Click here to get this post in PDF
This article contains affiliate links. For more info, see disclosure.
Creating a marketing campaign is essential to establish your law firm’s unique brand identity within the highly competitive legal practice industry. The many law firms in existence today have the advantages of reputation, loyalty, and legacies that speak for them.
Therefore, your campaign is the perfect opportunity to stand out amongst the crowd and build your own client relationships by fostering trust in your brand. This will also help eliminate the burden of choice once potential clients know they can depend on you for legal services.
Here are some of the best procedures to create a law firm marketing campaign:
1. Conduct Competitor Research
Competitor research should be the first step in a law firm’s marketing campaign. It’s necessary for you to find out where your firm stands in comparison to others.
Do specific research to answer key questions. What resources and skills do your competitors have access to? Where does their reputation rank them in the legal practice industry? What type of clientele do they attract? What are their strongest and weakest legal assets?
Analyzing this research will help you discover a gap in the market that your firm can take advantage of.
2. Find Your Unique Selling Point
When your research analysis has uncovered an area that your competitors aren’t filling, it’s time to find out what makes your firm different from the others. What makes you unique can be in the form of:
- The type of specialized services you offer
- Your brand voice and how you communicate to clients
- Having access to skills, techniques, or technology that rivals don’t have
- Using a new age or creative method of providing legal services
Not only will this determine your brand identity, but it will become your selling point. This will be the reason potential clients will seek your firm and not one of your competitors. This can determine the focus of your marketing campaign.
3. Establish Your Goals
Once you’ve found out what separates your firm from competitors, it’s time to set your goals. Crafting a successful marketing campaign requires specific goals that are results-driven and set the purpose of each strategy.
To set goals, ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve with the campaign. Is your firm trying to increase its clientele base? Or are you aiming to utilize marketing strategies, such as PPC for law firms? Perhaps you want to gain brand awareness and visibility, so the industry knows you exist?
Whatever your campaign goals are, it’s important to make sure they are set within a reasonable timeline. This is so you can measure if the campaign has been successful or whether you need to go back to the drawing board.
Your unique selling point and goals will help you to formulate a core brand message. This message is like a nutshell of what you want to communicate in your campaign. It will represent what the brand of your law firm is all about.
4. Plan Your Media Strategy
At this stage, once your goals have been established, you can decide how you’ll communicate your campaign to the world. Digital marketing has been at the forefront of campaigns for the past decade. With more than four billion people online daily, it’s the ideal tool for modern-day advertising.
Some of the options to consider are:
- Social Media Marketing on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) such as Pay Per Click Advertising or
- Online Marketing on legal practice websites and related
- Email Marketing with MailChimp and HubSpot
- Content Marketing on social media or your own website
Your media strategy should align with your brand identity, core message, and goals. If you’re trying to gain credibility and authority in the law firm industry, utilizing a business-minded platform LinkedIn, would be the best option.
Make sure you have a social media policy set in place as a guideline to maintain brand consistency and to manage the online reputation of your law firm.
If you’re trying to increase brand visibility, then online marketing will ensure your law firm has a presence on websites across the internet. On the other hand, if gaining new clients is one of your goals, SEM will put your campaign at or near the top of search pages for law-related keywords you bid on.
5. Create And Publish Your Marketing Material
The final step in your marketing campaign is to create your actual content and publish it online. This content will appear on the media channels that you have decided to use as part of your media strategy.
Some content suggestions include:
- Creating blog posts on your website and publishing them on social media
- Designing pop-ups to get people to subscribe to your email newsletters
- Filming a video highlighting your brand identity and publishing it on YouTube
- Planning a live Q and A session on social media with people seeking legal advice to build brand trust and community
- Running screen and banner ads on related legal websites across the internet
To get the most out of your marketing material, it’s best to keep your content as engaging as possible. Static ads that don’t prompt users to take action often go unnoticed. Make sure your content can grab the attention of anyone who sees it.
Conclusion
Crafting a law firm marketing campaign is essentially applies the same digital marketing principles used by any business. It starts with finding and exploiting an angle that your competitors are lacking in.
Then you set goals for what your campaign wants to achieve and plan and execute the media strategy. Finding out what makes you ‘not like other firms’ will be the key factor in whether your campaign will set firm your place in the legal industry.
You may also like: The Top Benefits of Consulting Marketing for Legal Firms
