#025 – Daily Law Firm Marketing Activities
Law firm marketing is unique, and the common marketing tactics that work for other businesses do not always translate well for law firm marketing. However, there are a variety of daily law firm marketing activities that are an ideal fit for law firms, depending on the particular goals of your business. When you adopt a certain mindset and include these everyday marketing activities, they will become second nature as you work on gaining clients and building up your business.
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TRANSCRIPT
The Legal Marketing Lounge
Hello again. Another week, another podcast. I’m so excited that you are joining me here today in Legal Marketing Lounge because today, we’re going to talk about some daily law firm marketing activities that you should be doing every single day for your law firm. But before we get started, if you’ll go ahead and hit that subscribe button, then you’ll always know when a podcast of mine has dropped, and you’ll always be the first to know. So go ahead and hit that subscribe button, and we’ll get right into it.
Daily Law Firm Marketing Activities
Law Firm Marketing is a constant process. I always say that it’s kind of like being a farmer. I’ve never been a farmer, but from what I know of farming, you start at one end and you do all the things—you plant the seeds, you water them, they grow, then you harvest, then you get rid of any excess, and then you start it over. There’s really no end to the process. And it’s very similar with marketing in the sense that there is no end. But don’t let that discourage you. Don’t let that make it feel overwhelming to you. I am going to try to explain today how you can have certain activities that you do every day that will exponentially help your overall online visibility, increase your brand visibility online, and increase your visibility as an expert online to potential clients as well as to others in legal industry.
Law Firm Marketing Is Unique
Now, law firm marketing is unique. And the common marketing tactics that work for other businesses don’t always translate well. For law firm marketing, you may already know that there are certain things that law firms cannot say on their website because of bar marketing guidelines in their state. There are certain pieces of information that law firms cannot provide to potential clients. There are even certain words that law firms can’t say such as best personal injury lawyer.
I mean, I know you’re the best. We know you’re the best, but you can’t say it. So the things that work for other businesses in marketing don’t always work for law firms. But that said, there are a variety of marketing activities that are an ideal fit for law firms, and that will depend also on the particular goals of your business.
Daily Law Firm Marketing Activities You Should Be Doing
When you adopt a certain mindset and include some of these daily law firm marketing activities that I’m going to give you today, hopefully they become second nature as you get to work on gaining more clients and building up your reputation, your business and your brand. So let’s just get into it.
Check Your Goals
The first thing is to check your goals. You can’t know if you accomplish a goal if you never set it in the first place. I feel like this is going to be a bit of tough love here. A lot of lawyers and law firms are on Instagram, or they’re on Facebook or LinkedIn and Twitter and they are engaging. They’re on there every day, but there’s no real strategy in the sense that they do not have a goal they want to accomplish with their activity. They just know they’re supposed to be on there because somebody told them “go beyond LinkedIn” or “go be on Instagram” or “have a Facebook group for your law firm”. And then they sort of engage on there, but they don’t really know what they should be doing or how often they should be doing it. So we’re going to clear this up right now. There are some crucial and foundational daily law firm marketing activities and objectives that are going to benefit your law firm, and they are going to enhance your client relationships. They’re going to propel potential clients to action—to call you, to give you money. And all of this is going to help achieve your marketing goals.
Sometimes you need to focus on just one aspect in particular, because all this can seem overwhelming, right? All of the LinkedIn and TikTok, and now somebody is on clubhouse. And it just feels overwhelming. This will be different for every law firm. It will depend on how far along your law firm is, and how far along you are in your marketing plan in the digital world. But no matter how mature your marketing strategy is, committing to a few everyday practices is going to help you reach your goals.
Let’s talk about what the end result should be. It should be building trust, establishing leadership, demonstrating expertise, connecting with clients, and requesting referrals. Let’s talk about each one of these as a goal.
Build Trust
The first one is building trust. We all know building trust is a critical requirement for any business. Typically, people do business with people. And it is even more of a critical requirement for a law firm because people are coming to you with challenges that they cannot solve themselves. They need your expertise. Trust allows clients to gain confidence in you. And not only hire you, but then refer you to other people. It assists communication and establishes you as a reliable authority.
How To Build Trust Outside Social Media
Keep your deadlines whenever possible, bill your clients accurately, preferably with the use of technology, because that makes it a lot easier. In fact, you should consider going to a flat fee. This doesn’t work for all law firms. So if it doesn’t work for you, you can ignore me for a hot minute. But this is a new trend that I have seen with a lot of law firms. It establishes a bit of trust with clients because they feel comfortable, they know how much they’re going to pay. You need to be approachable and make sure that your clients know they can contact you. Demonstrate empathy, show your clients that you care. It goes a long way in building trust. Listen more, be a good listener, not only with the clients that you have right now, but throughout all of social media. It is going to help you understand your clients pain points, and help you be able to solve their problems that they have legally. Under promise and overdeliver every single time. Give your clients realistic possibilities of their outcome. And then aim for excellence. I know you will, because you’re awesome.
Establish Leadership
The next thing to do is to establish leadership. Even if lawyers don’t have an abundance of natural leadership skills (not every lawyer does), those can be developed with practice. And showcasing your leadership on social media is important as well. Leadership skills start at the office in real world situations, or if you are a virtual office with your team, and they trickle down into your client interactions. And this is true of really large law firms and small law firms as well. And it is especially true with marketing endeavors.
Developing Your Leadership Skills
So let’s consider the following activities that you can do every day to develop or enhance your leadership skills.
Be a Positive Example to Your Team and Others
Make sure that what you are posting on social media is positive. You know, it’s like they say if you don’t have something nice to say don’t say it. If you have a particular view that you believe will be confrontational or adversarial, think twice about posting it. If it is something that is about a piece of legislation that you feel strongly about, then yes, you should make your feelings known about that if it directly affects your clients and your practice area. But overall, make sure that the posts that you are putting on social media are positive and provide value.
Provide Active Listening Skills
Make sure you provide active listening skills. And this is not only with colleagues and clients, but it’s on social media as well. Every day, look and see if anyone has responded to your posts on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Instagram, and take the time to not only be positive, but practice active listening. Answer their posts that they’ve placed on your article or post or comment in an insightful way. Take the time to do that. They will notice if you do that.
Be Solution Minded
You should also consider being solution-minded. When you face comments, really provide value, provide a solution. Every day when you check your social media, or you check whatever other marketing strategies you have, make sure that you approach all of them with a solution in mind for your clients.
Delegate Tasks
You should also consider delegating tasks to team members whose skills match up with a project. You may have someone on your team that is great at Instagram, then just have them do your Instagram and have someone else do your Facebook or have someone else do your LinkedIn. Those social media platforms can be separated. And also, in real-world practice, you should also delegate tasks to team members who have appropriate skill sets.
Tough Love
The next is a bit of tough love—to decide where your law firm has weaknesses in your marketing strategy. Where are you deficient? Where do you want to grow? Try to fill in those gaps and create a cohesion among all of your social media platforms or your offline marketing strategy as well. It should be a big, comprehensive strategy. Your print ads, or your press releases, and your website and your content and your social media should all have similar branding. And you should make sure that whatever you’re doing on a daily basis on whatever platform or marketing activity you’re doing, is cohesive.
Set Clear Expectations
And the last thing is to set clear, daily, weekly, and monthly expectations for both yourself and your staff, or your virtual assistant, or whoever is helping you with your marketing strategy. Every marketing strategy is going to be different, especially digital marketing strategies. So set a goal for yourself, whether that is to provide new value every day on LinkedIn, or if it’s to do a facebook live every week, or if it’s to provide short videos three times a week on LinkedIn, or make sure you tweet something every day on Twitter. Whatever your goal is, try to make it reasonable and something that is accomplishable. So those are definitely ways that you should incorporate your marketing activities every day.
Publish Consistently
Make sure your branding looks correct across all platforms, and be doing something every day in at least one social media platform. And then you can grow from there, either by doing it yourself, or by using a scheduling tool like Smarter Queue to post the same valuable content across multiple platforms, and do it in a way that you can schedule it ahead of time. Maybe that’s your goal for this month—to find a scheduling tool. I use Smarter Queue but there are other ones out there that you can create a content plan and a strategy for your law firm. Because the next thing that you should be doing every day as part of your daily law firm marketing activities is to publish consistently. I believe it should be daily.
I understand that some law firms are not able to either do that themselves, or have the financial ability to outsource that, but let me try to convince you here. Showing up as a leader is a key for good marketing, and the only way you can show up is to provide content on these platforms. One way to back up your leadership claims is to consistently offer high quality published content either on your website or on social media or all of the above.
If writing is not your forte, you can consider hiring a content company such as Law Quill, who focuses on material for law firms either on a website or on social media, but you can do this yourself. In fact, I created an entire system that you can go through from start to finish to create this content yourself. Not only blog articles, but also how to repurpose those blog articles for social media. It’s free, I created an entire podcast series. It’s towards the beginning of this podcast. If you scroll back and look at some earlier podcasts, there’s a whole series. Also, I created blog posts about it that you can read through and go step-by-step to do this yourself. But I know a lot of law firms just don’t have the time to learn about SEO, or the time to write these articles. But whether you have the time to do this yourself, or you need to outsource it, really having consistent content is incredibly important. You can be weighing in on important issues in your practice area, you can be showcasing your expertise, and you can be utilizing these platforms also to answer frequently asked questions that you encounter all the time in your law firm, which is going to help prospective clients.
Be A Thought Leader
The next thing you should be doing every day, which is either on social media or on your website, or on an email newsletter once a week, or whatever you’re doing is to consider yourself to be a thought leader.
Thought Leadership is a current buzzword. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of it or not, but in order to be a thought leader, you must voice a unique and insightful slant on issues that matter. One of the daily marketing activities your law firm can aim for, is to just post quick comments or thoughtful questions on Twitter, LinkedIn, or other social channels. And this practice of posting daily marketing questions or thoughts, is broadcasting your expertise and your unique perspective to a wide audience.
Listen, I know you have a unique perspective, I know that you feel you do law differently than other people in your practice area. So showcase that expertise.
If you are an estate planning attorney and you focus on single people, young people, while you’ll take any work for estate planning, if that is sort of your niche, then make that your niche and become a thought leader in that area. If you are a business attorney that works in a certain industry, perhaps the food industry, the catering industry, or restaurant industry, become a thought leader in that area. Showcase your expertise in that area. You’ll still get business; you will still get other clients that are interested in estate planning, but you will showcase yourself and set yourself apart as a thought leader in your practice areas.
Demonstrate your E-A-T—Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness
If you consistently post content, on social media, on your website, in emails, in everything that you do that showcases your uniqueness as a thought leader, the next thing you should do is demonstrate expertise. This is why it is so important as part of your daily law firm marketing activities.
Well, what does that mean? It means that if you have been involved in digital marketing for a while, you may have heard of the metric called E-A-T. I’ve talked about it before. It’s Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Law firms are held to a different standard in marketing and by Google than, let’s say, a caterer or a small business owner that creates their own jewelry or art. Law firms are held to a higher standard. And the truth is, the only way to get better Google rankings on your website is to demonstrate E-A-T. Again, that’s expertise, authority and trustworthiness. That E part of E-A-T, expertise, is highly important to Google. You can show others that you have expertise in your legal practice areas by regularly providing content that proves your expertise in these legal matters.
Now I am going to drop a bomb right here. There is news that now says that whatever you post on LinkedIn will be counted towards your Google rankings and your Google SEO. That was not the case before and this is very new. So we will have to see how it plays out. But the reason
I am encouraging you to broadcast your expertise, trustworthiness, and authority on these social media platforms is because this is the direction that it’s headed. Right now, if you post something on Facebook, Google is not really using that as part of your overall SEO. But I think that’s the direction that it’s going. We can see it already with LinkedIn. So if you have regular content that you’re posting on LinkedIn, that’s showing that you are an expert in some way or a thought leader. As I said previously, it’s proving its social proof and it’s proving that your law firm has expertise. Some of the ways to do this is to include client stories, not just testimonials, but their story—their client journey.
I have a blog post about the difference between a testimonial and a client story, a client journey. If you want to check that out, they are highly persuasive to potential new clients that may be interested in hiring your law firm. Testimonials also go a long way, so make sure to include those not only on your website, but also include them as posts on LinkedIn as well, and other platforms—Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all of them.
The practice of demonstrating your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Your E-A-T score is one of the most powerful ways to show potential clients that you have the skills needed to successfully tackle their issues. So this is a law firm marketing activity that you should be doing every day, because it is never going to hurt you and it is always going to help you.
Connect With Clients
The next thing you need to do is to connect with clients. When you approach marketing, you first have to understand who your ideal client is. And this is not just a wasted exercise; you need to really dive deep into who your ideal client is.
Understand Your Ideal Client
The example I gave earlier, regarding estate planning, yes, maybe that attorney works with anyone who wants an estate plan, but their ideal client is working with single people, younger people.
If your law firm has already been serving clients, you probably know who your ideal audience is. Some law firms can create one simple client persona; others need to create a few different areas because they have different practice areas. This will depend on your practice, but definitely set aside some time to brainstorm with your team or with others to answer these questions: What legal issues does your ideal client often face? What is their financial status? How much can they afford? Where does your ideal client live? What is their life like at home? Who are they within their own workforce? What kind of employment do they have? What is their profession? What are their major concerns when they come to you? What are their pain points? What can you solve? And what is really important is what kind of service does your ideal client expect from you?
Someone who is a personal injury attorney is going to have a client that expects something very different than a criminal attorney, a sophisticated business attorney, an estate planning attorney, all of these things are very, very different. And because the practice areas are different, the clients are different as well. You will want to take that into account as you’re doing your marketing activities every day and creating this brand for yourself and establishing yourself as a thought leader.
Ask Questions
Always check in regularly with your clients, not only in real life, but also check in with your audience on social media.
One of the very best things you can do in any post on Facebook, Instagram, or anything is to add a question at the end. If you are giving some information about a will versus a trust in your LinkedIn post, at the end of it, ask a question. “Do you have a will?” “Do you have a trust?” “Do you have both?” “Are you interested in enhancing your already existing estate plan?”
Asking a question allows the people looking at your post to have something to say. If you just explained the difference between a will versus a trust, well, that’s great, now they have information. But the truth is, they don’t really have anything to say to that. So make it easy for them.
Respond To Your Posts
This is important, because if you are consistently putting out valuable content that people are responding to, it will help your algorithm on all of these social media platforms, which means that your post will get seen by more people, which means that more people in the future will respond to your post. It is a cycle that you want to perpetuate and continue.
Maximize Technology
The next thing you should do is to use technology as much as possible in your marketing activities. This should include obviously, all of the social media platforms. It should include email lists, and sending emails to your existing clients and potential clients. But it should also include using technology to keep a connection with your existing clients, such as having online client portals, and offering video conferencing through zoom. We are all already doing that, really.
Consider Text Messaging
Here’s another idea. Consider text messaging, because texting is really popular, and frankly, it’s generally preferred over phone calls with most of our population. Am I right? That is just true. You just need to keep the ethics rules in mind when texting clients. But this is a great way as part of not only connecting with your clients, but really an overall marketing strategy to keep your clients really happy so that they use you again, and refer you to their friends and family.
Speaking of referrals, here’s our last portion of marketing activities you should do every day. Maybe if not every day, at least very often.
Ask for Reviews & Referrals
You should never ignore any opportunity to ask for reviews and referrals. Ask early, and ask often. After every single case wrap up, your next step should be to request a client review of your services. Clients often don’t write reviews, frankly, because attorneys just don’t ask. And happy clients are usually really willing to write them.
You’re not allowed to provide any kind of monetary incentive to give a review. However, one thing you can do is incentivize your staff. If you have someone working in the front of your law office, you can give them a gift card or some other small financial incentive to say that if they get a client to leave a review, they will be rewarded. So you’re not rewarding the client, but you are keeping your staff mindful of the fact that they should be asking for reviews from clients. It’s a really unique way to try to get your staff to also get those very coveted reviews on Google and in other places.
Besides client reviews, you can actually ask colleagues to also review and rate and recommend you on various platforms, such as LinkedIn. So make sure to request referrals.
And I will say this, if you ask for a referral from a client—a happy client—and you don’t get it, don’t be afraid in a few months to circle back and send an email and ask. Google actually makes it really easy to leave a review. If you go into your Google My Business Page, there is a way to find a link specifically for people to leave you a review. When people click that link, it literally pops up a box where they can click five stars and write a review and be done. The whole process can take less than a minute. So find where that link is in your Google My Business Page and send that out in an email early and often to your clients that have not left you a review.
Let’s be honest, the reason most people don’t leave you a review isn’t because they didn’t like your services. We just forget. I do it as well. We just forget to leave these reviews. So just remind people because they may not remember at that specific time to do it. They have every intention of leaving you a good review, but they just forget.
Conclusion
I hope that today has given you some practical tips and some ideas to consider regarding law firm marketing activities you should be doing every day or at least every week.
I’m going to take my own advice and I’m going to request that you leave me a review on iTunes because those really do help the algorithm of iTunes and help me get seen among other people who might be interested in The Legal Marketing Lounge podcast.
Taking my own advice, I’m going to ask you to leave me a review and also just give me a little rating on there. I certainly would appreciate it.
As always, thank you so much for listening. I appreciate all of you. I appreciate the fact that you are so supportive of this podcast and I just hope that I can continue to give you a lot of value and help you in your digital marketing journey for your law firm.
Until next time, thank you again for joining me in The Legal Marketing Lounge.