Law Firm Marketing - Don’t spend a dollar in 2023 before reading this
Marketing a law firm doesn’t have to be hard or expensive, especially if you know these five secrets that agencies want to keep from you. Whether you are a new lawyer or the owner (or marketing manager) of a seasoned firm, you know that you are competing against a sea of other professionals.
Your skills are sought after, but the amount of competition and possible laws against direct outreach make it hard to stand out at the right time.
So instead of wasting time and resources trying to figure out how to beat your competitors at the exact time your lead needs you, your goal is to drag the “right time” back a few months (or years) and get people to know you before they need you.
This type of advertising has a name; it’s called brand awareness. But the issue with brand awareness is that it doesn’t translate into sales immediately.
So to the untrained eye, the whole process is a waste of time. The average business owner would much rather spend money on direct marketing (“Hey, my name is XYZ. Buy my services NOW.”)
So this bias toward instant results leaves a huge pocket of opportunity for those that are willing to run marketing campaigns the right way.
People will gladly follow your law firm on social media, even before they need a lawyer
There’s a massive misconception when it comes to building an audience, and I hear it almost every time I work with my clients.
“Deniero, why would someone follow me before they need an *enter type of lawyer”?”
Social media changed since when it started. From 2006 to 2015, we used to go on Facebook and Instagram to see what our friends and family were up to. We shared status updates, and we tagged each other on (more or less appropriate) pictures. And we saw which events were happening in our community.
But as the algorithms changed, social media became more of a source of entertainment and education. You stopped seeing Johnny’s photos from Saturday night, and instead, you got served videos and infographics from the pages/accounts you followed.
People went to social media to learn how to crochet, barbecue a tomahawk, find their next favorite book, learn how to work out… and yes… even how to deal with a potential car accident, divorce, and anything in between.
But there is a caveat. Most people on social media don’t want to feel like they’re being taught. So if you come across as preachy, you’re going to lose your audience.
The key is to take scenario from every life or a relevant news story and turn it into a teachable moment for your audience. This process is called edutainment, and it’s what will set you apart from your competitors.
Some of our clients had taken this approach to scale Instagram accounts and Youtube channels to over a million followers/subscribers in less than a year.
Your target audience may not need a lawyer now, but they are craving edutainment because it makes them feel both smart (for learning something) and relaxed (for winding down on social media)
You can get PR for your law firm virtually for free
I wrote a ton of content on this topic, so if you want to dig deeper, sign up for my email list here and get a free 15-page report that will explain the whole process in detail. But in a nutshell, PR agencies can only offer two things
Their network of media outlets
Their time and effort as they try to match new opportunities to the right clients
A few years ago, hiring a PR agency made sense because building your own network and a team was just too impractical.
But now, you can easily use social media (and a couple of other tools) to build your own network of media contacts.
On top of that, you can hire an A+ low-cost remote assistant whose job is to scout new media opportunities for your firm.
But it gets better. If you set up a couple of automation tools, the assistant will only need to spend an hour per day on PR, leaving them plenty of time to do other things, such as, creating graphics for social media, editing podcast episodes, managing your calendar, etc.
Paid advertising for law firms is overrated
If you do a search for any type of legal service (especially in a big city), you’ll see that the first sponsored results are mainly occupied by firms that have larger budgets.
I’m not saying that a well-managed paid advertising campaign won’t yield results for smaller firms. But you’ll always fight an uphill battle against more established competitors.
As I mentioned earlier. Your leads need to know who you are, consume your content, and then reach out to you for help. So unless you already have a great online presence (aka. Brand awareness), those expensive clicks from Google Ads won’t turn into calls as often as you would like them to.
The drawback of hiring marketing agencies for your law firm and how to prevent it.
I owned a digital marketing agency for about 6 years, and I can tell you that the agency system is often not scalable for the clients. That’s actually the #1 reason why I decided to sell my book of business and focus on building remote teams for my clients instead.
Now let me tell you a little-known (but somewhat obvious) fact about agencies.
As an agency onboards more clients, the work becomes more complex. The agency starts hiring more workers. And those workers need coordinators, project managers, and often bigger office spaces, etc.
As overhead costs increase, retainers increase as well. But the only things that don't increase are the results clients get! Over the years, I saw all my agency owner friends go through the same struggle. They either had to bump up their prices or decrease the quality of their services.
So I decided to take a different path before facing that dilemma, and remote teams were the perfect solution to that problem.
When we build low-cost remote teams for our clients, those workers don’t have other projects to work on. They only focus on making your business successful. They work full-time (for about $700 a month), and they give their undivided attention to the projects you need to get done (SEO, PR, paid ads, and social media management, to name a few).
You have full control over the final result, and most importantly, you don’t have to pay for expensive agency retainers and fees.
