Digital marketing is the term that accounts for all marketing efforts that occur online. Social media, YouTube, Google Reviews, SEO, and your website contribute to your firm's digital marketing strategy. Without one, you can’t have a modern, robust legal marketing strategy, and if you don’t have that, it’s unlikely that your law practice will reach its potential for growth and success.

To help you maximize the number of people visiting your site each day, we’ve curated several ways to generate viable leads. There’s something valuable here for every law practice, and we’re confident you can build a strategy that attracts your target audience.

If you don’t yet have a functional marketing strategy for your firm, do not panic! Even if you’re totally new to online marketing, we can help you understand and implement the basics. These 15 tips will benefit your law firm marketing journey no matter your practice area or location.

Read on for 15 of B12’s favorite digital marketing strategies to help your marketing plan grow your practice’s client base.

15 digital marketing strategies for law firms

1. Build a great website

The first and most important step in a law firm’s digital marketing is to build a professional website. Your site is where you’re likely directing all of your online traffic, so it needs to make a great impression on visitors.

To ensure that your website is convincing to potential clients, we recommend that you work with experts who keep up with the latest web design trends. If you can build your site using a platform or designer that’s well-versed in web design specifically for law firms, that’s even better! This will guarantee that your site has the tools and design that’s popular in your industry and that your competitors have.

You also need high-quality messaging tailored to your practice area. This can be in the form of web page copy and blog posts, both of which appeal to search engines and prospective clients. Compelling, benefits-oriented copy that demonstrates your expertise and presents actionable next steps for your website visitors can boost important metrics like clickthrough rate, time spent on the page, and conversion.

If you don’t have an online presence yet, you can check out our tips for building a great website and let our AI build your website draft to see what’s possible for your law firm’s website.

2. Start using social media

Perhaps you think social media isn’t relevant for a law firm, but trust us, you’re behind if your practice isn’t already using it. It has quickly become a dominant piece of a company’s online presence, whether you want to share information with your audience or you want to hear directly from them.

Creating a legal marketing strategy on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook is about building up a rapport with users and establishing yourself as a trustworthy entity. You can project authority to your followers and feed by sharing news relevant to your firm or the larger industry, offering some free advice, and advertising content that lives on your website.

Another tip that works exceptionally well for law firms is sharing success stories and reviews from past clients. This will make them more likely to work with you again and will put you on the radar of their followers and friends.

3. Create strong SEO content

SEO (search engine optimization) content is content that’s designed to make your website appear in Google searches. While paid search ads can be effective, we're going to focus on organic search, which tends to have longer-lasting results, making it worth your investment of time and money.

There are two types of searches important to law firms. The first opportunity is local searches, which are when someone searches for “best (your specialty) law firms.” You want your firm to be in the top five results of their search. In a local search, Google prioritizes firms that are in the same area as the searcher, e.g., “divorce lawyer in New York.”

The second opportunity is informational searches, and these are important for law firms focused on particular issues that are relevant for a national audience. For example, DoNotPay, the world’s first robot lawyer, is creating a content series about parking tickets in every major metropolitan area.

SEO content helps you accomplish that goal. It’s too deep of a subject to completely tackle here, but mostly, SEO is about understanding how Google picks those top five results and then doing everything you can to be in the top five.

The experts at B12 can help your law firm build a general and local SEO strategy. B12's SEO efforts will also ensure that your law practice is listed on popular legal directories like FindLaw and general directories like Yelp.

Once you understand what a search engine algorithm wants, you can start adding SEO-tailored content to your website in the form of blog posts, video marketing, image alt text, backlinks, and so on.

4. Start an email marketing campaign

Email campaigns have been around for a while, and surprisingly, they’re still considered effective. Despite all of the different platforms and mediums available for communication now, email marketing appears to be here for the long haul, which means you should leverage it in your law firm marketing.

An email campaign is a marketing tactic that involves sending emails to past, current, and potential clients to encourage them to do business with you. Your campaign could highlight a promotion, new service, or available appointments. Figuring out what to include in these emails, how often to send them, and how to adapt them to your target audience is crucial to their success.

There are several platforms that can make your email marketing a success, including B12, which offers some starting points and shortcuts related to email campaign services.

5. Optimize your website for all devices

This one should be a no-brainer in 2023, but we thought we’d throw it out there just in case. If your website doesn’t look right or load properly on mobile devices, you’re majorly hurting your conversion potential.

Mobile internet usage has increased by 222% in the last five years, making up the majority of internet users today. That means more people are going to visit your website from their phone than they will from their laptop (if they even own a laptop anymore!).

Fortunately, optimizing a website for mobile is easier than ever these days. When picking your web builder or developer, make sure to choose an option that offers mobile optimization.

6. Take advantage of client reviews

We touched on this briefly above, but we want to reinforce this important point. As a law firm (or any other business in the service industry), reviews are going to make or break your business. They should be one of the cornerstones of your law firm marketing strategy.

With that killer website we’ve been talking about, you can directly advertise your best reviews by showing highlights of them throughout your site. You can even build a testimonials page to make finding the reviews easy on your website visitors.

We also recommend creating a referrals program with a corresponding landing page on your site, where you incentivize previous or existing clients to help you reach new clients. This creates client loyalty and helps you drum up new business.

7. Use SEO linking techniques

Circling back to SEO, let’s talk about link-building. Links are those little blue, underlined bits of text you see everywhere online. They’re a powerful way to drive traffic to your website, as potential clients don’t have to know who or what you are to click on them.

The most powerful linking tool in SEO is backlinking. Backlinking is a fancy term for when someone includes a link to your law firm on their website. If Forbes publishes an article about you and includes a link to your website in the article, that’s a backlink — it “links back” to you.

Now, as great as a Forbes piece would be for your business, you can’t afford to wait for it to happen. So, instead, using that SEO content we mentioned earlier, you can backlink to other websites (preferably not other law firm competitors) in exchange for them to backlink to your website. As you publish more content on your blog, your chances of receiving backlinks will increase.

8. Have specialized web pages for each of your services

This one is directed at law firms that offer multiple types of legal services, so if you’re a niche law firm, this tip might not be as relevant.

To the rest of you, we’re going to talk about specialized web pages. This is a simple idea that might take a little more effort when building your website but will make the experience for potential clients much more straightforward.

Let’s say you’re a family attorney law firm, and you offer services like settling divorces, drawing up prenups, and handling custody agreements. Rather than having one generic webpage that lists all of those services, you can create separate pages for each one, detailing which lawyers handle which types of cases, post testimonials specific to those specialties, list your pricing, etc.

This makes it much easier for potential clients to figure out exactly what you offer, how you provide it, and what they can expect from you.

9. Streamline your firm's branding

Giving your website a recognizable brand is a great way to set you apart from the competition, especially since many neglect this aspect of law firm marketing.

Branding your firm involves creating a high-quality logo, a beautifully designed website, and crafting an image, voice, and tone that clients will learn to expect from you. This will give your firm an identity, which is crucial to your marketing efforts. If you’re not confident in your writing and design abilities, we recommend hiring a creative expert, like the ones at B12.

10. Incorporate video marketing into your strategy

Video marketing is one of the most powerful methods of marketing today. Of the businesses using video marketing, 85% feel it is essential to their marketing plan. It’s a swift way to attract potential clients and give your law firm a voice. What makes video marketing so great is its simplicity. You can take nearly any aspect of your law firm and break it down in a way that’s easy for your clients to understand in video.

11. Use pay-per-click advertising

Pay-per-click advertising is a cost-effective way to take your law firm marketing up a notch. Mainly, it involves paying someone else to push links to your service. Every time one of those links is clicked, you pay them a small sum.

You can create PPC relationships with just about anyone on the internet, including Google and other search engines. It’s a great way to incentivize others to share your brand.

12. Create a high-quality blog

Though we’re long past the blogging craze of the early 2000s, written content still dominates the internet. Blogs are an opportunity to give your law firm a personality and a purpose in the lives of potential clients. Regular readers (and even first-time readers) are more likely to choose you as their representative if they like your blog.

If you’re not sure what kind of legal blog content to create, answering common questions is a great place to start. Law is esoteric to most of the public (hence the rigorous education), so share what you’ve learned with the world and raise their awareness. They’ll reward you with their business.

14. Add live chat features to your website

One last tip for your website design is to add a live chat feature. You can have a human or a chatbot on the other side of this feature, but either way, it’s a great way to provide fast customer service to anyone visiting your website and to encourage engagement.

A live chat feature can be on your Contact page or available all over your site as a little chat bubble. If you want to seem reachable and personable, take some time to implement this quickly rising trend. It’s one of B12’s most popular integrations!

15. Use technology to automate your marketing needs

Finally, automate as much of your business development and online marketing as you can. Automation is one of the most powerful tools available to the legal industry today, and we encourage you to explore some of the exciting platforms out there.

Learn more: 16 ways to promote your website, increase traffic, and gain clients

Here at B12, we use automation to build professional websites with the tools that businesses like law firms need to reach prospective clients and sell legal services online. We have creative experts ready to work with you on your website design, SEO, content marketing, and more.

For more tips on legal marketing and building a successful law firm website, browse our Resource Center or get started with B12. Whether your firm specializes in personal injury, family law, or another practice area, we're well-versed in how to build an online presence that reaches your desired client demographic and keeps them coming back.