Introducing the SLFE: The Engine: A Digital Marketing Growth Roadmap for Law Firms in the Age of AI

This year marks the 13th year of Good2bSocial’s Social Law Firm Index, where we rank the AmLaw 200 firms in order of their adherence to social media best practices. This year’s index has an obvious new metric: AI Visibility. What’s exciting about this metric is that law firms of any size can compete with bigger law firms by having a focused strategy on specific areas of growth. This resulted in AmLaw firms in the second half of that index ranking in the top 25 of ours.

What this means for boutique and mid-sized law firms is that you can earn a share of AI Visibility regardless of your firm’s size with the right content strategy that amplifies your message in authoritative channels. This takeaway inspired our team to create the inaugural SFLE: The Engine. Spawned from the SFLI: The Index. We created a roadmap for firms to develop and implement a right-sized digital marketing plan based on the success of the top 25 firms in the SFLI.

The Index shows AmLaw Firms where they stand and helps them set benchmarks for success in 2027. The Engine shows all law firms how to implement the best digital strategy possible; it’s a framework for building the visibility that will put your practice at the center of the conversations driving growth.

How Social Media Helps Communicate Your Law Firm’s Value

Do you remember the tombstone ads law firms used to place in the Wall Street Journal? If you’re too young to know what these are, Google it; you will get a laugh. The ad announced a closed deal, named the client and the dollar amount, and let the firm’s reputation do the rest to communicate their value.

Digital marketing changed that and frankly made it more complicated to communicate value. This inspired the first SFLI: The Index in 2023, to help large law firms adapt to the digital age. That same newspaper communication about a case win has traversed to LinkedIn and requires a brand image, brand colors, carefully crafted language minding attorney advertising rules, and more. However, it also has the potential to be seen by many more thousands of people across the globe, and for every attorney that shares that firm post with their own comments, the reach exponentially magnifies.

Social media made it possible to share your firm’s unique set of experience and relationships with clients and referral sources, your connections with industry leaders and trade associations, your alumni network, and the capabilities and industry knowledge behind each of your practice areas. Now, AI has taken social media to the next level because LLMs are crawling social channels for authoritative answers to use in the summaries they serve up to human prompts on their platforms. Your website, while still wildly important, has a new companionship with your social channels as they now work together to earn the trust of the bots choosing the content and brands they will cite in their AI answers. Your job as a legal marketer is to craft a plan to achieve AI Visibility so your firm’s brand shows up when someone asks questions about what you do.

Every component of your marketing engine connects with and reinforces the others. A single article can become a LinkedIn post, a newsletter feature, a topic for a podcast episode. As your visibility improves in both traditional search and on AI platforms, you’ll find that your practice and its attorneys are increasingly participating in the conversations that drive growth in your practice areas. The SFLE is designed to make this otherwise overwhelming task of trying to do everything simpler by focusing on what makes the most sense for your firm’s needs.

​Legal Marketing Digital Plans Start with Law Firm Growth Goals and Strategies

The first step in crafting your digital marketing plan is to understand your firm’s strategy for growth. Work with your partners to identify the following areas of strategic focus:

• Practice areas and sub-practice areas – get as specific as possible
• Geographic areas – are certain cities more important than others
• Existing clients – which category is there opportunity to deepen relationships for cross-selling; how niche can you get with these categories, the more specific, the easier the marketing
• New clients – what are their buying signals that could indicate the opportunity for new legal counsel
• New partners to the firm – are lateral hires bringing new relationships; how are newly promoted partners expanding their relationships to bring on their own new business
• Defining your target market – review the firm’s definition of who your target market includes and discuss buying signals that they know are likely to occur when people or companies have a need for new legal counsel

How Do You Put The Engine to Work?

Firms seeing results from their digital strategy focus their energy on specific growth areas. Choose three or four digital marketing activities that will resonate most with your target clients, and find them where they hang out. Here are some suggestions:

Where to Focus Website Updates for AI Visibility

• Practice areas and sub-practice areas: update content to make these detailed; add internal links throughout the site to the pages that relate to the firm’s growth areas instead of updating all the practice area pages on your website at one time.
• Attorney bio pages: these are often the most visited pages on your website. Make them complete by adding links where possible to authored blogs/papers, podcasts, etc.; make sure every credential appears; you get the idea. Add anything relevant that could provide an answer to an AI prompt while keeping it professional and neat.

How to Prioritize Content Creation for Growth

• Write thought leadership content that strengthens your attorneys’ credibility in the focused growth areas
• Create client tools once or twice a year that attorneys can send to clients and prospects. Examples include 50-state evaluations of a target topic, calculators that measure a risk pertaining to new laws, etc.
• ​Cross-selling campaigns that introduce clients to complementary practice areas

How You Can Get Around the Algorithm

• Maintain and build a proprietary email list to send targeted email outreach to the contacts and industries you most want to reach; make sure your domain is warmed up so your emails do not go to spam filters
• Relationship engagement through meetings, events and warm introductions

How You Can Get the Most Leverage from Your Best Content

​Your firm’s SFLE (social law firm engine) setup needs to include digital platforms used by your target markets. You do not need to do everything to be visible, but you do need to choose a couple of areas to show up in consistently to be visible.

​If your practice is focused on complex business transitions, LinkedIn, YouTube and your website are your strongest tools for reaching decision-makers and industry leaders. If you represent individuals in bankruptcy or personal injury matters, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok will help you build brand awareness and connect with the people you want to reach.

When you have powerful content that sets your firm and your attorneys apart from the rest, you can extend its use by turning it into:

• Video – you can interview the authoring attorneys using the topics from their thought leadership insights; you can take the key takeaways and turn them into animated videos
• Podcasts – you can start a podcast for your firm if you have multiple topics that are relevant to the same listener profile; for example, if you are targeting in-house counsel for a particular industry, hosting a podcast on relevant topics will keep them tuning in with each episode and give attorneys opportunities to invite them as guests to deepen relationships
• Webinars – hosting educational forums for clients and prospects places your firm in the leadership position and makes it the go-to for specific industry or practice area information that can be critical for managing business risk

Which one of these additional media would serve your market and your AI visibility?

Equip Your Team

The Engine will only function as well as the people behind it. Make sure your team has access to the best tools and skills available. That may mean building new capabilities in-house through training, bringing in outside support for areas like SEO/AIO, video or podcast production, or investing in technologies to automate and streamline your workflows.

Make Your Website the Hub

Every post, video and campaign should lead back to your website, so give it the attention it deserves. Start with your practice area pages and attorney bios. This is where prospective clients evaluate you, and they’re also what AI platforms use to understand what your firm does and who your attorneys are. Detailed, up-to-date bios and accurate practice descriptions help establish the experience and authority both people and platforms look for when deciding which attorneys to contact or sources to cite.

Stay Connected and Keep Optimizing

Once you’ve got your engine in place, you need to get it in front of the right people. Keep your email list clean and up to date so your client alerts and communications always land in the right inboxes. Using tools such as HubSpot for Marketing and SigParser for Data capture and enrichment enable you to set up automated workflows and provide immediate insights into attorney relationships. This helps the marketing team get more done and dedicate time to the strategy part of your job. Ensure your website content maintains visibility with weekly, or at least monthly, SEO and AI optimization. This is the glue that makes the Engine work!

Amplify Through Your Attorneys

Your attorneys are critical to your marketing efforts. Think of their combined social networks as your largest untapped audience. On LinkedIn, a company page post generates fewer impressions than a personal page, and every time an attorney reshares, the post reaches an entirely new network.

Ready to Build Your Legal Marketing Engine?

The TLDR; narrow your strategic focus to the most important growth areas for the firm to enable investing your marketing efforts in a concentrated place that will achieve AI visibility. Share your content in a couple of media areas across the channels your potential clients favor. And leverage attorneys’ personal social networks to extend your reach. This will get you on the road to AI Visibility.

Looking for more guidance? Pre-register for G2BS SLFI: The Index and SLFE: The Engine today. And don’t hesitate to connect with Good2bSocial to learn how our team can help your firm drive growth and achieve its business development goals.