Which services are generally used in Solicitor/Legal Practice marketing?
Strategy:
Audit
Training
What goals do Solicitors/Legal Practices generally set?
- Greater number of enquiries for their services, be they general or specific, such as business, divorce orchid law.
- Greater brand recognition.
It’s important to set attainable goals, so when looking at specific numbers of enquiries we have to take into account where you are currently and, realistically, how much work and time would be required to attain those goals alongside the viable market for a businesses specific services.
We won’t be talking about a specific solicitor or legal practice marketing in this case study.
All of our case studies are white labelled. We will happily sign NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) with our clients when working with them on their marketing. We never share specific details with anyone else, so rest assured where we have experience working with more than one client in any one industry sector, you’ll never know what we are exactly does for them or they for you. We only bring our experience and understanding of the sector with us, every solution is totally unique to each and every client.
We have worked with, and are still working with, a number of different businesses within any one industry space. Within the legal sector we have been working with both general and niche practices within the UK.
The wants and needs of all the legal practices we have worked with have been generally the same; ‘we would like to have a great presence in our (local) area’, ‘we would like more enquiries for our key legal services and specialities’ or a combination of the two. The majority of legal practices we have worked with have a want for more enquiry for their niche specialities as they are already approached for more generalist services. Being approached for the wrong services is almost always lead by generalist, non-focussed marketing.
When looking at solutions for our clients we’re also looking at their capacity or want to get involved with what we are doing for them. Larger practices may have someone to that we can work with internally if they don’t have a marketing manager, but generally we are working directly with practice owners.
Working with practice owners means we need to have processes in place to use as little of their time as possible when working with them, so 4 hour meetings will be costly to them directly. It’s important that we get as much information or reference material as possible that can be distilled and made more consumer frienldy. Everything can then be created and submitted for approval before posting if we are working with then through their social media.
Let’s take a look at a typical solicitor/legal practice marketing project:
A typical solicitor/legal practice marketing solution will be split into different working stages. The content for each of these stages varies from client to client, so we have included those that are within almost all campaigns.
Stage 1
Stage 1 is about getting to know you and your business:
Stage 2
Stage 2 is about improving your chances of success and planning:
Stage 3
Stage 3 is about getting things going, creating leads and analysing what’s happening to assess how your legal practice marketing is working:
- Social media marketing.
- Tracking
- Analytics.
- Reporting.
Solicitor/Legal Practice Marketing Stages in More Detail
Stage 1:
- Understanding our clients businesses and their requirements is at the top of our list. Without fully understanding what a business does, how it functions, who is responsible for what and the desired outcome from any engagement is required we can’t offer our clients the right solution.
- We’ll carry out a full audit and review of the legal practices website, social media and a competitor analysis. We want to see how you really sit in the landscape, not where you think you site – it’s not often the same place! Out audit will give us and you a detailed view of every aspect of your website and online presence:
- What keywords you are ranking for.
- Your websites health, including it’s structural health, how the search engines are seeing you, what needs changing and much more.
- How your social media (if you have any) is performing.
- How your competitors are performing again you online and through their websites, keywords you are missing that they are ranking for, and again, much more.
- What your current website analytics are telling us. We’re often told ‘we have thousands of visitors but no enquiries’. There are reasons for this which we’ll be able to uncover.
- We’ll review your marketing material online and off. It’s a brand thing! We see so many businesses being to generalist online and then turning enquiries away as they don’t have specific specialisums.
- Many businesses don’t see why we would need to know what they do once a form comes in or a phone rings, but it’s a vital part of what we do and it’s something our clients become accountable for.
- Firstly we carry out a lot of online wizardry that can save hours in admin (we’re already making you money!) through automation and secondly, we don’t want to be telling people one thing in your marketing campaign when you’re actually doing something else.
- Secondly, and this is important to us, accountability. We want to know that every enquiry, no matter how small, is treated with the same degree of professionalism, as that one small, trivial enquiry, could turn into your next big client! Being accountable for any and all of your generated leads tells us all if your campaign is working or not, if it’s bringing in the right people and if not, how we need to change things to improve your results.
Stage 2:
- Having carried out stage 1 we’re now in a position to offer our suggestions across the board for changes that could be or need to be made. Depending on how your website is built we may be able to help with further development or changes or, if you have a developer, we can work with you and them in an advisory or consolatory capacity to get critical changes in place. On occasion we have worked with our clients to rebuild their websites from scratch as sometimes this is the most cost-effective solution and the best way to more forwards.
- We can now begin to plan your campaign/s. Typically we would plan overlapping campaigns for a 12 month period. For the generalist legal profession this can mean overlapping campaigns to establish with potential customers the depth of help they can give for any one area of law as well as letting people know which areas they can’t help with. Each campaign is developed around our clients requirements and tailored to their specific business.
- We’ll be updating social platforms and getting those up and running that our clients don’t already have ready for campaign posting. In the interim we’ll begin posting content that lead into your upcoming campaigns, repositioning the business if necessary to accommodate what is to follow.
- We’ll be working with you to create content. Content comes in many shapes and sizes and the amount of work required by our clients depends on their capacity, budget and brief to us. Initial content that will re-align the business with the upcoming campaigns can be released through the website and into social media channels.
- If staff are to be interacting with content or posting to any social media platforms as part of the business we will take them through some training. The training will teach them how to post and how to construct their posts that align with the business. Many employees we meet have their own social media accounts, but we need them to understand how different it is and how important it is to post in the correct way for business and remember that they are representing a business, not expressing their own personal thoughts on any business postings.
Stage 3:
- Now we have everything lined up we’ll begin running the campaigns. We don’t use automation, so this isn’t us done at this point. We post strategically, we monitor what’s happening and we adjust as required.
- If our clients have opted for our website tracking, this data will now be coming through. We’ll train all those that need access to the tracking system and all the data can be extracted to be used outside of the system. Our tracking software will present our clients with business information for those businesses coming to their websites. We can’t give you an exact name to contact, but we can tell you the business name, what they looked at, how they got to you, a telephone number if it can be identified and a list of employees on LinkedIn.
- Our training will show you how you can use this data as cool/warm leads and through our systems automation we can setup automatic email notifications to specific criteria to be sent to individual employees when a business fitting those criteria lands on the website.
- We’ll be looking at your analytics and continually reviewing what’s happening, how successful specific posts and content are, which platforms are performing better than others and for which content, how things are changing against your competitors and much more.
- Everything that’s happened will be put into a detailed report each month for us to go through with our clients. We’ll walk you through the report, explaining everything in there, what it means, how it affects your campaign/s and what actions we should be taking if required.
- We also look for feedback when going through our reports. Part of that feedback will be following up on your leads and conversions.
Need Some Help or Would Like to Discuss your Legal Practice Marketing and How We Could Help you with Your Next Campaign?
If you would like to find out more about how we can help with your recruitment agency marketing give us a call on 02080 883 464, 02080 883 466 or complete the form for a call back or email: