Marketing is necessary for any business to flourish, and that includes your legal practice. With the rise of digital marketing, there are now more marketing solutions available as well as more agencies offering to help attorneys like you implement a wide range of marketing strategies.
Many lawyers find this overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. This article will help you think through whether your law practice needs a marketing agency, how to select one if you decide to do so, and some alternatives you may wish to consider.
Why Does a Lawyer Need Marketing?
Your law firm is a business. It provides a service (your counsel and advocacy) for a price (your fee) that meets the needs of its customers (your clients). In today’s digital economy, all businesses need to engage in marketing tactics to reach potential customers – not only through traditional marketing channels, but with digital strategies such as search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and more.
Effective legal marketing can help your law firm:
- Reach more potential clients
- Generate legal leads
- Improve brand awareness
- Manage your online reputation
- Increase revenue
But marketing, especially digital marketing, requires a wide range of skills that are not taught to attorneys in law school. For many lawyers, it makes sense to find someone else to do your marketing. So how do you decide who to select for that job?
Law Firm Marketing: Should You Hire an Agency?
Hiring a marketing agency can help your law firm boost its online presence with services like website design, targeted advertising, and brand building. An agency can help you stand out in the highly competitive legal field, attract new legal clients, and solidify your reputation as a trusted legal authority.
If you hire a marketing agency, it will give you access to expertise, experience, and the ability to stay ahead of your competition by making the most of cutting-edge marketing tools and technology. Drawbacks of hiring a marketing agency include less control over marketing strategy and execution, the amount of time it takes to establish trust and rapport, and the sometimes inordinate expense associated with many marketing agencies.
When you do a cost-benefit analysis, you might decide it makes more sense to set up your own marketing department to oversee your law firm’s marketing needs. So let’s look at how that compares with hiring an agency.
In-House vs. Marketing Agency: Which is Right for Your Law Firm?
An in-house marketing team can offer you the benefit of direct communication, deep brand familiarity, and a solid understanding of your firm’s culture and values. But this approach can also be expensive, difficult to scale, and behind the trends when it comes to marketing expertise and technological developments.
In contrast, a marketing agency can provide time saving access to marketing experience, expertise, and cutting-edge technology. An agency can help you clearly identify your target audience, develop a comprehensive marketing strategy, select the right marketing channels, and execute appropriate tactics for your marketing needs. Those who specialize in the latest online strategies and tools can help you reach your target audience more effectively.
The bottom line is that hiring a marketing agency can free up your time and let you devote yourself to billable legal work.
How to Choose a Marketing Agency for Your Law Firm
Some factors to consider when choosing a marketing agency include the services they offer, their experience in working with law firms, their reputation, cost, and how well their approach and style fits with your firm and professional image.
Marketing agencies offer practical help with online visibility, attracting leads, and building brand reputation. They can equip your firm to attract more clients and stand out in the competitive legal landscape through:
- Boosting your website’s ranking in search engines
- Running targeted ads to reach potential clients
- Creating valuable content that showcases your expertise
- Managing social media to connect with your audience
Whether you need a marketing agency to handle these tasks and create these outcomes really depends on the size of your law firm.
There are a few good legal marketing agencies that specialize in law and the legal field, but they are generally very expensive and require a level of investment that only a very large firm (such as a national law firm) can justify. If you run a small legal practice it probably doesn’t make sense to hire a marketing agency at all.
Also while agencies can be great for branding, they don’t typically focus on lead generation like we do. Depending on your law firm’s needs or goals, it might make sense to handle marketing with an in-house team or hire an outside marketing agency. But it’s also possible that neither of these options is right for your legal practice.
For most attorneys in private practice, LegalMatch can provide a much better return on your investment.
The financial impact of LegalMatch for me is very valuable. I would tell other attorneys that it’s working very well for me. Financially, my return on investment is a little over 7:1 or 6.7:1. Anything better than 1 is great! Criminal Defense Attorney, Michael W.
I have grown so satisfied with the return on my investment that I extended my membership for another three years. Family Law Attorney, Alan R.
How LegalMatch Can Help
If you run a law firm (with ten attorneys or less), the cost of hiring a marketing agency or setting up an in-house team is most likely prohibitive. And the services that either an in-house team or an outside agency can provide may not meet your needs.
The focus of most marketing efforts is related to branding, messaging, and consumer awareness. These are important, but it takes time for these efforts to turn into clients who are ready to hire you. Even marketing efforts focused on lead generation take time to be effective—if they are effective at all in the sea of advertisements from other law firms.
It might be more important for your legal practice to get new clients today than to make sure your branding is perfect or invest in wait-and-see efforts that may not pay off. This is why, for many attorneys, LegalMatch is a valuable alternative.
LegalMatch is a good investment for what it brings in and what it costs us. I joined LegalMatch because I want to increase my bandwidth on lead sources. LegalMatch is another form of getting the word out. Bankruptcy and Credit Attorney, Peter D.
At LegalMatch, our sole focus is on providing you with new potential clients. These are not cold leads. LegalMatch gives members fast access to people who are actively looking to hire an attorney today.
We do this by providing an online platform where people can share basic information about their legal problem – for free – and be provided with a list of attorneys nearby who regularly work on their type of case.
Because we help people find an attorney anywhere in the United States for most legal problems, we are able to leverage an economy of scale to continually reach new legal client leads on behalf of our member attorneys. Currently, almost a million potential legal clients use our platform each month.
Whatever LegalMatch is doing to generate the traffic, it is working! It creates a steady stream of leads for us. Family Law Attorney, Todd I.
I’ve tried other lead-generating systems that I’ve had to let go of because it just didn’t produce enough traffic and enough leads. LegalMatch has always come through with solid, good leads. General Practice Attorney, Stephen J.
When a potential client with a need in your legal practice area and geographic location submits a case, we notify you immediately. You then have the opportunity to review the client’s detailed case information to determine whether they seem to be a good fit for you. If so, you can use our convenient suite of tools to communicate with that potential client directly and begin moving them through your client-screening process.
By delivering leads who actively need legal help in your area, LegalMatch membership can have a more direct impact on helping you gain new clients and increasing your revenue—which are the goals of marketing in the first place.
Generating Leads with LegalMatch
To help boost your firm’s revenue, LegalMatch focuses on finding and presenting new leads to you so you can focus on practicing law. Our member attorneys regularly tell us that LegalMatch provides them with an efficient and effective way to have consistent access to potential new clients.
Over the last 8 months I got anywhere from five to seven referrals a week and about eleven or twelve hires based on these referrals, which has done a tremendous amount for my business. Family Law Attorney, Jennie H.
LegalMatch is a good, legitimate source of new legal cases. LegalMatch will assist you with finding new potential clients to help grow your business. Employment and Labor Law Attorney, Maxwell L.
Within 2 years my firm was able to retain 52 clients through LegalMatch. It made my firm more successful and at the same time encouraged us to up our game. Family Law Attorney, Michael Spencer C.
When I joined LegalMatch (and it’s the only marketing platform I’m using) I cut my marketing overhead by eighty percent and I doubled my business. It’s been radically impactful for me and my firm. It’s been so amazing. Wills, Trusts and Estates Attorney, Clarke W.
About 80% of my business has come from LegalMatch and it provides a consistent stream of clients. Anywhere from very small matters of simply a few thousand dollars, to dealing with resources in the millions. Business – Transactional Attorney, Timothy C.
LegalMatch membership can provide you with the same outcome as personalized marketing services or campaigns, but much more efficiently because we connect you with potential clients directly.
If you want to learn more about how our services can help you reach your practice building goals, reach out to request a guest pass. We’d love to show you examples of real cases that we can provide in your location and practice area today.
