Effective Ways to Market Your Legal Practice

Busy lawyers have less and less time to devote to their marketing efforts. Yet developing and maintaining client relationships in an increasingly crowded and competitive legal landscape is more essential than ever. The good news is that marketing your legal services doesn’t have to be overly complex or expensive in order to be effective. Proper strategic planning armed with a bit of knowledge, allows firms to use what marketing resources they have to maximize results.

Effective Strategies

1. Spend a lot of time thinking hard about your target market. Who are they and where are the decision makers in that market? The answers to these simple questions will help form the basis of your marketing plan. It is of little use to focus your efforts on the wrong target audience.
2. When developing a marketing plan, it can helpful to concentrate on activities you actually enjoy. For example, if you like to write, you can focus your efforts on improving your website with blogs or composing a monthly electronic newsletter. If you communicate better with people by meeting with them in person, consider attending networking activities, such as bar association events. Or consider participating in volunteer work in an area consistent with your practice.
3. Get with the social networking program. It has become essential for any modern marketing plan to include a strong presence on a variety of social media platforms. While communication trends can change quickly, services like Facebook and Twitter have established themselves as leaders in this area. Make sure you post frequently, but not so much that you overwhelm your followers. This will keep your message fresh in clients’ minds without irritating them. And try and stay on top of social media trends. For example, according to online media company Mashable, posting tweets between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. will net you the most clicks.

4. About that website…make sure it is kept fresh and up to date. Try and add new content daily, or at the very least, weekly. Search engines such as Google use algorithms that favor sites with updated and original content, so an updated site has a much better chance of showing up towards the top of a keyword search. One very effective way to do this is with a blog. Blog posts don’t have to be very long or exhaustively researched. Some text about a recent event and a link to an item your audience will find interesting will suffice. Just make sure it’s relevant to your practice in some way.

5. Be yourself! Don’t adopt a false persona for the sake of marketing. Long-term success will come only by authentically representing yourself to your clients in a way you find appealing.

Let the Experts at Firm Evolution Help

Firm Evolution provides a wide range of marketing, public relation, and business development services to law firms in Seattle, Salt Lake City and Madison, Wisconsin. We focus on the needs, goals and differentiating aspects of each law firm client. Our emphasis is on the big picture—leveraging the strengths of the individual attorneys, practice groups and overall firm on all fronts. We work closely with our clients to ensure that all components of their marketing program—from press releases and marketing plans, to website and Internet campaigns—provide a strong foundation for maintaining existing clients and developing new ones. Contact Firm Evolution at 206.321.3220 to learn more.