What is lead generation for lawyers, and how do you attract new clients to your law firm? Is the only option to buy leads from an agency, or are there other legal marketing methods that are more affordable and sustainable long-term?
Below, we answer all these questions and more as we dive into lead generation for law firms.
What Is Lead Generation for Lawyers?
Lead generation is the process of attracting new leads and bringing them into your sales funnel. A sales funnel is the multi-step process that guides your leads from casual interest or awareness to actual clients.
Lead generation for lawyers is a broad effort that covers everything from word-of-mouth marketing and referrals to billboards, social media, and more.
Anything that brings a new client to your law practice, whether it’s a television ad or your grandma telling her quilting group about your law practice, falls under the lead gen umbrella.
In short, lead generation for lawyers is the collection of tools you use to bring new clients into your firm.
Lead Generation Agencies
Often people use the term “lead generation” to mean “lead generation agencies”. But these companies are only one small piece of how you can generate leads and far from the only way to get new leads.
Lead generation services do the work of attracting leads and making sure they’re both legitimate and interested in your services. They use many of the same tactics that we’ll discuss later to get prospective clients to call them.
Once they have a lead’s information, they pass it along to their clients (for a fee, of course). The law firm can then follow up with that lead, talk to them about their needs, and sign the case.
As we’ll discuss, buying leads from attorney lead generation services can be a helpful piece of a larger marketing strategy. But the term “lead generation” goes beyond the work these agencies do and encompasses tactics you can use to bring clients directly to your law firm.
The Lead Generation Process for Law Firms
Your lead generation process should guide potential clients through the four steps of a sales funnel.
- Awareness – The first step is to make leads aware of your law firm. Although this may sound simple, it can actually be one of the most challenging steps. Most of your strategies to generate leads will be focused on this first step of the sales funnel.
- Interest – Once you have your leads’ attention, it’s time to gain their interest. They need to believe that you’re capable of handling their case and that you’ll do a better job than your competitors. This is where your content strategy and web design come into play.
- Decision – Next, you need your leads to decide to hire you or learn more about you. Frequent CTAs, testimonial and results pages, and banners with previous client reviews can all impact this stage.
- Action – Finally, you need the lead to take action and contact you. The best thing you can do at this stage is make it easy. Links to your contact page, frequent CTAs, and a solid intake system can all help improve your lead conversion.
Remember, most of the strategies you use to generate leads are aimed only at the first stage of the sales funnel.
Once a lead is aware of you, it’s up to your law firm’s website and intake to convert them to a paying client.
How to Generate Leads for Your Law Firm
There are several strategies that can help you generate leads for your law firm. While each of these strategies can do some good on their own, they work best when you use them together.
Word of Mouth
Word of mouth can be a fantastic technique for generating leads for your law firm, especially when you’re working on a limited budget. This strategy relies on people personally recommending your law firm to others they know.
Word of mouth can be an effective and affordable way to grow your law firm’s reputation and bring in warm leads. In fact, studies show that clients are 88 percent more likely to trust a recommendation from someone they know than from any other channel.
But this approach is time-consuming and can be difficult to track since it relies on organic conversations.
Networking
One of the best ways to begin word-of-mouth marketing is by networking.
Get to know the other professionals and leaders in your market, and not just in the legal industry! An accountant or doctor may be just as likely (if not more) to send a potential client your way as a fellow lawyer.
Your local chamber of commerce can be a fantastic place to start these efforts. Many of these organizations routinely hold meet-and-greet events, so attend as many as you can.
And remember, networking is a two-way street. When you come across a client who’s looking for an accountant or doctor or travel agent, be sure to mention the professionals you’ve met!
Those people might be more likely to send clients your way in the future if they know you’re doing the same for them.
Conferences
It’s also a good idea to attend conferences in your practice area and connect with fellow lawyers.
Conferences offer learning opportunities and are great places to start building your network of colleagues (and competitors).
When these lawyers come across clients who they can’t or don’t want to work with, they may refer them to you.
Now, it may sound strange to make friends with your competitors, but it’s one of the best ways you can get ahead in your market. Being on good terms with other lawyers in your practice area can open new opportunities for referrals, professional development, and genuine connection.
At the conferences you attend, make sure to go to as many of the social events as you can. Introduce yourself, show interest in your colleagues’ work, and take note of their names.
Community Engagement
Most importantly, look for ways to get involved with your community! While professional connections are important, you want to become a household name in your market and someone the people trust.
Volunteer at community events, sponsor local charities, do fundraisers, and attend school sporting events. Shake hands at church, be kind to baristas and waiters, and get involved with community organizations.
The more you’re out and about, making connections with the people in your area, the better your results will be.
Referrals
Another fantastic way to bring new clients in the door is with plenty of good reviews and referrals.
There are two sources you can get referrals from: other attorneys and former clients.
- Attorney referrals – Sometimes, lawyers in your market will run into clients that they aren’t able to take on. Many lawyers prefer to send these clients to another law firm in their network, rather than outright rejecting them. If you’ve got a good relationship with that lawyer, they may start directing those cases to you.
- Pros – The leads you get tend to be a little more reliable, since they’ve already been “vetted” by another lawyer. They’re also warmer, since you’re coming recommended from a lawyer they already trust.
- Cons – You may have to pay huge referral fees (possibly up to 50 percent of your legal fees from the case). The other lawyer can stop sending you cases at any time and for any reason.
- Former client referrals – Clients who you’ve worked with in the past may send their friends and family to you when they need legal services. This is different from word-of-mouth marketing, because referrals tend to be a little more structured and often come with an incentive for the referring client. Incentives can include gift cards, vouchers, or even cash.
- Pros – Like attorney referrals and word of mouth, this method tends to produce warm leads. And because you’re not paying referral fees, it’s more affordable than attorney referrals.
- Cons – This method may not be a great option for new law firms, since it requires you to have former clients. It can also be unreliable, both in frequency and in quality of leads.
Remember those conferences we talked about earlier? They’re one of the best ways to bring in more attorney referrals.
The best thing you can do to get more former client referrals is to provide every client with the best experience you can. Beyond that, offering incentives and an easy referral process can make it worth a client’s time to send you a referral.
Social Media
Social media is one of the most accessible and useful marketing tools for businesses today.
Almost 70 percent of US adults use Facebook, and another 47 percent use Instagram. This means that social media gives you a tremendous opportunity to reach a huge portion of your target audience.
Social media posts can be a great way to grow your brand awareness and drive traffic to your website without the expense of traditional marketing.
It’s relatively easy to manage on your own if you don’t have the budget for a professional coordinator at first. And the campaigns you run help strengthen your brand.
If you do decide to manage your social media yourself, you have to dedicate time to it. Creating an Instagram account isn’t going to do you any good if you never post on it, and managing those accounts properly can be time-consuming.
Social media marketing is also one of the slower forms of generating leads. It takes a while to grow a big enough following that you start getting cases from those channels.
When you’re developing a social media strategy, it’s important to focus on providing more helpful content than sales content. Remember, your followers come to your page to see useful information, not to hear a sales pitch.
Aim for a 70/30 split between informational content and sales content.
You also want to focus on visually engaging content. Photos get far more traffic than text posts, and videos get more than photos.
Aside from posting visually appealing content, it’s important to work on building and engaging with a community.
Respond to comments, encourage your followers to message you with questions or topics they’d like to see you discuss, and then follow up on creating that content.
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing gives you the opportunity to connect with leads who are already searching for legal services, rather than trying to cultivate lukewarm leads.
This approach to generating leads encompasses all your online marketing efforts. It can include organic and local search engine optimization, paid ads, and even social media.
One of the best things about these strategies is that the more time and resources you put into them, the better returns they generate for your law firm.
We’ve discussed the finer points of search engine optimization for lawyers in other posts. But in simplest terms, SEO focuses on aligning your website with Google’s best practices to help it show up higher in search engine results.
Digital marketing is a powerful tool for lead generation because it helps you connect with very warm leads who are actively searching for legal services. And because your platform is Google, which handles about 8.5 billion searches per day, this approach is almost infinitely scalable.
The biggest challenge of digital marketing is that it can be tricky to get right on your own, especially when it comes to SEO.
You may need to invest in hiring an SEO agency for lawyers to avoid wasting time and money on ineffective efforts.
And even with professional help, SEO for lawyers takes time to start working well. It’s also most effective in combination with some of the other marketing strategies we discuss here.
But with the right law firm SEO company on your side, you can get a fantastic return on that investment in the long term.
Organic SEO
There are two basic types of SEO: organic and local.
Organic SEO works on improving your law firm website to show up in informational searches – that is, searches that are looking for more information about a topic.
Examples of informational searches can include “what to do after a car accident”, “how much does it cost to get divorced”, or “dui laws state of Florida”.
There are several components of an organic SEO strategy, including
When you get your organic SEO right, your website will start showing up on the first page of Google search results. Not only does this help to establish you as an authority in your market, but it also connects you with leads who aren’t yet at the decision stage.
If you’d like to learn more about how to improve your organic SEO, check out our resource page on the topic!
Local SEO
The other type of search law firm leads tend to run is called “transactional”. As you might guess from the name, these are searches that users run when they’re looking to make a purchase or sign up for a service.
Examples of transactional searches in the legal industry can include “personal injury lawyer in [city]” or “divorce lawyer near me”.
When a user runs these searches, Google shows a map with the top three results in their geographic area. This is called the map pack, or the local pack, and you’ve likely seen it when you’ve searched for things like “coffee shop near me” or “mechanic near me”.
Local SEO focuses on getting your law firm to show up in the map pack.
It uses many of the same techniques as organic SEO. But it focuses on geo-targeted keywords like “Dallas personal injury lawyer” or “Chicago criminal defense lawyer.”
If you’d like to learn more about how to make it into your local map pack, take a look at our resource page.
Paid Ads
In addition to your organic and local SEO efforts, running Google ads can be a fantastic way to supercharge your digital lead generation.
Local service ads (LSAs) and pay-per-click ads (PPC) are both popular ways for lawyers to get their names in front of more leads and grow their firms.
- LSA – Local service ads appear when a lead searches for a specific service in their area. These ads appear above both organic results and PPC ads, but they are limited by geographic range.
- PPC – Pay-per-click ads appear above organic search results and are not limited by geographic range. You get charged a fee each time a user clicks on your link.
Of course, the key to LSA and PPC ads is to select the right keywords so that you show up in relevant search results.
They can also be a fantastic way to approach remarketing – reminding leads who have already encountered your name in other places about your business.
While running targeted online advertising can be a great way to expand your reach and stay at the top of leads’ minds, you don’t want to rely entirely on this tactic. Paid ads work best as one tool in a broader lead generation approach, not the basis of the entire strategy.
Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing is what many people typically think of when they imagine law firm advertising. This strategy can encompass TV ads, radio ads, and billboards.
Traditional marketing can be a great way to grow your brand recognition, and it can actually build more trust with leads than some other lead generation strategies. Many people feel like a company with billboards and TV ads is more “legitimate” than one running only social media ads.
The big problem with traditional marketing is that it’s incredibly expensive.
- Billboards can cost up to $16,000 per month with design expenses, and that’s just for one. Many experts recommend you have at least five billboards per campaign, and you’ll need more than that if you’re in a competitive market.
- A local TV ad can cost about $20 per 1,000 viewers (for context, the average TV ad in Dallas reaches about 665,000 people a week), plus up to $50,000 in production costs. National ads tend to cost about $115,000 and up for air time alone.
- Radio ads can cost up to $5,000 per week, depending on where you’re running the ad and how long your spot is.
And unfortunately, as soon as you stop paying for these ads, you lose all the benefits they were bringing to your law practice. Unlike search engine optimization, they won’t keep working if the budget runs out.
It can also be challenging to determine how much of a return you’re getting on all that investment, since you may have no way to tell what made a client decide to call you.
That being said, traditional law firm marketing can be a great way to strengthen your other marketing strategies. A lead may be more likely to click on your law firm’s website or refer a friend to you if they’ve seen your name on billboards or television ads before.
Purchasing Leads
And of course, you can always buy leads for your firm from a lead generation service.
Lead generation services handle all the work of searching out people in need of your services and vetting those leads. The agency will make sure the leads they collect are real people in need of legal services.
Your firm can then pay that company for those names and contact information.
While this is a quick and easy way to generate leads, it comes with some downsides.
- Higher chance of cold or dead leads – Unfortunately, many lead generation services don’t care about making sure you get quality leads that are worth your time. They may not send you exclusive leads or properly vet those contacts. You can waste a lot of time sorting out the viable leads, and you may actually damage your reputation with some prospective clients along the way.
- Less brand recognition – When you focus on generating leads through all the other avenues we’ve discussed, you build your brand recognition. When you buy leads, you skip over all that recognition and trust that can generate leads in the longer term.
- Not sustainable long-term – Because buying leads is expensive and doesn’t gain you the same brand recognition that organic lead generation does, it isn’t sustainable long-term. As your firm grows, you’ll need to buy more and more leads, which eats up huge chunks of your profit margin.
There is a time and place for buying leads. But it’s critical to put resources into organic leads so you can keep growing into the future.
Are Lead Generation Companies Worth It for Law Firms?
Lead generation services don’t have a very good reputation among lawyers, and not without reason.
The truth is that many of these companies don’t do a good job. Too often, attorneys end up losing money in those efforts.
Larger law firms tend to see better results from lead gen services since they represent more lucrative accounts for those companies.
Buying leads can be a useful part of a larger marketing strategy. If you find a good company that provides quality leads, the investment may be worth it. But it definitely shouldn’t be your only tactic for bringing in new clients.
Think of buying leads like paying rent.
If you can’t afford to buy a house or you aren’t ready to buy one yet, renting is a much better option than being homeless. And even once you do own a home, you might occasionally pay for a vacation rental.
But at the same time, all that money you’re pouring into rent isn’t getting you any more equity in the home.
The other lead gen methods we discussed are more like paying on a mortgage.
Yes, you still have to dedicate budget to them every month. But that money is buying you “equity” in brand recognition, search engine rankings, and law firm reputation.
The Importance of Law Firm Client Intake
As you consider all your lead gen options, it’s critical to remember that none of these tactics work if you don’t have good intake.
Your marketing efforts work to bring prospective clients to your intake team. If that team isn’t on top of their game, it doesn’t matter if you have the best legal marketing in the world. You still won’t sign more cases.
Before you put any resources into generating leads, make sure your intake process is working well. Your intake specialists should be pleasant, compassionate, and helpful, and you need to make sure information isn’t getting lost in communication.
Generate More Leads for Your Law Firm
Lead generation for lawyers covers a variety of strategies, from social media and SEO to traditional marketing. While it can be helpful to buy quality leads from time to time, it shouldn’t be your only strategy.
In fact, using a blended approach to generate legal leads can help you get the best results from every tactic.
If you’re looking for more ways to generate leads for your law firm, LawRank is here to help. We provide legal marketing that works, from search engine optimization and web design to PPC, LSA, content marketing, and more.
Contact us today and start getting honesty, transparency, and results from your legal marketing firm.
