6 Key Elements of Successful Law Firm Marketing in 2024

How you can generate more new cases and more revenue with smarter marketing this year

After nearly 20 years of running digital marketing campaigns for law firms, I can say without hesitation that competition amongst law firms for cases online is tougher than it has ever been before. If you want to “win” in your market, your marketing game is going to need to be smarter and better than your competitors. This guide is aimed at helping make sure you know what you need in order to run highly successful marketing campaigns in 2024.

Mike Perez, Founder & CEO, iLawyer Marketing

In the ultra-competitive field of law firm marketing, making sure you are doing all the right things isn’t just important; it’s essential. As marketing costs continue to increase,  and with new players entering the market, your marketing needs to be firing on all cylinders . Unless you are executing on all the key components that successful digital marketing campaigns require, you’re leaving potential law firm revenue on the table. The “6 Key Elements of Successful Law Firm Marketing in 2024” will help provide you with the knowledge you need to win the marketing battles you face this coming year. Let’s discuss the crucial elements that can help your law firm consistently generate new signed cases through smarter marketing.

1. Website Built to Convert

Your website: It’s the foundation of all your marketing and can make or break the success of your marketing campaigns. Whether a prospective client finds you online through a web search or they are referred to your law office, they will end up on your website trying to learn more about you. Your website is their first impression of your law firm – so it needs to be great. Consumers will have an instant opinion about your firm within the first few seconds upon visiting. Do consumers actually care about what your website looks like? Absolutely. From years of consumer testing, we can tell you they have a lot of opinions when it comes to your website.

Conversion Rate Optimization: The key to generating more leads

While the aesthetics of your site is important, it needs to be more than just visually impressive; it must be optimized to maximize conversions. At iLawyerMarketing, we do this with Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). What is CRO? It is a process used to increase the percentage of website visitors who take a specific desired action. For law firm websites, the desired action is for consumers to contact your office with a potential case. This typically means filling out a form to request a consultation, engaging in a chat conversation, or calling the firm. CRO involves understanding how users navigate a site, what parts of the site they click on, what actions they take, and optimizing your website so that you end up with as many leads as possible.

Part of that process involves ensuring that your website is built user-friendly, with clear calls-to-action, making sure the site is easy to navigate, and of course loads quickly and is responsive to whatever the device is that a visitor is using. We have over 15+ years experience building law firm websites and researching consumer behavior, and we put our knowledge and expertise into each one of the websites we create. There’s a literal science to the law firm websites that we build. By understanding and applying principles from psychology, we can create websites that resonate more deeply with potential clients and increase their levels of trust, thereby increasing conversion rates.  

Every year we run new research studies, conduct regular conversion rate testing, and invest thousands of dollars into learning more and more about this process. For example, here is a video we recorded after a recent consumer study where we asked some of the study participants what was the most impactful thing to them on a law firm website. The most common response we heard back was video testimonials. 

Having a website that maximizes conversion rates ultimately means more successful marketing campaigns, better ROI on your marketing investment and more revenue for your law firm.

Your website should look modern, cutting edge and include important CRO elements.

2. High Visibility Online

Competing for 1st page visibility on Google is a very tall task. Law firm SEO is the most competitive local vertical there is. Thousands of websites are often competing for the same search terms. The truth is, when it comes to organic rankings, only a select few legal marketing agencies are even capable of getting results for competitive search terms (especially in larger market size DMAs). If you’re not with the right agency, you are wasting time and money. So, make sure you are working with a great legal marketing agency if you want to have great results

For many law firms today, having great online visibility is an important part of the law firm’s growth plan. Those firms that  do have a strong internet presence have been rewarded with a steady flow of leads and new signed cases. But smarter marketers know that they should never be solely reliant on one single marketing channel, because if that source dries up then you are in trouble. 

For example, if you are solely dependent on Google local pack (aka map pack), Google can make an algorithm update overnight that could cause a huge drop in visibility and bam, suddenly your leads run dry. The same thing could happen if you solely depend on organic SEO or LSA ads. If you rely just on Google search ads, new competitors could come in overnight, get more aggressive and spike the costs of pay per click search ads, crushing your target CPL (Cost Per Lead) numbers. Smart law firm marketers have a more diversified approach that involves a mix of different sources and channels.  A well rounded marketing strategy should probably involve:

• Google Organics: You need 1st page visibility on Google for bottom, middle and top of the funnel search terms. This will help give you a much greater chance of consumers finding your law firm when they are researching online.
• Google Paid: Since Google gives priority to paid ads, it’s important to invest in Google ads if budget allows. Your ads must be managed efficiently and intelligently in order to maximize the number of leads you generate.
• Social Media Channels: While organic social is not a great avenue for most firms, paid promotion on the most popular social sites in the world makes a lot of sense. With millions of people using platforms like Facebook and Instagram, running ads on those networks will increase your online visibility.
• Branding and Awareness Ads: In years past, this was mainly done through TV, radio and billboards. Now, there are other ways to increase your brand exposure so your brand can be more top of mind in your market. In addition to running ads on the social platforms mentioned above, you may also want to consider running ads on YouTube, and possibly streaming service ads (OTT) to help increase the chance of your firm being top of mind for the consumer. 

By having a multi-channel approach, you increase the likelihood that your firm will be found online, ultimately resulting in more leads for your firm.

3. High-Quality Content

In the SEO world, we say “content is king”, and this holds especially true in law firm marketing. High-quality content serves multiple purposes: 

• It provides helpful information to your potential clients
• It can increase confidence and trust in your law firm
• It satisfied Google’s search engine algorithms 
• It increases your levels of trust with Google, which is needed for high rankings
• It can help to attract inbound links to your website

Content can take various forms, I’m not simply talking about text on a page. Content can also mean imagery, charts, graphs, data visualizations, videos, etc. If you create enough high-quality content, it can help to position your firm as a thought leader on any given topic. 

Take this content we created for our client, where our data analysis team analyzed hundreds of thousands of crash records to identify the most dangerous intersections in Ohio.

The content had data visualizations, interactive maps and had valuable, highly interesting data that was featured on multiple news outlets and websites that linked back to the study.

Although there are all forms of content, traditional text based content is still the most common way that law firm content is consumed. High quality content (in the eyes of Google) can increase your chances of ranking organically, so it should be a big part of your firm’s marketing strategy in 2024. Years ago, many SEOs would recommend having 500 words on a page, but that often doesn’t hold true today when it comes to competing for ultra-competitive keywords in the legal industry. Today, you typically need more in-depth content. It’s not uncommon to see pages with over 2,000 words that take up some of the top positions on Google. While content length itself is not a ranking factor, many sites that do rank high on Google have content that is more comprehensive and in-depth on a particular topic. This type of content is often rewarded by Google if it is satisfying the intent of the user. 

Content quality is important to Google rankings, so we’ve invested heavily in developing proprietary content optimization software that helps us significantly in our SEO process. Feel free to contact us if you would like to see a demo of our software.

Content also plays a huge part in converting website visitors into actual leads. Your content needs to do a great job of “selling” your law firm. Why should a prospective client choose your firm? What kind of experience do you have handling the type of case your prospective client has? What kind of case results do you have? Do you have powerful client testimonials? Providing great content that answers these questions means more leads, and ultimately more new signed cases for your law firm.

4. Highly Efficient Intake System

Once you’ve attracted potential clients to your firm, it’s crucial to have a highly efficient intake system in place. This means:

• Available 24/7: To be available to prospective clients regardless of the time of day or night.
• Phone calls answered quickly: Calls should be answered within 3 rings to minimize missed opportunities.
• Integrated with Live Chat: Visitors like the ability to chat with a live person to help them get immediate assistance and answers to their questions.
• Fast response time: The sooner you get back to leads that come in to your office, the better your chances of retaining qualified prospective clients.
• Substantial Lead Follow-Up: Ensuring that no potential client falls through the cracks, you need an organized and thorough follow up process so you don’t miss out on potential new cases. This may involve following up with calls, emails and text messages.
• Bilingual: Depending on who you are targeting and where your firm is located, having bilingual receptionists can be very important.

Of course, it’s not practical for law firms to have all these things handled by their employees at all times. That’s why it’s important to find great 3rd party providers who can handle things like answering calls after hours, or on  holidays and weekends. In a recent study we performed in November 2023, 40% of participants said that if they called a law office and were sent to voicemail, they would hang up and call a different law firm. 

If your intake is missing some of these key elements, there are companies like Alert Communications that specialize in intake services for law firms and can help plug in the holes of your intake process.

5. Online Reviews

Online reviews can make or break a law firm’s reputation and play a huge part in your ability to sign up new cases. Did you know that 98% of consumers say they would look at the online reviews of an attorney before they hired them? This is according to another consumer study we performed, “How Consumers Choose Lawyers Online”,  that involved over 1,000 participants. 

Unless your law firm has really high review ratings, you will miss on signing new cases. In that same study, 89% of participants said they would only hire a law firm if they had review ratings of 4 stars or higher.

Actively generating positive reviews and effectively managing negative ones is very important to your overall marketing success. Not only do you need great reviews, but you need a good quantity of reviews. We’ve learned from our consumer research studies that if you have 20 reviews with an average of 4 stars and your competition has 200 reviews and also has a 4 star rating average, consumers will often lean to the firm with more positive reviews. 

When discussing reviews, the topic of ‘fake reviews’ always comes up. Although Google said they removed 95 million fake reviews back in 2021, review spam is still a huge problem, especially in the legal industry. Maybe firms that do engage in this practice would think twice if the FTC’s proposal to ban fake reviews and fine businesses $50,000 per fake review actually passes. We’ve all seen unethical law firms that have engaged in this practice. It’s frustrating to see these businesses get away with this. Eventually, it will be penalized, hopefully by both Google and the government, because it’s unfair to the law firms and businesses that are honest, ethical and play by the rules. 

Make getting more legitimate reviews a top priority this year because it will definitely impact your bottom line and can help encourage more people to hire your law firm.

6. Performance Tracking

Last but not least, let’s discuss performance tracking. Being able to monitor what is working (and what is not working) is important in being able to make smart marketing budget decisions. Some of the things to pay attention to:

• Lead Volume: How many leads are you getting each month? It’s important to be able to track the number of leads coming in,, including the number of forms filled out on your site, total chat leads, and the number of phone calls coming in to your firm. 
• Lead Source Tracking: To identify the most effective marketing channels, your  marketing should show you how you are getting your leads. Is it through organic Google traffic? Is it Google Ads? Is it Facebook Ads? Directory listings? 
• Traffic volume: How much traffic is your firm getting each month and where is that traffic coming from? Is it from within your state? Is it international? Is it bot or human traffic? Is it coming from organic search,  paid channels, or social media?
• Conversion Rate: Especially when running paid ad campaigns, you want to know what your website conversion rate is. Improving conversion rates means more leads and signed cases!
• CPL: What is the CPL (cost per lead) on your marketing spend? : To review what strategies are working and which ones need adjusting, you should know these numbers. 
• CAC:: What is the Cost Acquisition Cost on your marketing spend?
• Revenue: How much revenue has the firm generated from your marketing efforts?

Knowing the answers to metrics like these is important to your law firm. At iLawyer Marketing, our reporting dashboard helps to answer a lot of these questions for our clients so that together, we can make smarter marketing decisions and ultimately provide our clients with more successful marketing campaigns.

By focusing on the six critical elements listed in this guide, your law firm can have more marketing success in 2024!

Questions?

If you have any questions, or would like to speak to one of our legal marketing consultants to discuss a smarter marketing strategy for your law firm, don’t hesitate to reach out and contact us today. Each of our consultants has a minimum of 5 years of legal marketing consulting experience in crafting powerful marketing solutions to help law firms succeed in their market. 

About iLawyer Marketing 

iLawyer Marketing has been handling digital law firm marketing since 2006, and is one of the premier law firm marketing agencies in the U.S. We help law firms all over country with:

• Law Firm Website Design & Development
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Paid Search
• Google Ads
• Facebook Ads
• YouTube Ads
• OTT Ads
• Geofencing 
• Content creation
• Video production
• Consumer feedback testing
• Conversion Rate Optimization

If you are interested in finding out if we can help your law firm, feel free to reach out to us. Ask us to share our results with you. You will be impressed.