A new year is just around the corner, and now is the time to strategize your firm’s growth and set your business goals for 2023. However, it can be difficult to know how to get started and where to focus your efforts to save both time and money.
Most firms struggle to differentiate themselves in their marketing by focusing too much on the broader competition. However, directing your marketing efforts toward the right audience, marketing verticals, and tools can help you find and leverage your competitive advantage. If you want to hit the ground running in 2023, the last days of 2022 are an excellent time to make assessments about the current state of your law firm’s web marketing.
Read on for tips on maximizing the marketing assets you already own and control, and three tips for growing your law firm in 2023.
Auditing your 2022 marketing progress
Before you begin strategizing how you’re going to come out on top in 2023, it’s helpful to take a look at the choices and progress that was made in 2022. There are a few key elements of a good marketing audit that help to keep attorneys on track towards achieving their marketing goals. It’s helpful to review these for your firm and take any necessary action to course-correct your marketing.
Check out this guide to auditing your marketing process in 2022 to evaluate your marketing metrics for any pain points.
Focus on assets you own and control in 2023
As you head into the new year, it can be easy to get distracted by “quick fixes” and unrealistic expectations for your firm’s marketing. However, you will find that the best return on your investment may be higher when you focus on assets you already own and control.
Asset #1: Your website
Your first major asset is going to be your firm’s website. Your website is going to be pivotal to your firm’s ability to drive business to your firm for many reasons. There are several areas where you can optimize your website to get more out of it and increase its conversion capacity.
Part of this will be your ability to deliver a positive user experience on your website. Overall, this can be measured by the user friendliness of your website and the quality of your written content. A good website will answer the legal questions of your potential clients and guide them to a convenient way to get in touch with your firm.
It’s also useful to provide case results and client testimonials to make it easy for potential clients to determine if your firm is a good fit for them. Be sure to provide several easy ways to get in touch with your firm with click-to-call phone numbers and contact forms with a reliable system for replying to missed calls or messages.
Asset #2: Free search engine traffic
Even though it may feel like you can’t, you can gain more control of the free search engine traffic that leads potential clients to your website. This starts with understanding how potential clients find attorneys. They are dealing with a potentially scary and confusing legal issue, and are ultimately looking for answers and guidance. They also want to do their due diligence and conduct a reasonable amount of research on both you and their case matter before making any decisions.
To help your website appear in more relevant and local searches, it needs to address the concerns of your potential clients. It’s likely your potential clients are using search engines to research their legal matter. To do so, they often search using long-form questions such as “What are my rights at a traffic stop in Florida?” The more information you can give to those potential clients about handling specific aspects of their problem, the more likely Google will return your web pages to them when they make a related search.
Asset #3: Social media
If your firm is on social media, you don’t have to sink a lot of time or money into it to see positive results. If you’re looking for an easy way to take advantage of this low-cost marketing asset, start with choosing the right platforms for your firm and staying consistent.
As a goal, it will be helpful to you to post about once a week on all of your social media channels. In addition, take just five minutes a day to like and comment on other user’s posts, respond to follow requests, and respond to any comments or reviews that were left on your page. If you’re not sure where to start for creating and organizing social media content, you can watch the on-demand replay of our webinar “6 Ways to Repurpose Your Website Content” here.
Three tips for growing your law firm in 2023
#1: Build your client testimonial bank
To help you gain a competitive edge online, focus on getting more positive client testimonials. Client testimonials are extremely important to your firm’s online presence because it’s solid, third-party proof that you care about your potential clients. It also shows that you’re a competent attorney who handles cases or matters well and that other clients have had positive experiences with your firm.
It’s important to remember that most potential clients are looking for that kind of information. Before they make the decision to hire you, it helps potential clients to put themselves in the shoes of the client that wrote the review. Because choosing an attorney is such an important and likely expensive decision, testimonials make a big impact on potential clients.
The first place you can collect and display client testimonials is your website. Many attorneys don’t have a client testimonials section of their website, and they’re missing out on very impactful marketing that is free, evergreen, and requires little effort on your part. If your website doesn’t currently have a testimonial section, I’d recommend working on establishing one in the new year.
For LawLytics members, it’s easy to request, collect, and organize client reviews right through your dashboard. You can send out requests to happy clients that make their way back to your dashboard where you can choose which reviews to highlight and in what order on your website.
The second place is Google Business Profile (GBP). Potential clients can toggle between their local options for law firms using Google Maps, comparing businesses side-by-side. Part of making your listing stand out amongst the competition will be your 5-star reviews from happy clients. It’s helpful to have a system in place for requesting these and directing clients to a quick way to leave a review on Google.
The final area to focus on for collecting more client testimonials is on social media, particularly on Facebook. It’s become a common practice for clients to leave reviews on the Facebook pages of law firms. It’s helpful to stay on top of these and prioritize this platform as one of the places you should direct clients to leave a review.
#2: Review your attorney bio
Attorney bios are one of the most viewed pages on law firm websites, yet this is an area with which a lot of attorneys struggle. Some attorneys find it difficult to talk about themselves, but it’s important to go beyond a bulleted list of facts about yourself to provide a good narrative that will resonate with potential clients.
Review your attorney bio to see if you answer the question: “How much do you care about your work?” That’s going to translate to how much you care about your clients. Next, we know you’re an expert at what you do, but how does your attorney bio reflect this? Where can you expand outside of where you went to school and what bars you’re admitted to?
There are some key things you need to include in your attorney bio to maximize its impact on your web visitors. First, you want your bio to spell out your journey to practicing law. Include what inspired you to choose this profession. Explaining this helps potential clients develop a personal connection to you and it can demonstrate that you care about your work and their problem.
Next, you want to show what motivates you as an attorney. Frame this so that it conveys your motivation as dependent upon the benefits you provide to clients. When you make it about more than simply winning a case or making money, you become more relatable to a potential client.
Third, you’ll want to include your career accomplishments, but you want to go beyond a list of awards and accolades. This can be done by providing context to your accomplishments. For example, if you won an award, why did it matter and what did it mean to you to receive it? In addition, be aware of what may need more context for readers who are unfamiliar with certain terms used in the legal community.
Next, let your readers know who you help. Create a narrative of the kind of person you help and why you enjoy doing it. That way, a potential client can see that you’ve helped people like them in the past and that you can help them as well. Whether people come to you because they were arrested, injured, or facing debt collectors, paint a picture of who you help and why you enjoy helping them.
Lastly, show who you are outside of work. If you’re involved in your community or passionate about certain cases or issues, include these in your bio to show a fuller profile of yourself.
#3 Focus on content marketing
Content marketing is your website’s best friend – it is going to bring you the best ROI for your business goals. Just like in 2022, developing high-quality content will be the key to getting ahead of your competition in 2023. The concept of content by itself as your overarching marketing strategy can be a bit broad or overwhelming, so you may find it helpful to implement a plan for creating content for the new year.
First, begin with the content basics: attorney bio pages, case results, client testimonials, and practice area pages. Your practice area pages should start with a base layer that covers the main topics for that practice area – those will be the pillar pages of your content. For the next step in your plan, you could work toward creating content that builds out from those pillar pages to become increasingly specific – these are your cluster topics.
LawLytics has recently released a built-in content generation tool that helps you to create pages of practice area content in just one sitting. We grow our topic library consistently and now have around 250 topics to choose from, 10 practice areas, and look forward to 7 new practice areas coming in 2023.
Lastly, as a third and higher tier of your content plan in the new year, you want to think of topics for blogs you can post to your website consistently. Posting new content at least once a month will make a big difference to your website’s ability to remain visible on search engines. As a goal, try to create a bank of blog topics to refer to throughout the year so there’s less time spent on brainstorming.
Start the new year strong with LawLytics
Don’t wait to get the website you need to succeed in 2023. In just minutes, our dedicated team of design and development experts can have everything they need to begin creating your new, high-performing website. Get started here or book a no-obligation demo of the platform with a product expert.
