Inbound marketing is ideal for many businesses and law firms in particular are really well suited to this kind of marketing. So if you are a lawyer or solicitor and want to see how inbound marketing can help you, then this post will teach you how to grow your business with www.
I have always believed that law firms are perfectly suited for inbound marketing as choosing the right law firm can be a difficult task and so many people these days like to do their own research and are a lot more knowledgeable about the law.
People want to learn before they buy. If your company gives them the information they seek and answer all of their questions, then they are more likely to choose your firm. By creating a well-crafted lead nurturing campaign you could see a big increase in the amount of sales leads you convert.
How Inbound Marketing can help draw Traffic to your Website
We all want traffic that converts and the best way to acquire such traffic is via three different methods: blogging, search and social.
Blogging
If your law firm is not blogging then you are really missing out on clients. Blogging is one of the major corner stones of inbound marketing. The problem is that so many businesses blog the wrong way.
Too many solicitors just talk about themselves and not about the problems their clients face. When someone makes the decision to use a firm, there are always reasons why they chose that firm over another.
Why not sit down with your sales team and come up with a list of common questions people ask them every day and then use these questions to create great content. Here are just a few I found after doing a quick search on Google regarding litigation.
- Does a certificate of pending litigation expire?
- Does litigation include arbitration?
- Does litigation stop foreclosure?
- How does frequent litigation affect international business?
- How much does a litigation cost?
- Is litigation better than arbitration?
- How can a business avoid litigation?
As you can see these would be great ideas for content. If you were to create content around these questions (assuming you provide litigation services) you will draw in people who are interested in your services.
People are most likely in the research phase at this point, so a follow up lead nurturing campaign would a great way to turn them into clients.
Search Engines
The competition for the litigation questions in search are more likely to be low and if you can create really in-depth helpful content, you will be more likely to show up when someone does a search on Google for these questions.
The fact they are searching for question like this means they are interested in your services and are more qualified than someone who types ‘solicitors’ into Google.
Social
Social media is a great place for you to connect more with your clients and engage with them on a more personal basis. Social is also a great place to share your content. Sharing your content on social media sites will help to spread your expertise to people who may be interested in it.
Turning Traffic into Leads
Now that you have ‘interested people’ visiting your website it is time to turn these prospects into clients. We need them to trust you and you must make that as easy for them as possible.
The first thing you need to do is get them to surrender some kind of identifiable information. Usually at this stage that would be an email and name.
Let’s take the question “How can a business avoid litigation?” You have created a really informative piece on your blog answering this very question. Now that the prospect has read the content they feel more informed about the subject, you now need to create a call to action to move them along your sales funnel.
You could have a call to action strategically placed at the bottom of the blog post to entice them to download “The Ultimate Guide to Litigation”.
Example call to action.
This will then take them to a landing page offering more information on why they should download this helpful guide and a way for them to give you their name and email address. Similar to one in the picture below taken from A2L Consulting.
Example landing page
Once they have downloaded your great content you can then begin the lead nurturing process.
Turning Leads into Clients
Now that your prospects have a name we can call these people leads. At this point they are not strong leads and not all of them are going to turn into clients. How you nurture these leads into customers will vary from business to business. So you must test to see which works best for your firm.
I have given you an example of a typical lead nurturing campaign below. I have used an ideal piece of software to build this called Infusionsoft.
Example lead nurturing campaign
Example email nurturing campaign
Lead Scoring and Your Sales Team
Not only can inbound marketing help nurture your clients, it can also help send the hottest leads to your sales team. This will help drastically cut down the time sales spend chasing leads as the leads they receive will have already shown great interest in your services.
By using a system called lead scoring, every action a lead performs on your website will be given points and the more points the leads acquires, the hotter they are. Once a lead gets to a pre-determined score they then can be passed onto sales.
This in time eliminates the need for any kind of cold calling and when the leads comes to you they already know and trust you and will convert at a higher rate.
Customer Testimonials
Why not survey your existing clients and find out why they chose you. This will uncover some of the pain points that your target market has when choosing a solicitor.
Let’s take this example a little step further. Once you have surveyed your clients, create testimonial videos with your best clients and put them on your website.
They don’t have to be long but these videos will not only show new potential clients that you are a trusted company, but will also answer the questions and pain points they have when choosing a solicitor.
Now It’s Your Turn
I really hope this post has helped you to understand how inbound marketing can help lawyers and solicitors. What challenges is your law firm faced with when converting leads online? Let us know in the comments below.