Is the Sales Funnel a Meaningful Concept in Law Firm Marketing?

Generic marketing advice is of limited usefulness to law firms. Your legal expertise is not a widget. The rapid changes in consumer tastes rarely effect law firms, except in superficial ways. If you designed your law firm’s logo in the 80s, you might want to update it, but no matter what you do, Bloggins and Associates will never be to 2021 what slap bracelets were to 1989. Still, the sales funnel is a meaningful concept in law firm marketing, just as it is in retail.

The goal of the sales funnel is to engage with and appeal to prospective clients at all stages of readiness to engage your services. The four segments of the funnel are called awareness, consideration, decision, and buy. Well-written legal blog content can make the awareness and consideration segment of your sales funnel more effective, especially if you complement it with other sales and marketing strategies that target other segments of the funnel.

Awareness: Lead Generation

The awareness segment of the sales funnel is about letting the general public know that you exist. It is in your interest for as many people as possible to know the name of your law firm and what it does, even though most of them will never need your services. Personal injury lawyers don’t wish that there were more hit-and-run accidents, and family law attorneys don’t wish that more people would have acrimonious divorces, but you still want everyone to know about you, so they can mention your name when someone does need you. To increase awareness, advertise your law firm on billboards, or sponsor community theater productions or youth sports teams, so that your law firm’s name appears on the program. Perhaps the most important aspect of lead generation is having a website with strong SEO.

Consideration: Lead Nurturing

The segment of the sales funnel is about keeping the attention of prospective clients who have initially shown interest in your law firm. These are some effective lead nurturing strategies:

· A frequently updated blog with detailed information and news on topics related to your practice area

· Email marketing

· Webinars

· Podcasts

Decision: The Last Mile

At this point in the sales funnel, the prospective client has decided to contact you. Your goal is to make the process as painless as possible, so the prospective client doesn’t give up at the finish line. Here are some ways to achieve that:

· Displaying your contact information prominently on your site

· Live chat on your website

· Responding promptly to inquiries submitted through online contact forms

· Offering free initial consultations

From Sales Funnel to Flywheel

In many industries, the “buy” stage of the sales funnel is about turning new customers into repeat customers or “brand evangelists”. (You don’t have to be religious for that term to give you the creeps.) You do, however, want your clients to write good reviews of your law firm online. You achieve this by providing excellent service.

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The legal content writers at Law Blog Writers can provide engaging blog content for your site, turning casual readers into people who recommend your law firm to friends and colleagues who need your services.

Making the Most of a Modest Content Marketing Budget in 2021

The economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are not going away anytime soon. Frugal is the name of the game this year, as it was during the 2008 recession. Even though you have probably saved some money on commuting and hairstyling since you have been working from home, your law firm has probably greatly reduced its operating expenses since the pandemic started and may need to reduce it even more.

Trimming your marketing budget may not be as painful to think about as laying off employees of your law firm or terminating the lease for your office space, but making budgeting decisions is never easy in a pandemic that drags on and on. Marketing is still an essential part of your business operations, and legal blog content is still one of the most effective ways to do it; here are some ways to get the greatest possible return on the money you spend on content marketing for your law firm in 2021.

Decide Which Marketing Strategies Are Helping Your Law Firm the Most

While diversifying your content marketing strategy is generally a good idea in prosperous times, 2021 is not the time to throw all your content marketing strategies to the wall and seeing what sticks. First, assess which of your content marketing activities are bringing in the greatest number of new clients or, if applicable, keeping existing clients coming back. The fanciest and most expensive strategies are not always the best. 2021 is not the time for slickly produced videos or paid social media influencers, if social media influencers ever had a place in law firm marketing.

Decide Which Marketing Activities Don’t Require You to Spend Money

After you decide how much each of your content marketing efforts is helping your law firm’s bottom line, be honest with yourself about how much each one costs. According to Ann Gynn, you can make your content marketing budget go a long way without spending extra money. Whichever marketing activities are already the responsibility of your law firm’s employees or interns, whether it is writing blog posts, posting on social media, or anything else, you know you can keep it. Gynn also recommends audio content, since it is inexpensive to make, and it is suitable for the audience to listen to while driving.

Collaborate with Colleagues

Now that so-called social media has become commercial, it’s time to involve your real collegial relationships for marketing strategies. You and your colleagues can amplify each other’s voices by guest posting on each other’s blogs or trading back links. Your colleagues will be delighted to have a break from the social and professional isolation of the pandemic. Even if you don’t end up collaborating on marketing activities, brainstorming together can help both parties come up with marketing strategies to apply separately.

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Who Should You Hire to Write Your Law Firm Web Content

After seven exhausting months of working from home as a lawyer while being a stay at home parent to your children as they deal with online school, you have reached the conclusion that there are only so many hours in a day. Therefore, you have made the wise decision to hire someone to write content for the blog on your law firm’s website, instead of doing it by yourself, on top of all the other things you are already doing.

Hiring a blog post writer is a much better solution than scrambling to do it yourself when you are already overscheduled, and it is a whole lot better, especially from an SEO perspective, than simply not posting new posts on your blog. Of course, choosing the right person to write blog content that appeals to your target audience and reflects your law firm’s brand identity is no simple task. The ideal hired writer to compose legal blog content for your site is someone with knowledge of your practice area and with commercial writing experience.

Four Types of Writers, and the Pros and Cons of Each

According to Chris Gillespie of Content Marketing Institute, hired writers tend to fall into three categories, based on their professional writing background. He also includes a fourth category of people who can hire, who are professionals in their field first and writers second. Gillespie identifies reasons for and against hiring writers from any of these groups to write your blog content:

· Journalists – They have learned to find and evaluate the credibility of facts on almost any subject, so their writing tends to be accurate. By journalistic standards, though, promotional content is not informative or accurate. Hiring a journalist to write your blog content could work if you want your blog to be purely informational instead of promotional. (Gillespie does not think journalists are a good choice for business blogs, but he is not writing specifically about law firms.)

· Copywriters – They have been trained to deliver content quickly, but their content tends to prize style over substance. Some inexpensive content from copywriting services amounts to little more than “colorless green Seattle DUI lawyers sleep furiously.”

· Novelists – Gillespie recommends against hiring novelists to write blog content; he uses the term “novelists” to refer to people who write in any genre of creative writing, including screenwriters and poets, among others. They are used to making an argument over the span of hundreds of pages, instead of 500 words.

· Subject Matter Experts – In the context of a law firm blog, subject matter experts are lawyers. They have professional knowledge of the subject matter of your blog, but they may or may not be skilled at writing concisely and in a way that is understandable to a non-specialist audience.

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