Do you need help with marketing for business lawyers? When you run your practice, you are also running a small business and this means you need to know how to prepare administration policies, handle the business expenses and do the marketing for your business.

As a starting point, we have over one million lawyer profiles on our website. To see if you are listed, go to our homepage and search for your name. You are probably on there. Then make sure to claim your free profile.

After you are done, see our Clearway Profiles page to learn how to use your profile to its maximum potential. If you have a marketing company, you can ask them to do it for you.

There are a lot of different areas of digital marketing. Are you going to focus on SEO, LinkedIn viral marketing, email marketing, PPC, or email marketing? Are you going to focus on getting referrals from other lawyers on Clearway’s website?

The way that you get new clients will depend on your practice areas. Legal marketing strategies will depend on if you are looking for incorporation agreement clients, or if you want to focus on corporate lawsuits.

When hiring a marketing team, find out if they have experience with corporate lawyers. You don’t want a marketer who only knows real estate law.

That’s why we’re here to help with this complete guide to marketing for business lawyers.

Your marketing plan

As a B2B business, you will have a different marketing strategy and plan than other B2C businesses. Your marketing plan should be built around particular strategies and research to be effective.

Before starting social media marketing, or any marketing, you need to know your target audience. Your marketing team can’t help you if you don’t know who your customer is. Below are a few things you will want to talk to a marketing expert about as part of your plan:

Should your business law firm work on search engine optimization (do you have a large enough budget)
Is your law firm website good enough to start marketing for business law?
How much do corporate law ads cost-per-click
What sort of metrics will the marketing expert use?
Before hiring a content marketing company, can they supply you with case studies of their success?
How will your corporate law firm generate word-of-mouth clients (eventually)
Will the leads that you get be high-quality?
What marketing tools do they have at hand? What are their marketing tactics?

You should also be honest with yourself. Do you need lots of new prospective clients right now? Or are your current clients already taking up most of your time?

You don’t want to give new clients a poor first impression of your law firm. If they need to keep doing follow-ups with you, it could lead to you getting a 1-star review on your Clearway profile.

Let’s break down these strategies below.

B2B strategies

In marketing, there can be business-to-business or B2B marketing or there can be business-to-consumer or B2C marketing. If you’re a law firm catering to business law, then you would be using B2B strategies.

B2B and B2C require very different strategies. In B2B you often have a lower volume of clientele but a higher price, compared with B2C which is usually a higher volume at a lower price.

To attract your ideal clientele and build authority, a B2B strategy will focus on education, offering value and interpersonal relationships, and building towards ongoing relationships and long-term goals in this much longer sales cycle.

Branding

In B2B marketing the branding is more focused on positioning than messaging. Your branding should maintain a strong understanding of your ideal client avatar, how you serve them and your place and position in the market.

Branding for a business law firm should retain a laser focus on your niche and establish authority, positioning your law firm as the number one firm for your specific niche whether it be health care practitioners or retail businesses.

If you do a good job at branding, you should be able to get referrals from other business owners.

Once you have your branding, you can work with a web development company on web design and create nice-looking web pages.

Read other interesting legal articles:

Ideal Client Avatars

To successfully establish your business and market to your niche, you will require a complete understanding of your ideal client avatars.

This includes their age, gender, political leanings, social habits, hobbies, pain points and financial position.

Your ideal client avatars should be so detailed in their design that you should have a clear and full picture of the people behind these businesses, what their favourite TV shows are and if they prefer their coffee as a latte or in a cold brew.

Your ideal client avatars are crucial to your marketing plan. After all, if you’re talking to everyone then you’re talking to no one.

In this topic, we also need to address a common mistake made by B2B businesses in their marketing. There is too often a focus on the business they market to and not the people who run the business. It’s crucial to remember in all your marketing copy that you are talking to a human behind a business, not just the business.

Marketing Funnels

Every customer of a business goes on a journey before finally making a purchase. This is even more true in the B2B world where sales cycles are extra-long.

Before you start trying to get new business, work on your marketing funnel.

Your marketing funnels are your customers’ journey to purchase, you must consider the lifecycle of this experience and how to move them through in a way that leaves them with no doubt about the choice they are about to make.

There are several stages to this journey, awareness, evaluation, and conversion.

Marketing for Business Lawyers

At the start of their journey, in the awareness stage, you’ll need to create content such as blog posts, social media posts and infographics that make them aware of the business and what you do for your niche.

You should also be courting positive public relations activities for this stage of their journey as well, so that’s local news stories, podcast interviews and even sponsorship deals.

In the evaluation process, the kind of marketing content you’ll need to create will help the customer evaluate your expertise over competitors and establish your authority. Marketing efforts for this stage should include content that is more heavily focused on education and providing value for your niche, as well as webinars and quizzes.

At the final stage of conversion, the focus is on getting that yes and moving forward with the business relationship. This is something you might do through free consultation calls or client success stories and testimonials etc.

Building Authority

As a B2B business, interpersonal relationships play a much larger role in your business and so establishing trust and authority are key to your marketing strategy in business law.

For this reason, it’s important to showcase your knowledge and build your social authority and trust with your client base.

To showcase your knowledge, you should create a roster of content topics on which you can offer your expertise, in small bite-sized pieces of content. Such as blogs, social media posts and newsletter highlights, combined with client testimonials. Doing this positions you as an expert, that your client can turn to and trust.

You should also be working hard at getting positive reviews from past clients.

You will also want to look into domain authority and page authority. As a business lawyer, you will need to put a lot of effort into link building. This is part of local SEO.

Competitive analysis

To find your position and place in the market you will need to know how your business law firm places for cost and niche within the market.

To complete this kind of analysis you’ll need to find other law firms who cater to your niche and work out their base fees in comparison to yours. You’ll want to find some who charge more and some who charge less.

When completing this competitive analysis, you should also strive to find some business law firms doing marketing better than you in your niche and some that are not.

SEO marketing strategy for business law

There is always something to learn from your competitors whether it’s what not to do or what you could also be doing to increase your brand awareness.

Let’s say you are in Brisbane, Australia… You don’t want to try and rank for “business lawyer” or even “business lawyer in Australia.” That will be way too hard.

Instead, you should make realistic marketing goals. You want to try and rank for “Brisbane Australia business lawyers.”

If you can even get more specific with the area of your legal services, then it makes local SEO even easier. Maybe you go after “Brisbane, Australia incorporation agreements lawyer.”

This is why planning is important as part of your marketing campaign.

Today, being a lawyer often requires you to be flexible and able to adapt to unpredictable situations. In part, this is due to the increasingly changing world we live in where everyone is always out of time. The digitization and globalization of our society have impacted every aspect of the business.

That’s why lawyers need to know how to promote themselves to find clients faster. One of the most effective ways to do this is with the help of the Internet. Hence, here’s a complete guide to marketing for business lawyers with a focus on digital marketing.

Understand Corporate Law

Perhaps one of the most important things you should start with is studying and fully understanding Internet law. Without a good understanding of the legal aspect of the World Wide Web, you won’t be able to market yourself online successfully. Besides, because you are a lawyer, you will likely be expected to know what company compliance law is.

The umbrella term company online compliance law includes such things as cyberlaw, privacy and data protection laws, intellectual property law, free speech, and contract law among others. You probably already know some aspects of these, but you still need to dive deeper into the subject matter to fully understand Internet law.

Marketing for Business Lawyers – Consider Outsourcing

One important thing you should carefully consider before you start planning your marketing strategy is whether or not you will be doing all of your marketing on your own. If you don’t have that much time (or you are unsure about your abilities as a marketer), you can always outsource part or all of your marketing tasks.

You can hire a professional writer from the custom writing reviews site Top Writing Reviews to create content for your content marketing efforts.

This way, you can be sure that all your content will consistently be of the highest standards and will achieve its goals. On the other hand, you won’t have to spend a lot of time creating it yourself.

Define Your Brand

To be able to market yourself successfully, you need to have some kind of brand attached to yourself or to your law firm (if you will be promoting the firm). Your branding strategy will significantly impact your marketing for business lawyers strategy and your success at finding clients.

What kind of brand image do you want to have? Most lawyers will prefer to be associated with words like “professional”, “serious”, and “reliable”. You can choose what kind of image you will have and then make a plan for how you will uphold this image.

Know Your Audience

What goes hand in hand with defining your brand is knowing your audience. In part, your branding strategy depends on the kind of clients you want to find. That’s why you need to know who your target audience is and what appeals to your ideal clients the most.

It’s a good rule of thumb not to consider your audience a monolith. Many different people could become your clients, so you need to target these segments of your audience in different ways. Create customer personas that will represent these types of clients.

Business Lawyers Should Learn SEO Basics

Something else you will have to study is the basics of SEO. Search engine optimization is essential for your website, but it will also be important for your social media and your overall online marketing strategy.

For instance, the keywords you use and how you use them could impact your search rankings and increase traffic which, in turn, leads to more clients. How well you understand SEO will also influence how effective the techniques you use will be.

Use Various Techniques

Speaking of techniques, it’s important to use a variety of different marketing practices to diversify your strategy. This way, you will still do what works best for you and will be able to further optimize your strategy to make it more effective. Here are the most common digital marketing techniques:

Content marketing (including blogging, guest posting, email marketing, video marketing, and social media marketing)
PPC ad campaigns (including native ad campaigns on social media)
Influencer marketing and affiliate marketing
Mobile app marketing

Social media marketing is by far one of the most essential tools available to you. All of the social media platforms today are the places where you can find millions of potential clients as long as you know how to reach these people. The first step is to set up your social media profiles.

Choose the platforms where most of your target audience is. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are good places to start but don’t underestimate other platforms like YouTube, Quora, Reddit, or LinkedIn. Make sure that your profiles look professional and switch on the business model to get additional perks such as analytics.

You can use social media to simply post content and gradually grow your online follower base – or you can go a step further. Reach out to influencers who can promote you and your firm, launch native ad campaigns, start hashtags, etc.

Build Your Marketing Funnel

It is very important with marketing to understand the journey your clients take to get to you and purchase your services. This is pretty much what building your marketing funnel is about.

You will need to do it for each one of your customer personas and take into account different variables, but the most important stages in the funnel to take into account are:

Awareness: The first stage is when your client realizes that they have a problem they need to solve. They start looking for a solution.

Consideration: The second stage is when your client better understands the problem and is now considering different ways in which they could solve it.

Decision: The third stage is when the client starts actively looking for a lawyer to help them and eventually decides to pay for your services.

By defining the touchpoints that your clients go through at every stage, you can better guide potential customers to the final step where they purchase your services.

Even after you have solved their case and helped them, you will likely want to stay in touch in case this client returns in need of your services again.

Use Traditional Marketing

You also shouldn’t shy away from traditional marketing techniques, especially offline ones. Some of the most popular and effective ones include:

Direct Mail
Pamphlets and Flyers
Billboard/TV/Print Ads

Marketing efforts to get potential clients

It can be hard to get potential clients for business law. Once you get them, however, they will likely have many legal issues and work for you to do. It can start as an incorporation agreement, lead to a shareholder agreement, and become ongoing legal advice.

Below are some things that you might want to speak to a marketing company about:

How to get the most out of your marketing budget
How to do law firm SEO (you can pay them for advice and you can do the work)
The amount of time it will take to get on the first page of Google and Bing
What CRM company you should go with
How will your law firm brand appear top of mind with potential customers?
Which social media platforms should you be using?

Marketing for Business Lawyers conclusion

Focus on popular B2B strategies when working on marketing for your business law practice. Carefully consider your branding and develop your ideal client avatars.

Once you have those down pat, map out your marketing funnel and work towards building authority. If you do all of these things you will start to see results which you can then use to perfect your B2B marketing strategies.

While you do have to consider some traditional marketing techniques you can use, you should still mostly rely on digital marketing to attract most of your clients.

There are many tactics you can use, but you should still first understand Internet law before you start promoting yourself. Use the tips in this article to help you successfully promote yourself and find clients.

We hope this article made you think about law firm marketing strategies for business lawyers. Lawyer marketing is hard, and we wish you the best.

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Guide to Marketing for Business Lawyers