Promoting your private legal practice: The best way to go about it

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Private legal practice isn’t exactly a walk in the park. If you don’t keep your marketing game strong, you’ll eventually run out of projects and have nothing to work on. Therefore, you must always be on your toes and focus on promoting your legal agency. Here’s how to do that.

Private lawyers always have to be on the lookout for the next client. That means the process of hunting clients never ends. Also, private legal practitioners don’t have the advantage of a full-fledged law firm since they don’t have a business development or marketing department. However, that doesn’t mean private lawyers can’t compete in the market. In this blog, we’ll discuss all the marketing strategies you need to stand out from the competition.

Business cards are crucial

Every firm must have business cards. They’re one of the most fundamental marketing collateral you need to have. Let’s suppose you’re meeting a potential client and telling them how you can help them. After the meeting’s over, what do you do? Exactly… you tell them to give you a call if they have any queries and hand them your business card.

A business card is the first impression anyone has of you, so make sure you present yourself well. Gone are the days when you had to hire a graphic designer. Just using an online graphic design tool like PosterMyWall, which contains dozens of business card templates. Pick one, customize it, and you’re ready to go!

Create a conversion-focused website

Just having a website isn’t enough — you need a website that converts visitors into customers, and that’s quite challenging to pull off. To break it down for you, here are the 3 basic things you’ll need to do:

  1. Clarity, readability, and structure — The first thing to do is envision your site the way you want it. Your website must reflect your brand identity. Next, you need to structure it. Decide how many pages it’ll have and the overall design of the website. We recommend keeping it minimalistic and user-friendly.

  2. Site speed optimization — Your website must be lightweight so that it loads easily on a browser. Slow sites are annoying, and if it takes more than 2 seconds to open, people will close it. Site speed optimization is also something Google takes into consideration when deciding if it should be higher or lower in its SERP rankings.

  3. Explicit calls to action — A call to action directs a visitor to the sale. For instance, a button like “book your free consultation here” with a hyperlink to the in-built website query form will increase your chances. 

Word of mouth is more important than you think

People often underestimate the power of word-of-mouth buzz, but it can secure solid leads. That’s because potential clients are more likely to trust your past clients than your marketing slogans. So, don’t be hesitant to showcase your portfolio on your website, mentioning the big names you’ve worked with in the past. Even if you’re a new company, you should still mention your past profile to gain trust.

Online directories and customer review sites are the best way to generate word-of-mouth buzz. Make sure you list your business on Google My Business and other law-related sites out there. These reviews will be essential to more and more people coming to you for legal help, and eventually, they’ll snowball into something big enough to get your company famous. All in all, customer testimonials are an excellent way to build trust and credibility.

Add social media into the mix

If you’re not on social media, you’re squandering away a huge opportunity to market your private legal business. That’s because everyone is on social media. The first step is to identify which social media you should advertise on. This depends on where your target audience is hanging out. Normally, we recommend Facebook and Instagram because they’re the most-used platforms on the planet.

Remember, gaining traction on social media takes time. Keep posting regularly — it could be URLs of your blog articles or YouTube videos accompanied with a catchy caption. Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to doing this except to keep your audience engaged. Once you’ve built a sizable audience, you can run a paid advertising campaign to accelerate your lead generation.

Email marketing can do wonders

Despite being one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, email marketing is mostly considered obsolete in today’s marketing landscape. That’s because most people don’t know how to harness its power, as it’s not that easy. You only have one chance to convince the reader to open your email, let alone book an appointment with you.

The key to a successful email is a catchy subject line, which acts as a hook. Target customer pain points in a creative but easy-to-understand way, hinting that you have the solution to their problem. Include a handful of CTA buttons, blend in some visuals to make the content easy to digest, and follow the 80-20 rule — 80% of the email should be informative and educational, while only 20% should be explicit marketing.

SEO expands your digital footprint

Lastly, you should have a solid SEO strategy. SEO (search engine optimization) is a set of best practices that make your website and social media channels rank higher on Google’s SERPs. The higher your ranking, the more traffic you’ll get on your site, and the better your chances of converting visitors into clients.

While SEO is a multi-pronged strategy, one of the most important things is to hunt for the most searched keywords on Google in your industry via Google Keyword Planner. Once you’ve found these words and phrases, incorporate them into your content, including website material, blogs, YouTube video transcripts, and social media posts.

A final piece of advice

While the above strategies work like a charm, remember that every private legal firm is different and has a unique target audience. Hence, there’s no universal set of strategies that’ll apply to everyone. Instead, you’ll have to tailor each strategy to your specific circumstances and pick the best ones.


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