Being a lawyer needs extensive education and years of concentration on trying to interpret and comprehend the complex nuances of the law. But after passing the bar exam, how do you use strategic planning to expand your law firm? From where will your clients be sourced?

When it comes to the strategic planning of their marketing and growth activities, legal professionals frequently do not even know where to start because developing a growth strategy needs an entirely new set of abilities.

The legal industry is likewise extremely competitive, and law firms are continually seeking strategies to outperform and surpass the ever-escalating competition.

What is Outreach Marketing?

Outreach marketing is a type of marketing that includes engaging potential clients, prominent individuals, or businesses who have a strong relationship with your key demographic. To achieve this, look for these influencers, research them, and then approach them with your collaborative proposal.

Benefits of Outreach Marketing

1. Brand Awareness

Brand recognition fosters trust in your law firm. Clients are more likely to trust your law practice when you give it a name and a face. Your firm’s revenue can be directly impacted by loyal clients, who are connected to your firm’s brand through your brand awareness initiatives.

Ways to achieve brand awareness can begin by giving your law firm a personality and defining a narrative which showcases the law firm’s vision and mission. Law firms should also use social media platforms for building brand awareness and utilising sharable content in the form of blog posts or resource web pages.

2. Lead generation

More and more lawyers and firms are using the internet to generate leads. Fortunately, there are a lot of efficient and quick ways to find leads online. Your website is where the online lead generation activities must begin. It serves no purpose to provide traffic to your website if those users choose to depart without taking any further action. Using website heatmaps, a popular tool for conversion optimization, is another option. The use of email marketing through newsletters is another strategy that law firms can use to improve lead creation. These days a lot of law firms are also seen hosting webinars to improve lead generation.

3. SEO outreach

SEO for law firms has many facets. You must manage your on-page SEO, content creation, local listing optimization, and more in addition to managing your technical SEO. Link building, the practise of acquiring high-authority links back to your website, is a crucial SEO chore for law firms. These links can increase your website’s authority in Google’s eyes, resulting in better ranks and increased visitors. Nevertheless, It’s not always simple to get backlinks to your law practise. If law firms want to get the correct kinds of connections back to their websites, they must be innovative. Backlinks are important since they essentially represent a “vote of confidence” from another website that your website is a reliable source of information.

4. Boosting customer retention

Gaining a client’s trust is challenging. It is even harder to keep it. Less time and money are available to take care of your current clients whereas, the more time and money are devoted to market your law firm in order to attract new clients. Any law practise that wants to flourish must have client retention measures in place. Customers who are happy with your services are more likely to consult you and may even recommend you to others in their network. The most basic way to do it is to deliver. Delivering excellent services in a time-bound manner is essential. The other essential is a clear communication. You may demonstrate your expertise as a lawyer and aid in the client retention of your law firm by anticipating legal problems and responding to them when they happen. Proactive issue solvers who can deal with the future and handle legal mattera that are time-consuming, are recommended further by clients.

5. Escalates partnerships and collaborations

Building connections or collaborating with others is another outreach marketing approach you may use. A smart marketing tactic is to create strategic marketing and service partnerships with other companies in your network (but not with rival businesses). It may enable you to connect with a larger group of potential clients. Additionally, it saves money because you can leverage cross-promotion with your audience rather than your cost on marketing.

Building connections with well-known companies in your area will accelerate the growth of your company, especially if it is new. For building collaborations, it is important to look for brands you can collaborate with. These should be brands that work well with yours, rather than being straight competitors. Contact possible business partners or you would typically target the same audience.  Once you’ve identified your potential collaborators, create a marketing outreach effort to introduce your proposed cooperation. Make sure to structure your messaging such that you emphasise how the partnership will benefit your potential partner.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the best methods for law firms to generate leads. The reality is that what will be most effective for you will depend on the specifics of your practise. Whatever approach you decide on, keep pursuing leads even when business is flourishing. You can accomplish a variety of business objectives with the help of an effective outreach marketing plan. A carefully thought out and performed outreach campaign is a terrific method to collaborate with influencers and businesses that may support your success, whether it be for content marketing, PR, or link building. It is important that law firms are a part of a community that can help to enlarge the objectives and scale of outreach marketing. Interlegal is one such community. Lawyers and Law Firms should become a part of Interlegal as it is a platform that helps in developing or managing these strategies.  It is a community that collaborates with lawyers, but more importantly, it collaborates with people.

Frequently asked questions

1. Why is it challenging to market a law firm?

It can be challenging to market a law firm for several reasons like law being a service industry and not selling a product per se thus it becomes hard to sell a service without establishing goodwill. Moreover, there are many jurisdictions which have an explicit ban on soliciting law practices, making it much harder to adopt a conducive marketing strategy.

2. Does a law firm need a website and SEO?

A law firm is a knowledge-based industry and the only product they can sell is their knowledge thus it is very important to have a website that produces relevant content to showcase your expertise. Having a website will not suffice if you are not using the right keywords. This is where SEO comes into the picture.

3. How can a small law firm compete with big city firms that have huge budgets?

Utilizing a sophisticated SEO and content marketing strategy is the best possible way to keep up with major law firms advertising online.  This software is cost-effective and can facilitate you in besting big online advertisers.

4. How can Interlegal help in marketing law firms?

Interlegal is a community of lawyers with many distinguished law firms across the globe. Since marketing strategy also includes networking as an important aspect, being associated with a community like Interlegal can be beneficial.

5. Without using the “I’m too busy” defence, what is something doable that I can start doing right away?

Making legal practice area videos is by far the simplest thing you can do without compromising a lot of extra time. After that, these videos are included on your website which will make your website stand out. This method of website improvement is the simplest and most affordable one.