5 Ways to Tweak Your Legal Marketing Strategy to Get More Leads

Without leads, your law firm cannot succeed. No matter how many current clients you have, you need a steady, ongoing flow of new ones to ensure stability and growth. That’s what your legal marketing strategy should be designed to do — generate ongoing, qualified legal leads — but it can be frustrating if they’re not the type of leads you need. 

Your first temptation might be to toss out your strategy and start from scratch, but that’s a mistake. It might just be that you need to fine-tune a few aspects to see the results you want. In this post, we’ll highlight five tweaks you can make to your legal marketing strategy to regularly get better leads.

1. Be there when your leads need you

First, take a long, hard look at your strategy and how the lead generation process usually pans out. For many law firms, it looks something like this:

1. Lead sees an ad and clicks the link.
2. They hit a landing page, recognize their problem, learn about your solution., and how you can fulfill their need.
3. They take the necessary action – click to call, email, or chat.

And then nothing happens.

Does this look like your process? If leads are flowing in but your team isn’t connecting with them, that’s a problem. You can’t afford to wait days or weeks to reply to emails or web chats, or to return phone calls. Your leads need answers and they’re not willing to wait. If you don’t reply within a reasonable time, they’ll go elsewhere. And make no mistake, you’re not the only law firm in town that can help them.

So, what can you do to get around this issue? Be there when your clients need you. That can be challenging, particularly if you don’t have the budget for a 24-hour, in-house receptionist, but there are plenty of ways around this particular hurdle. A legal answering service can provide phone, email, web chat, and even SMS support, ensuring that every communication is answered immediately. By improving your speed to lead, and making sure every lead is engaged immediately, you increase the likelihood of generating more leads and closing more deals.

2. Use AI when and where you can

AI is everywhere these days, and for good reason. It offers powerful automation that saves you time, money, and hassle. It can and should be a central part of your legal marketing strategy. 

For instance, integrating AI into your website ensures that leads can get answers to their questions in real-time, right on your website. Advanced AI can be trained in your brand voice and with your firm’s data so that it provides accurate, timely answers. Meanwhile, a legal answering service, like Smith.ai, can ensure that sensitive or complex questions AI cannot handle are answered by a human being.

3. Use gated lead magnets

Don’t assume that your landing page copy will be enough to convince a lead to call or text. Often, they need more encouragement. Depending on where they are within the overall process, they might need more information about their problem and the various options, or why your firm is the right choice. 

You can provide that information in the form of reports, whitepapers, eBooks, templates, checklists, and guides. These can be offered as free downloads in exchange for the lead providing their name and email address, as well as other information that you can then use to reach out to them later. 

Gated lead magnets offer leads something of value while providing you with a way to communicate with them down the road and the opportunity to move them further down the funnel.

4. Conduct social listening and then answer legal questions in your content

Content marketing is a huge component of most firm’s marketing strategies, and rightly so. However, you must have the right content. Yes, talking about your services and the problems that lead to the need for those services is important, but it’s even more critical to answer questions leads have. Often, those are quite literally what bring them to your website. 

Social listening allows you to tap into the conversation through hashtags and social media groups. This then provides you with insights into the questions that leads have. You can then create content that includes both the question and the answer, both of which are important for lead generation and for being featured in a Google Snippet to increase traffic to your site.

5. Partner with a trusted legal answering service

No matter your firm’s size or marketing budget, there’s simply no way that you can answer every call when it comes in. You only have so many team members and so many phone lines. A legal answering service can ensure that every call is answered promptly and that leads get the information they need immediately. 

However, it’s not just about answering questions. A legal answering service can also help with other crucial parts of the process, including lead screening and intake to make sure that you’re spending your time as wisely as possible. 

Build a better legal strategy with a trusted partner

There’s no reason that your legal marketing strategy shouldn’t be successful. With the right efforts, you can reach your ideal audience and move them through the sales funnel. However, it’s easier to achieve success here when you have a trusted partner. Smith.ai’s experienced virtual receptionists can be integral in your ability to get not just more leads, but more of the right leads.

Our services include 24/7 answering, appointment booking, lead screening and intake solutions, and even AI and live web chat to help ensure that your leads get the answers they need immediately. And when your leads are ready to take the next step, we seamlessly hand them off to your team. 

To learn more, schedule a consultation or reach out to hello@smith.ai.