As a legal firm, you constantly need to generate new clients. Even if you have a solid client base, your current clients won’t always need legal advice or help. While this is of course a benefit to your clients, it doesn’t necessarily offer the same boon to you and your employees. It’s important that your legal firm continues to cultivate leads on new clients to keep the books in the black.
Doing this organically while still working on your current caseload can be overwhelming, which is why many legal firms are turning to lead generation.
What is a lead?
In its simplest terms, a lead is a person who has an interest in what you’re selling—in this case; your legal services—and they express this interest by providing you with their contact information. This is usually done digitally.
While having leads can be an exciting experience for a business, not all leads are created equal. In fact, it’s been found that only 25% of leads are legitimate and will actually advance to sales. These leads can sometimes occur organically but are often the product of targeted lead generation.
What is lead generation?
Lead generation is a marketing process that helps stimulate interest in your business for the sole purpose of providing your company with more clients. It is the method you use to get people’s contact information so that you can reach out to them about your services. Essentially, lead generation is the difference between “they found us” and “we found them”.
Important things to remember about law firm lead generation
Law firm lead generation may seem different than traditional lead generation since law firms are not trying sell a specific product, however, they are quite similar in many ways. Here are five of the most important things to remember about law firm lead generation
- Not all leads are created equal
It’s easy to be taken in by a lead generation company promising thousands of viable leads, but that isn’t often the case. Many companies are selling lead generation tactics that don’t work for law firms, and they are taking in law firms by droves. Before agreeing to pay a company for lead generation, you should know exactly what form of lead generation their company uses. The success rates of their approach should factor heavily into your decision.
It’s also important that the lead generation company you’ve hired should be knowledgeable on penetrating your target market. This can be tricky for law firms, so it’s important to use a company like Whitehardt.com, who are familiar with law firm lead generation to provide you with the viable leads your firm needs.
- Provide something in turn for leads
People don’t often peruse law firms’ websites for fun. When someone is visiting your website, they are doing so because they are looking for information on a specific issue. If you want to produce leads, give your visitors a reason to give you their email. For example, provide well-crafted free reports or how-to guides, or some other educational giveaway that people will provide their email in exchange for. For example, these prospective clients may be looking for information on how to save money during a divorce, or what to do after a car accident. This kind of information is valuable to people and they are willing to “pay” for it by providing their contact information.
Another thing to keep in mind here is that this information should be written in layman’s terms. Make sure these reports or educational material are written in an easy-to-red, jargon free format.
- Use one of the top three lead generation tools
When you’ve found a company to provide your lead generation (or are doing it yourself), you will find the most success using the top three lead generation tools for law firms, which are:
Email marketing
Content marketing
And SEO
These three tactics can help you generate real, viable leads for your firm that will result in actual clients. This is because email marketing and content marketing both play off the idea of offering something to people in exchange for their contact information. You need to entice people if you want them to provide you with contact information.
As for SEO, bumping your company’s website up in results—especially when those results are linked to something like a report or an article—never hurts.
- Lead generation allows for discrete advertising
If you’re the type of law firm that prefers a more discrete form of advertisement to billboards on the overpass, lead generation allows you to have your potential clients forwarded to you discretely. This kind of discretion often helps your clients feel more comfortable as well. Most people requiring legal help are not interested in advertising their need for it. Instead, your client information is provided to you for you to reach out privately.
- Social media is always important
Some law firms eschew social media, but if you want more clients your firm will need to learn to get on board. Social media provides businesses incredible platforms to connect with potential clients. It’s almost a guarantee that your clients use social media and that they use it to locate and review businesses they have worked with or want to work with in the future.
Through social media platforms, you can provide potential clients with links to direct them to your site’s content. As discussed above, this content should be relevant to your clients’ needs and written in plain language. By directing prospective clients to this content, you give them the chance to read through the content by providing their contact information.
Final point
It’s important for law firms to have a strategy when it comes to lead generation. It’s not enough to just have a website—your competitors have websites too—it’s what you do with it that will help you achieve the results you’re hoping for with your business. Getting more potential clients through lead generation is not only feasible; it’s also a great way to increase your business and your law firms’ earning potential. You just need to know how to harness that power.