How Inbound Marketing for Law Firms Works

Amid the uprising digital transformation trend today, the vast majority of law firms still employ traditional offline marketing strategies. This leads to an exceedingly high cost for acquiring clients while the return is low. Let also not forget the great problem of the legal services, market saturation in many countries.

Don’t panic as there is a solution: Inbound Marketing. This strategy, coupled with digital transformation and marketing automation tools, can result in a reduction of client acquisition costs and boost growth.

But first of all, what is Inbound Marketing?

It is a methodology that combines different marketing techniques to attract customers and add value in a non-intrusive, non-interrupting way. Its main purpose is to draw the right people, at the right time, to your brand and convert them into lasting customers.

Inbound Marketing is about accompanying and engaging your customers by offering content that is relevant to their buyer’s profile and each phase of their buyer’s journey. Once a lead turns into a customer, companies continue to leverage Inbound Marketing to delight them further, thus sustaining their loyalty.

Read more: Why an effective talent strategy should include inbound recruiting?

How to apply Inbound Marketing to a law firm?

To create a content strategy, it is necessary to follow these 3 steps:

1. Construct your buyer personas

For every product or solution, there are different types of ideal clients, which we call Buyer Personas. Typically, there are two types of potential customers, companies and individuals. However, not all companies or individuals have the same profile. You must develop a separate buyer persona for each type of client. Our partners at HubSpot offer a great tool to help you construct your buyer personas.

Creating buyer personas is vital to the Inbound strategy as the discovery of your target audience’s pain points, interests, preferred communication platforms will directly influence your content planning. Each buyer persona prefers a specific piece of content. Therefore, this first must be done right.

Example: You have created a Buyer Persona of a private client. Within their buyer persona profile, you have established socio-demographic characteristics such as: a married woman and a mother with an average yearly income of $30,000. 

Once you have a clear understanding of who your Buyer Persona is, you can then proceed to generate content that is relevant to this particular customer profile, like minimising personal income tax, instead of content targetting corporate taxation.

Read more: 8 best-in-class Marketing strategies for 2020

Hence, it is important to:

2. Discover their problems and offer solutions

The objective of your strategy should be to generate content that is both relevant and useful to the reader. For this, you must know your potential clients (buyer persona) in-depth, study what their problems and concerns are, and what their thought processes are to offer them a solution.

Example: your potential client is a firm that is looking into a lawsuit for copyright infringement. They might be researching and seeking answers to queries like: “How to initiate a copyright infringement lawsuit?” or “Best lawyers in (your city or country) for copyright lawsuit”. Think about how you can create valuable content around these topics or concerns and publish it on your website. Keyword research can help you greatly in this endeavour.

3. Spread your content

Distribute content on your social networks. During the initial buyer persona research, you would have analysed social networks your ideal client is most active, so you reach and influence them. You can optimise your strategy by leveraging A/B tests to gain insights into the best time to publish an article, platforms that produce more interactions, and more. Note that it is an iterative process that requires your non-stop attention and ongoing adjustments to achieve desired results.

To give you an example, a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Company A would be more active on a professional platform like LinkedIn than other social networking sites. Thus, you score a higher chance to influence this persona by sharing an article related to a new Law on the prevention of money laundering on this site and direct them back to your page for additional content.

Aim to create content that not only provides a great value but is also shareable. The more engagement and shares a piece of content receives, the higher rank it would reach on search engine result pages (SERP). 

All in all, to effectively implement Inbound Marketing in your law firm, it is essential to pursue a clear objective in each of the phases of the buyer’s journey and maintain consistency.

If you are interested to learn more about Inbound Marketing, or Digital Transformation, check out our TRG Talk Virtual series where we cover these topics more in-depth. For more content like this, subscribe to TRG Blog today!