Inbound Marketing for Law Firms

The question we are asked by most law firms is: “What should we write to get as many leads to our website as possible?”

The answer is: All your content marketing efforts should be premised on an inbound marketing strategy.

Digital marketing agencies wax lyrical about the benefits of inbound marketing, yet many law firms don’t know how to implement it. If you’re one of them, you’ve arrived at the right place.

In this blog, we’ll explain what inbound marketing is and share some best practices to help you get new clients.

What Is Inbound Marketing for Law Firms?

The global leader of inbound marketing, HubSpot offers this definition of inbound marketing:

“Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don’t always want, inbounding marketing forms connections they’re looking for and solves problems they already have.”

In essence, traditional or outbound marketing brings your offering to your client base, whereas inbound marketing brings your prospects to you. Inbound marketing strategies include content marketing, pay-per-click advertising (PPC), and search engine optimization.

These marketing strategies are designed to “pull” prospective customers at their exact moment of intent.

Let’s illustrate how inbound marketing strategies generate more leads with a little story…

An Example of Inbound Marketing in Practice

I met Peter at a marketing conference way back in 2013. Inbound marketing was a brand-new thing back then, and not many businesses knew how to incorporate it into their digital marketing strategies.

Peter owned four sleep clinics in Alaska. One day, one of his salespeople told him he’s asked the same questions over and over again by prospective clients. His solution: they should create a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section on their website for their target audience.

Peter thought it was a good idea, so, for the next 2-3 weeks, he made all of his phone reps write down the questions callers ask. Subsequently, they analyzed the questions and discovered they had 113 unique questions, each of which was asked more than once.

Does your law firm have a plan for growth in 2023?

Let us help you create a growth plan

Now, a FAQ section of 113 questions is much too long, so they decided to write blog posts (relevant content) that answered their potential customers’ questions in detail.

Peter’s website traffic exploded a few months after they had published this highly engaging content. Many local visitors turned into clients because of those blog posts. And the search engines continued to send more and more people to Peter’s website. His business quickly became a trusted thought leader.

Eventually, Peter was approached by a company that owns a chain of sleep clinics — a business that, unlike Peter’s, had establishments in most big cities across the country. They wanted to buy Peter’s website – not his clinics – for all the traffic AKA high-quality leads it was getting. Peter sold his website for a whopping $13 million, all thanks to his business’ content creation strategy.

This is how powerful an inbound marketing strategy can be.

What Are Examples of Inbound Marketing for Law Firms?

Inbound marketing content material builds trust with high-quality leads who demonstrate an active interest in your law firm. The type of content you create depends on where your qualified leads are online, and at what stage they are at within the sales cycle.

Inbounding marketing generates leads because it attracts, delights, and engages customers. It can take many forms, such as:

• Blogs
• Infographics
• White papers
• E-Books
• Case studies
• Webinars
• Video Content
• Podcasts
• Paid ads

How Do You Promote a New Law Firm?

Both traditional marketing practices and inbound methodologies can be used to promote new law firms. If we’re looking strictly online, you’ll need to develop a robust digital strategy implemented across various online platforms to reach potential clients.

But, before that, you’ll want to create a mobile-friendly website and ensure it’s optimized to rank on search engines. This provides a solid foundation upon which all your marketing efforts are built. Then you can promote your law firm through publishing content on social media platforms or via Google Ads.

Having clear goals will help determine which inbound tactics and platforms you use.

What Are the Steps in Inbound Marketing?

Define Your Brand and Value Proposition

Before you can initiate inbound marketing, you need to define what makes your brand unique. Is it prestige? An impressive track record of winning cases? Or affordably serving your community? In marketing, we call this a unique selling proposition.

Then you have to determine what your value proposition is, which is the reason clients should choose your law firm instead of your competitors’.

This is where thought leadership via content marketing can set you apart from the rest, especially if your law firm is in saturated markets like New York or Chicago.

Transform Traffic Into Leads

An inbound marketing strategy typically moves prospective clients through the sales funnel. To generate leads, you need to create online marketing content, and to achieve this, you have to know to whom you’re marketing.

Crucial to inbound strategies is the development of buyer personas. These semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer increase your ROI because they guarantee you are marketing to the correct target audience.

For example, you might be a personal injury lawyer who serves two different buyer personas—truck drivers and dog bite victims. Part of your marketing strategy would include producing different content covering relevant and helpful topics that appeal to these personas and encourage them to hire your law firm.

Website and Content Optimization

It’s pointless creating great content if it doesn’t appear in Google search results. Unoptimized content won’t stand out or drive lead generation. Therefore, improving the quality and quantity of your website and content plays a major role in producing positive conversion rates.

Implementing an on-page, off-page, and technical SEO strategy will drive organic traffic to your website and improve natural results in search engines. There are numerous tactics you can use, some, such as technical SEO (server optimizations) are better left to marketing professionals, whereas others like on-page SEO are easier to implement on your own.

On-page SEO has to do with determining which phrases users search for online and including them (keywords) in your content (See: write the questions you get asked) and website. Conducting keyword research and a site audit is a good place to start.

In addition to publishing high-quality content, you’ll want to insert keywords in your content headline, HTML tags (title, meta, and header), and images. Implementing an SEO strategy also means making sure your website conveys a high level of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Monitor Your Results

Using analytics to monitor your marketing results identifies what is and isn’t working with your website visitors. Evaluating your conversion rates and average session duration will reveal if prospective clients consider your content high quality.

Inbound marketing focuses on creating valuable customer experiences that lead them to hire your legal services. If you don’t monitor results, you won’t know what’s working. A tool like Google Analytics is extremely helpful in this regard.

Of course, you’ll need to set KPIs for your marketing strategy, so you have a benchmark to measure your results against. Remember, while the objective of inbound marketing is to improve revenue, there are other goals you may wish to achieve, such as using social media to build relationships and raise brand awareness.

Whatever your objectives, it’s important to make them specific. For example, instead of saying “we need to invest in email marketing,” you might say “we need to invest in email marketing to generate 20 new leads a month.”

Inbound Marketing Strategy Tips

Write the Questions You Get Asked

Just like in the story we shared, you probably get asked questions all the time via the phone, email, and in person. If you’re at a loss as to what your content marketing material should be about, answering these questions is a good place to start.

These questions might become your blog post headlines, the topic of your video marketing, or the latest podcast. Their answers are what your client base or buyer personas want to know, so answering them will lead to more clicks, more traffic, and new business.

When creating your content, answer in simple, understandable language that always includes calls to action, whether it’s at the end of a blog or a video. These might be things like contact details or downloading useful documentation (checklist, guide, or an e-book) in exchange for their email addresses, so you can send them marketing material at a later stage.

Don’t have the time or desire to write all these? Read on.

Create Videos

Most people prefer consuming video content over written content—it’s faster and easier for them to watch, and for you to make, especially if you create video content with your phone. Instead of writing dozens of blogs, you can record videos answering potential client questions.

Then you can upload them to YouTube—one more way to enhance visibility—and embed them in your blogs.

You can do what we do (see, we practice what we preach): we record videos with the answers to the questions we get asked, then our in-house copywriter writes the content for the video in a blog post format.

This allows your qualified leads to choose whether they want to watch a video or read an article, while simultaneously optimizing your website for Google. Remember, having written content is still a must for Google to index your site and direct traffic to you.

Easy? Yes! But, as Jim Rohn used to say, “What is easy to do is easy not to do”. We know many people who read this article (or watch the video) won’t do this, even though it could help them boost traffic, reach their target audience, and bring in more business.

We strongly advise you to be one of the few law firms that act! It is so simple: just invest in a tripod and an OK-quality microphone, find a room with good lighting, and record.

You can assign someone on your team to do your content creation. All you have to do in order to take advantage of all the opportunities inbound marketing for law firms provides is to hit record!

Outsource Your Law Firm Marketing Needs

Inbound marketing strategies are highly effective; however, they do take time to yield results. Most attorneys prefer to focus on their clients and hire professional agencies who specialize in inbound marketing for law firms to get as many leads as possible through the sales funnel.

Want to speak with an expert?

Call us at (312) 265-0580

If you need help promoting your legal services online to acquire new clients, then contact us today! We’re a full-service Chicago-based digital marketing agency that specializes in web design and inbound marketing for law firms. Read more about our content marketing for law firms.