National Legal Network of Lawyers

Navigating Legal Marketing

Navigating Legal Marketing

How to dominate your competition.

As attorneys and law firms, you know the struggle to bring in clients every day. You spend thousands of dollars every month hoping for enough exposure to, not only sustain, but to grow your practice. You are bombarded with marketing solutions daily, often times to the point of annoyance.

    You need answers from a trusted source.Large horseshoe magnet attracting legal leads

  • How do you figure out which marketing solutions to implement?
  • Which ones deserve more attention and dollars than others?
  • Which ones will bring in quality leads and which ones are money pits?

1-800-Attorney, wants to see you succeed in building your practice. We get that you are busy lawyering and don’t have time to learn, let alone implement solid marketing strategies. To help you get started in the right direction, we’ve put some basic information together to help you understand some of the different marketing options available to you and what the benefits can be using them to market your practice.


Our marketing philosophy at centers around the idea of customers NOW and customers LATER. We want clients right now because we need revenue to survive.We want clients later because we don’t want to have to carry a huge marketing budget through the life of our practice.


So…How do you get clients now?

Vanity Numbers…and I’m talking about 1-800-ATTORNEY!

1-800-ATTORNEY BillboardToll-free numbers have been around for a long time, and they’re still extremely popular with businesses and consumers alike. Even though vanity numbers have been with us for decades, many businesses see them as unobtainable or unnecessary.

Small practices and those just starting out can benefit from vanity numbers rather quickly. It’s like getting instant prestige and trust. When clients see 1-800-ATTORNEY on your card, your ad, or anywhere else, they don’t care how small or new your practice is. In their minds, they associate the vanity number with successful practices, giving you an instant advantage in the market.

Because response rates are MUCH higher with 1-800 vanity numbers, your conversion rates will be higher than your competitors using generic numbers. Vanity numbers are highly recognizable and memorable.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Marketing for Attorney’s

Pay-per-click ads are a super-fast way to bring potential clients to your practice. Ads are highly targeted to one particular thing and one thing only. They require precise keyword research, extremely relevant ad copy, and highly specific landing pages to be successful. In the beginning, they are time consuming but once you nail down a working system, they are very easy to manage. The down fall for many attorneys, especially new or smaller practices, is that they can be expensive.

Legal keywords are among the most expensive ones to buy in the world of PPC. Because of this, we can’t stress enough, that you or whomever is running your ads be on their game when building campaigns.

Business woman pointing at an image of a click with other graphics depicting the components of pay per click advertising

Expense is the downfall of PPC but the upside is that, if you can get your ads in a top position in search results, you can pick up 40% of the clicks. If your ads are written correctly, the leads you’ll get are highly qualified with intent to hire you!

Though you won’t get the same volume of leads from running Bing Ads, they are cheap compared to Google AdWords and usually worth the investment. PPC Ads on Facebook and Instagram are also highly effective and much less expensive…you’ve just got to make sure your social media accounts are up to par before running ads through them.

PPC is competitive, especially if your budget is lower than everyone else’s. This is another way using a vanity number, like 1-800-ATTORNEY can help your business. Even if you can’t make to the top ad position, having a recognizable phone number in your ad will draw attention and make you stand out. It can serve as a recognizable call to action and even sway people to go ahead and call rather than clicking.


SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

Search Engine Marketing is an all-encompassing, big term that can be hard to wrap your head around until someone explains it in simple terms. Think of it like this: SEO + PPC = SEM. That’s it…Search Engine Marketing encompasses everything “search”, both paid and organic. We already covered PPC because it falls under “customers now” so on to SEO…


Digital marketing concept image. Internet. Online. Search Engine Optimisation. SEO SMM Advertising

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) 

Organic traffic brings in the best leads, hands down. People who find your website organically and click on your form, or call you, have the highest intent of hiring you than leads coming from any other source. Once you get on top of the search engine results page (SERP), the maintenance cost of staying there is  much less expensive and time consuming than PPC ad spend & management.

SEO is a term thrown around by pretty much all business owners these days, regardless of their industry. As an attorney, especially in highly competitive areas of practice, you know the importance of your website’s optimization in terms of dominating your competitors and are probably watching it like a hawk. Whether you have a marketing team, you outsource SEO, or you’re learning as you go, you, as the business owner, need to know the basics, if for no other reason, than to make sure you’re getting what you pay for.

SEO is the be all, end all to customers later however, it is a slow process. Do not be fooled by someone (and the industry is full of them) who tells you they can rank your website at the top of Google in less than 6 – 12 months. If someone tells you they can rank you in an extraordinarily short period of time, they are either lying to you or they’re planning on using unethical, “black hat” techniques such as backlinking to high traffic, undesirable sites (i.e. porn). This and other black hat techniques can work fast but the consequences can be lethal to your business. When, not if, Google catches on, penalties can be as harsh as taking down your website and banning your domain.

SEO is a big job but there are a few things you can easily do yourself.

Questions to ask yourself about your websites optimization:

Does your website contain lots of original, authoritative, relevant content?

  • Content is KING! We’re not just talking sentences stuffed with keywords, (quite prevalent on attorney websites!) we’re talking well written, easy flowing, authoritative, and relevant content that gives readers value.

Do you have 5 relevant, high search volume, competitive keywords threaded throughout your amazing content?

  • Many of you attorneys are going to read that last sentence and immediately tell me that 5 keywords aren’t enough. Well, you’re wrong…and you’re right! First of all, just because you are targeting 5 keywords doesn’t mean your website will only rank for 5 keywords. You’re also going to rank for all sorts of variations of those keywords with the help of “stop words” (a, the, for, etc..).
  • In addition, if you truly have amazing content, along with those 5 keywords, you’re going to rank organically for lots of long tail keywords (4 or more words strung together) that are flowing through your content.CONTENT IS KING seo search engine optimization and content marketing concept
  • The more keywords you’re trying to rank for, the more time and money it takes. If you hit it hard with 5 keywords, you’ll end up ranking well for those 5 plus more from your content. If you spread yourself too thin, you won’t rank anywhere near the competitive mark. With the revenue you see as you begin ranking highly, you can increase your marketing budget and add more keywords.

Do you have keyword rich headings, titles, tags, and descriptions? What about Alt text?

  • Every page of your website should have at least one heading that is carefully written to include a keyword that you are trying to rank for (these are referred to H1, H2, H3, etc…). Every page on your site should have a keyword rich title and description. Every single image on your website should have Alt text, which is a detailed description of an image that Google uses when a user has a vision impairment.
  • Headings are sprinkled throughout your content while titles, descriptions, and Alt text are found within the back side of your website. Depending on what platform your website is built on, you should easily be able to Google instructions on how and where to enter titles, descriptions, and Alt text no matter what platform your website is built on.

Do you have plenty of internal links on your website? What about high quality backlinks from other relevant websites?

  • Internal linking referrers to links you sprinkle throughout your content that take users to other areas within your own site. You can link pages to other pages, pages to blog posts, and blog posts to pages. It’s super simple to figure out and really doesn’t take that much time, especially if you do you internal linking as you publish new content.
  • Backlinking is a bit more difficult to grasp and achieve but it is possible to do yourself with a little self-education and dedication. Let’s start with a basic explanation: a backlink is a link to your website from another website.
  • How do backlinks help you? Let’s say that “AB Legal Services” has been around for a long time, has an amazing website full of great content and they are ranked at the top of organic searches. With all of that said, Google considers them an authoritative and trustworthy website and because they’ve done everything right, they have high domain and trust metrics (numbers assigned based on all the things I listed and more).  When “AB Legal Services” puts a link to your website on one of their pages, some of those high trust numbers start flowing to your website. The higher the number, the more trustworthy the site and the higher that site ranks in search engine results. Always be super picky when deciding to ad a backlink to another website…if it’s metrics are lower

All in all, getting backlinks from great websites, makes your website better (in the eyes of Google). Because of this, you need to be careful about what websites link yours. The rule here is that it’s not about quantity, its about quality.

SMM (Social Media Marketing)

social media concept showing a globe full of shared image from around the world

By nature, social media is the closest you can get to your target audience. You can easily find the exact people you know will benefit form your services and engage with them immediately. Social media allows you to build trust and loyalty for your brand, which ultimately leads to long term consumer relationships.

Instagram is virtually untouched by attorneys right now, leaving the door wide open for opportunities to build loyal followings and promote your practice in your specific location.  Associating and promoting your practice or firm in conjunction with 1-800-ATTORNEY gives you a head start. We’re already out there and going strong, building loyal a following who recognize us no matter where they see us.

Social Media Stats

– Social Media is the fastest growing marketing platform. Here’s why:

– As of 2017, the population of the world was 7.6 billion.

– 3.5 billion people in the world are internet users

– Of those, 3 billion are active on social media

– Between Q2 2017 and Q3 2017, the number of active social media users grew by 121 million

3 Tips for Successful Social Media Campaigns

  • Be consistent with your firm’s brand. The look and feel of your website needs to flow through to your social media accounts.
  • Be consistent in your posting. Your content should flow well and be in a variety of formats (i.e. text posts, image posts, and videos.
  • Post regularly to all your social media accounts. There is no such thing as over posting. You should post a minimum of 5 times per week.

Last but not least…the Oldies with a modern twist


Radio Advertising 

Radio may be “old media”, but it still reaches nearly 60 percent of the population every day and over 90 percent every week. Throw in that services like iHeart Radio that allow listeners to stream any station they want to, at any time and you’ve got a wide range of targeting options.

On the top tier of radio advertising are “live readings” (when a radio personality reads your spot on the air). Why is the best of radio advertising? Because we all tend to rely on reviews we find online and on social media. A live read is like bringing these reviews to life. It’s on par with influencer reviews on social media and is quite successful. Combine “live reads” with an amazing vanity number (1-800-ATTORNEY, of course!) and you’ve instantly got a trusted review that consumers can easily remember in their time of need.

For a modern twist, consider running ads on streaming services like Pandora and Spotify. These ads can be pretty tightly targeted thus giving you a better opportunity to reach your ideal client.

Television Advertising

High volume frequency and repetition work well for brand recognition. TV advertising can help you build a lasting presence in your market if you can establish yourself as a credible business and sustain the length of time it takes to convey that message to the masses.three images depicting tv, radio, and billboard advertising for Lawyers

A few things to keep in mind when toying with the idea of advertising on TV:

  • High production cost
  • Time consuming to produce making changing your message difficult and expensive
  • Difficulty changing message quickly
  • Targeting is limited to location and time of day
  • Difficulty of tracking
  • With expensive production costs and a large time investment, television advertising may be out of reach for smaller practices or firms.

For a modern twist, consider advertising on streaming services like Hulu. Just as with music streaming, ads can be specifically targeted.

 Outdoor Advertising 

96% of Americans are exposed to outdoor advertising every week, and billboards and bus ads are among the most conspicuous of all outdoor advertising modes. The effect is multiplied if the billboard is strategically placed like an intersection with regular two-light delays. Keep in mind that there are limitations with billboard advertising. The biggest one being that there is no engagement with your audience…they can’t click on,  save, or call you directly from your ad.

This is where 1-800-ATTORNEY plays a huge part in conversion. Passing motorists or public transportation commuters will never remember a random 10-digit string of numbers, but they will certainly remember 1-800-ATTORNEY. They will remember it even if they don’t use the minute they see it.

 

We Want to Hear From You

Any law firm – in or out of network – is welcome to offer a perspective on marketing. Share your opinion across social media or e-mail your comments using the form found on this page.

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