Legal Marketing Services

Mapping your law firm’s marketing strategy to your law firm’s business goals is the best way to be competitive with the right law firm marketing tactics.

Being competitive in legal marketing can mean different things to different firms. Some firms have very large marketing budgets and want their name to be everywhere such as on billboards, radio, TV ads, etc. On the other hand, that strategy doesn’t work for most solo and small firms, they need to be more targeted in their approach.

Once you know the right marketing strategy for your firm, then you can see who the competition is for that strategy. For example, law firms that want to utilize SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are often surprised to find that the firms they are competing against online are usually not the same as the firms that are dominating the mindshare with the many TV commercials and billboards.

With over a decade of experience helping law firms grow we know that you should question anyone who tells you there is a secret marketing trick that applies to all law firms to beat the competition.

The law firm marketing strategy and tactics that we use are always adjusted based on many factors such as our discussion of the law firm’s goals, their ideal clients, practice area focus, and the competition within their geographical location. With those factors and more, specific marketing strategies and tactics are unique to each law firm, and even change as the law firm grows and builds new goals.

GNGF has an array of tactics in our toolbox that we can apply to our law firm clients such as legal online paid ads, social media, law firm SEO, and much more.

However, because of the uniqueness of each law firm, their competition, and their geography, which tactics we use and how they are applied often differ.

This is why we don’t have one-size-fits-all packages and pricing for our full-service work with clients.

Our marketing consultants work with each prospective client to understand their individual needs to suggest the right marketing plan for their law firm’s goals so they can utilize their budget to be competitive on the right law firm marketing tactics.

GNGF experts recommend spending between 7%-12% of your revenue on legal marketing services.

Because your competition is also working to grow and investing in their own marketing efforts, if you are happy with your current lead flow, revenue, and profit, 7% of revenue toward marketing is typically enough in many markets to keep up and maintain your business.

However, if you are looking for healthy growth of your law firm’s revenue and law firm’s profits you will need to invest more than 7%.

You can spend more than 12% of revenues if you are looking to grow fast, but we have found that 10-12% of revenue can provide a healthy growth so your business doesn’t get ahead of your operational capacity.

As you grow you will also want to invest in growing your team, your back-office systems, procedures, and policies, investing too much in marketing will pull from these other needed investments in a healthy growing firm.

For many of our clients, digital marketing is how they have focused much of their growth so it can take up to 90% of that marketing budget. For others, they still utilize a lot of local offline marketing, from radio to sponsoring events and therefore their digital marketing spend may be about 60-70% of their overall marketing budget.

Every firm is unique in its goals, ideal client, competition in the geography, and a good agency will help you understand how far your law firm’s marketing budget will be able to get you in your situation.

Don’t just take our word and experience that shows us these numbers work for law firms, according to the most recent CMO Survey (a survey run by Deloitte, Duke Fuqua business school, and the American Marketing Association), showed that average marketing spend was “10.3 percent of company revenues” and this was in the middle of Covid.

The same survey showed that digital marketing spending has continued to increase every year. Digital marketing on average makes up “57.1 percent of marketing budgets” and is expected to grow double digits again this next year.

Because that survey includes big brands that have massive traditional advertising budgets, the fact that digital marketing represents half of all marketing spending shows the huge marketing shift that has happened for all businesses in the past decade.

If you want more information on how marketing interacts with law firm budgets you can listen to this two-part interview our founder Mark Homer and his “Your Law Firm is a Business, Take it to the Next Level” podcast co-host Melanie Leonard did with Profit with Law host Moshe Amsel titled “Financial 101: Understanding Revenue vs. Profit – What Are Your Margins?“.

You can check out that two-part podcast over at nextlevel.legal or on your podcast app of choice.

Episode 30: Part 1

Episode 31: Part 2

Review management is proactively working to create positive trust about your law firm online by building a process to encourage your clients to provide online reviews and monitor and comment on the law firm online reviews that you do receive.

Law firms should have a process in place to be aware of what is being said about your law firm online, across multiple channels such as Google, Yelp, Avvo, Lawyers.com, FindLaw, Facebook, etc. Law firms should also build a process to encourage reviews (of course, within the professional ethics rules of their state).

We recommend initially focusing on growing reviews on your Google Business page to get to at least double your local competition, then you can branch out to encourage reviews on the other review platforms we mentioned.

Law firms should be aware of where they stand as far as their law firm reviews go and then have a proactive review management strategy to grow that.

To learn more about review management, you can watch this “GNGF Live” interview we did with a law firm owner who has built a successful review management process.

To keep tabs on your law firm’s online reviews, you can build a process for someone on your team to check the different review platforms each week, or you can utilize online tools to be notified when reviews happen.

GNGF offers law firm reputation management services to keep tabs on what clients say about your law firm. We use advanced tools to keep up with your reviews online across multiple platforms.

After analyzing such reviews, we create an outreach and content strategy to improve your reputation and attract even more prospects.

We recommend that law firms don’t just encourage reviews, but also comment on all reviews that they receive.

Just remember, that before you start defending against the occasional bad review, take a breather and don’t reply to the initial reviewer, but write your comment that shows a positive image to the people that will see that bad review and read your comment when researching your firm.

Remember that as a lawyer, the way you can manage and encourage law firm reviews are not only guided by the review platform’s terms of service, but the ethics rules and ethics opinons around reviews differ state by state.

Check with an experienced law firm marketing agency or with your state bar practice management group.

For more information on law firm review ethics you can check out these blog posts we wrote Why You should Never Fake Online Reviews and Ethics of Responding to Negative Reviews

You can market your law firm on social media organically by regularly posting to the appropriate social media sites, engaging with others and building a following of those who will share and react to your messages.

You can also market your law firm on social media using targeted paid advertising to put your law firm’s brand and message in front of your target market.

Organic and paid advertising for law firms on social media require different approaches but they can also provide a great synergistic (1+1=3) effect when done together.

We strongly advise you to talk to us about your law firm’s goals so we can help you understand how and when social media marketing fits into a marketing strategy for your firm.

For many law firms, social media marketing may not be the best use of their marketing time and budget until other foundational items like brand design, website conversion optimization, and lead magnets and nurturing exist.

Once your law firm is ready to market with social media, our law firm social media marketing experts will review your current social media platforms and then create a strategy based on the existing data and long-term goals.

For example, we know which posts do well when promoted, which ads can provide a lift in branded google searches, and which posts are great at attracting organic traffic!

Marketing is about understanding who your best potential clients are and where they spend their time so you can deliver your message to them.

Law firms should be spending more and more of their marketing budget with digital marketing because that is where their potential clients are spending more of their time.

Starting in 2019, time on the internet beat time in front of a TV and even when people are “watching” these days they are doing that more and more with streamed media from laptops, tablets, and even mobile devices according to Nielsen data

Combine these trends with the fact that the tools for identifying your target market online are often better than traditional offline marketing and you can see why digital marketing now represents over 50% of budgets for all businesses

Research we did back as far back as 2015 showed that the majority of consumers (over 75%) look for a law firm online or check out their website before they call the firm.

We know from the 2019 Clio Legal Trends report that almost half of legal services consumers ask a friend or colleague when they need a lawyer and about half of legal service consumers would never ask anyone and go search on their own.

What we also know from our data is that even if an ideal prospective new client finds out about your law firm from a friend offline, chances are they’ll still look you up online to find out what other clients think of you.

Therefore, putting a focus on digital marketing so that you have a strong digital presence is a requirement to not just attract the 50% of legal consumers searching on their own, but to Protect Your Referrals from those checking you out online — your law firm website, law firm reviews, law firm google business profile — before they call you.

The qualities of a good law firm website are:

• A prospective new law firm client can quickly see that your firm provides the solution to their issue
• Shows the PNC proof that your law firm can be trusted – often using testimonials, case studies, review scores, and awards
• Is designed to match your law firm’s brand and resonate with your ideal target client and bonus points if it can repel those clients that are not a fit for your firm.
• As design aesthetics change over time, it should be designed recently enough so a potential client doesn’t think it looks outdated and ten years old
• Has the ability for the PNC to quickly contact you multiple ways (phone, chat, text, a form on the website, etc.)
• Knowing that the average legal services consumer is facing a tough situation and rarely if ever has needed to look for a law firm, the website content should lead with empathy to show the consumer that you know how to solve their problem, that you care, and maps out what it is like to work with your firm on this issue
• Legal consumers want to know how much the solution is going to cost, so the website should provide some detail that indicates a range of the potential costs and the issues that can cause it to be more expensive.
• For those not ready to contact you, your website should provide some useful information that they can download and use to help them understand more about the things they should be asking or thinking about their issue. Bonus points if you provide that in exchange for their email address and phone number so you can do some follow-up to continue to check in and help them.
• After all of that, your website should be designed and structured in a way that allows the search engines to also understand the solutions your firm helps consumers solve and why you should be ranked in the search engines when someone searches for answers to that problem. This is done through SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and content strategy work. Followed by ongoing SEO and content adjustments and additions to the website over time.

When designing a law firm website, it’s important for prospects to feel that they made the right decision the moment they visit your website. GNGF law firm web design experts know exactly what prospects look for on law firm websites, and we use this approach to build award-winning websites.

The core strategy of how we generate leads for law firms starts with:

• Understanding the perfect client for a law firm
• Learning what makes the law firm unique and the right choice for that perfect client
• Researching where that ideal client spends their time
• Working with the firm to put the right message in front of that consumer when they need legal services.

We are able to utilize many different marketing tactics we use to help firms generate law firm leads using this strategy such as:

• Search Engine Optimization – we work to make sure our law firm clients appear in the search result when ideal prospective clients search on answers to the problem the firm helps to solve. This takes working with our clients on a strong content strategy and local focused link building combined with understanding that while SEO is a great and affordable long-term strategy, it can take 6-12 months to really generate enough leads for a strong return on the marketing investment.
• Online Paid Advertising – through google ads, paid listings on well-ranking directory sites, social media ads, YouTube,  connected/streaming TV, and more, we can target ads to the ideal client and get the exact message in front of that prospective client, often much faster than SEO, but the nature of online ads is that it carries a long-term ongoing cost because as soon as you stop paying for the ads, they stop appearing.
• Offline to Online – We work with many clients that historically used law firm radio ads, billboards, TV advertising, and even print in newspapers and magazines. We work with these firms to maximize the ability of someone to quickly find the law firm online when the brand message sticks and they go looking for that law firm later. Furthermore, many of these ads can be repurposed in more targeted online media such as using TV commercials as pre-roll YouTube video ads, or Radio ads on networks like Spotify, Pandora, or podcast networks.
• Social Media – this is an area that continues to grow and can be a great source of leads after all the other foundational digital elements exist (website, great content, conversion optimization, etc.). Depending on your ideal client, focus can be put on awareness and engagement in different platforms from Facebook to TikTok.

We’ve been in this industry for over a decade, and we know what works and what doesn’t.

The reason we know this is because we don’t just try to generate leads, we use various law firm marketing tools to monitor the success of the campaigns combined with feedback from the legal CRM system or the law firm’s intake success data to know what leads turned into ideal paying clients.

This data is used to continuously refine and build upon our law firm lead generation strategies over time.

Working with GNGF, you won’t just get lip service about how many law firm leads we generated.

You will hear us ask about what leads are turning into clients. We will ask about improving your intake process and follow-ups. And we integrate with or help many clients implement tools such as Legal CRM or email autoresponders platforms.

This is because we know that converting an additional 2-5% of leads to clients is typically better for a law firm than just throwing more leads into the top of the funnel.

We work hard to help your law firm grow revenue and profits not just grow the marketing budget.

Over the last 10 years marketing just for law firms, we’ve learned what works for solo law firms up to law firms of 25 attorneys.

If you are a law firm larger than that and like what you read here, feel free to reach out and we can refer you to someone who may be a better fit.

To be able to deliver consistent results for our clients, we built a proven winning formula for growing a law firm from a marketing perspective. We call this proven method “Marketing Law Firms the GNGF Way, or “The GNGF Way” for short.

The method is built at a strategy level, so that as law firm marketing tactics and tools come and go the core process stays consistent and focused on success.

So instead of you worrying about all the complex terms and keeping up with the latest tactics such as SEO, SEM, SERP, OTT, CRO, etc., this formula focuses on:

• Understanding the law firm’s owner(s) goals and strategy
• Educating law firm owners on what marketing strategy best maps to their business goals
• Building and explaining the tactics and defining the measurable marketing goals
• Full transparency of the data in executing marketing campaigns.
• Quantifiable, results-oriented project management
• Check-ins with our expert law firm marketing strategists to ensure business goal to marketing strategy remains aligned
• Transparent identification about what tactics are working and what needs to adjust.

Read more about the GNGF way and how it is a better and more enjoyable way to partner with your law firm’s marketing agency.

Law firm branding refers to two important foundational law firm marketing needs.

1. Law Firm Branding refers to the process of identifying your ideal clients, what solutions you provide those clients, why your firm is best at serving those specifc ideal clients, and the way you want your message to convey the values and differentiators of your firm. You should document all of this information into a Law Firm Brand Platform. This process is critically important to making your marketing more effective whether you have been serving clients in the same practice area for years or are embarking on a new practice area, new business model, or a new market.
2. Law Firm Branding also refers to what we call Brand Design. This is the specific design elements that are used to support your brand platform. From your firm logos, the colors you use in your designs, the fonts you choose, letterhead, and even the website design, the Brand Design will document how your message is felt through the design elements.

The right law firm branding creates the right lasting memory in the minds of your ideal potential clients – and existing ones as well – which portrays your firm as the perfect authority to solve their issue or refer to their friends and colleagues.