Many legal marketers and marketing consultants incorrectly correlate new marketing trends with an increased marketing budget. But leveraging the latest marketing trends can actually have the opposite effect, allowing for more streamlined tools, operations, and processes to build marketing efforts and initiatives that are more effective and achieve better results than operating with the status quo.
Nobody has a crystal ball here, but it’s apparent if you’re watching the news that the economy is a bit shaky at the moment and this is causing some concern for business owners everywhere. So, how can your law practice stay ahead of the curve regarding marketing trends but still save money and make good financial marketing decisions?
We’ve compiled a list of our favorite law firm marketing trends that we believe could truly transform your law firm’s marketing efforts while cutting costs, making your teams more efficient, and building strong, more effective marketing departments.
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The Law Firm Marketing Trend to Try if You Value Good Client Communication
Trend 1: Invest in Marketing Automation
We are in the unique position to peek behind the curtain of many law firms. From boutiques to global law firms, one of the most surprising aspects of marketing operations we see is the lack of marketing automation in law firms, especially firms who prioritize digital marketing and have a strong presence on social media platforms.
We see a huge gap between how law firms operate and how they communicate with their legal clients in a way that could be served by digital marketing automation. Law firms are famous for wanting to service their premier and potential clients with exceptional client service, yet do little to automate some of the simplest tasks like birthday cards and work anniversary notes. Our favorite for this is Handwrytten.
Even simple and easy-to-implement best practices in law firm digital marketing processes are often overlooked. Things like proper email segmentation and list review are left to be done for later. This results in the firm’s accumulating higher fees for email marketing tools and potentially mismatched messages going to the wrong audience.
Not only can this leave a bad taste in the mouths of your potential clients, but this can hurt the firm’s bottom line and make it appear unprofessional and out of touch, even to satisfied clients who have been with the firm for years.
Where we see the most opportunity for law firms to benefit from the ease and cost-lowering effects of digital marketing automation is in their post-webinar communications. Often lawyers spend hours developing a presentation for a virtual webinar for a key client demographic only to let the conversation die on the vine by not doing proper follow-up post-event.
By segmenting within an email marketing tool those attendees into a separate list, the law firm could create an impactful marketing message or nurture sequence to further warm that audience and demonstrate expertise, experience, and strong promotional efforts to highlight their attorneys who serve those target clients. This can all be done with a series of email marketing campaigns called a sequence.
Marketing automation is easy to setup and something that can cause a positive revenue impact to legal firms, yet is rarely employed. Furthermore, email automation in your digital marketing processes would not require the attorney to take billable time writing personalized emails to each person who attended the webinar or presentation.
This fast and efficient form of communication even makes it easy to touch base with law firm clients who weren’t able to attend your event, which helps boost the ROI of your event, despite no-shows.
The Law Firm Marketing Trend to Try if You Value Efficiency
Trend 2: Repurpose Your Video Content
We see man law firms leaning into video content, especially short-form video content, lately, and some are doing it better than others. But the firms that are most strategic with this approach are leveraging the video content they produce for more than just a one-off webinar or a quick introduction video on their law firm website. The law firms that are doing video marketing strategically are the ones who are repurposing the video marketing content they create for other social media platforms and audiences.
That type of reusing and repurposing after creating content once isn’t just for a small law firm with a lean digital marketing department. This strategy is a big saver that every firm could use to save on time spend.
But are there big law firms doing this? Husch Blackwell is doing it quite well. Not only do they post regular content to YouTube, but they also repurpose some of it to YouTube Shorts and TikTok.
This approach means that marketing investment in a videographer goes so much further when the content marketing collateral is repurposed across channels to each social media platform, like Instagram, TikTok, and even LinkedIn.
Pro-tip: creating content to be reused in the future might seem like skimping, but it’s actually a strategy that strengthens visibility and continuity of your law firm’s brand.
The Law Firm Marketing trend to Try if You Value Serving Your Clients Well
Trend 3: Productize Your Services
A marketing trend that has caught fire in the tech industry and is becoming more popular as law firms dive into legal operations and technology is the productization of services. With the slow death of the billable hour and the push by clients for predictable rates, we believe the law firms who are ahead of the curve will be leveraging productized service offerings in the future and marketing them clearly and transparently on their law firm websites, similar to the way tech companies market their service offerings.
The reason why this model of marketing efforts works is because it creates predictable pricing for clients while allowing law firms to scale and create predictable workflows, processes, and outcomes for their clients on routine and ongoing legal service offerings.
Productizing your legal services can have a huge impact on cutting costs and ensuring your marketing is consistent yet effective. Your marketing department’s efforts become more streamlined when they don’t have to market many services for various client types.
Your past clients have different needs than new clients and prospective clients. They all require different messaging. The firms invested in client journey mapping and personal development will see that marketing one message (buy our productized services) to a clear audience is far more effective (and cost-effective) than one to many.
A great digital marketing strategy can magnify and amplify the reach and visibility of a productized service offering by unifying the message under one umbrella for single persona type. Combining efforts around search engine optimization, social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, video marketing, and other digital strategies, the law firm that chooses to employ this method will see greater revenue at lower costs and maintain messaging that accurately reflects their core values to the intended recipients of their messaging.
The Law Firm Marketing Trend to Try if You Value a Wholistic Approach to Client Acquisition
Trend 4: Leverage ABM for Sales & Marketing
Account-Based Marketing is just starting to get its feet wet in the legal industry. And it’s one that more law firms should sit up and pay attention to, since it’s a trend that is likely going to change how law firm market, but also spend their marketing budgets.
Account-based marketing flips inbound marketing on its head. Most law firms operate from an inbound marketing funnel approach to their efforts. They target large audiences and seek to move people through a traditional marketing funnel whereby small touchpoints happen over time, leading to a prospect converting into a client.
Whereas Account-Based marketing is focused on cultivating relationships with key target prospects and focusing all marketing efforts on nurturing those relationships to become clients. This is a new approach to marketing for many law firms.
This approach can create a more streamlined and cost-effective approach to marketing because instead of marketing across many platforms and to audiences who may not be within your target audience, a law firm focuses its marketing efforts strategically on those accounts it wants to win.
The result is a better prospect experience and encourages collaboration and cooperation between marketing and sales, or in law firm’s cases, attorneys doing the pitching and proposals.
The Law Firm Marketing Trend to Try for a Long-Term Legal Marketing Strategy
Trend 5: Bring Your Search Engine Optimization In-House
The trend that has the most lasting power is search engine optimization. Search continues to reign as a relatively low-cost, but high-value legal marketing strategy that most firms can employ by leveraging the business development efforts of their existing lawyers. The problem is, most law firm marketers are already overstretched and don’t have the time or capacity to stay on top of SEO trends. And we all know that search engines change their algorithm frequently.
However, you may be shocked to hear lawyers are well-primed for top ranking in search engine results pages like Google with relatively low effort and without the need for an expensive consultant and paid advertising. Many of you may be paying top dollar for consultants to optimize your content and develop a thorough SEO strategy, but it’s not necessarily necessary.
What many lawyers don’t realize is that Google loves lawyers and the content they produce. Generally speaking, law firms are creating content that is well-researched, high-value, and original work. Where most firms go wrong with SEO is they don’t take the time or effort to perform strong keyword research and optimize the content their lawyers produce properly. So, although their content is top-notch, it’s not really law firm SEO or readable by Google’s bots.
So, lawyers are forced to turn to consultants to help them run a technical SEO strategy because they haven’t realized that their in-house marketing teams are completely capable but overstretched when it comes to managing their own website content. And this easy cost could quickly be cut with the right training and support.
The Law Firm Trend to Try for a Better Approach Overall
Trend 6: Rework Your Law Firm Marketing Plan
The final trend we recommend to try to cut costs is to build a better strategy. I know this might sound like it’s going to carry with it some hefty costs, but hear us out on this one.
The most common issue I see in a legal marketing strategy or a law firm marketing plan is it’s built and never implemented.
Law firms are well-known for investing heavily in strategies and plans they never implement. So, before your firm invests heavily in a new law firm marketing strategy, why not revisit the one you have collecting dust on the shelf?
It’s well known that marketing changes rapidly, but that doesn’t mean some of the key demographic research your marketing strategist did for you isn’t relevant today and can’t be reworked into something useful tomorrow.
Marketing strategies do change, especially digital marketing strategies. But generally speaking, law firms don’t change core offerings that frequently and tend to target the same prospective clients for years. Thus, the data and information compiled in even a 3-year-old law firm marketing strategy is likely extremely valuable to your marketing department.
So, instead of investing heavily in something new, try working with a marketing professional you have to build a good marketing strategy and practices that are more timely and relevant to your current goals and initiatives.
