The 2022 Guide to Content & Brand Marketing for Small Law Firms

Law firm marketing isn’t as difficult as you think.

Legal practices are in a unique position to offer and benefit significantly from various marketing tactics. Creating thought leadership content, for example, is a fantastic strategy that every law firm should partake in, one that’s both easy to create and attractive to prospective clients.

For an effective content marketing strategy to work, though, law firms need to focus on the two major factors of legal marketing: Branding and Web Presence.

Let’s look at both of these areas of law firm marketing and how best you can apply them to your own law firm, so 2022 becomes synonymous with profit.

Branding

Law firm branding isn’t about flashy logos or a polished color palette, although those things do help. Effective branding essentially ties your law firm’s mission to the experiential assets you present to clients and prospects. Experiential assets communicate your brand’s story. They include all the things you think of when it comes to branding a business: logos, colors, promos, landing pages, and so on.

Before creating those assets, you need to decide what kind of message you want to tell consumers of your brand’s content. Are you a dogged family law attorney that never backs down during negotiations? A personal injury lawyer filled with compassion for your clients? These things, also called key differentiators, need to be clear in your marketing messaging.

Key Differentiators

Key differentiators are characteristics that make your law firm stand out among your competitors. Think of the unique ways you serve your clients, things you do that make you different from the rest of the law firms in your area.

Have you been featured in any kind of media before, something like the evening news or podcast of note? Embed that content on your site. Not only will it validate your credentials, it also provides “social proof,” i.e. signals that tell prospects your services are trustworthy.

Website

One of the most important aspects of your law firm’s digital footprint is your website. It communicates the brand, relays the services you provide, and ensures prospective clients you’re worth hiring. The first step in conveying these things is to solidify your messaging around your area of practice.

Areas of Practice

Each area of your practice should have dedicated landing pages. Use a “sticky” header that travels down the page along with the reader so they can navigate your site easier. Provide internal links in your text to the proper areas of practice pages. The point of all of this is to make your site as comprehensive as possible, detailing to the reader the aspects of your law firm that pertain to their situation.

Call-to-Actions (CTAs)

CTAs are the buttons and elements on your website that call attention to the bottom of your marketing funnel, i.e., setting up an appointment or consultation with your law firm. There are a variety of ways to do this properly. Some personal injury law firms scream out their CTAs in bold letters and bright colors, dousing their landing pages with heavy doses. And it likely works for them.

Law firms servicing large corporations typically use a sparse presentation, choosing instead to relay more information about their law firm and area of practice instead of the quick sale. In this case, applying bold CTAs throughout the page undermines quality and integrity in a prospect’s eyes.

It’s important you align your messaging with your mission throughout your marketing materials. CTAs should speak directly to the potential client and need to be tailored in a way that is both conversational and transactional.

Attorney Ethics

Law firms are in a unique spot when it comes to online marketing. Because of their place in the U.S.’s legal matrix, law firms have to be careful with the language they use. You cannot convey, for instance, that you’re the best law firm or the best lawyer in the state. In most cases, statements like these are considered attorney ethics violations.

Here are a few rules for avoiding attorney ethics violations:

• Don’t say it if you can’t prove it.
• Avoid comparing your law firm to others.
• Don’t imply that your past results are the status quo for all future cases.
• Register your website and advertisement with the state.

SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the technical method of getting digital content discovered by search engines like Google–the largest–Bing, and Yahoo. The primary goal of SEO is getting your legal content on the first page of a SERP, or search engine results page. The best way for a small law firm to propagate its message to the masses is through its website’s blog.

Blogging for Law Firms

Content marketing’s goal is to provide search engines with relevant, comprehensive content that gets in front of your ideal customer. By placing your content on the front page of Google–the most popular search engine–you’re occupying prime real estate with a built-in audience ready to purchase your legal services.

But it’s not just about publishing as much broad legal content as possible. Creating SEO content requires smart keyword, market, and competitor research. With Google’s continuous updates to their artificial intelligence algorithm, it’s more important than ever to ensure your legal content is answering prospects’ questions succinctly and thoroughly.

If you’re not sure where to start but still committed to creating content that ranks, ask yourself this vital question before writing anything: What kind of legal content can you create that’s valuable to your prospective clients and difficult to find? Start there. Create the most comprehensive piece of content you can in that specific area and strategically tie it back to your services throughout.

For lawyers further along in the digital marketing journey, tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Google’s Keyword Planner are cornerstones to a healthy content marketing research process. Build content around keywords that have low competition, but that still generate organic search traffic.

Start off with a broad search term squarely in your realm of legal expertise. Something like “personal injury law.” Then browse related questions, search terms, and autocomplete suggestions for ideas on what your potential clients may be searching for.

The goal is to place content on the SERP (search engine results page) that’s transactional (asks readers to take the next step) and informative (provides solutions to their problems), so look for topics that can fill that description.

Above all, test various keywords, track your results in Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and remember that your content’s value proposition is the knowledge in your head– don’t be afraid to share it!

About the Author

Roni Davis is a writer, blogger, and legal assistant operating out of the greater Philadelphia area. She writes for Mosser Legal, a criminal appeals lawyer in Pittsburgh.

Photo by Eva Elijas from Pexels