8 Must-Use Tactics for Legal Lead Gen

(10 minute read)

Since attorneys usually bill at an hourly rate, time is (quite literally) money for law firms. That’s why you need an automated solution to identify and win new clients. We know that the time of partners, associates, and paralegals is better spent taking care of your clients, so we’ve put together an 8-step playbook to setting up this automated system for your legal lead gen.

Answering Some Legal Lead Gen Questions

First, we need to answer a few questions you may have about legal lead gen.

For more guidance on ethical legal lead generation practices, please consult the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct here.

8 Must-Use Tactics

Now that you have some helpful context for legal lead gen, here are 8 of the best tactics to set up your automatic system for generating new leads.

1. Utilize Your Existing Client Base

Your clients are your best friends. If you take care of them and provide them with the highest quality of service, they’ll take care of you. According to a recent Nielsen study, 92% of consumers prefer word-of-mouth referrals to any other form of marketing. You need to capitalize on this. Set up an email template that asks your existing and previous customers to refer your firm to their family and friends. Send this email once per month.

2. Optimize Your Website

Your site should be optimized in two ways: one, for visitor ease-of-use, and two, for search engine rankings. Too many law firms have websites that have not been updated in the last 7 to 10 years. If your firm falls in this category, strongly consider giving your site a facelift. The reality is that you don’t need to pay for some huge website development project. Your site simply needs a clean, professional design and include information about the results you’ve achieved for clients, how you can help solve your prospects’ problem(s), and how visitors can contact you for more information. Everything else is essentially fluff.

You may have heard of search engine optimization, or SEO. Optimizing your ranking on search engines pushes your site to the top of the results page when potential customers search for specific keywords related to your firm. This is a critical source of organic, or unpaid, web traffic. Since best practices for SEO are constantly changing, this is one area where it makes sense to bring in an expert. Your clients are willing to pay for your expert advice on legal matters; you should pay for expert implementation of SEO practices to ensure that your site is at the top of the results page.

3. Google Ads Are Your Friend

While referrals and organic traffic are important components of any law firm’s lead generation strategy, it is important to diversify your web traffic sources with paid advertising. Running ad campaigns with Google is a strong complement to your SEO efforts. Google ad campaigns are typically executed on a pay-per-click basis, where users bid on keywords and pay for each clicks on their ads. Keywords for legal topics tend to be some of the most expensive on the Google Ads platform, so it’s important that you have a very specific understanding of the types of keywords and phrases that your target customers typically use to search for your services. While running ad campaigns is a bit more straightforward than implementing SEO tactics, it may be in your best interest to also outsource your ad management to an expert in order to maximize the return on your budget.

4. Highlight Your Victories in the Press

If they aren’t hearing about you from a friend or family member, prospects want to hear about what you’ve done for other clients with similar cases. This is why testimonials and case studies are so important to feature on your site. However, what if you could amplify your client results to a much larger audience beyond the prospects who are already visiting your site?

The great news is that there is a free and powerful solution to do just that! Online PR News is a free press release site with a proven track record of getting your press releases ranked in Google News and other top news sites. Highlight the results of the big case you just won. Let the business media know about the industry-changing transaction you just closed. Use free press release dissemination to your advantage.

5. Use a Call Scheduling Application

Nearly every legal website these days provides visitors with a form to submit contact information for an initial consultation. Improve the conversion rate on your offer by making the process even simpler. Let the prospect schedule a call with a member of your firm directly from the contact page.

This does two things. It first filters out the legitimate prospects from those visitors who are simply seeking free legal advice. It also eliminates a few steps in the sales process, since you don’t have to reach out to schedule a call and you know when the prospect is free to connect for a discussion.

Calendly and GoToMeeting are both free call scheduling apps that sync with your calendar and update for your availability. You can set the times when you are available, include a customized call invitation, and collect the prospect’s contact info.

6. Efficiency and Focus are Keys to Content

Yes, content is important for SEO. However, crafting high-quality content takes time. Here is the trick to balancing quality and quantity: you can produce only one or two pieces of content for your site per month as long as they are of very high quality. What does that entail? Your content should be a long-form blog post, a podcast or audio file, or a video post. The post should address one or a series of specific questions or topics that are particularly important for your target client. Think about the most common or most pressing questions you receive from your clients. Those topics should be the central themes you address in your content.

To be a high-quality post, the content should be optimized for search engine rankings with specific focus keywords. Share your content with your existing and previous customers via email on a monthly basis. Depending on how your website is set up, you can create an automatic process to post your content to each of your social media accounts as soon as it is posted on your site. Remember, it’s important to diversify your sources of web traffic. Share your posts with more sources, and both your SEO and overall traffic will improve.

7. Social Media is a Team Game

Social media is effective for one simple reason: network effects. Many companies view social media execution as a “check-the-box” exercise that simply requires posting once per day or a few times per week. However, social media marketing is only effective if your followers engage with your posts. It is very important to establish certain processes with your fellow attorneys. Any time your company posts something on social media, especially if it’s a piece of high-quality content, each member of the firm should like post and share it with his or her own network.

Here’s the rationale. The more engagement a post receives, the more views it will receive from social media users outside of your immediate following. This is how posts go “viral.” Having your colleagues share the post with their networks expands the content’s reach and helps establish your firm as a thought leader in your particular niche. It won’t be hard to secure the buy-in of your fellow attorneys once they see the results.\

8. The Follow-Up is the Difference Maker

It sounds simple, but most companies don’t do it enough. Follow up with your leads again and again. Recent studies have shown that most consumers require at least 7 points of contact before making a purchase decision. People looking for legal services of any kind are usually on a more urgent timeline to make a decision, which works in your favor. However, you still need to follow up at least 5 times to cover your bases.

How do you follow up effectively without badgering your leads? Using an email management system such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact, set up an automated sequence of emails to send to your prospects. Use these emails to guide your leads along their customer journey. This process includes a few specific intervals. Provide your prospects with more information on your services during the “Awareness Stage.” Highlight examples of your previous work and testimonials during the “Consideration Stage.” Once you’ve qualified the lead as a customer you want, you may even wish to provide some additional incentive to convert the prospect during the “Decision Stage.” Just remember that the focus should always be on the client and how you can help resolve their problem.

Time to Execute

If you follow these 8 tactics to legal lead gen, your firm will be ahead of at least 95% of the competition. Many firms utilize a few of these tactics, but very few use them all. Even fewer utilize them within a cohesive system to generate new leads. These tactics are highly effective but do require some initial investment of time. If you have any questions on how to set up these strategies, schedule a free consultation with a member of our team. And if you found this helpful, subscribe to our blog for the latest tips and tricks to dominate legal marketing!