Let’s face it – given all the resources out there – attorneys have the ability to become marketing gurus and get their firms seen. 

There are training courses on LinkedIn, videos on youtube, free articles, paid-for articles, books, podcasts, seminars, webinars, training courses, retreats. You name it – if you want to become a legal marketing expert, your dreams can come true. 

But who actually has the time or the inclination? 

If you wanted to spend all day marketing yourself you wouldn’t have gone to law school. 

I actually had a chat with a lawyer the other day who said she absolutely hates the fact that she has to know what SEO is. Her life was so much happier BC – before content. 

Let’s start with a little bit about me – I’m a qualified solicitor in England and Wales and practiced in Family Law for about three years. Then I met my American husband and we decided that I really was going to throw away all those years at law school and training, to travel around with him and the Air Force. 

When I first started my copywriting business, I would jump on all these calls with law firm owners and be buzzing with excitement about blogs, website copy, calls to action, analytics, keywords. OMG I could talk about copywriting all day. 

Alas, I was mostly met with a blank stare or a curled lip. Much like your clients don’t care about the specifics of which section of which year’s legislation is going to keep them out of jail, it turns out that business owners don’t care too much about marketing jargon. They just want to rank number 1 on Google. 

Well, to break things down for them, I came up with the ‘ABC Marketing Strategy for Law Firms’ process, which helps them gain more clients through their online presence with NO MONEY SPENT ON PAID GOOGLE OR FACEBOOK ADS. 

I just had to capitalize that because it’s true. Paid ads only work for as long as you keep plugging money into them. As soon as you stop funding them, they disappear, and any trace of what you had to say goes with them. So let’s avoid that if possible. 

A – Aim 

If you talk to everybody, you talk to nobody. 

Have you ever been scrolling through Facebook and been stopped in your tracks by an ad that caught your attention because it describes an issue you’re facing in so much minute detail that you’re left wondering if you’re on the Truman show? 

You need to understand your ideal client inside and out so that your content can be perfectly aimed at them. 

When folk are confident that you get them, they don’t only turn into initial inquiries – they become paying clients, never quibble about their invoice and leave great reviews when they’re done too. 

Getting clear on your aims is more than the ‘who’. It also includes the ‘why’. 

Growing your online presence is all well and good, but the way you communicate online can be used in more ways than just gaining as many clients and fees as possible. 

Your specific aims could be to: 

• Become a Thought Leader – being asked to appear on podcasts or tv 

• Create enough organic warm leads that you never have to work on Fridays again 

• Target a particular type of client and become a true specialist in a niche area 

• Just make a decent enough profit to make it all worth it! 

B – Build 

Whilst your marketing plan will always be a work in progress, there are a couple of items which need to be perfectly in line with your aims in order to build a solid foundation. 

• Homepage that captures the essence of your brand 
• About Page that makes you seem like a real person and not a corporate avatar 
• Services Page that shows you understand your clients issues and how you can help them 
• Mission Statement so that clients know that they’re doing the right thing by parting with their hard earned cash to instruct you 

No matter how many eyes you get in front of, they’re all going to be heading to these pages to decide if you’re right for them. They need to be flawless.

C – Continue 

Climbing the rankings of Google isn’t something that’s going to happen overnight. Anyone who tells you they can make that happen for you is lying. 

To get real, authentic and business-changing results from your online presence, you need to play the long game. 

Posting a short blog once every few months is basically pointless. I don’t even offer to write that infrequently for clients because it won’t get them any results and their money is probably better spent elsewhere. 

Blogs should be at least 1,200 words long – the Google algorithm is great at picking up when you’ve just bashed something out in a rush. And they need to be posted at least twice a month, but ideally more. 

The same goes with social media – either you’re committed to posting consistently or you’re off, there’s really no point being an in-betweener. 

Once you get in a solid rhythm though, and bring the right help on board where necessary, the continuing part doesn’t have to be as daunting as it sounds. 

You can play around with batching content – spending one chunk of time actually creating blogs / youtube videos / whatever your strategy is focussed on but releasing it periodically over the month. 

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Well, there you have it. A whistlestop tour of building a successful marketing strategy in 2022. 

Consistency really is key. As with everything in life, if there was a magic pill you could take to reach all your goals overnight, everyone would take it. But having a plan and promising to stick to it for at least six months will have to do. 

Hannah Meza-Irvine practiced as a divorce attorney in England before starting her legal copywriting firm – hmicopyagency.com