From working with successful law firms for over 24 years, we know they’re often too busy to plan, implement, and carry out a marketing strategy alone.

Before you commit to a legal marketing firm, you’ll want to know if they’re right for your specific requirements.

With that in mind, here are all the important questions you should be asking when deciding on the perfect growth partner.

1. Do they have a long-term strategy?

Creating and implementing an effective marketing strategy for your law firm isn’t something that can be done overnight.

Even after the bulk of your plan is in place, it still requires ongoing monitoring and optimisation before you see the desired results.

This might seem like a significant commitment, and it is, but it’s essential to get solid foundations in place if you want to enjoy long-term success.

With that in mind, you should be wary of any legal marketing firm promising quick wins through digital ads, for example.

Google or social media ads are fine to run providing it’s alongside a thorough organic strategy and may contribute to a boost in traffic or conversions.

But this uplift will quickly drop off once your campaign ends, or you’ll have to blow the budget in order to keep running your ads.

Even then you won’t be getting the most out of your money if you’re not sending users to a high-quality website with a wealth of authentic, informative, and SEO-optimised legal marketing content.

Working alongside a legal marketing agency to create a long-term plan begins by identifying your main goals and objectives.

This involves identifying your law firm’s KPIs and providing a clear understanding of what you’re working towards and what success would actually look like.

You should be given access to a detailed project plan outlining timelines, setting in stone how the project should progress from one stage to the next.

Ultimately, the entire purpose of a legal marketing strategy is to reach a point where you’re consistently acquiring new clients through a developed, reliable pipeline.

Of course, not everything can be 100% accounted for but your agency should be as prepared as possible for any upcoming changes and adapt as they happen.

Look for legal marketing firms that provide up-to-date knowledge on the changing legal and digital landscapes, such as legal marketing news and law firm marketing articles.

2. Are they data-driven?

When setting your goals, you need to ensure they’re easily measurable, allowing you to clearly see that your strategy is working.

Rather than simply desiring a general increase in conversions or improved client acquisition, your agency should help you set ambitious but achievable goals, so you better understand the scale of success you should expect to see.

With this in mind, your legal marketing firm needs to be data-driven, taking the guesswork out of monitoring performance.

Effectively utilising data and analytics involves identifying and agreeing upon key metrics which are important to your organisation’s success.

We recommend that our legal clients prioritise several metrics revolving around user engagement, SEO rankings, and ad performance, including:

  • YoY Summary and Previous Period summary (reporting on both ‘all users’ and specifically ‘organic users’)
    • Active users
    • New users
    • Total conversions
    • Conversion event breakdown
    • User conversion rate
    • Percentage of engaged users
  • Average engagement time
  • Service average rankings 
  • Subservice average rankings 
  • Rankings distribution
  • Benchmark rankings vs current rankings
  • Sources and engagement
  • Best and worst
    • Rankers
    • Climbers
    • Performing pages (traffic, conversions, engagement time)
  • No. of new enquiries
  • No. of new matters/cases
  • Inquiry-to-client conversion rate
  • Breakdown of lawyers articles and organic traffic and new enquiries

Monitoring these metrics by integrating Google Analytics 4 (GA4) with your website, social media, CRM and SEO tools is key to unlocking ROI reporting for your law firm.

They show how effectively you’re meeting the agreed targets and, ultimately, how much you’re getting for your money.

Your legal marketing agency should help you better understand this by providing regular reports compiling key metrics, highlighting what is working effectively and what could be further optimised.

For this, we use Google Looker Studio which will be integrated with GA4 and our SEO tools, enabling the presentation of data in simple, highly visual reporting dashboards which are particularly useful when presenting to managing partners or fee earners who might not be marketing-minded.

It helps them to understand the value of marketing, both motivating your lawyers to keep producing thought leadership content and ensuring stakeholders stay in firm support of the project.

In addition to monitoring key metrics, analysing user behaviour is imperative.

We use CrazyEgg, a software which uses screen recording, click and scroll tracking, A/B tests and heatmaps to monitor how real users are interacting with your website.

This allows us to identify where users are struggling to find the information they’re looking for or where something might be blocking them from converting.

With this insight, we then run A/B tests to tweak elements one by one, such as adjusting a page layout or moving the position of a CTA or form, so we can see which combination is most effective for driving conversions.

This careful monitoring and testing is vital to refining your strategy and should be an important part of working alongside a legal marketing firm.

3. Do they specialise in your niche?

From experience, we know that law firms often provide hundreds of services.

Even if yours only has a single speciality, it’s likely you offer a wealth of sub-services stemming from your key practice area.

Trying to cover every service and subservice in your marketing strategy may spread your resources too thin, resulting in too little content being produced in each sector for it to have a meaningful impact.

Therefore, it’s essential you only focus on a few key services that generate the majority of your revenue.

That being said, honing in on a couple of specific services also presents other unique challenges.

Primarily, it becomes increasingly vital that you work with a law firm marketing agency that possesses experience and knowledge about your chosen niche.

Instead of just telling you they understand what you do, they should be able to prove it by showcasing relevant law firm marketing case studies where they’ve helped other clients through similar challenges to those you’re facing.

With this experience, they’ll already have an understanding of your audience’s needs, which helps when creating client personas.

These are fictional representations of your ideal client, encapsulating the key characteristics of your prospective clients, the problem they’re facing, and what they want to achieve by working with you.

Your marketing agency’s knowledge of your industry and audience can then be applied to your specific requirements, resulting in a bespoke marketing strategy revolving around your firm’s specialisms.

4. Can they speak legal language?

When working with any marketing agency, it’s important you both have a good understanding of each other.

Your marketing firm needs to be able to speak your language, both in terms of having a familiarity with legal terminology and generally staying on the same page as you.

Communication is key and if your agency is constantly stumbling over terms you use on a daily basis it can potentially cause important information to be misunderstood or overlooked entirely.

That can result in mistakes, inefficiencies, and frustration on both sides.

If your legal marketing firm has plenty of experience working with clients like you, terms such as ‘intakes’, ‘fee earner’, ‘matter management’, and other phrases related to your niche shouldn’t be alien to them.

Not only does this streamline communication between your teams, but also between prospective clients too.

Seeking legal help isn’t a small decision so your prospects will want to be fully informed before committing to becoming a client.

Most of your prospective clients aren’t going to be familiar with technical legal language so you need to find an agency that can make the complex simple, producing legal marketing writing that your website visitors can easily understand.

They must also understand the nuances of a law firm’s content production process and work closely with lawyers to create thought leadership that is both SEO-friendly and legally accurate.

5. Are they ahead of digital trends?

We’ve already touched on the importance of choosing a law firm marketing agency that stays on top of the latest developments in your sector.

These should cover all the elements which may impact your marketing, including:

Make sure your legal marketing firm keeps you informed about the latest marketing updates. If you’re the one sharing links to recent trends, it’s a sign they need to step up their game.

6. Is their content client-focused?

Your legal marketing agency should communicate clearly with you and in any marketing materials they create for your firm.

Again, this means using clear, jargon-free language which is easy to understand for people who aren’t overly familiar with technical marketing terms.

Making it clear is one of several positives about Contra. We strive to ensure all our clients fully understand each decision and the reasons behind them throughout every stage of your law firm marketing.

Your agency’s marketing decisions should be tailored to your needs and solve your challenges.

With that in mind, you don’t just want to be given endless amounts of theory with no tangible solutions as to how it’ll be put into action.

While showing theory and logic can be beneficial to a certain extent, your agency also needs to provide you with practical, actionable legal marketing tips and advice that will produce results.

Depending on your service area, these tips might also need to be designed for a specific type of audience, such as businesses or individuals.

Your legal marketing firm will need to be able to adjust their approach depending on your audience, and should be able to show they’ve done it in the past by sharing client success stories.

7. Do they demonstrate tangible results?

And that brings us nicely on to our next point.

Your agency needs to demonstrate precisely what success looks like with honest, transparent results.

Seeing this in case studies is one thing, but it also needs to be true throughout the marketing activities.

Your law firm marketing agency should set clear, measurable, and realistic KPIs with no empty promises from the start. You should know exactly what you’re paying and what you’ll receive for your money with no hidden fees or surprises.

Easy-to-understand and jargon-free reports should be produced regularly, clearly explaining the relevance of each metric and how they reflect a campaign’s performance.

Successes and failures should be equally transparent. It’s unrealistic to expect everything to work perfectly from the outset so your agency shouldn’t shy away from sharing inefficiencies.

Shining a light on problem areas ensures they can be addressed and improved as quickly as possible, resulting in an optimal ROI later down the line.

8. Can they scale with your firm?

If your law firm is investing in a marketing strategy then you have growth ambitions.

So, you’ll need an agency capable of matching your ambitions and handling larger campaigns.

They should approach your project as a partnership rather than a one-off service, treating your long-term success as their own.

Again, this capacity and willingness to manage growth should be reflected in their case studies.

But what exactly will your firm’s growth look like?

Well, it will likely include a greater number of clients, so you’ll require a legal marketing agency capable of managing greater client intake and lead generation.

Your firm’s growth might also involve the expansion to new locations, bringing about additional requirements from your agency such as the production of more local SEO content or updating your website for multinational locations.

Ensuring your firm is ready for these changes involves the implementation of scalable technology systems such as powerful customer relationship management and marketing automation tools, including a future-proof website which can accommodate new content and pages for any additional services you might start to offer.

Of course, as you grow and require more from your marketing agency, the amount you pay will inevitably need to change.

Your agency should be flexible and open with budgets, making it abundantly clear why a fee needs to increase and what you’ll receive in return, just as they should have when you first began working together.

9. Are they flexible to your needs?

And it isn’t just budgets that need to be flexible. Strategies should be too.

From the outset, your marketing strategy should be designed around your specific needs, rather than being an off-the-shelf package which is assigned to every type of law firm client.

If you think you’re satisfied with your plan, you should have the chance to undergo a trial period or pilot programme before you commit.

Contra offers a three-month retainer commitment so you aren’t tied down long-term but are also allowed enough time to get a feel for what’s involved, your working relationship, and to potentially see some early results.

While it’s great if you’re satisfied with your strategy and trial period, the plan doesn’t need to be completely set in stone going forward.

Admittedly, it can be counter-productive to constantly change plans at short notice or after work has already begun, resulting in time and resources being wasted.

However, we understand that unforeseen circumstances can bring about the need for strategy adjustments.

This is something your legal marketing firm should be open to, effectively adapting to your feedback and modifying tactics accordingly.

To ensure any adjustments are carried out as efficiently as possible, you should be in regular contact with your agency.

At Contra, you are assigned a dedicated project manager as well as having access to the senior marketing team and directors.

We like to hold fortnightly meetings with our law firm clients, presenting the opportunity to analyse and discuss progress towards targets, address any concerns, and set actions for the next two weeks as part of the wider strategy.

We also encourage ongoing communication via email and use an urgent request system for anything that needs to be addressed right there and then.

The process of adjusting your strategy is much simpler if you work with a full-service agency specialising in legal marketing.

We provide a variety of legal marketing services, from web design and SEO to content creation and digital advertising, so we can work together to identify the services which best suit your needs.

Need a legal marketing firm?

If you’re looking for a legal marketing agency that ticks all the boxes mentioned throughout this article, let’s talk.

Our work includes several successful law firms who we’ve helped boost their client intake and maximise their marketing ROI through a variety of marketing and web design strategies.

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Charlie Leighton, Digital Marketing Executive I help law firms, charities, and consultancies drive traffic, conversions, and revenue through data-driven SEO and paid marketing strategies. View my profile