How much time should I spend marketing my firm?
One question we are often asked is, “How much time should I spend trying to market my law firm?”. The answer is, of course, not a simple one. A lot of it depends on the type of law practice you have.
For example, a family law attorney can post items on Facebook with great results. Where a personal injury attorney may not have the same result. The reason, Facebook is more of suggestive advertising that works very well with practice areas like family and divorce law, workers compensation and bankruptcy. Imagine you are behind on your bills to the point that bankruptcy may be an option. You are on Facebook and you see a post with the title, “Did you know that you won’t lose your house in a bankruptcy?”. To the person in that situation, that is a very interesting article and they will probably read it, creating a potential new client.
The problem with this type of post for personal injury attorneys is the client you are looking for needs to have something happen first. It will most likely still work, but patience and more posts are required. A post for an accident attorney might look like, “Why you should not take the first offer from an insurance company after you’ve been involved in an accident”. Another post might be, “According to a study by the insurance industry, more money is paid to victims of accidents when they hire an attorney”.
A successful digital marketing program takes a substantial time commitment, but it can be done without dedicating full time hours.
What types of effort is needed to make a program successful? Here are a few tips that may help.
- Post daily updates to your social media profiles. There are always interesting articles in your local online paper or in the national media worth re-posting. Choose articles that will create conversations and then start one by saying things like, “Do you agree that…..” Once someone responds to your post, then you can invite them to like your law firm page.
- A website should have content added to it every month. Blog content of 700 to 1,000 words is good, but a well drafted page of content, 1,300 to 1,700 words, is much better for Google rankings. Authoring content should be divided up among different members of the firm or it can be outsourced to an agency that specializes in legal writing. The content should be interesting, readable and it must be on point with the firms practice areas. You aren’t trying to write a legal brief, so it shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes to an hour to draft an impactful page or two of content.
- Videos are extremely important for a website and for Google search. Unfortunately, to be effective, these can take a long time to produce internally and even harder to make them look professional. We would suggest hiring an agency to help you craft a professional video presence. Hiring an agency can cut the time investment considerably and will deliver videos that help your firm create an extremely professional online presence.
- For better rankings, a website should have a well thought out backlink strategy. Developing high quality links takes time can be the biggest draw on the firm’s time. Again, we would suggest you work with a professional SEO company on your linking strategy.
- A monthly newsletter is a great, inexpensive tool at every firm’s disposal. You work so hard to get a client, then most firms forget about them when the case is finished. This is a huge mistake. You have built a relationship with that client, why not take advantage of it. You never know when they, or someone they know, may need legal representation in a matter totally different than the one you handled. Even if you don’t handle the type of case, it may be a great lead for you to refer to another firm or another attorney within your firm.
- Creating a newsletter program is easy. Armed with client names and e-mail addresses (if you are not collecting your client’s email addresses, then you should start now) you can create an email template and send one useful tip each month. The time investment will vary depending on the length of the newsletter and monthly changes, but it will be time well spent. Our suggestion is to use the blogs you are adding to your website as newsletter content. That would streamline the newsletter creation process.
- Removal of unwanted backlinks. A backlink from an untrusted or dangerous website can happen without warning. Running reports to check for internal errors or “bad” links is necessary but doesn’t take very long. Once you find them, you will want to disavow them, so Google doesn’t hold them against you.
We hope these tips help you bolster your marketing efforts and give you some ideas on how to energize your website. But, if you don’t have a ton of extra time and you would rather partner with an expert, contact Sundown Legal Marketing today. Our goal is to make sure all your marketing needs are taken care of and that you choose how much time you want to spend marketing your firm. Contact us today at (800) 649-1764 or through our website contact form.
