: Paid Media can make a huge difference to your marketing activity. You can increase traffic, sales and conversions through clicks. All of which will ultimately increase revenue. Your message can be refined to influence your audiences to take action. Cost-per-click (CPC) is the most popular model used within Paid Media. This model allows you to pay a fee for each click received, regardless of how many impressions are achieved. This is a performance-based metric that allows you to control how much you’re willing to spend per click.?

Marketing in the legal sector requires a strategic and targeted approach. By understanding, following these steps and creating a strong marketing campaign, you can effectively market your business within the legal sectors and reach new clients.