Tackling your firm’s legal marketing can seem like a daunting prospect with various strategies and platforms to get your head around.
We won’t downplay it. It is a mammoth task, but it is manageable providing you have the right strategy to tackle the various activities for maximum ROI.
In this blog, we break down the essentials of legal marketing, offering clear, actionable insights to help law firms attract clients, build authority, and stand out in a competitive landscape.
What is legal marketing?
Legal marketing focuses on promoting legal services using advertising, branding, and online strategies to attract and retain clients.
It involves several digital marketing tactics like SEO, content marketing, and social media. The goal is to establish trust, showcase expertise, and connect with potential clients, encouraging them to choose your law firm over your competitors.
How to develop a legal marketing strategy.
A robust legal marketing strategy requires a multi-channel approach. This includes branding, website optimisation, SEO, digital advertising, email marketing, CRM, analytics, change management, CRO, and social media marketing. By integrating these elements, from branding to social media, law firms can build a strong online presence, nurture leads, and ultimately, increase client acquisition.
Let’s break down each element of legal marketing.
Law firm branding.
Potential and current clients won’t remember what you say…
…they’ll remember how you made them feel.
Your branding goes beyond a logo and a tagline.
It represents everything your firm stands for, including your values, identity, and services, making it a vital aspect of your law firm marketing plan.
Your brand provides the basis for all your legal marketing efforts.
It needs to consistently reinforce the messages you’re trying to put across.
This is achieved by using a consistent look and feel across your website and campaigns.
As a law firm, one of those will inevitably be a sense of reliability and expertise.
However, a strong law firm brand goes beyond simply conveying professionalism, trust and a positive reputation.
Great law firm branding communicates your values and purpose.
For example, to differentiate its brand, The Family Law Company embarked on a deep dive into client feedback, internal conversations, and competitive analysis.
This revealed a core value: "Bravery." "It's about our clients finding the strength to navigate incredibly challenging situations and our lawyers having the courage to have difficult conversations,” explains Kerry England, Business Development Director.
This insight translated into the ‘Everyday Bravery’ campaign, celebrating courage within the firm and the community.
This focus on bravery was then integrated into all aspects of the firm's operations, from employee recognition to recruitment, ensuring it became an authentic and enduring part of its brand identity.
"Let's lean into difficult conversations," emphasises Kerry. "Quite often, you become a partner because you're good at the law, not necessarily because you're good with people. We needed to flip that on its head and recognise that having those difficult conversations, whether it's with a client or a colleague, is a crucial part of our roles."
By championing "bravery" both internally and externally as part of its legal marketing, the firm not only differentiated itself but also fostered a stronger, more authentic culture.
The ‘Everyday Bravery’ campaign demonstrated significant success.
18% of new inquiries indicated awareness of the campaign, highlighting its effectiveness in raising brand visibility.
The dedicated ‘Bravery’ page on the website received over 3,000 visits, showcasing strong online engagement. Social media reach soared, with over 50,000 video views across platforms.
The campaign also garnered significant media attention, securing 12 pieces of free PR in local and regional media.
Most importantly, the "bravery" value became deeply ingrained within the firm's culture, influencing employee behaviour, recruitment, and internal communication.
Key points:
Deeply Understand Your Unique Identity and Values:
- Don't try to be everything to everyone.
- Identify your niche and what truly sets you apart.
- Define your core values and ensure they are authentically reflected in your law firm’s digital marketing and everything you do.
Involve All Stakeholders:
- Actively involve partners, staff, and even clients in the brand-building process.
- Seek their input and address their concerns.
- Foster a sense of ownership and shared responsibility.
Focus on Emotional Connections:
- Move beyond traditional, self-serving law firm marketing messages.
- Tell authentic stories that resonate with your target audience on a human level.
- Show your firm's personality and values through your legal marketing efforts.
Embrace Bravery and Authenticity:
- Be willing to stand out from the crowd and try something different.
- Don't be afraid to be vulnerable and share your true story.
- Encourage open and honest communication within the firm.
Measure and Iterate:
- Track key metrics to assess the impact of your law firm branding efforts.
- Continuously analyse your results and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Website.
You might think your current law firm website is fine.
You have a steady stream of organic clients coming in.
So what’s the problem?
Well, if you saw how many clients your dated design costs you, you'd quickly change your mind.
Speaking from experience, we find that law firm websites are often dull and uninspiring.
Instead, you need something engaging without taking away from the professional feel.
This can largely be achieved through your website’s visual elements and hierarchy.
Utilise the 60-30-10 rule, whereby 60% is your primary neutral colour, 30% your secondary colour, and 10% your CTA colour.
This creates contrast and makes the important elements like CTA buttons stand out.
CTAs can also be made clearer by placing them in prominent locations on your law firm website.
A bold button or form should be included at the top of the page, making it easy for users to contact you.
These Call to action statistics provided by Wiser Notify highlight how optimising your CTAs can significantly boost the success of your legal marketing:
- Using a specific, clear CTA can increase conversion rates by 161%.
- Placing the CTA button at the end of the product page can increase conversions by 70%.
- Increasing the size of the CTA button can increase click-through rates by 90%.
- Changing the colour of the CTA button can increase conversions by 21%.
Next, consider your imagery.
In general, images are a great way to break up the page and make it more engaging.
They should reflect the themes and emotions most important to your audience, such as family and justice.
You can use stock images, just ensure they’re relevant and of high quality.
Putting faces to the people behind your business by including team imagery is beneficial to your law firm’s digital marketing too.
It helps to build trust, which is crucial for prospective clients deciding on a law firm.
Using images will naturally result in less text, which leads on to our next point.
Of course, you need copy but you don’t want paragraph after paragraph.
This quickly becomes overwhelming for the user and can put them off reading, limiting the value of all that time-consuming legal marketing writing.
If you do need to provide a lot of information, break the copy up with short sentences and snappy subtitles.
Or, if you have a long, complex message, share it in the form of a video.
Videos provide the user with the answers they’re looking for while making the design feel less static.
Adding videos can also increase the average time users spend on your website by 88%.
While dwell time isn’t considered a ranking factor in itself, people staying on your page signals to Google that your content offers a positive user experience, which can lead to higher rankings.
Incorporating microinteractions has the same effect.
While only a small feature, something like a change of colour when hovering over a button can make a big difference.
These details make your site feel more interactive and even improve usability.
Finally, Ensure your law firm website provides the same experience on mobile as on desktop.
Over 60% of website traffic comes from mobile devices and whilst the percentage may not be as high for law firms due to the nature of the business, you’ll still be missing out on a significant number of prospective clients if your website isn’t optimised for mobile.
Responsive design adjusts text, images, buttons, and menus to fit any screen size.
This way, your visitors can easily access all the information they need and navigate your site seamlessly.
SEO.
Many law firms are guilty of not giving SEO the time, effort, and resources it requires.
Law firm SEO is more than basic keyword optimisation.
It requires an in-depth strategy to improve search engine visibility and drive intakes.
The importance of ranking highly can’t be understated, with top-ranking search results seeing an average click-through rate (CTR) is 22.4%. This drops right down to just 2.3% for results in position 10.
The process begins with thorough keyword research.
You need to identify popular, relevant keywords your target audience is searching for using a tool like SEMrush.
Building topic clusters using these keywords should then become a key aspect of your law firm marketing strategy.
Services pages, which usually act as a pillar page, should be optimised with commercial-focused terms.
For an injury at work service page, you might use:
- claim for injury at work
- injury at work compensation
- injury at work solicitors
Meanwhile, blogs and articles, which link back to your main service page, should be optimised with informational terms:
- accident at work can I claim
- I fell at work what are my rights
- accident at work how to claim
By linking back from advice articles back to your service page, you’re highlighting their importance to Google.
This builds page authority, helping the page climb search engine rankings.
And the more high-quality content you produce and link to that page, the higher it’ll reach.
This is particularly true since Google placed greater emphasis on E-E-A-T principles, highlighting the importance of showcasing your expertise through informative, authentic content.
In addition to your overall strategy, you need to prioritise on-page SEO.
Optimising each and every page for SEO involves several elements:
- Include bold title tags which feature your target keywords.
- Relevant H2s, H3s, and so on to create a hierarchy. They too should include your keywords if possible.
- Populate metadata in the back-end of your with descriptive copy using your main target keywords.
- Thread your keywords throughout your body copy but don’t overdo it. Google can understand variations.
- Optimise images with descriptive file names and alt text to improve accessibility and search engine indexing.
While Google should be a priority, it’s also worth optimising for ChatGPT Search as part of your legal marketing.
Many of the optimisations you make for Google will naturally help you rank for ChatGPT Searches, but there are a few features that could make a significant impact.
For example, our research suggests you should utilise question-based H2s and include bullet points throughout your content.
This makes it easier for the search engine to identify answers to users’ queries and provide a succinct but valuable response.
Your law firm SEO strategy may also involve the production of locally optimised content.
Naturally, people are likely to opt for a law firm in close proximity to where they live.
Therefore, gaining the edge in your local market can give a huge advantage.
You’ll need to utilise many of the same SEO techniques we’ve mentioned....
…but the keywords you’ll target will be tweaked slightly to include your location.
For work injury content, “work injury lawyer in [your city]” could be an example of a term you’ll use.
There are various other elements of local law firm SEO which an experienced agency can help you carry out, such as adding and testing LocalBusiness schema, and implementing positive local reviews.
Aspects like link building and technical SEO require a deep understanding of the techniques.
Rather than going into the details here, we recommend seeking specialist support.
An agency can guide you through the process and explain the optimisations being made.
Digital advertising.
Digital advertising can be utilised effectively alongside your law firm’s SEO to further enhance your legal marketing strategy.
Paid ads provide near-instant visibility and traffic, which can result in more clients.
The most common type of paid advertising is Google Ads, with 80% of global businesses using Google ads for their PPC campaigns. Many law firms will be amongst these businesses meaning you could be at a significant disadvantage if you aren’t running any campaigns.
In short, Google Ads allows you to bid on search terms related to your legal services.
You’ll need to conduct research to identify terms with high traffic and low competition.
Similar terms can then be grouped together in ad groups with a particular focus.
With the foundations in place, you can begin setting up your campaign.
Select a campaign type based on your objectives, target a particular location, and set your budget and bid strategy.
With your campaign built, you can move on to creating your ads.
Your ad copy is written in a series of headlines and descriptions.
Your headlines should include your target keywords where possible to improve ad relevancy.
A few of your headline spots should be saved for CTAs, encouraging users to interact.
Descriptions provide the opportunity to offer more detail about the service and your business.
Include the benefits and main selling points, such as your experience or track record.
Your ads should also include extensions like site links, your location, and phone number.
This makes it easy for users to explore your other services or get in touch.
As well as your ads themselves, it’s important to optimise your landing pages too.
The quality score of your ads is partly dependent on the relevance of your landing pages.
Including some of your keywords on your landing pages helps to show the content is relevant.
Your ads are now close to being launched, but you’ll need a way of monitoring success.
This is done by implementing conversion tracking.
Conversion tracking allows you to monitor the number of actions being made by users.
They might include form submissions, calls, or other conversions you deem important.
Once you’re ads have been launched, you need to keep an eye on their progress.
By using insights and running tests, you can make tweaks and optimise your budget.
This could involve anything from updating your keywords to editing your ad copy.
Monitoring and optimising your ads is made simpler by integrating them with your CRM.
We’ll discuss this in more detail later.
Running Google Ads can become an expensive element of your law firm marketing if you aren’t careful.
If you aren’t overly familiar with the platform, we recommend outsourcing to a digital advertising agency.
They can work closely with you to create compelling ads and get the best out of your budget.
Email marketing.
Emails are a great way of providing a personalised experience for individual users, making them a valuable aspect of your law firm digital marketing.
Most law firms offer a range of services, so your prospective clients won’t all be looking for the same thing.
If you provide every prospect with the same generic content, you risk making them feel overlooked which can harm their chances of converting.
In fact, 61% of customers believe they're often treated like numbers rather than individuals.
If you can segment your audience, you can provide unique email content that directly addresses each user’s specific needs, making them feel valued.
One way of doing this is by adding a monthly newsletter to your law firm marketing plan.
This can be tailored to the services your contacts are most interested in.
Clicks and open rates can be monitored to determine your most engaged contacts, and those likely to convert.
For these users, the personalised approach can be taken a step further.
Unique emails can be sent with personalised video messages created using software like Vidyard.
This adds a human touch to your communications, showing you care and are trying to meet their needs.
As well as focusing specifically on your services, you should also include advice articles.
These can be used in both your newsletters and your one-to-one emails.
Again, advice articles add to the personalised experience, helping to resolve a user’s specific problem.
A simple subject line like “I wrote this advice piece and thought of you...” can make all the difference.
You’re making your audience feel listened to while pointing them towards your services.
That’s the dream combination for generating legal clients through email marketing.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
Many partners think the CRM's role is to store contacts.
They’re wrong.
A good CRM is crucial to your legal marketing, revealing where contacts came from and how they interact with your firm.
It provides clear analytics dashboards for deeper insights.
A good CRM will help the legal marketing team and fee earners by:
- providing fee earners instant access to the prospect information they need
- using automated reminders to prevent prospects from slipping through the cracks
- managing daily tasks with prioritised lists
- logging email correspondence automatically for better record-keeping
- qualifying and scoring prospects based on set criteria
- offering visual dashboards to track prospect ownership and pipeline status
- designing and sending newsletters and monitoring the effectiveness of email campaigns
- displaying customisable marketing and business development KPI dashboards
Ensure the CRM has an open API and strong integration capabilities for seamless connection with your case/matter management system.
This is the key to unlocking ROI insights, as we explain in the next section.
Analytics.
The most frustrating aspect of a legal marketer's job?
Contra has spoken to over 200 legal marketers in the past year, and they all said one thing:
Attribution and ROI.
But most legal marketers don’t have the technical skills to integrate systems and unlock attribution & ROI insights.
Use a digital agency like Contra to execute these four fundamental steps:
1. Google Analytics
GA4 is a crucial skill for legal marketing.
Set up key events to track website conversions.
Develop custom reports focusing on important law firm KPIs based on your managing partners’ preferences.
Some KPIs covering the website and SEO we recommend monitoring include:
- YoY Summary and Previous Period Summary: Reporting on both 'all users' and 'organic users.'
- Active Users
- New Users
- Total Conversions
- Conversion Event Breakdown
- User Conversion Rate
- Percentage of Engaged Users
- Average Engagement Time
- Service Rankings (e.g., Personal Injury)
- Subservice Rankings (e.g., Accidents at Work)
- Rankings Distribution
- Benchmark Rankings vs. Current Rankings
- Sources and Engagement
- Best and Worst
- Rankers
- Climbers
- Performing Pages (traffic, conversions, engagement time)
If partners can clearly see the benefits of your law firm marketing through measurable data, they're more likely to invest in other areas, helping you further grow the firm’s revenue.
2. Google Looker Studio
Now Integrate GA4 with your keyword rank tracking tool (such as Semrush, Moz, Ahrefs etc,).
You can create a custom Google Looker Studio dashboard that pulls data from GA4.
This will enable you to present a range of insights to your partners in a clean, simple and visual format.
3. Multi-system Integration
Integrate your case/matter management system, ads platform, and marketing tools with an effective CRM like HubSpot.
By doing this, you’ll unlock end-to-end attribution reporting and ROI insights.
Your case/matter management system will share this data with your CRM.
Your CRM will identify intake sources and evaluate ROI across cases and channels.
Partners rely on data to justify budget increases.
Give them what they need.
Law firm marketing relies on data to drive decision-making.
Unlock the insights you need to double revenue.
Change management.
Change management is the most underrated skill in legal marketing.
Contra has transformed firms by implementing a new CRM, new processes, and fostering a data-driven approach.
These changes were seemingly small in the mind of a legal marketer.
However, they were monumental for partners.
Here are six key lessons when implementing marketing changes in your law firm.
1. Communicate the benefits, not the features
Define your stakeholders, whether they are managing partners, IT, marketing, or fee earners.
Now, put yourself in their shoes. What are their challenges, needs, and concerns?
Communicate exactly how the proposed changes will solve their challenges.
2. Find internal champions
Start early, using champion partners / fee earners who are digitally engaged.
Show them the benefits.
Build advocates who can influence the firm's culture.
3. Address resistance early
Allow people to be open about their concerns.
Listen to their feedback and provide reassurance.
Show them how you plan to measure success and start small.
Note, people's concerns often have underlying stories.
Someone might object due to perceived disruption, masking a discomfort with technology.
Continuously inquire (gently) to uncover their genuine feelings about change.
4. Training and support
Provide comprehensive training sessions tailored to partners' needs and roles.
Offer personalised support to address individual concerns.
Ensure partners feel confident in the new processes / technology.
5. Celebrate early successes
Make data central to your project to showcase KPIs and gain senior stakeholder support.
Highlight early successes and quick wins.
Celebrate achievements such as an increase in leads, intake-to-client conversion rates, and ROI.
6. Market your change
Take stakeholders on the journey with you.
Set up an internal newsletter that updates the firm on progress, key milestones and wins.
Always remind everyone of the 'why', communicating the benefits of change at each stage.
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO).
CRO is key for law firms. By optimising your website to convert more visitors into leads, your advertising and SEO spend provides more ROI.
We achieved a 199.5% YoY increase in organic conversion rate for Hudgell Solicitors.
Here’s how we did it:
1. Provide multiple contact methods
Offer various ways for potential clients to reach out.
Hudgells includes a primary ‘Call’ CTA in the hero section.
There is also a secondary ‘Start My Claim’ CTA.
Additionally, a chat function is implemented in the bottom right.
2. Use personalisation and action-orientated language
Use the first-person in CTAs for higher conversion rates, like ‘Start my claim.’
Hudgells also uses a second-person, empathetic tone in its body copy.
3. Include trust markers in hero
Display positive client feedback to build credibility and trust.
Highlight any relevant certifications, awards, or professional affiliations.
Hudgells showcases its Trustpilot score, Legal 500, and Times Best Law Firm in its hero section.
4. Prioritise needs
Include the most important information first.
Most people search for No Win No Fee.
Hudgells includes this high up the page.
5. Balance SEO and UX
Google likes in-depth, high-quality copy.
However, lots of copy can hinder user experience.
Hudgells uses fixed-image 50/50 columns that balance SEO with UX.
6. Highlight the process
Contacting a solicitor is a scary thing to do.
Customers need to feel safe and in control.
Hudgells outlines the process in a friendly, reassuring tone.
7. Optimise for mobile
Optimise your site for mobile.
Hudgells has a user-friendly design.
It blends high-quality images with a clean, professional layout.
8. Create localised content
Produce locally optimised pages that target a specific area.
Hudgells utilises Hull- and Manchester-focused service pages.
These are optimised local search terms and include LocalBusiness schema.
9. Embed expandable contact forms
Provide conversion opportunities throughout your content.
Hudgells includes a contact form between advice article paragraphs.
They’re expandable to avoid compromising the reading experience.
10. Utilise a jump-to menu
Use long-form content to rank on search engines.
However, ensure it’s easily navigable,
Hudgells uses a jump-to menu with a CTA for further conversion opportunities.
Social media marketing.
Social media is a cornerstone of legal marketing.
It can strengthen your brand, increase awareness, build trust and humanise your firm.
However, it’s important to select the right channel.
If you’re not sure which one to choose, we highly recommend LinkedIn marketing for lawyers.
In general, it’s much more professional and business-focused than other mainstream platforms.
This makes it a suitable place to not only reinforce your brand…
…but also target people who might be interested in specific legal services.
Your lawyer’s personal profiles make a significant contribution to this.
As your people profiles represent your brand, you need them to be professional.
Here are some of the features they could include:
- High-quality, simple profile photo.
- Headline featuring their job title and a brief value proposition.
- Summary of their expertise and achievements ending with a clear CTA.
- List of skills and practice areas.
- Your firm's contact information, including email, phone number, website, and location.
- Education and certifications to further emphasise their expertise.
- Featured publications, articles, posts, or case studies.
With their profiles optimised, your lawyers are ready to share their knowledge with their LinkedIn audience to really kick off your law firm social media marketing.
But how should they go about it?
Thought leadership must be shared regularly, keeping your people and brand at the forefront of users’ minds.
There’s several elements that make a strong piece of legal LinkedIn content.
Here’s a great LinkedIn marketing post from Ellie Davies, a solicitor at Leathes Prior Solicitors.
It features many great engagement elements, including:
- an attention-grabbing opening with a provocative statement, bold figures, and emojis
- a conversational and humorous tone to make a high-profile legal case more entertaining while remaining informative
- bullet points to simplify and highlight key information, making it more digestible
- quirky and relatable elements, like unusual financial claims, making the post more sharable
- relevant legal issues to connect with both professionals and the public
- subtle invitation to think critically about legal matters, encouraging engagement
All these elements can be replicated in your own team’s LinkedIn posts.
The engagement they generate not only brings attention to their profiles but to your firm as a whole.
A relatable, interesting post could be what prompts a user to visit your website, potentially resulting in a new client down the line.
Request a free legal marketing consultation.
Contra has helped leading law firms double conversion rates, scale search engine rankings for target services and drive new clients. Request a free consultation today to discuss how we can help your firm.
