Best Practices

4 Expert Law Firm Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Firm

Mark Homer

February 23, 2021

Content contributed by Mark Homer, Get Noticed Get Found (GNGF) Mark Homer is CEO of GNGF, a leading law firm marketing agency. At GNGF, Mark leads the team to help empower and educate law firms to grow their practice. He is the author of “Online Law Practice Strategies” and speaks around the U.S. on marketing and social media ethics for law firms.

As a law firm owner, you are running a business. If you want that business to grow, at some point you must think about marketing as a core part of your budget. Whether you are putting hard earned dollars toward targeted ad campaigns or just your own valuable time focused on networking and growing your referrals, marketing is a key part of a growing law firm. There is so much content out there about marketing that many firms don’t know what they should be doing. As you enter 2021 let me help you assess the right marketing that fits where your firm is right now and where you want it to go.

As the owner of law firm marketing agency Get Noticed Get Found you may be a bit skeptical as to my bias in this area. But 2020 has provided us real data that shows the benefits of marketing.

When we looked at the drop in leads across all of our clients that had been investing in marketing with us for at least two years, those firms had a much smaller dip than the large drop that caused many law firms to lay off staff or consider shutting their doors. A strong testament to the benefits of marketing and being the firm that is top of mind when there is less business to go around.

I am going to give you a few quick tips that we see most law firms miss that you should be able to implement in the first month of 2021. Then I will tell you what areas to consider focusing on for the rest of the year depending on your revenue.

Quick Tips for 2021

Work to own your audience vs. paying for it every time

If you have been providing legal services for some time, you likely have a list of clients and email addresses. You probably have a list of contacts that you have been working on for referral business. You need to get that list into an email marketing tool. While there are a lot of options out there, including legal-specific tools like Lawmatics, you can just start with something as simple as MailChimp. Get those email addresses into the tool and try to send out an email once a month to stay top of mind with people that can refer you to their friends, family, and colleagues.

As you get new leads, clients, and new potential referral partners, add them to your email list. As you begin to invest time and money in marketing campaigns, always work to create a way to capture the email address. You paid for the lead, so capture that and follow up with email marketing so you don’t have to pay for it a second time.

Claim and Optimize your Google My Business Page

While you should have a quality website for your law firm, Google My Business pages are quickly becoming the most visible first impression of your law firm. Claim this, and optimize it with good descriptions and images, post something every 7 days, and keep an eye on questions people may be asking. Look at your Google My Business insights and you may be surprised how many phone calls you are getting from Google My Business without someone even visiting your website.

Become a 24/7 firm

We did a study almost five years ago to see when leads were coming into a law firm. We found that about 25 percent of leads are coming in after traditional office hours—and that was five years ago, before consumers were trained by Uber, DoorDash, Amazon, and Netflix that we can pretty much get anything, anytime online. You should add a call answering service and live chat (or both if you use Smith.ai) and gain 24/7 handling of leads to your firm.

Once you do this, you can go on Google My Business and change your hours to 24/7. If you have office hours listed, Google doesn’t default to show the office hours, they will show something like “Closed, opens tomorrow at 8 a.m.” in the search results. Clients tell us all the time that someone said they called their firm because they were the only firm that Google said wasn’t closed.

Build a process to follow up with leads

Now that you have a call answering service to make sure that all of your leads, no matter what time they call, are being answered without going to a voicemail, what is your process to follow up with leads? These days some people answer texts and emails more than they answer a phone. Do you have a process to follow up with a lead quickly and are you reaching out to them multiple ways? How many times do you try to reach them? Many times, someone had a concern, came across your website somehow, reached out, then moved on with their very busy life. It is worth building a process to reach out to a lead via phone, email, and even text once a day for five days before you give up on that lead.

One more quick tip: because of spam robocalls, many people don’t answer calls from phone numbers they do not know. Next time you are calling a lead back for the first time, text the person first that you are the lawyer they reached out to and are about to call them and let them know the number that will show up in the caller ID.

Expanding your practice doesn’t require you to upend your firm or cost you a ridiculous amount of money or time. With these easy-to-implement tips, you’ll find your foot traffic growing, your revenue increasing, and your referrals rising. For more tips on growing your business, improving efficiencies, and streamlining revenue in your firm, check out our free e-book “Strategic Law Firm Management: Easy-to-Implement Tips to Drive Cash Flow.”