Speaker 1: If you're a lawyer, marketing is how you connect with people in need of your services, and you may already have a great digital marketing strategy that is working for your firm. However, these five tips I'm about to share with you are tips that you can easily implement into your existing strategy or into a new strategy, and they're proven to increase engagement and help you secure more clients. How's everybody doing today? Welcome back to the channel. I'm Matt with Life Marketing, the digital marketing agency that helps small businesses grow, and today I'll be telling you five powerful law firm marketing tips to secure more clients. Before I dive into that, though, make sure you're subscribed to the channel so you don't miss out on any of our weekly digital marketing videos, and don't forget to like this video for more law marketing tips. Did you know that law firms with videos on their landing page increase their number of email signups by 127%? The fun doesn't end here, though. Emails that have a video attached to them have a 137% higher click-through rate to your website than emails that don't have video. And furthermore, 95% of video marketers said video helped increase user understanding of their product or service. Clearly, videos are an effective and attractive marketing method to clients in the law industry, yet, all too often, law firms center their content marketing strategy around text-heavy blogs instead. That's not to say that blogs don't have a place in your marketing strategy. They absolutely do. But for topics that aren't always exciting to read, like those that relate to the study of law, there is a better and more engaging way to present information to your audience. That method is video production. Videos can host the same content that blogs do, but provide your audience a way to watch or listen to your content instead of reading plain old text. This helps retain their attention so you can retain their time on site. As you now know from the statistics I just mentioned, your website and emails are a great place to use video, but you can also use video for social media posts. YouTube is one of the most popular places for businesses to post videos, and for good reason. YouTube is the second most popular website after Google, which makes sense considering that Google owns YouTube. Also, 6 out of 10 people say they'd rather watch online videos than television. The great thing about videos is you can break them down into snippets or micro-content and use either short snippets from the video or the entire video, depending on the length, all throughout your marketing efforts. Now you may be thinking, well, that's all great news, but what makes video so effective? For starters, video will increase your brand engagement. The more engaged your potential clients are, the more likely they are to select your services over competitors. Video is also a great way to move potential clients through your marketing funnel. In order to do this effectively, you must provide a clear call to action in your video. A call to action in a video is a phrase that you will say that is designed to encourage an immediate response from the viewer. Your law firm can use a call to action such as, head to our website now to claim your free consultation, and then provide the viewer with a link to your website. Video can also help with your search engine optimization, or SEO for short. SEO is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic by appearing higher up on search engine result pages. One of the key factors that determine your SEO rank is time spent on your website as well as bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the number of potential clients that view your website and leave before clicking through other pages on your site. To improve your SEO, you want to increase your potential client's time on your site and decrease the overall bounce rate. What is the best way to do that? You guessed it, it's with video. Depending on how long your videos are, you can drastically increase the time a potential client spends on your site. Because videos are so engaging, potential clients are less likely to leave your site after watching a video too. Stay tuned because later in this video, I'll be sharing a tip on how improving your SEO rank can help secure new clients as well. But overall, you want to make sure your marketing efforts include video marketing if they don't already for an increase in engagement, time on site, and ultimately, clients. With that being said, traditional text content is not dead and should still be valued highly by your firm. Including video in your marketing efforts is not equivalent to ruling text content out completely. They should be used together. So that brings me to tip number two, content focused on clients, not accolades. A recent study showed that law firms that had high quality content marketing and blogs had a significant difference in the amount of website traffic they generated. In fact, law firm websites that had a blog but weren't even actively writing new content still generated 237% more visitors than websites without a blog. Now you might be wondering, what type of content is best suited for my target audience? As an established law firm, it's an expectation for clients that you have a team of talented and distinguished attorneys. However, potential clients don't want to hear about what your attorneys have achieved in the past. They want to know how your attorneys will be able to help them win their case. While it is important to showcase your attorney's achievements and awards in some capacity, it should not be your main content focus when trying to secure new clients. A great way to generate client-focused content is by referring back to your existing target audience. If you've already spent some time on your marketing strategy, at some point you probably created a customer avatar, or in other words, determined who your ideal client is. If you haven't, I'll link Sherman's video on how to build a digital marketing strategy here, which has a great section in it on how to create your buyer persona. But in short, you want to think about what your ideal clients are looking for in a law firm. What services do you offer that will benefit them, how much are they willing to spend on their case, and what will they look for in an attorney? When you create great audience-focused content, you'll establish your credibility and trust with your audience, and you'll beat the competition. Just take a look at these shocking statistics on the state of digital legal marketing. 70% of law firms don't have a call to action on their website, 40% of small law firms don't even have a website, and 35% of small firms haven't updated their website in the last three years. These are all areas where your firm, through great content marketing, can stand out from the crowd. Okay, moving on to my next tip. Remember earlier in the video when I said stay tuned for an SEO tip later in the video? The time has come to share that with you. My best tip for SEO to help your firm secure more clients is, drumroll please, focus on local SEO. You might be wondering, why focus on something like local SEO as opposed to overall SEO? Well, for starters, 71% of people looking for a lawyer think it is important to have a local attorney. It is also much easier and much more time efficient to improve your local SEO rank versus focusing on overall SEO. So what are some quick ways to improve your local SEO? Creating a Google My Business account is a great place to start if your law firm doesn't already have one. Google My Business is how your business will appear on Google Maps when a consumer performs a local search query related to services. This is important because when a consumer performs a local search, the general structure of the results page will be paid ads on top, followed by the top local results with Google Maps, followed by the top ranking organic results. If you can optimize your content so that you appear in the top three local results listings, you are sure to see a large increase in qualified clients for your firm. When creating your Google My Business account, be sure to fill out all of the information that you can about your business. This may sound like a no-brainer, but Google allows missing information about your business to be filled in by other people, including your competitors. Google My Business can also host pictures of your firm as well as your team. Taking semi-professional pictures of your law team gives your firm personality, which will make a potential client feel more comfortable in choosing to work with your firm. A quick tip to help your local SEO efforts while taking pictures of your team is to use a phone with a high-quality camera. This is important because pictures that are taken with your phone store location data. By taking pictures of your team on your phone and uploading them to your firm's Google My Business page, you are helping Google further verify the location and legitimacy of your law firm. We have a whole video on how to improve your law firm's SEO rank, so if you'd like more information, be sure to check out that video which I've linked here. Also, comment down below if your firm is using Google My Business for SEO purposes and what results you've achieved. My last tip on securing more clients for your law firm has to do with social media, in particular, a platform that most law firms miss out on optimizing for their social media strategy. Can you guess which social network I'm talking about? Surprisingly, it's LinkedIn. LinkedIn is often viewed as a business-to- business social media platform, which makes it a great choice for firms and attorneys that represent businesses, like insurance defense firms, for example. However, what is often overlooked is that LinkedIn can be extremely effective for business-to-consumer law firms as well. For starters, by simply managing a page for your firm on LinkedIn, you are already putting yourself in an advantage. This is because only 57% of law firms have a presence on LinkedIn, even though we know that 45% of all website traffic for law firms is generated through social media platforms. As previously mentioned, potential clients are going to research your firm before deciding whether or not they would like to work with you. Since LinkedIn is known for its professional tone and ability to connect with professionals, people often use LinkedIn to find a credible law firm they can trust. Having a detailed profile and publishing on LinkedIn frequently can help improve your visibility on the platform and collect new leads. You might be wondering, though, since this network's tone is much different than Facebook or Twitter, what should I post? Great question. We know that images and videos are known to get more engagement and the same is true for LinkedIn. LinkedIn posts that include an image receive a 98% higher comment rate, while posts that include a YouTube link leads to a 75% higher share rate. As with any content your firm posts anywhere, you'll want to keep your target audience in mind. LinkedIn states that posting 20 times per month will help you reach 60% of your unique audience. You'll also want to keep in mind the time that you post in order to receive the most engagement possible because engagement on your posts is known to increase your reach on LinkedIn. So, it would be a good strategy to encourage your firm staff to interact with posts your firm puts on LinkedIn. LinkedIn will also be able to help your SEO efforts. For starters, when somebody searches for your firm on Google, your firm's LinkedIn page may be one of the top organic results. LinkedIn can also help your firm's SEO because it is another means of sharing your content which can then be shared by people that follow your profile. All of this sharing can help your firm acquire valuable backlinks which are known to improve your SEO rank. We have a whole video on LinkedIn marketing too which I'll link here if you want to go more in depth into LinkedIn. But for now, let's move on to tip number five. Social media and SEO are both fantastic marketing tools to increase your brand awareness, drive initial website traffic, and put your firm in front of potential clients. But what happens after that? How are you staying in touch with your leads? This is where email marketing can help. Unlike your social media followers or Google searchers, you own your email list. This is why building an email list that you can market to regularly is so important. Email marketing is a consistent method of nurturing leads by delivering high quality content and information right to their inbox. There are two email marketing methods that accomplish this. One way is by sending out email newsletters. Email newsletters can be great for potential clients that are interested in the services your firm offers but aren't quite ready to make a decision yet and would like a little more information first. They will also serve current clients by keeping them up to date with everything that is going on in your firm. Some popular email newsletter topics that can increase your brand engagement are recently won cases, new attorneys that have been added to your team, changes in state or local laws that pertain to the services you offer, and even seasonal advice like how to prep your car for winter which can be great for injury attorneys that deal with car accidents. The best part is people who sign up for your email newsletter are already further into your marketing funnel than the cold leads you are trying to market to on other platforms like social media. The other way to use email marketing to nurture leads is through email drip sequences. First let's look at what email drip sequences are. Email drip sequences are automated messages that get sent to a consumer and depending on how the consumer interacts with that first email, that will then trigger another email to be sent based on that consumer's behavior. For example, if your firm sends out welcome emails to all new leads that fill out a lead form on your website, they can automatically receive a welcome email from you. The welcome email may include a list of all of your services and ask which services the consumer wants to know more about. Depending on what option they click, they can receive another email with more information on the services they selected. In creating a drip campaign, you set a predetermined order in which the emails will be sent out so that you are not rushing potential clients through your funnel and to make sure that you are providing them with the valuable information they are seeking. Email drip sequences don't have to end when a potential client becomes a new client though. Many law firms will use email drip sequences only during the lead nurturing process. However, they can also help with the onboarding process. When you bring on a new client, there is often a lot of paperwork that needs to be filled out and many exchanges of information. Your firm will benefit from continuing to use email drip sequences during this stage because as previously mentioned, email drip sequences are automated. That means you'll have more time in a day to build great cases for your clients. That's all for my five powerful law firm marketing tips to secure more clients. Don't forget to give this video a like if you found the information valuable. Also, subscribe to the channel so you don't miss out on any of our weekly digital marketing videos. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see you in the next video.