Top 25 Client Acquisition Tips for Family Lawyers
Clicks and views are vanity metrics. Good family lawyer marketing is about generating leads. Follow these tips to create a lead-generation machine for your law firm.
1) Offer Free Initial Consultations
The initial consultation is a chance for you to build a relationship with your clients and earn their trust. Give a free 30-minute consultation to potential clients and answer their questions to the very best of your ability. Provide as much value as you can during that time. The better you identify the client’s core concerns and demonstrate that you can resolve their problems, the more likely the client will hire you.
2) Build Your Email List
Your law firm newsletter is a powerful marketing tool that should not be underestimated. Use your website to capture emails by putting a newsletter signup form on your blog page and individual blogs. Capture emails in person by hosting events and collecting people’s names and email addresses at the door. Always be building your email list. See our Newsletter Sign Up Form below as an example.
3) Start An Email Newsletter
If you don’t already have a firm newsletter, then start one. Email newsletters are a powerful outbound marketing tool because they go straight to people’s inboxes. However, there are things to keep in mind. The content in your newsletter must be high-value content. Average content is no good. Send out newsletters at regular intervals, and send them as often as you can provide high-value content. Don’t sacrifice quality for quantity when it comes to newsletters – they should be your very best pillar content.
We suggest converting your blogs into newsletters. Doing so ensures your newsletters are always fresh, relevant, and useful to your audience. You can also include firm news, recent wins, new hires, employee spotlights, sponsorships, speaking appearances, podcast appearances, and other firm events in your newsletters.
4) Do Community Service
Do good in your community, document it, and share it on your platforms. Community service builds trust and goodwill with your tribe. Share evidence of your good works, and your community will reward you by steering your business your way. Take photos and share them. Giving back to your community is a great way to build relationships and build your practice.
Volunteer for local organizations you care about. Attend and sponsor local events to build brand recognition and goodwill in your community.
5) Update Your Practice Area Pages
If your website isn’t converting traffic into leads, your practice area pages are likely part of the problem. People who visit your practice area pages are ten times more likely to become clients than people who visit your blog.
Your practice area pages should be 2,500-5,000 words and should answer every question a client may have about the topic. Go into deep detail. The better you answer clients’ questions, the higher you will rank, and the better your page will convert readers to leads. The practice area page should mimic a sales conversation, answering every question and objection the client might have.
Have a dedicated page for each of your practice areas and sub-practice areas. The practice area pages are the backbone of your SEO. They should be your strongest content. Poor practice area pages mean poor SEO.
6) Check Your Site for Speed and Mobile Functionality
Slow loading times and poor mobile functionality are silent killers of your SEO and may be sabotaging your marketing efforts. Check PageSpeed Insights to get your website’s speed and mobile friendliness scores. If your website is not in the ”green,” it is underperforming. Contact your developer or hire us to optimize your website for speed and mobile friendliness. Don’t lose leads due to a glitchy website.
7) Put Testimonials on Every Page of Your Website
Testimonials, reviews, and case studies are your strongest evidence that you are great at what you do. But here’s the catch: very few people visit testimonials pages. The solution is to put testimonials and five-star reviews on every page of your website in conspicuous places. Make them as visible as possible. Your best evidence is useless if nobody sees it.
8) Update Your Testimonials
A complete testimonial has the person’s photo, job title, company name, company logo, links to their profile and business, and a headline. In some cases, this may not be appropriate out of respect to client confidentiality. However, the more information you can include, the more persuasive the testimonial. Our testimonial below is a good example. Use this as a template to make your testimonials as persuasive as possible.
9) Follow Up Promptly with Potential Clients
Many lawyers are poor at following up with leads, and as a result, they lose clients. Develop a system for you or someone from your office to promptly follow up with every lead. Following up is a simple way to increase your conversion rate. Don’t lose leads due to poor follow-up.
10) Streamline Your Intake Process
Prepare questionnaires for incoming phone calls and initial consultations. Write down answers to your client’s most common questions and objections. Revise and update your questionnaires to fine-tune them. Create a standard procedure for signing clients and continuously update it as you improve your closing techniques. Organizing your intake process into repeatable steps assures quality and allows you to refine the process.
11) Leverage Word of Mouth
Encourage friends, family, and satisfied clients to refer people to your law firm. Recommendations from friends and family are more trustworthy than ads and other forms of marketing. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising. And the best part? It’s free.
12) Be Empathic and Provide Emotional Support
Family law often presents issues that are sensitive and emotionally charged. As such, your law firm’s marketing should prioritize empathy and the client experience from the beginning. Ensure your content and marketing material attend to clients’ emotional needs. Be supportive and provide reassurance from the start.
13) Create Guides and Checklists
Provide detailed guides and checklists for common family law processes like marriage, divorce, marital agreements, and adoption. Describe each step of the process and the information and documentation necessary at each stage. Use visual graphics that make the processes easy to understand. Provide links to commonly used forms and other resources. Simplifying complex processes demonstrates your value and earns the client’s trust.
14) Warn About the Risks of Do-It-Yourself Options
Discuss in detail when and why it is necessary to hire a family lawyer. Highlight the benefits of hiring a family lawyer versus do-it-yourself options. Highlight the pitfalls of trying to navigate family law processes without a lawyer.
15) Network with Mental Health Professionals
Develop relationships with marriage counselors, therapists, and psychologists who can refer clients to you. The relationship is symbiotic because you can refer clients to them as well.
16) Sell Closure and Peace of Mind
Emphasize closure and peace of mind in your messaging. Offer solutions that save time and money and reduce conflict and stress. Be a calming presence and a voice of reason.
17) Demonstrate Expertise in Related Practice Areas
Family law often overlaps with other practice areas like business law, tax, and estate planning. Demonstrate your expertise in these related fields. Create practice area pages and blogs for them.
18) Discuss the Litigation Process
Discuss the litigation process, including the risks and the costs. Divorces can get massively expensive, especially when litigation is involved. Educate your clients about cost-effective solutions. Discuss dispute resolution techniques like mediation and collaborative law and when they might be appropriate for your clients.
19) Warn Against Common Pitfalls
Educate your clients about common mistakes. Tell them what not to do based on errors others have made in similar situations. Doing so demonstrates your experience and your value.
20) Develop A Method to Secure Testimonials
Create a routine for securing testimonials from clients. Some clients may not provide testimonials, and that is okay. Develop a method for asking in a way that is polite and sensitive to the issues the client is facing.
21) Blog About Specific Scenarios
Write about topics that mirror your clients’ situations to prove you can solve their problems. Choose blog topics that apply to your client’s specific scenarios. Outline the benefits of your services. Demonstrate what makes you uniquely able to resolve the client’s problems. Categorize your blog so readers can easily access the information relevant to them (divorce, adoption, etc.).
22) Provide Tips for Peaceful Resolution
Provide tips for achieving a peaceful resolution in conflict. Be empathetic and provide emotional support. Discuss emotional issues and how to manage them.
23) Network with Other Lawyers
Build relationships with other lawyers in person and online. Lawyers in different practice areas are valuable referral sources, and the relationship is mutual because you can also refer cases to them. Join professional associations and attend their events to meet other lawyers in person.
Use LinkedIn to build relationships with other lawyers online. The best way to do this is to comment on their posts and contact them via DM.
24) Track Performance Data
Track your SEO and PPC data with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Ads. Doing so allows you to allocate more resources to what’s working and adjust what’s not. Continuous data-based updates are necessary to stay on top of the competition.
25) Hire An Expert Family Law Firm Marketing Company
Good law firm marketing is about getting leads, not just clicks and impressions. We will create a lightning-fast, mobile-friendly website for you that ranks for the most lucrative keywords in your industry. We will structure and design your site to convert readers into clients.
Anybody can build a website. Building a website that generates leads is a different story.
We offer a complimentary 30-minute consultation where we’ll ask questions about your practice and create a detailed marketing plan for you based on your responses. There is no cost, and the marketing plan is yours to keep.
Schedule your consultation today!