In today’s digital landscape, internet marketing has become increasingly important for targeting consumers. The same applies to law firms, where legal digital marketing strategies are essential for targeting specific audiences and achieving measurable goals. That being said, lawyers have always been famously “behind” the cutting-edge of technology when it comes to firm implementations, so internet marketing for lawyers continues to be met with some suspicion in the legal industry.

We have you covered. Contact Walker Advertising to speak to a member of our team who is experienced in internet marketing for lawyers. We’ll explain how our sub-brands can help you connect to the right clients to help you grow your firm’s business and build an even stronger industry reputation.

What is Digital Marketing for Law Firms?

Digital marketing for law firms refers to the strategic use of digital channels to promote legal services, attract new clients, and enhance a firm’s online presence. This multifaceted approach includes search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, content marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and email marketing. Each of these strategies plays a crucial role in increasing a law firm’s visibility and credibility in the digital space. By leveraging these digital marketing strategies, law firms can effectively reach potential clients, build a robust online reputation, and drive more leads and conversions.

Why is Digital Marketing Beneficial for Lawyers?

Digital marketing offers numerous benefits for lawyers, primarily by enabling them to reach a broader audience and build a strong professional brand. In today’s digital age, potential clients are increasingly turning to the internet to find legal services. This shift makes it essential for law firms to establish a strong online presence. Digital marketing provides a cost-effective way to promote legal services and target specific audiences, ensuring that marketing efforts are both efficient and impactful. By embracing digital marketing, law firms can attract new clients, enhance their reputation, and stay competitive in a rapidly evolving market.

Is it Legal to do Digital Marketing as a Lawyer?

It is legal to engage in digital marketing as a lawyer, though there are a number of complex compliance-related restrictions when it comes to internet marketing for lawyers.  These restrictions are implemented variably by the bar associations of each state, so you’ll want to comb through the rules based on the states in which your firm operates.

Finding a middle-ground solution that avoids compliance violations in all the states you operate in is key.  Make sure to create common documentation for all your copywriters and other marketers so that they have a reference point for understanding the restrictions — failure to abide by the marketing rules can result in significant fines and even suspension or disbarment in some cases.

Do Law Firms Need Digital Marketing?

Though law firms don’t need digital marketing or social media marketing to succeed, it has become incredibly important for growing new firms that don’t have the networks necessary to build a thriving client base off of real-world relationships.  Many established lawyers and law firms have a stranglehold on networks of clients that are accessed through referrals and such — for new lawyers and neophyte firms, finding alternative sources for leads is crucial.  You can filter through a broader set of leads and find the right clients so that you can build a firm (and a reputation) on the back of high-value, high-success-rate disputes.

Legal digital marketing involves tailoring strategies to meet specific law firm goals and target audiences, ensuring that marketing efforts are both efficient and impactful.

Digital marketing for lawyers is particularly important to accessing Millennial and Gen Z clients, who aren’t as easily targeted by traditional media — and who may not have the in-person event engagements necessary to be marketed to through your on-the-ground professional networks.  Thus, to maintain steady growth in the future, digital advertising and smart digital marketing strategies will be increasingly relevant for all sorts of law firms — even those with more established client acquisition funnels.

Do Law Firms Need SEO?

If a law firm is intent on creating organic written content that will rank high in targeted Google search queries (and in queries on other search engines), then the effective implementation of SEO (“Search Engine Optimization”) principles should be core to their marketing strategy and is necessary for success. Effective SEO strategies can help law firms appear higher in search engine results pages, which is crucial for attracting potential clients who rely on search engines to find legal services.

While social media platforms continue to grow and dominate the online advertising space, there continues to be a place for organic written content when it comes to acquiring online leads and for attracting potential clients. Generally speaking, your law firm website (i.e., the website’s organic web traffic) is core to effective attorney internet marketing. Search engines guide new law firm clients towards your website. Ergo, search engine optimization is important when it comes to internet marketing for lawyers.

SEO optimization may seem straightforward on the surface, but it actually involves complicated, multilayered, and dynamic strategies — what works one month will not necessarily work the month after.  Thus, the SEO marketing strategy for each piece of content has to be dynamically implemented in accordance with updated requirements.

That being said, for local law firms, if the focus is on social media content, then an SEO-focused marketing strategy is of minimal benefit.  On YouTube, for example, which is the second most popular search engine in the world, search results make up only 10 percent of all views on the platform.  While an SEO marketing strategy is not of “zero” value, the efforts spent on true SEO optimization will not be worth it on most social media platforms.

Setting Your Digital Marketing Goals

Setting clear digital marketing goals is crucial for law firms to measure the success of their marketing efforts. These goals might include increasing website traffic, generating more leads, improving search engine rankings, or boosting social media engagement. To create a focused and effective digital marketing strategy, law firms should adopt the SMART criteria—setting goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. By defining precise objectives, law firms can better allocate resources, track progress, and adjust their strategies to achieve optimal results.

Building a Strong Online Presence

Building a strong online presence is vital for law firms aiming to attract new clients and establish their professional brand. This process begins with creating a professional, user-friendly website that clearly communicates the firm’s services, expertise, and values. Engaging in social media marketing is also essential, as it allows law firms to connect with potential clients and share valuable content. Additionally, optimizing the website for search engines ensures that the firm appears in relevant search results, increasing visibility. A strong online presence not only builds trust and credibility but also drives more leads and conversions.

Building a High-Performance Website

A high-performance website is a cornerstone of successful law firm marketing. To attract and engage potential clients, a law firm’s website must be user-friendly, mobile-responsive, and optimized for search engines. It should provide clear and concise information about the firm’s services, expertise, and values, making it easy for visitors to understand what the firm offers. A well-designed website enhances the firm’s professional brand, builds trust with potential clients, and ultimately drives more leads and conversions. By investing in a high-performance website, law firms can ensure they make a strong first impression and effectively support their digital marketing efforts.

Is Copywriting Necessary for Digital Marketing?

Yes, though AI-written work has become more common in online marketing, Google, Microsoft, Meta, TikTok, and other internet players have taken steps to limit the reach of AI-written content.  Though these AI detection systems are still in their infancy and are not always accurate, it points to the importance of working with human copywriters who can put out content that feels natural and crafted for the audience.

After all, to secure more clients, it’s not just about increasing your reach — the content has to be appealing enough to generate conversions. Internet marketing efforts that fail to consider this human psychological element will not be as effective as those that do. So don’t mindlessly implement digital marketing solutions that lack consideration for the human element. That being said, AI assistance through writing tools (that do not write the full content for you) is handy for maximizing productivity for law firm marketing teams.

Important Social Media Trends in 2024 and Moving Forward

Social media is changing rapidly in 2024, and industry observers are noticing some interesting trends that are worth considering as you map out your content strategy going forward.  On the backend, digital marketing channels are updated multiple times a year, after all, so it’s only sensible to keep apprised of these updates so that you can maintain better online visibility in your social media content marketing efforts.

Here’s what to look out for when it comes to law firm digital marketing on social media platforms:

• Shortform reigns from a cost / reach standpoint.  Longform content builds a more loyal audience, but brands are already having “consistent impressions” suppressed by most social media platforms.  The key to overcoming this suppression is to lean into short-form content that is informative, entertaining, or controversial enough to force the algorithm to spread it organically.  Longform content can still “win,” but it takes a lot more resources and a lot more effort — something that teams trying to iterate quickly will not necessarily want to invest in.
• Building an invested audience is tougher than ever — focus on making fewer and more focused content pillars.  Consistently-themed content series perform better over time because the algorithm knows that it can feed new content uploads to audiences that watched your other content.  This ensures a slow but steady audience growth if your content resonates.

Making Successful Content in Saturated Online Spaces

Digital marketing is increasingly challenging in a world suffused with content of all kinds – corporate and otherwise. Online spaces are saturated. So how can you succeed? Simple principles continue to provide ample guidance for early content creation. Content pieces should aim to fulfill at least one of the following requirements:

1. Informative;
2. Entertaining;
3. Controversial;
4. Engaging.

To stand out in saturated online spaces, it is crucial for law firms to appear higher in search engine results pages, driving more organic traffic to their websites.

As “a, b, and c” are rather obvious on their face, let’s consider “d” — engaging. Engaging content is increasingly important online, in the sense that it’s content which is designed to evoke a sharing or community-oriented response.

Comments, reshares, and discussions about the content (e.g. discussing the content in an Instagram direct message chat) all qualify as engagement in these social media algorithms, and — according to Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram — are the primary way in which they evaluate whether content should be promoted more widely.

Ego-driven Content Simply does not Work

Most businesses simply don’t understand how to “win” online when it comes to attracting eyes and ears to their content — and this holds especially true on social media platforms, like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

The problem, essentially, is that law firms, individual lawyers, and other business entities have experience with a more narrow digital marketing space — one reliant on SEO-driven organic content, and paid advertising content.  This has led to a number of bad habits that have limited their ceiling for digital growth in this new age of content.  Simply put, old digital marketing habits have incorrectly taught firms that:

• “Boring” content can succeed in reaching target audiences merely through the implementation of SEO best practices.
• Building a successful online brand and reaching different impressions goals is a fast, consistent, and predictable process.
• Pushing content that matters to the brand is critical.  All content can be tagged and optimized to reach the intended audience.

In reality, organic growth in today’s digital content landscape — particularly the social media space — does not follow predictable growth patterns.  For example, your firm’s Instagram profile might grow 100 followers per month for several months, and then 1,000 followers in a single month, before it returns to the 100 followers per month growth rate.

This sort of chaotic growth is quite common — and it behooves firms to understand that there is only rarely a straightforward growth trajectory when it comes to online brand-building in today’s digital landscape.

One of the core issues, above all, is the idea that “if we build it, they will come.”  This maxim is no longer true on algorithm-focused, consumer-first social platforms.  In this context, law firm brands make the mistake of being ego-driven, or me-focused.

They often create content meant to satiate their own desires — for example, behind-the-scenes content of their latest community outreach event.  This might seem relevant to the firm, but it is of little interest to the target audience of potential clients.  When, say, Instagram shows the ego-driven reel content to the target audience, they will likely swipe through quickly, sending strong signals to the algorithm that the content is not “worthy” of being promoted and taking up space on their digital billboard.  This affects overall reach moving forward and can stall channel growth.

Instead of creating content that your firm “wants” to create and then attempting to squirrel it through to the target audience through older methodologies like SEO optimization, the solution is to create content that the audience actually wants to see, and would watch regardless of the brand associated with it.  This ties into new data that shows that people are increasingly less invested in brands themselves, and are more interested in individual pieces of content and whether that content satisfies their immediate entertainment/information needs.

Contact Walker Advertising to Attract More Clients and Grow Your Firm

Whether you’re a solo attorney or working for a larger law firm, we encourage you to contact Walker Advertising for assistance in building up your client base.  Here at Walker, we operate several sub-brand networks — including Los Defensores and 1-800-THE-LAW2 — to better connect potential clients with your firm.  Thanks to our well-respected, well-developed sub-brands, we have the ability to target relevant audiences so that you can access the ideal clients (and claims) to help grow your firm.

Interested?  Contact us today to get started talking to one of our sales representatives who can discuss your strategic options and how we can assist you.

Put simply: our team of digital marketing experts handles the difficult business of building an extensive online footprint and targeting potential clients.  When you join one of our legal networks, you’ll gain access to “leads” that we’ve pre-qualified for you.  That way, you can focus on doing a case evaluation and (potentially) moving forward with the client instead of spending valuable time and resources on digital marketing efforts.

We look forward to assisting you.