How to Do Digital Marketing for Lawyers – Beginners Guide

As a lawyer, you can leverage digital marketing for lawyers to drive visibility, gain traffic and attract new clients for your law firm. A number of top lawyers are already leveraging both digital marketing and AI to drive their visibility but most new law firms are not.

With regulatory frameworks like the Rules of Professional Conduct (RPC) and the famous Rule 39 which regulates legal advertising, most lawyers do not even bother but there are ways you can position your legal practice for visibility without breaking the rules.

A number of your favorite famous lawyers have used these digital strategies to position their brand for recognition. And I’ll be sharing some of these strategies with you in the following paragraphs.

Create a Professional Website

A website is your first official contact with a potential client. it is where the world will learn about you, your legal services and every other details. So, you need a website at the core of your digital marketing strategy.

Now, before getting a website, you need a domain name and web hosting. Usually, your web developer will get this purchased on your behalf but you’ll have to keep in mind to create a domain that aligns with the brand name for your law firm, area of practice etc.

After getting a brand name, you can go ahead and hire a web developer to build a website for your law firm.

While building your law firm website, keep in mind to build for the following:

• Simplicity: Outside getting a professional website, you need a platform that is simple and easily accessible by users.
• Mobile Friendliness: Majority of web users will be accessing your website from mobile devices. Make it easy to access for your audience.
• Clear Call to Action: Your pages should have a clear call to action that will guide your users on the next steps forward.

If you’re able to get your website done well, you’ve successfully gotten on your first steps to unleash digital marketing for lawyers, regardless of your year of call.

Optimize for Visibility

Now you have a website and you’re all set to use digital marketing for lawyers to build your own visibility. But here’s your next step, optimizing for visibility.

What this simply means is getting your entire website to be easily visible to your potential customers whenever they are making searches on the web using search engine platforms like Google or AI search options like ChatGPT.

To get started with this optimization, you’ll have to understand your search keywords. Like I mentioned earlier, search keywords are those phrases people type into the search engines when they are looking up things online.

You’ll find those phrases relevant to your area of practice. Usually, SEO specialists working with you are the ones that will get this sorted but it is still good to have an idea about your search key words.

If you’re offering legal services in areas like Technology Law, Oil and Gas Law, Intellectual Property Law etc, these practice areas in themselves are also search keywords. In fact, all your areas of practice can be considered as search keywords as well.

It is now your SEO specialist that should use these keywords, expand and use them to optimize each of the relevant pages on your website using Law Firm SEO strategies. Doing this is very important.

Outside your web pages, consider important areas like Meta Titles, Meta Tags, Meta Descriptions etc. Also pay attention to getting these properly optimized.

Build a Social Media Presence

You now have a professional and well optimized website and you’re all set to leverage digital marketing for lawyers for your next stage in practice visibility. This is where social media comes in.

Social media is at the center of digital marketing for lawyers. It is the platform where you get to interact with clients, build and engage from scratch and of course, shape perception about your brand.

Depending on your preferred area of practice, get on the top social media platforms with the largest number of your target audience, build your professional profiles on those platforms.

Supposing you’re totally new to the platform (which I don’t think you are), after building your profile, consider studying the platform to understand the kind of content that works there, how people are interacting with that content and how you can create them.

The following are the top social media platforms for lawyers and the kind of posts you can easily post there:

• Facebook: If you’re here, you’re going to be making a lot of written content alongside image-based posts and some videos.
• Instagram: Instagram thrives on Images and Videos. Be ready to post this kind of content if you want to build on this platform
• Twitter (X): On this platform you’ll post a lot of short witty intellectual content
• YouTube: This is a platform that posts mostly video content. As a beginner, you can leverage it to build huge visibility, alongside your website and other platforms
• LinkedIn: A top-rated platform for professionals. You’ll need this platform especially if you’re targeting top rated clients

You can use any or a combination of platforms based on your own goals but it is important that you share content relevant to the audience and popular content format on the platform.

Create & Share Content

Be it digital marketing for lawyers or general online marketing, content is the engine room of digital marketing. It is what drives visibility, traffic and engagement.

As such, you want to be able to create valuable and customer centered legal content that will not only be helpful but capable of getting a potential client to come back to your platform.

Regardless of your preferred platform, the following are things you have to keep in mind while creating legal content for a law firm website:

• Know your Audience: Understand their needs, the kind of content that will meet those needs and how you can create it in a way that stands out.
• Create Easy to Use Content: Content creation might start with you as the legal creator but it ends with your user. They are at the center of your content creation journey so you have to create content they can understand and use quite easily.
• Create Consistency: Both your search algorithms and users love consistency. Show up consistently and overtime you’ll get even more users and better visibility.
• Promote & Share: Don’t just create and abandon your content, promote it. Ask your users to share them. This will create a wider visibility for you and your brand.

There are a decent number of legal content creators out there. To get a decent visibility, you have to stand out. So, after taking all the steps here, also ensure that your content is exceptional.

Build Thought Leadership

It is true that advertising is highly regulated in the legal profession but thought leadership has given most legal professional a high ground to get ahead in terms of visibility in the legal profession.

Think about some of the leading legal professionals in your country and their hot takes on important legal topics and social issues. And why they are giving those takes.

In the era of digital marketing and social media, it is now even easier to build a platform and get your voice heard whether you’re a legal professional or not. But you have to be strategic about it.

Also, using digital marketing for lawyers as the cornerstone for your visibility definitely means that one of your primary mechanisms is going to be digital. And there are many ways to build digital thought leadership as a legal professional.

• Strategic Content Creation: I have already mentioned how you can use content creation and marketing to build your brand visibility as a lawyer. You can also leverage these strategies to build thought leadership by creating, sharing and distributing content strategically across social media, your blog and on other people’s platforms.
• Write eBooks, Case Studies, Opinion Articles: Write and Publish books and digital documents on hot topics in your area of practice where you have adequate expertise and experience. You can publish them on your own- or third-party platforms.
• Get Cited on Publications: Share your opinion on important and trending legal and other social issues that bothers on your area of practice and beyond. This can come in the form of guest posts, opinion, op-ed on publications etc.
• Take up Visible Pro-bono Cases: There are some pro-bono cases that can position your career in the public eyes. Take up these cases and you can build visibility for your brand while also providing a free service, where it is very much needed.

Thought leadership can be a great tool in your journey to using digital marketing for lawyers to position your law firm but you have to be very strategic as you get on with this.

Leverage PPC Advertising

Compared to most others, the legal profession is very conservative, with regulations that makes overt advertising a bit difficult for lawyers. This has made most lawyers to abandon anything advertising entirely.

But there are ways you can legitimately use digital marketing for lawyers to position your brand either as a law firm or as a lawyer. And pay per click (PPC) advertising is one of them.

PPC is an advertising program that works with social media and search platforms where advertisers pay a specified amount whenever a user clicks on the ad.

Remember, overt advertising can also come as part of pay per click advertising so in line with the RPC, I am not advocating for the use of Social Media Advertising or Search Engine Advertising to try to circumvent the system.

However, instead of promoting your business directly, you can consider using PPC to promote your website, blog posts, eBooks or special publications.

While these may not directly be promoting your practice, it will promote resources built by your legal brand and this can lead to improved visibility for the brand.

Let’s say you are organizing a special law clinic or short program for law students or young lawyers, sponsored by your organization; you can use PPC to promote this to reach a wider visibility while also positioning your brand at the center of it.

Measure and Adjust your Strategy

Just like it is in any other field, digital marketing for lawyers can be hard but with the right strategies and consistent monitoring and adjustments, you can evolve a plan that works for your brand. This is why measuring is important.

So, you do not merely want to create a marketing plan for your law firm, you want to measure your success at intervals.

Study your metrics, analytics platforms and observe all feedback mechanism. Find out what digital strategy worked? Which one did not? Beyond that, find out how well you’ve grown your brand using these strategies over a specified period.

If a particular strategy does not work, overhaul it and set up a new one. Where a digital strategy is outdated, get over it and engage with the new ones.

Leverage technology’s ever-changing system. Try to understand how generative AI can serve your goals as a lawyer. And how you can leverage its systems to help your brand in a way that is compliant.

Above all, use your feedback to better position your brand for an even more improved outcome.

Final Words

As a legal marketing specialist, I do not merely believe that digital marketing can transform your brand presence as a lawyer, I have worked with a number of brands to reposition their online presence using strategic marketing.

And I want to reemphasize that with a well optimized website, engaging social media platform, valuable content and strategic thought leadership, you can get your legal brand in front of your customers.

I am sure that by now you would have realized the potential of digital marketing for lawyers and how it can reposition your brand presence.

But, the decision to get started on the journey to improved visibility is all yours to make. And you can start this journey with us today. Right here.

Now, it’s your turn. What are your challenges when it comes to digital marketing for lawyers? Drop your comments below.