For attorneys, the quality of your leads from your marketing efforts is the most important success metric. Not only do high quality leads drive more business, but they also reduce your marketing costs in the long term. Before joining LawLytics, many attorneys are able to get their phones ringing, but most find themselves wading through a pool of unqualified leads that drain their time and resources. For some, this could be the main obstacle preventing them from a thriving practice.
Marketing agencies are quick to sell the promise of hits, clicks, or impressions as the key to achieving success in marketing. However, solo attorneys and small law firms tend to have more of a specialized focus for their marketing efforts that don’t align with the typical approach to digital marketing. Mainly, an emphasis on localized, targeted marketing while staying within a modest budget tends to be the best plan of action for small law firms.
Read on to learn the importance of quality leads for legal marketing and the four steps to better quality leads for your law firm.
Why Does Quality of Leads Matter for Law Firms?
One of the most common complaints we hear from attorneys before switching to LawLytics pertains to their leads. While many feel that they aren’t getting enough leads, almost just as many have issues with the quality of the leads they do receive. If you are getting leads for matters you don’t handle or leads from outside the geographic area where you practice, this should be a red flag that something is not working with your firm’s marketing.
So, if leads are steadily coming in, why does quality matter so much? Let’s consider where most potential clients enter your marketing funnel: The top. This is also known as the awareness stage. In the awareness stage, the potential client is either inquiring about legal representation, or doesn’t yet know they need representation. For either reason, a potential client will connect with your website through a search engine by a relevant search query.
At this point of a potential client’s journey, your firm’s marketing should be working to encourage qualified leads (in this scenario, a qualified lead is your ideal client) to move to the next stage of the marketing funnel. From there, the lead can move through the various stages of their customer journey until they have become your client.
In addition to a more seamless client journey and higher conversion rates, higher-quality leads can positively impact your client satisfaction, brand awareness, and reputation – all elements that work to boost your website’s visibility on search. For example, a high-quality lead is more likely to feel satisfied with your firm’s services and leave a positive review or refer your firm to a friend. By working to attract more high-quality leads, over time your firm can build a strong, positive reputation with both clients and search engines.
Now let’s consider the same scenario but for an unqualified lead to understand why lead quality matters. In this scenario, an unqualified lead is a potential client who can’t hire you due to their location or matter type. Despite being unaligned with your ideal client profile, they have found themselves moving through your marketing funnel until eventually they are lost as a lead because they are unqualified or bounce from your site.
Why does this unqualified lead reflect poorly on your marketing strategy? For one, an influx of unqualified leads can spike your website’s bounce rate impacting your search engine optimization. If your website is attracting leads that aren’t aligned with your firm’s offerings, the natural outcome is for the leads to bounce from your website. Higher bounce rates, however nuanced, ultimately signal to Google that its users are not finding the substance of your website to be in line with what they were looking for. As a result, Google may suggest your firm’s website to less of its users.
Get Better Quality Leads in Four Steps
Fielding bogus calls, sorting through a lot of noise, and pouring time and resources into unqualified leads can be both frustrating and discouraging for attorneys. If you’re looking to save both time and money on your marketing efforts, your pursuit of targeted marketing techniques can make all the difference.
In this section, we outline the four steps to get better quality leads for your law firm.
Step #1: Make your forms more relevant and specific.
If you have a basic contact form that routinely gets spammed (or is routinely submitted by potential clients who aren’t a good fit), consider making your form more specific to the matters you handle and the types of clients you typically work with.
For instance, if you’re a personal injury attorney looking to attract more quality auto accident leads, collect more specific information about the accident on your contact form.
Here are some specific fields you could add to a form to quickly improve your lead quality:
- Date of the accident
- City where the accident took place
- A description of the vehicles involved
- A description of injuries as a result of the accident
- A description of who responded to the accident (police, EMTs, etc.)
By collecting more specific information, you can quickly assess lead quality and act accordingly.
Tip: If you’re a LawLytics member, you can easily create and optimize unlimited intake forms or have our support team set them up for you.
Step #2: Adjust your calls-to-action (CTAs) to account for your ideal clients’ behavior.
It’s critical to understand how your ideal clients want to collect information and get in touch with you, and then use that to create effective calls-to-action on your website.
CTAs are the prompts on your web pages that encourage users to take a particular next step. An effective call-to-action almost always includes a directive such as ‘Schedule Your Free Consultation Now’ or ‘Request Your Free E-Book Now’. These phrases generally entice the user to fill out a form or call your firm.
Why is it important to understand calls-to-action in the context of your ideal client? If your ideal client is a busy entrepreneur, trying to push an immediate phone call for a consultation probably won’t work. Your ideal persona is probably someone who wants to fill out a form to give you more details about what they need assistance with and then schedule a time to meet with you when their schedule permits. As a result, your calls-to-action should reflect and accommodate their preferences. In addition, having calls-to-action in several different formats and locations throughout your website can help capture leads regardless of where they may be on your site or marketing funnel.
Step #3: Use geographic and experience-specific headlines.
Most of us scan a headline to determine whether something is worth reading.
If you only work with certain types of clients in a certain part of the country, make that clear on your web pages.
For instance, if you’re a family law attorney in Houston, a headline that reads “Filing for Sole Custody in Houston” will clarify for whom the page’s information is intended — someone filing for sole custody of a child in Houston (as opposed to Dallas or San Antonio).
Your headlines should make it easy for readers to confirm what you do, where you do it, and how you can help the reader.
Tip: The LawLytics smart content generation tool is helping attorneys create proven, localized, and optimized practice area content for their websites in just minutes. Choose from over 300 practice area topics and complete the customization prompts to publish new pages to your site that work to target qualified leads on search. To see the technology in action, view our quick content tool demo.
Step #4: Use data to determine where your best leads come from.
If some pages on your website produce fantastic leads, while others result in poor-quality leads, that’s vital information you can use to understand your potential clients and improve your marketing.
Does your highest-traffic blog post have a visible contact form? What is the top entry page for your website? Understanding what is resonating with potential clients can allow you to make strategic decisions and convert visitors to leads.
To do this, make sure you have access to reliable reporting tools that allow you to see your website data in real time.
Tip: LawLytics provides direct integration with Google Analytics, which gives you clear metrics into what is and isn’t moving the needle for your firm.
How Can LawLytics Help My Firm Drive More Qualified Leads?
LawLytics makes it easy to have a successful website that attracts and converts your ideal clients, including:
- Direct integration with Google Analytics that provides comprehensive website performance metrics
- Customizable forms that facilitate data collection to get the right leads
- An intuitive, easy-to-use site editor that allows you to quickly tweak headlines and calls-to-action to maximize impact
- A smart content creation tool that helps you create pages of high-quality website content in just minutes
Our team can design, build, and launch your new law firm website in as little as two weeks. Whether you’re improving an existing website or need something completely new, your website can go live relatively quickly and start showing up in search results. Our proven approach has delivered website success stories to over 1600 law firms across the country. Getting a modern, optimized website fast has never been easier.
Ready to get started? Schedule an interactive demo with a product expert to learn more.
