At the end of every year, the most successful lawyers know it’s important to strategize their firm’s growth and set their business goals for the year ahead. If you want to hit the ground running in 2024, the last days of 2023 are an excellent time to assess the current state of your law firm’s web marketing and set your goals for the new year.
Read on for guidance on auditing your 2023 marketing progress, how you can make the most of the marketing assets you already own and control, and three tips for growing your law firm in 2024.
Start Here: Audit your 2023 marketing progress
Before jumping into new strategies for 2024, it’s helpful to take stock of the choices and progress that were made in 2023. Any effective marketing audit has a few key elements in common that help to keep attorneys on track to achieving their marketing goals.
The following are the top elements of a good marketing audit:
- A holistic approach. One of the first things to consider when performing your marketing audit is whether the audit is comprehensive. To be most effective, you will need to apply a holistic lens to your marketing strategy. In turn, it will be easier to make broader connections about your performance data and help to provide a clearer snapshot of your progress, any pain points, and opportunities for improvements in 2024.
- Systematic organization. Successful marketing audits are systematic in nature. They have both order and efficiency and account for each environment, principle, strategy, and operation in your marketing plan. By laying out each key player in your marketing strategy, you’re able to save time and achieve efficiency in your marketing audit. Identify the how, who, roles, responsibilities, and contributions of each player to effectively audit your current marketing strategy.
- Consistency. While this could be the first marketing audit of the year, it’s important not to wait another 365 days until your next. By conducting regular marketing audits, your firm will be able to easily identify problem areas early on as well as uncover successful strategies.
A successful marketing audit will be data-driven, but not all of your available data is relevant to your firm’s marketing goals. Instead, it’s best to focus on specific marketing metrics to complete the audit more quickly and efficiently.
The best marketing metrics to measure in your marketing audit include:
- Brand reputation and consistency. How does your web marketing support your firm’s brand awareness? Take stock of your firm’s branding assets, the user experience of your website, and the consistency of your firm’s messaging online.
- Marketing quality. An effective law firm website successfully addresses the needs of their potential clients whether they are seeking information about the law firm, their legal issue, or a way to get in touch. In addition, high-quality web marketing will be informative and client-friendly. Your web marketing should make the choice easy for your potential clients by providing them with plenty of answers and resources on your website that show your competence and expertise as an attorney.
- Leads and conversions. A successful conversion can look different depending on the goals you have for your firm’s marketing. For example, successful conversions may include your social media accounts driving more visitors to your website, a prospect downloading an ebook from your website, or another prospect submitting a contact form. To make tracking these metrics easier for your firm, assign a clear definition of “conversion” to each channel.
- Nurturing opportunities. How does your web marketing support your client journey? Assess whether your website has content that is relevant to the various stages your potential clients experience over time. Also, ask yourself whether you’re connecting with clients on the right channels or platforms. An effective audit will uncover where your ideal clients are, and knowing this helps you make decisions about where to direct your efforts and make your website a predictable client-generating tool for your firm.
- Engagement. Engagement is about developing trust and helping potential clients establish a relationship with your brand. While other industries may prioritize clicks, hits, and visits to measure their marketing success, getting new clients is the most important measure of success for attorneys. Determine whether your brand is resonating with potential new clients and whether you’re effectively addressing their pain points. You can make these determinations by tracking leads and identifying how prospective clients engage with your website and other marketing channels.
Once you have identified your top marketing metrics, it’s time to take a deeper look at each of your marketing assets to determine their strong points, weak points, and overall value. To simplify this process, limit your area of focus to the past six months of data. Compare this data to your marketing goals and objectives for 2024. You should be able to optimize from there and make any decisions on where you may need to course-correct your strategy if necessary.
Step 2: Get your main web marketing assets on track for 2024
To get the most out of your digital marketing efforts in the new year, it’s best to focus on assets that you already own and control. That way, you can ensure the best ROI for your law firm.
Your first, and arguably most important, marketing asset is your firm’s website. If this is not already a major driver of business for your practice, it has the potential to become one in 2024. Your website offers several opportunities for optimization that can help you use your website as more than just a marketing tool while greatly improving your firm’s conversion power.
For example, potential clients need to know they can trust you before they hire you, and your website can do a majority of the heavy lifting to build that trust. By delivering a positive user experience, providing helpful answers and resources, leveraging social proof, and more, your website can work as a powerful marketing tool.
Tip: If you don’t yet have an impactful attorney bio, crafting a new bio is a great goal to have in the new year. 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. To get the most out of this section of your website, include elements such as your journey to practicing law, what motivates you as an attorney, career accomplishments, and who you help and why.
Your next marketing asset that is best to focus on in 2024 is free search engine traffic. It is possible to gain more control of the free search engine traffic that leads potential clients to your website with the right approach. To do so, your website needs to work to address the concerns of your potential clients. 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.
Step 3: Implement these 3 tips to grow your law firm in 2024
#1 Grow your client testimonial bank
Client testimonials are extremely important to your firm’s online presence and can help you gain a competitive edge. Testimonials help prove to other potential clients that you are a competent attorney who can successfully handle cases. They can highlight the positive experiences that other clients have had with your law firm.
When your potential clients are researching their options for representation, reviews are almost always taken into consideration. Because the decision to hire an attorney can be an expensive and important one, testimonials make a big impact on potential clients. As a result, it’s a good idea to display positive testimonials wherever your firm is represented online.
Testimonials Page on Law Firm Website
One of the most important places to collect and display testimonials is on your law firm website. After creating a reviews section or testimonial page on your website, the page remains a low-cost, evergreen, and very low maintenance, yet extremely impactful asset to your web marketing. If this is something your website currently lacks, it should be a top priority in 2024.
Tip: For LawLytics members, it’s easy to request, collect, and organize client reviews right through your dashboard. You can send requests to current or former clients, receive responses, and choose which reviews to highlight and in what order to display them.
Google Business Profile (GBP)
The next place you should have reviews is on your firm’s Google Business Profile. GBP is a handy search engine tool where potential clients can browse through local businesses and view things like business hours, updates, and reviews.
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. For example, many firms email clients a direct link to their GBP listing to make it easy for them to leave a review.
Finally, your firm can collect client testimonials on your firm’s Facebook page. It’s become a common practice for clients to leave reviews on the Facebook pages of law firms. It’s easy and helpful to use this platform as one of the places you direct clients to leave a review.
#2 Reach more potential clients on social media
More and more clients are finding legal representation through social media rather than by searching online. As a result, your firm should focus on creating a sustainable and consistent social media presence in 2024 that will support your other web marketing efforts.
Social media is beneficial to attorneys in three main ways:
- To build brand consistency. Having a clear and consistent brand throughout your marketing strategy helps people make the connection between who you are and what you do easier and faster.
- To increase online visibility. Social media platforms such as LinkedIn already have strong search engine optimization. You may have noticed that when you google a colleague’s name and/or their business name, their LinkedIn profile typically appears in the top results. In other words, you can take advantage of a social media channel’s established SEO by having an account, and if you don’t, you could be missing opportunities.
- To supplement your law firm website. Social media is an excellent tool for connecting with potential clients outside of your website, but it should never replace your website. Rather, social media is a great way to direct traffic back to your website where you can encourage potential clients to get in touch.
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to sink a lot of time or money into social media to see the desired results. For most attorneys, choosing the right platform and staying consistent with your engagement can result in a successful social media presence.
In addition, six types of social media posts are ideal for legal marketing:
- Your story. Your story is who you are and how you help your clients as both an attorney and a human. These posts include content such as your journey to becoming a lawyer, a client story that resonates with you, personal beliefs or experiences, and similar.
- Updates, news, and blogs. These types of social media posts emphasize the educational value of your content rather than sales. Good posts include original blogs and articles or a blog or article that is written by a trusted source.
- Case results. Detailed case results articles are a great opportunity to brag about yourself. However, you should consider what will resonate with your potential clients and how you will show your competence and care as an attorney. Ways to share include blogs, video testimonials, graphic design, or similar. (Note: Case results articles should never disclose or use confidential or proprietary information of your firm or any client unless permission is received.)
- Client testimonials. Client reviews operate similarly to case results in that they show your competence as an attorney and help potential clients put themselves in the shoes of your happy clients. These can be posted on social media as quotes, graphic design, video, or similar and must be actively pursued to have a consistent supply.
- Firm highlights. Social media is a great place to give potential clients a “behind the scenes” perspective on your practice in a way that is approachable and organic. These posts essentially take everyday life and use social media to make attorneys look relatable and approachable. Posts can include employee shout-outs, achievements or milestones, work anniversaries, attorneys or staff in the field, or similar.
- Community engagement. These social media posts help you share the excitement of what you’re already doing. You can share things like community and attorney events, your involvement in charitable causes, local groups, and similar.
Tip: To learn more about social media best practices for attorneys, click here to access our on-demand webinar and receive a free 4-week social media content calendar.
#3 Focus on high-quality content marketing
As we move into 2024, content marketing remains your website’s top tool for getting in front of more potential clients online. 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 and publishing content consistently throughout the new year.
First, begin with the 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.
Tip: Need to take content off your plate in 2024? LawLytics has a built-in smart content generation tool that helps you to create pages of practice area content in just one sitting. We grow our topic library consistently and currently offer around 325 pages across 20 practice areas.
Lastly, as a third and higher tier of your content plan in the new year, you want to think about writing quality blogs to post to your website regularly. 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.
Crush your 2024 business goals with LawLytics
Don’t wait to get the law firm website you need to succeed in 2024. It takes just minutes for our dedicated team of design and development experts to have everything they need to begin creating your new, high-performing website. To get started, book a 20-minute interactive demo with a product expert.
