All business begins with lead generation. No matter what the industry is, cultivating a list of potential clients is crucial for success. If you offer legal services in particular, attorney lead generation should be at the top of your to-do list to ensure your firm’s growth..

Lead generation involves reaching out for potential clients to get to know your firm and use your legal services. When done right, you can increase conversion rates and foster brand trust.

If this is your first time diving into lawyer lead generation, these seven tips will give you a good head start. We’ll teach you everything you should know—from the basics of lead generation, identifying quality leads, and turning them into clients to even keeping them loyal.

How to Generate More Leads for Your Law Firm

1. Know the Fundamentals of Lead Generation

In business, there are two ways of generating leads: inbound or outbound strategies. It’s the same in the legal industry. Inbound strategies attract potential clients by offering valuable content. In contrast, outbound strategies involve directly approaching them.

The goal of all lead generation efforts is to attract prospects and bring them into your sales funnel. It means guiding them through the four stages of becoming a paying client: awareness, interest, desire, and action.

• During the awareness stage, potential clients become familiar with your firm and what you offer.
• In the interest stage, they learn more about your legal services and their benefits.
• In the desire stage, they begin to actively consider working with you.
• Finally, in the action stage, they choose to become your client.

By understanding each stage and tailoring your strategies accordingly, you can increase your chances of converting potential clients into loyal customers.

2. Create an Ideal Customer Profile

An ideal customer profile is a detailed description of the prospective clients you want to attract to your law firm. It includes demographic information (e.g., age, gender, income level, and location) as well as psychographic information (e.g., interests, values, and behaviors). Knowing the characteristics of your ideal customer allows you to attract people who are the best fit for your practice and most likely to become loyal, long-term clients.

To better understand your target attorney leads, law firms can try a number of things.

• Analyze your current clients. Identify trends in their demographics, behaviors, and legal needs.
• Get feedback and reviews. Doing this helps you understand what they value in a legal service provider.
• Profile your dream customers. Find an ideal person or entity that you would like to work with and create a profile around them.

3. Use a Mix of Inbound Tactics for Legal Lead Generation

While both inbound and outbound strategies have their merits, the latter has seen a decline. The reason is that outbound methods like cold emailing, cold calling, and targeted online advertising tend to be unwanted and interruptive, annoying prospects.

Inbound tactics, on the other hand, are permissive; they allow prospects to engage with you when and how they want to. And because the prospects themselves initiated the interaction, your strategy is more likely to deliver results.

Here are some of the most effective inbound tactics for lead generation.

Website Marketing

A website acts as a business’s storefront online. Just like a physical storefront, a website sets the first impression customers will have of your business. It showcases your law firm’s brand and services. To entice visitors and leave a lasting impact, your law firm’s website should be professional, easy to navigate, and responsive to mobile devices.

SEO

A law firm’s website wouldn’t work without law firm SEO. It’s the practice of optimizing a website to be at the top of search engine results. As an inbound lead generation strategy, it attracts prospects doing online searches for legal services.

To turn your website into a lead generation machine, follow these tips:

• Research and use relevant keywords.
• Publish website content regularly.
• Build high-quality backlinks.

Social Media Marketing

Another effective lead generation channel is social media, where you can reach millions of people. Each platform has built-in tools that can provide you with comprehensive audience insights in a few clicks.

Remember that people are on social media for entertainment and engagement. So focus on creating posts that are highly visual, such as image carousels and videos. You can also run interactive content such as polls, contests, and live Q&As.

4. Balance the Quantity and Quality of Your Leads

It’s a common practice to get as many leads as possible. The premise is that the more leads you have, the higher the chances of getting more clients.

While that’s true, you should strike a balance between quantity and quality. Here are ways to know if your prospective clients are high-quality:

• Marketing-qualified leads may not yet have the intent to work with you. Still, they qualify because they have shown interest in some way, perhaps by downloading content or opting into your email list.
• Product-qualified leads have used a no- or low-risk version of a product or service. A lead that hopped on a free consultation call with a personal injury firm, for instance, qualifies in this category. Ideally, they can become a paying client because they’ve already had a “taste” of your service.
• Sales-qualified leads are ready to pay for your services. If someone, after some engagement with you, inquires about pricing or requests to speak with your sales team, they’re considered sales-ready.

Get a considerable quantity of these types of leads, and your lawyer lead generation efforts will be worth it.

5. Go Local Online and Offline

Local marketing is also a crucial aspect of lead generation. By targeting your locale, you can attract clients who are looking for legal services in your area.

You can reach customers locally through both online and offline means.

Online local marketing involves optimizing your website through local SEO for lawyers. To do this, research and use location-specific keywords in your website’s metadata and content. Another online local marketing tactic is to use Google Local Service Ads.

Offline, there are more ways to generate legal leads.

• Speaking as a guest at conferences
• Hosting educational seminars or workshops with clients
• Attending industry events to meet other professionals in your field
• Sponsoring local events or organizations to increase brand awareness
• Partnering with local nonprofits or charities to give back to your community

Because these marketing opportunities are face to face, law firms should prepare printed content with a professional design and clear, on-brand messaging. They should also train team members on how to collect information efficiently and follow up with prospects after the event.

6. Invest in CRM Software

Attorney lead generation experts maximize their efforts by investing in customer relationship management (CRM) software. This tool helps you score leads to evaluate their readiness for sale.

You can rate each lead on parameters like website visits, email opens, ad clicks, resource downloads, seminar attendance, and newsletter subscriptions. Leads that get the highest points are high-quality leads. You can then forward these high-quality leads and their contact information to your sales team for pitching, pushing them further down the sales funnel.

Use the data stored in the software by generating reports. Get to know your target audience more, check which content is most effective, and create strategies based on data.

7. Nurture Leads to Boost Conversion

Your sales team is responsible for the sales pitch. Yet throughout the lead generation process, you can increase the chances of conversion by developing your relationship with your leads. This process is called lead nurturing.

Lead nurturing involves creating and sharing content that’s relevant and useful to your leads to establish trust and credibility. This can include

• web content such as blogs and landing pages,
• social media campaigns, and
• personalized emails.

With these content marketing strategies, your law firm stays top-of-mind with prospects, resulting in more sales and even successful upsells.

As you nurture your leads, don’t forget to keep scoring their readiness to buy using your CRM. Make adjustments as needed to optimize your results.

Digital Marketing: The Secret to Successful Lead Generation for Law Firms

Lead generation can spell success or failure for your firm. It lets you acquire potential clients, get your brand and offers out there, and target an audience with high chances of converting into clients. Follow the seven tips outlined here, and you will win more clients and grow your practice.

The backbone of a reliable lead generation process is digital marketing. Local Business Marketing Solutions can be your trusted partner in this. Optimize your bankruptcy, personal injury, or family law lead generation with our legal marketing strategies.

• Local SEO
• Google PPC
• Facebook advertising
• Website design
• Social media marketing

Contact us today for a 15-minute consultation and learn how we can help you generate more leads and grow your law firm.