GNGF is a strategic legal marketing agency specifically for attorneys and law firms. We work exclusively with law firms, so we understand the unique challenges that attorneys face when marketing online. Because we only work with law firms, we are uniquely positioned to use the data we’ve collected across the legal industry to develop best practices across our legal marketing services. In addition to helping with a law firm’s overall marketing strategy, every day we provide law firms with services in: At GNGF, one of our core values is transparency, and you can see that in everything we do. We are not a one-size-fits-all agency. What makes us unique is our high-touch and client-specific strategies combined with our 100% focus on law firms. We will use your specific web presence and your analytics combined with our years of experience to create the perfect strategy for you AND take the time to share this data so that you understand the WHY behind our marketing strategy and tactics. GNGF has been recognized by industry professionals for its outstanding work. Our law firm websites and content campaigns have received multiple awards both in and out of legal marketing categories. We even won an award for our agency’s professional ethics—The BBB Torch Award. As a frequent speaker at legal conferences and CLEs and our reputation as one of the industry-leading providers of legal marketing services, we constantly receive questions about various aspects of legal marketing. Our team put together this section to answer some of the most frequently asked questions we get about marketing for law firms. 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. 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: 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: We are able to utilize many different marketing tactics we use to help firms generate law firm leads using this strategy such as: 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: 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. 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. CASE STUDY: PERSONAL INJURY LAW FIRM SETS RECORD FOR NEW CASES Many Law Firm Marketing agencies rely on stats that do not lead to clients and revenue for law firms. GNGF provides tangible results; the kind that transforms firms and improves our clients’ lives. For this client, in 180 days: Why Your Law Firm Needs a Custom Marketing Strategy When we work with a Law Firm we look at: Your Practice Area, Your Geographic Area, Your Target Market, Your Competition, Your Goals (and budget). These are different for every firm. This is why you need a marketing strategy that is unique to your firm. Chris and his team at GNGF have been an outstanding addition to our marketing team. Not only is Chris knowledgeable, but he is forward-thinking, collaborative, generous with his time, and continuously on top of all of the tasks that keep us where we need to be. Thanks so much, Chris. And, thanks to the entire GNGF team! When you need a team of experts to provide legal marketing services to your law firm, whether you are a solo or have a dozen attorneys on staff, contact us today. Like we coach our law firm clients to do, we have many ways to contact us: Call us at 513-444-2016, chat with us live on our website or schedule a free consultation that works with your schedule using our appointment tool. We look forward to discussing how we can help your law firm grow.Get Noticed Get Found (GNGF) HAS BEEN EDUCATING AND EMPOWERING LAWYERS TO GROW THEIR LAW FIRM BUSINESS FOR OVER 11 YEARS.
How Can I Stay Competitive in Legal Marketing?
How Much Should My Law Firm Spend on Digital Marketing?
What Is Review Management in Law Firm Marketing?
How Can I Manage My Law Firm's Reviews?
How Should I Market My Law Firm on Social Media?
How Can Digital Marketing Help Law Firms?
What Are Some Qualities of a Good Law Firm Website?
How Does Your Agency Generate Leads for Law Firms?
What Is the GNGF Way?
What's Law Firm Branding?
Law Firm Marketing
Optimizing For Revenue, Not Stats
Beware of One-Size-Fits-All Marketing Packages
Our Clients love the GNGF Team!
Marc Lazarus, Russell & Lazarus APC
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