When you’re trying to grow your law firm, one of the concepts you’ll run into very quickly is lead generation. You may hear a lot of business resources talking about lead generation, buying leads, and developing leads.
But what are leads, and what is lead generation? Can you buy leads and if not, how do you bring more leads into your firm?
Below, we answer all these questions and more as we dive into lead generation for lawyers.
What Is a Lead?
A lead is any potential client or someone who is considering hiring you, but hasn’t done so yet.
Leads can come in a variety of stages, from those just browsing your website for information to those who are about to contact you about their case. Ideally, your website and other marketing materials should work to nurture leads at every stage, building their trust in you and working to lead them further through your sales funnel.
What Is Lead Generation?
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 is a broad effort that covers everything from getting your name out in the market to nurturing leads to convert them to clients. It can include a variety of marketing efforts, client relationship management protocols, intake processes, referrals, and so on.
In short, lead generation is the collection of tools you use to bring new clients into your firm.
Steps of a Sales Funnel
There are four steps to a sales funnel: awareness, interest, decision, and action.
Awareness
As you might imagine, the first step of a sales funnel is to make leads aware of your company. This can be as simple as seeing your name in an ad, hearing it from a previous client of yours, or finding you on a search engine.
Although this may sound simple, it can actually be one of the most challenging parts of the sales funnel. You have to beat out all your competitors and the other noise on the market to make it in front of your leads.
SEO, social media marketing, paid ads, referrals, reviews for your firm, billboards, and more can all play a role in bringing people to the awareness segment of your sales funnel.
Interest
Once you have your leads’ attention, it’s time to gain their interest.
You need to convince your leads that you’re trustworthy, experienced, and knowledgeable. 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.
Leads may come to your site looking for information; a good content strategy can help to ensure they find the answers they need. And a good web design can make it easy to find that information and may even make you seem like a more reliable source.
Decision
The next step after getting your leads’ information is to convince them to make the decision to hire you or seek more information.
The key to this step is showing a lead how much they stand to benefit from hiring you. Ideally, a lead should have already decided that you’re the best person to handle their case long before they even make contact with you.
This is another step that relies heavily on your web design and content strategy. Every page of your website should aim to do two things: provide helpful information and convince leads that you provide an excellent client experience.
Frequent CTAs, testimonial and results pages, and banners with previous client reviews can all work to guide your leads to a decision.
Action
Of course, the final step in your sales funnel is action: you need the lead to take action and contact you.
This may seem like a natural step after the lead has already made a decision, but it can actually be a bigger challenge than you might think. If you don’t believe it, think about all the times you’ve procrastinated on calling your insurance company or setting up a doctor’s appointment.
The best thing you can do to guide leads into this final step of the sales funnel is to make it easy. Links to your contact page, frequent CTAs, and a solid intake system can all help to improve your lead conversion.
Build a Strong Site
As we mentioned, a good website is critical if you want to bring more leads into your law firm.
Good Design
Not only can a good website design make it easier to navigate your website, it can also build trust in your leads.
A good web design makes you appear more professional and reliable – something legal clients are looking for in their advocate. It also reduces frustration when leads are exploring your website. You want an intuitive design that loads quickly and is optimized for both desktop and mobile devices.
A skilled web designer will also be able to optimize your site for search engines to help improve your rankings.
Bios
As you’re planning your website, remember: people want to hire people. Having bios of the lawyers in your firm can help leads feel a connection to your staff.
Be sure to include pictures of all your attorneys and preferably of your staff. Write bios that cover each attorney’s education, experience, specialties, certifications, and personal interests.
As a bonus, you can also use these bios on attorney registration sites!
CTAs
As we’ve mentioned, having plenty of calls to action throughout your site can help make your sales funnel more effective. The more you give leads an opportunity to reach out, the more likely it is that they’ll take one of them.
A good CTA should be specific and should come with a link. Instead of saying, “consider hiring us,” say something like, “schedule a free consultation with us today.” This gives leads a specific action to take then.
And, of course, each of these CTAs should include a link to a contact page. But remember – while you want at least one CTA on every page of your website, putting too many in can become tiresome.
Create Captivating Landing Pages
Once you have traffic moving to your site, you need to hook leads and bring them further into your sales funnel. One of the best ways to do this is with captivating landing pages.
A landing page is the page on your website that visitors “land” on when they first click a link from another source. So if you’re running social media ads, the page you link in that ad is a landing page.
Although every page of your website should be optimized for SEO and reader experience, landing pages are specifically geared toward new leads. They may focus more on CTAs, including for actions like subscribing to a newsletter.
Email marketing can be a great intermediate step in your sales funnel. It gives leads a chance to get to know you more before they make a final decision about which lawyer to hire.
In addition to strong CTAs, landing pages should be filled with your most compelling copy and images. These pages are meant to convince your leads that they could not ask for a better lawyer than you.
Show off your best results, discuss what sets you apart from your competition, and include pictures of your lawyers. By the time a lead gets to the bottom of your landing page, they should be convinced that you’re going to get them the best possible result in their case.
Use Social Media Marketing
Social media is one of the most accessible and useful marketing tools for businesses today.
Close to 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 can be a great way to grow your brand awareness and drive traffic to your website.
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.
And aside from posting visually appealing content, it’s important to really work on building and engaging with a community. Run contests, respond to comments, and encourage your followers to message you with questions or topics they’d like to see you talk about.
Design a Good Content Marketing Strategy
Another great way to bring more leads into your site is through content marketing.
For one thing, a solid content strategy can do wonders for your SEO. The more quality content you have on your site, the more likely it is that you’ll show up in leads’ search results.
Good content can also help to lead your client further into your site. Once they read one article, they may want to follow an internal link to another article or visit your “About” page to learn more about your firm.
We’ve written a guide on content marketing for lawyers if you’re looking for ways to improve your content strategy!
Run Ads
Of course, running ads can be a fantastic way to supercharge your 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 get the right keywords selected so 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 ads 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 them. They work best as one tool in a broader lead generation strategy, not the basis of the entire strategy.
Get Reviews and Referrals
Another fantastic way to guide leads further through your sales funnel is with plenty of good reviews and referrals. This strategy plays into the transition from the interest to the decision stage.
When a lead comes to you via referral, that is a very warm lead. They’re already inclined to trust you because someone they trust trusts you, so all you have to do is live up to the hype.
Reviews can act as a sort of proxy for referrals. When someone finds your firm through a search engine or social media, they’re going to want to know if they can trust you. Reviews from previous clients can help to convince that lead that you’ll help them get justice.
If you’re having trouble getting reviews for your firm, check out our blog post on the topic!
Offer Free Consultations
One of the best ways you can help move leads from interest to decision to action is by offering free consultations.
When you spend time talking to a lead about their case and what they can expect from the legal process, they begin to trust you. You have a tremendous opportunity to show them that you’re the best person to handle their case and that you’ll provide an amazing experience for them.
A consultation may also make a lead feel somewhat indebted to you, as well as giving them the feeling that you’re already the lawyer handling their case. Both of these can make the lead much more likely to hire you.
And by making the consultation free, you reduce any risk the lead may face in calling you. After all, what do they have to lose?
Now you may be concerned about the time you lose doing consultations for cases you don’t wind up taking on. But your firm can still benefit from these cases too!
When you take the time to talk to someone about their situation and explain why it isn’t a viable legal case or refer them to a lawyer who’s better suited to handling the case, they come away feeling like you really care about helping them get the best resolution in their situation.
From there, you have a couple of opportunities to bring in further leads. Ask this lead to leave a review for your firm, even if you don’t take their case on. They may be so grateful for your time and advice that they leave a great review.
And that lead may be more likely to recommend you to people they know who might be in need of your services!
Buy Leads
And of course, you can always buy leads for your firm.
Lead generation services handle all the work of searching out people in need of your services and, in some cases, of vetting those leads to make sure they are real people and their contact information is up to date.
Your firm can then pay that company for those names and contact information.
While this is a quick and easy way to bring in more leads, it comes with some downsides.
- Higher chance of cold or dead leads – Unless you’re paying the extra fee for vetted (or “warm”) leads, you have a pretty good of getting leads that are “cold” (unaware of your brand and potentially uninterested in your services) or “dead” (bots or leads with incorrect contact information). You can waste a lot of time sorting out the viable leads, and you may actually damage your reputation with the cold leads along the way.
- Less brand recognition – When you focus on lead generation through all the other avenues we’ve discussed, you build your brand recognition. People in your community become familiar with your firm and may develop some trust in you. When you buy leads, you skip over all that recognition and trust that works to bring you 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 in the 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. When you’re first starting out and trying to build your brand recognition, buying leads can help you get enough cases to pay the bills. But it’s critical to put resources into organic lead generation so you can keep growing into the future.
Bring More Leads to Your Firm
Lead generation can seem complicated and even futile at times, but it doesn’t have to be. A strong website with good landing pages can work wonders to bring more leads into your sales funnel. And a good content marketing strategy, plenty of excellent reviews, and free consultations can all guide leads through your sales funnel.
If you’re looking to bring more leads to your law firm, LawRank is here to help. We provide legal marketing that works, from SEO and web design to PPC, LSA, content marketing, and more. Contact us today and start getting honesty, transparency, and results from your marketing firm.
