A step-by-step guide to building a lead generation funnel for your law firm
Your law firm requires a reliable stream of leads to attract a thriving client base. Without a steady intake of leads, success will be difficult to achieve for your practice. These are just a few of the reasons your practice should be laser focused on generating leads:
- Growth: Leads are the first step to acquiring new clients. By converting leads into clients, you can grow your legal practice and increase your revenue.
- Relationship Building: Leads provide an opportunity for you to establish and nurture relationships with potential clients. By building trust and rapport with your leads, you lay the foundation for a strong attorney-client relationship.
- Targeted Marketing: Leads allow you to target your marketing efforts more effectively. By understanding the needs and preferences of your leads, you can tailor your marketing messages to resonate with them, increasing the likelihood of a conversion.
- Competitive Advantage: In a competitive legal market, leads can give you a competitive edge. By effectively capturing and nurturing leads, you can stay ahead of your competitors and position your law firm as a go-to choice for legal services.
To effectively leverage leads for your law firm, you must first understand the lead generation process. The lead generation process typically involves the following steps: Awareness, Interest, Engagement, and Conversion.
In this article, we take you step-by-step through each stage of the lead generation process, from establishing awareness with potential clients, to converting them into new cases for your practice.
1. Awareness
The first step in any lead generation process is building awareness. You need to make the general populace aware of you and the services you offer. Often called “Brand Awareness”, this is going to be the starting point of all your marketing efforts.
Advertising is a great way to generate initial awareness with your potential customers. You could go the classic route of television ad buys or billboards. But a more effective path to awareness for today’s market is through digital advertising methods such as Social Media advertising, Display Advertising, and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
With digital advertising methods, you can target a specific audience and then quickly test and adjust your advertising as needed. Once you’ve identified the types of digital advertising that your target audience responds to, you can focus your campaigns on those specific ads to maximize your conversions.
Digital Marketing agencies, like ours at Lead Science, can help build and manage your law firm’s digital advertising campaigns from start to finish.
Digital advertising campaigns are much more flexible than traditional methods. If you create an ineffective television ad or billboard, you are stuck with it (and the high cost of production) through the course of the campaign. In contrast, if one of your digital advertisements isn’t producing the results you were hoping for, you can instantly swap it out for a new one.
By employing a, dare we say, scientific method to your online advertising, you can identify the type of advertising that resonates with your audience and use that knowledge to your advantage in all your marketing efforts.
2. Interest
Once your potential client is aware of who you are and the services you provide, your second step is to gain their interest. The best way to generate interest in your legal services is by earning the trust of your potential clients. As you can imagine, trust is even more important for a lawyer than to most professionals.
Your website and the landing pages within it are the perfect place to earn the trust of your target market. That is where you can pull back the curtain on your practice and give visitors an inside look at what it’s like to work with you. Make your notable cases and monetary awards easily accessible and provide social proof in the form of client testimonials.
Lead Science provides clients with well-designed, informative homepages and landing pages that highlight the strengths of law firms.
Producing high-quality, informative content is one of the best ways to build trust with your audience. Writing blog articles, creating videos, recording a podcast, and hosting webinars are all effective ways to show potential clients your expertise. But don’t just provide valuable information; encourage your audience to subscribe to your content. When your audience subscribes you not only gain the ability to send your content straight to their inbox, but you also build a database of potential clients that you know are interested in the type of service you provide.
You don’t need to be an expert at content creation or have high-production value (although that can certainly help) to create effective content. You just need to provide your audience with relevant, useful information that highlights your strengths as an attorney. Once you’ve created the content, share it through e-mails, newsletters, and social posts to drive traffic to your website.
Regularly creating and updating content doesn’t just show website visitors and subscribers how knowledgeable you are; it will also reap long-term rewards in the form of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) value. Search engines such as Google love fresh, informative content and will increase your search rankings when they find it on your website. Not only will higher search rankings increase your organic web traffic, but your audience will also will find you more trustworthy the higher up in search results you rise.
3. Engagement
Your potential clients know you exist and think of you as an expert. Now it’s time for them to submit leads through your website or pick up the phone to schedule a consultation. The act of turning website visitors into leads is the culmination of all your marketing efforts up to this point.
You must ensure that your website is optimized for lead capture. That means you have your phone number, lead forms, and CTA (Call-To-Action) elements prominently displayed throughout your site.
Persistent headers, also known as “sticky headers”, are an extremely effective tool for accomplishing this. When you use a sticky header, you keep the top navigation of your website onscreen, following the user down as they scroll through each page. That enables them to quickly find critical information such as your phone number and lead submission elements without having to scroll all the way back up the page.
Lead Science websites utilize persistent headers to keep your important contact information in front of site visitors.
Once your visitor submits a request for information, it’s time to establish a personal relationship with your potential client and “make your case” as to why they need to choose you as their representation.
While much of this process is carried out through direct communication, you will still want to provide them with marketing materials that show exactly what you can do for them and their needs. After you learn what problems they are trying to solve, you can send them information about the success you’ve had with cases similar to their own.
4. Conversion
We’ve now reached the endgame of lead generation: converting leads into clients. You’ve made them aware of who you are and the services you provide, you’ve earned their trust through education, and connected with them on a personal level by addressing their needs and concerns while providing solutions to their problems.
Now it’s time to ask for their business and convert them into clients.
If everything has gone right up until this point, you will have a new client and case to work on. But if your prospect decides to go in another direction, don’t worry, you can still continue to send them valuable information and solutions while employing tactics such as remarketing campaigns in the hopes that they will return in the future. A “No” today can easily turn into a “Yes” tomorrow. Especially if the prospect doesn’t receive the outcome they were hoping for through one of your competitors.
Let Lead Science guide you on your marketing journey
Understanding where leads come from is vital to producing them and is as important to the success of your firm as your work inside the courtroom. Focus your marketing on these 4 stages of the lead generation process to gain more leads, and as a result, more clients and cases for your firm.
Your marketing journey will take time and effort, but the rewards are well worth it. But to maximize the value of your marketing budget, you need an expert at your side to guide you along the way.
Lead Science has nearly two decades of experience helping businesses like yours find new clients. Schedule your Lead Science consultation today to learn how our Website, SEO, and Digital Advertising programs can increase your law firm’s leads.
