Finding new potential clients is the key to ensuring your law firm thrives
Every online-facing business lives and dies by their leads, but none more so than law firms. The legal field is one of the most competitive in the world, and you need to leverage every advantage to attract new clients.
What is lead generation?
Leads refer to potential clients or individuals who express interest or demonstrate a need for legal services. These individuals may be seeking legal representation, advice, or assistance in various areas of law such as family law, corporate law, criminal law, or personal injury law.
Lead generation creates opportunities to acquire these potential clients. It typically involves the development of digital campaigns such as website development, social media marketing, and search engine optimization. The goal is to attract and capture new leads by providing useful content to potential clients who are searching for legal services, and then prompting those leads to contact your firm directly for more information.
Despite the obvious need for this aspect of the business, some firms remain skeptical of the benefits of lead generation, preferring to rely on word-of-mouth or traditional advertising methods. For that reason, we’re going to walk through what makes lead generation so important for the long term health of your firm.
Grow your client base
The primary purpose of lead generation is to acquire more clients. Your marketing efforts are designed to produce more than they cost, and your lead generation should always be to the benefit of your bottom line.
While it can be tempting to cast the widest net possible, it is far more cost-effective to target your efforts. Your firm’s specialties are going to be more useful for specific demographics. For example, a divorce attorney doesn’t need to market to people who have never been married.
The more leads come in, the better, but leads can vary widely in quality. Leads in your target demographics, leads with more complete information, leads for potential clients looking to act; all of these will inform a lead’s quality.
Increase conversion rates
Lead quality feeds directly into improved conversion rates. The more leads you get, statistically speaking, the more high quality leads you will receive. You can and should research what types of campaigns bring in these higher quality leads.
In this way you gain access to valuable data that will allow you to dial in your marketing efforts. Target the channels that produce your higher quality leads, and your advertising dollar stretches. Additionally, you can then subject any campaign alterations to rigorous testing, which only helps your long term results.
Conversion rates are the name of the game, and any increase in the number of leads should correspond to an increase in conversions. Your challenge is to find out how and leverage that information for your overall marketing strategy.
Reduce marketing costs
Traditional advertising, whether it’s billboards, bus benches, or even TV commercials, are incredibly expensive. They’re also far less targeted, meaning that while more people overall are seeing them, your client base might not. Lead generation, done correctly, targets your client base with pinpoint precision.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media, and email campaigns are far less expensive than traditional advertising. With advanced tracking metrics, you can track your ad spend far more effectively, measuring ROI on specific marketing efforts. Operating on a stretched budget and real-time data analysis, you ensure a nimble marketing strategy that reacts swiftly to disruptions and punches above its weight for lead generation.
Precision targeting
As I mentioned before, traditional marketing methods can’t target with the precision of modern digital lead generation efforts. You can place a billboard in a specific neighborhood, but you’re still paying the same price, whether that attracts eight leads or eighty. You want to target and qualify your leads, which is possible with modern lead generation techniques.
Specific keywords can attract likely clients, and can be tailored to demographics for more precise targeting. Social media keeps potential clients interested, and further self-selects by interest. Ebooks and whitepapers can market to potential clients interested in particular legal questions. Leads gained in either manner are higher quality, being far more likely to convert.
Lead generation also serves as de facto marketing research. You learn more about the people submitting leads, and can winnow that to those who convert. In other words, lead generation helps you further refine your marketing techniques by teaching you who you’re reaching, and showing you how to reach those you’re not.
Lead generation techniques allow for precision targeting of your potential clients
Gain a competitive edge
The legal industry is an incredibly competitive field, with new lawyers being minted every day. You’re going after the same client base as everyone else. You need to grab every advantage you can. Lead generation is just one of these.
SEO efforts will include content generation and this is where you can make the difference. As your library of content—blog posts, podcasts, videos—grows, you will gain authority. This authority translates directly to SEO and from there, lead generation. Bolster your reputation and the leads will follow.
Additionally, keeping up to date on the latest lead generation methods will help you stay on top of technological advances, marketing techniques, and other factors. If you’re up to speed on these and your competition isn’t, you’re more likely to get those leads.
Save time and resources
The more you can streamline your lead gathering and sales process, the more time and resources you are ultimately saving. Traditional marketing tends to be resource and time intensive and has a far less measurable ROI than modern lead generation.
SEO, social media, and other digital marketing channels reach your target much more quickly and with greater precision than traditional methods. With the addition of products such as Lead Science’s Listings Manager and others, you can automate some of these processes, saving you even more time. Your marketing is important, but you are a lawyer first and every second spent marketing is a second not spent lawyering.
Develop brand awareness
Lawyers with good brand awareness develop into local celebrities, their marketing personas viewed with affection. Lead generation will help you do that, especially with a younger, more online generation.
Lead generation works directly with digital marketing efforts, and an increase in your lead generation will translate to an increase in your brand recognition, with a focus on those demographics more likely to hire you as a lawyer.
Your email marketing and social media, both of which play into your lead generation, help you build a relationship with your potential clients. You can answer questions, talk about expectations, or just offer a window into your day-to-day. All of these are invaluable at putting a human face on your firm and will contribute directly to both lead generation and brand awareness.
Lead Science: The lead generation experts
Lead generation is a vital part of any digital marketing strategy. Your question should not be why your firm needs lead generation, but how can you get the best available.
At Lead Science, we have nearly two decades of experience in lead generation. We leverage all of these factors and more to keep your firms flush with clients. Schedule your Discovery Call today and we’ll show you exactly how we can help grow your business.
