An increasing number of consumers look for lawyers online. While referrals may still be a major channel of leads for your law firm, having a website, local business directory profiles, and a broad social media presence play a crucial role in bringing in business (and verifying your business's legitimacy for word-of-mouth prospects). A significant online presence announces your business, building trust and credibility so prospects and leads feel confident taking the next step in reaching out.
In this post, we’ll review five tactics laws firms can utilize to build trust and credibility through digital marketing and develop a more prominent presence within your legal specialization.
Using Online Resources to Build Trust for Your Law Firm
Digital marketing is a broad category, encompassing everything from web design and PPC ads to an online blog and newsletter. When your firm prioritizes law firm digital marketing, especially the creation of online resources, you build a library of marketing resources that can be used repeatedly to connect with potential clients.
However, it's essential to remember that quality is central to achieving your objectives. Churning out high volumes of content that doesn't match your audience or your audience's needs can be a costly and ultimately fruitless strategy. Instead, developing high-quality resources that authentically help your audiences is better. That builds trust and makes audiences more confident in your professional capabilities.
With that essential note in mind, consider these five approaches to building online trust and credibility with a digital marketing strategy for your law firm:
1. Share Legal Knowledge with High-Quality Content
A business blog, a collection of eBooks, or a regularly scheduled legal podcast is a great way to share your legal knowledge in an engaging and convenient medium. You can create and distribute:
- How-to guides
- Discuss the specific instances that merit hiring a lawyer
- Insight into relevant legal precedents
- Information about local, state, and federal law that your prospective clients will care about
Your firm can share this content as articles on your blog, snippets in an email newsletter, or blurbs on your social media platforms. You can also transform the same core content into videos and webinars. Publishing these resources demonstrates your expertise. It also makes your website easier to find when prospects seek answers to legal questions.
Providing these resources for free also associates your law firm's brand with goodwill and a willingness to help while also giving prospective clients a pathway to reach out for further questions about their specific situation. In situations where their issue is unique, reaching out allows them to gain clarification from your firm’s expertise, where you can further convince them of your credibility. Answering general information regarding a cut-and-dry issue demonstrates your firm's trustworthiness and increases the chances of them reaching out directly to hire.
2. Prioritize SEO for Your Legal Site
Search engine optimization offers a cost-effective way of helping your firm appear in searches and generate leads for ongoing marketing messaging. Over 33% of potential clients begin searching for attorneys online – which is also why 49% of law firms claim web leads are the best marketing channel for their law firm.
Your law firm must appear early in Google’s search results for queries related to your services. While paid ad campaigns can push you into Sponsored Ad placements, SEO is the long-term practice of making search engines decide your web content provides the best answers for people's searches.
You can do this by:
- Making the technical organization of your website very clear to bots and search engines
- Creating high-quality, long-form content centered around very specific key terms, like 'What do I do if my dog bites someone in Sacramento?'
- Regularly refreshing and updating content to include up-to-date sources and more refined keywords
- Creating backlinks to your site on reputable third-party websites
Optimizing your content to keywords relevant to your industry and clientele increases the odds that people will find the knowledge and information you share online. It helps your firm make your valuable content more useful by letting it bring in organic web traffic.
3. Maintain a Professional Website
Your efforts should point to one core hub – your professional website. Local business directory profiles, guest articles, email newsletters, and social posts should all push viewers toward your website, where they can reach you, schedule a consultation, and begin using your services.
That means you need a high-quality website to serve as that destination. A crisp, clear, and accessible web design that looks modern is a must, and your website needs to serve audiences on both desktops and mobile devices with minimal lag. Ideally, your website will have all the tools visitors need to convert into paying clients with an appointment-setting tool, testimonials to establish social proof, multiple channels for direct communication, and any other widgets that can connect you with clients.
4. Leverage Client Testimonials
We briefly mentioned testimonials, but they are some of the most essential content for establishing trust and credibility. Client testimonials function like word-of-mouth referrals among strangers. When prospective clients see authentic testimonials about your expertise, quality of service, and speed, they're much more likely to believe it than if you had touted those attributes yourself.
Make it a standard practice to ask clients for testimonials and reviews in a non-invasive manner, such as including a survey link at the bottom of correspondence or in billing confirmations. Then, publish them all across your website. Feature them in your books, have clients leave reviews on Google and Yelp, and make sure there's no question whether your clients trust you.
5. Engage Customers Through Social Media and Email
When most people think of digital content marketing, they often think of web content and blogs. But today's audiences prefer multiple channels of outreach. For example, you can engage with prospects and clients through emails, share blogs, general newsletters, or specific resources, and conduct direct email outreach. You can also send emails asking for testimonials.
Social media is another excellent channel for lawyers, even (or especially) if it doesn't spring to mind. With engaging social posts, you can connect with audiences on topics they care about and stay top-of-mind. You can use it to share your content by posting informative tidbits that link to specific blogs. That will help earn readers for blog posts as you get them to rank on search engines.
Put Your Online Strategies to Work with Support from McClatchy
When you have a law firm, spending time on your business is just as important as spending time in your firm. Building a website, creating high-quality content, and staying active across several digital channels will bring you more visitors, prospects, and leads. At McClatchy, we have a long history of helping businesses share and develop their brands, reach new audiences, and build stronger bonds of trust with clients. Our audience reaches over 75 million unique visitors whose online behavior and interests are well-known over years of interacting with them.
Reach out today to start building your digital marketing strategy for law firm growth and start winning more business.
