After law school, the most common path graduate lawyers take is seeking employment. But many have dreams of starting their private practice somewhere in the future, which means you need to know lead generation for attorneys. If you are among this group and have already started your legal practice, you may have realized that having a steady flow of clients takes more than setting up an office.
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Lead Generation for Attorneys
While having a constant flow of clients may not be as easy, having the right approach to lead generation for attorneys and law firms can make a huge difference. If lead generation is a new concept to you, this post will share what to do.
What Is Lead Generation?
The term lead generation for attorneys may not make much sense to you, especially if marketing is an entirely new concept. So the best place to start is defining what a lead is. A lead is a potential client that is interested in your firm. It follows then that lead generation is the process of finding potential clients.
Lead generation has four stages:
- Awareness: This is the stage where your audience learns about you.
- Interest: Your prospect is aware of your presence and is interested in working with you.
- Decision: At this stage, your prospect is sure they need what you offer and may even take the appropriate action or be on the fence, unsure if you are what they are looking for.
- Action: At this stage, the prospect is convicted and shifts from being a prospect into a client.
The flow of prospects through the sales funnel is not automatic. Most prospects drop off before they get to the action stage. So your lead generation efforts should ensure that as many leads as possible convert into paying clients.
How to Generate Leads
Have a Website
Most people will look up a law firm online before contacting them. So you will need a solid online presence, which often starts with getting a website for your law firm.
A website acts as your online office, so it has to be neat, organized, fast, and everything in between. There are many options for building a website, including free ones. But it is unlikely you will get a high-quality website for free, so you should consider having an expert design your website.
Optimize Your Site
Once you have a quality website up and running, the next step should be updating it with relevant content and optimizing it for search engines through a process known as search engine optimization (SEO). If your area of interest is a specific region, such as a county or city, you will want to have your site optimized for local searches.
Read our SEO for Law Firms Guide
Local search optimization is the process of fine-tuning your site to rank in the search engine results for people seeking the kind of legal services in your area of reach. For example, a personal injury law firm in Houston, Texas, will want to rank for personal injury searches made from within Houston or search times like “personal injury lawyer in Houston.”
SEO may not be your strong point as a lawyer. So it’s always best to outsource this service to law firm digital marketing agencies, such as On The Map Marketing, which has a deep insight into all aspects of digital marketing for a law firm.
Leverage Social Media
The majority of your target audience is on social media. So, it makes perfect sense to be on social media as well. Different social media platforms have different approaches in terms of the type of content that does well and the demographics of the audience.
You do not have to be on all social media platforms. You can have your marketing agency help you understand where you will need a presence while ensuring that you are consistent with posting relevant content.
You can also look into sponsored posts that can help you reach a wider audience based on your budget and the geographical reach you want to achieve.
Quality Service Delivery
The best marketing strategy will eventually flop if you do not match it with high-quality services. When your clients are happy, they become your best marketers. They will recommend you to their family, friends, and colleagues and return if they need the services you offer another time.
If they are unhappy, you get the complete opposite.
With time, poor client experiences will catch up with you slowing down your lead generation and ultimately hurting your revenue.
PPC Advertising
One of the most effective ways of lead generation for attorneys is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. As the name suggests, this is a kind of marketing where you pay the advertiser a specific amount for every click on your ad.
While effective, it is also the most expensive lead generation form, and you could easily run into losses if you are not careful with your ad optimization.
For example, if you have 100 clicks that do not translate into paying clients, you will still have to pay for the clicks. Like SEO, the best approach to PPC is working with a digital marketing agency to ensure you get the most out of it.
