As the total number of law firms and legal practices in the US and Canada haven’t seen growth in over a decade, most lawyers get new clients and grow through battling for market share. When it comes to family and divorce clients, there is a lot of opportunity in the market for your firm to grow the number of files it opens in this department on a monthly and annual basis.
Below, we’re going to look at 8 of the simplest, yet most effective marketing tips we can offer divorce lawyers to grow their practices and generate more clients.
1. Create Amazing Service Pages
There are numerous advantages to creating a thorough set of services pages. The most compelling is that it will really make a difference in the number of family law clients that you attract to your practice. A lot of people don’t know a lawyer when they need one, so they’re going to perform an online search. By creating a well crafted and in-depth page for each particular service, you increase the ability for your pages to rank organically in Google and Bing searches online.
Go beyond creating a single page for all of your services and instead, create one for each specific type of case you handle. For instance:
- Family law (general page)
- Divorce
- Separation agreements
- Child support
- Child Custody and Access
- Alimony and spousal support
Each of these pages could be at least 1,000 words in length, providing an overview of the process, how your lawyers help with these matters, frequently asked questions and links to helpful resources where they can learn more. The more specific and better you can explain the processes and services you provide to site visitors, the more likely you are to attract a larger audience and convert more visitors into paying clients.
2. Write Articles & Evergreen Content on your Clients’ FAQs
In the section above, we discussed going over frequently asked questions in your service pages. However, much of the time, you won’t be able to adequately answer FAQs in 1 or 2 paragraphs. In this case, this is the perfect opportunity to pull out your keyboard and write a more in-depth response. Think about all of the nuances that are entailed in a divorce or separation, from child custody, support payments, division of assets and so on. There’s nearly an unlimited amount of opportunity for you to inform potential clients about their family law and divorce matters.
When you write your articles, a tendency for attorneys is to say that it’s going to depend on a case by case basis. I understand that. However, your best bet is to write about the most common situations and inform people on what typically happens. This isn’t legal advice, it’s just information. So, it’s okay to be clear about that, but it also means you should attempt to provide as much valuable information to prospects as possible. The more people you can help with your information, the more your phones will start ringing with new consultations.
3. Include at least 1 Call to Action per Page
Typically, when someone realizes they want your service, especially when its to solve a painful issue, such as a legal matter, people will seek out a way to contact you. However, you can always improve the number of phone calls and consultation requests you receive by using call to actions appropriately.
It will increase your conversions significantly to the point where it makes the difference in thousands of dollars of billable hours. An anecdote I’d like to share about my personal experience, is how I’ve observed my buying behavior ever since I became serious about marketing. It’s difficult to always know when someone who has interacted with your brand is convinced and compelled to purchase a product or call a company. Ensuring that there’s a call to action always within reach to that visitor increases the odds of them following through with that desire to take action.
Make sure that you also include a call to action that is optimized for mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones. One of the incredible things about mobile is that most of these devices have a SIM card and can make a call immediately. Many legal marketers dismiss this as they see massive conversion rates on desktop. This is a mistake. By offering a big CTA for making a phone call immediately, you’ll greatly increase the odds that visitors turn into callers. This one addition that we offer to law firms that hire us is more than worth the time to add that call to action.
4. Build a Referral System
Family law is an area of practice that can hugely benefit from referrals and word of mouth. There are a couple of ways you can amplify the effects and results from referrals.
Develop a Stellar Reputation
The most critical piece of your referral relationships is client relationships. By simply improving your firm’s internal operations and efforts, you’ll make a notable impact on your client’s perspective and experience of your law firm. Following up to emails and communications promptly, ensuring that they receive adequate value from your services, set reasonable expectations for their cases and most importantly, represent them to the best of your abilities.
As the number of files you open and close continues to grow, so will your referrals naturally snowball and accumulate over time. Once you have these components nailed down, you can start doing some more advanced referral marketing and business development such as email marketing and newsletters.
Incorporate an Email Marketing Strategy
Email marketing is a powerful tool that almost any practitioner or firm should have in their marketing arsenal. Create lead magnets, such as video training series, subscriber-only podcasts, gated content or PDF downloads that people dealing with family and divorce legal issues will want to access. People won’t just hand over their email for no reason. They need to be incentivized. Create a piece of content that you can market on your blog, website or even advertise locally online in exchange for their contact info.
Lawyers and legal consultants report to us that not only does it lead to business from those who download the content directly, but typically referrals from their friends and family are sent to their firm through the use of email marketing campaigns.
Publish a Newsletter
Build up your email or mailing lists and start a newsletter. Get creative about it and understand that you can provide value to future clients, repeat clients and past clients. For instance, past clients of yours should receive your newsletter or content on a monthly or bi-weekly basis. In either a physical or e-newsletter, you can – for instance – give them tips on dealing with a divided family post-divorce process.
5. Position your Firm as Family Law and Divorce Specialists
This is probably a change to your firm that you’ll have to think long and hard about, but it’s highly effective if it’s what you want to focus on. We conducted a study where we found that over 85% of lawyers rankings on page 1 of Google for the term “family lawyer” or “divorce lawyer” in their city positioned their firm as only family law practitioners. This will lend your brand the image of being experts in this area of practice without you breaking bar ethics and advertising rules.
6. Use Social to Share your Articles
Social media is a very effective marketing channel for lawyers, when used correctly. Once you’ve produced articles on specific family and divorce-related subject matter, promote and share it on your law firm’s social media profiles, including Facebook and LinkedIn. Divorce and family matters are an especially good fit for these networks and can drive more traffic to your website at a reasonable cost as well as generate a good number of new leads from a single post. However, if you don’t see leads after a single post, don’t stop there. Sharing content, such as your own articles and legal info on a regular basis will produce the best results.
7. Use Reviews and Testimonials
If you see the value in developing referrals and network effects to generate more clients for your practice, then online social proof is an excellent way to kick those effects into high gear. The number of reviews for online businesses is growing rapidly and there’s no exception when it comes to law firms. As part of your internal process of finishing your work for a client and closing their matter, you should send them an email asking them for feedback and links to your social media, Yelp and Google My Business pages to leave a review. Approximately 20% clients are going to leave you at least one review when you ask for it. So there’s no reason you can’t be garnering glowing recommendations and testimonials now.
Every several months, you can update your website to host these reviews on a page just to showcase your testimonials. You can decide to use their full name if you get their permission, but alternatively you can use their initials, first name and surname initial to mask their identity. Don’t forget to share these on social media once a month or so and give them a shout out for the positive feedback. Sharing this social proof tends to be an effective way of attracting clients too.
8. Advertise on AdWords and Facebook
Two of the online advertising giants, Google and Facebook are perfect places to advertise and acquire divorce clients online.
If you’re facing challenges with appearing on the first page of Google search organically, then you can pay to appear there with AdWords search engine ads. The great part about this is that while CPC’s are typically higher than other platforms, you only pay for the clicks you receive. Conversion rates are pretty high for law firms as well, so when done correctly, you should definitely see a positive ROI from your investment.
Facebook ads are a great way to advertise on social media. Your conversion rates are going to be much lower, but with greater volume in traffic and a significantly lower cost per click, you can attract a swarm of new family law clients from social media ads on this platform. With advanced demographics targeting, you can put your ads in front of people based on age group, gender, relationship status, education level and so much more. These targeting attributes are just some of the basics, but should give you a clear indication why Facebook is ideal for divorce and family matter clients.
Conclusion
Divorce lawyers are in high demand due to, unfortunately, how many failed marriages and relationships we experience as a society. That aside, people need great legal representation so that they can move through this difficult chapter of their lives and get back on track. Use these tips and tricks to generate more business and revenues for your family law practice.
If you’re starting a new practice, you’ll want to focus on inbound marketing such as ranking in search with your service pages and articles. Once you’ve published a bundle of these, move on to sharing your content on social and then advertising. If you’re already well-established, consider working from the inside out, but focusing on your reputation and referrals, then moving onto search and ads.
