How Your Website Can Turn Into Lead Generation For Your Law Firm
Is your website driving leads for your law practice — real leads that turn into clients?
Generating leads is the number one challenge for most lawyers and law firms. Leads are getting harder and harder to come by using traditional marketing techniques like print ads or speaking engagements. With fewer quality leads coming in, and many marketing budgets remaining frozen, the cost per lead is increasing. Lawyers and law firms are increasingly turning to the online world for lead generation.
Yet, using the web to generate leads is still something of a mystery for many law firms. How does a law firm begin to navigate the complex world of online lead generation and digital marketing? There are so many buzzwords to learn (inbound marketing, outbound marketing, tweets, impressions, conversions, bounce rate, etc.), and so many acronyms to decipher (SEO, SEM, PPC, CTM, CTC, etc.).
Where Do Online Leads Come From?
It all starts with your website. Your website should be the hub of all your online marketing and online lead-generation activities. If you don’t have a professional-looking website that is set up to attract and convert leads, it will be awfully hard to generate leads online.
With a proper website in place, the next step is to employ digital marketing strategies to drive qualified traffic to your website. Once you have traffic, it’s your website’s job to turn visitors into leads. This is called “converting.” A website converts a visitor into a lead by getting that visitor to provide their name and contact information via a website form or by getting them to call you on the phone and provide this information.
How Do I Increase My Website Traffic?
You increase your website traffic through digital marketing tactics. These tactics include:
- Blogging — Writing blog posts that provide valuable information to your prospects and clients and feature your target keywords is a great way to attract visitors to your website and help it rank in search engines for those keywords. These posts are also great for sharing on social media and sending out via email.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — The goal of SEO is simple: Drive traffic to your law firm’s website and raise your search rankings so that prospects can find you. But effective SEO takes time, attention, and skill. And the process needs to be implemented every time you publish new content on your website. (For more insight into how to rank in search engines, check out this free webinar: SEO Basics in an Hour)
- Social Media Marketing — This enables you to share your content and engage in conversation with your clients, prospects, and influencers on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. By posting helpful content on social media, you can help drive those social media users back to your website and convert them into leads.
- Email Marketing — Sending helpful, informative emails to a qualified email list will keep you “top of mind” with your target audience and drive people to your website to learn more information. The trick here is to make sure you are sending the right content, to the right people at the right time and generating leads.
- Content Marketing — Content is at the core of any successful digital marketing strategy. Without valuable and engaging content, you cannot succeed in generating online leads. When you create helpful content (such as blog posts, videos, webinars, or eBooks), and you tell the world about it (via social media and email), visitors will flock to your website and share that content with others. One added benefit of good content is that other websites may then link to it (as a reference which will enable you to receive traffic from their websites and links!).
- Online Advertising – Advertising online is the cheapest, most effective, and fastest way to drive traffic to your website and generate leads. Unfortunately, most lawyers don’t understand how to properly optimize their online advertising and end up wasting a lot of money without seeing any results. Google Adwords (also called Pay-Per-Click) and social advertising on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn provide lawyers with incredible abilities to target their prospects and measure their results
- Measurement & Analytics – Digital marketing is more of a science than an art. But as with any scientific endeavor, it requires a lot of testing and experimentation. Without data and a method to measure your results, you cannot determine your return on investment nor can you glean actionable insights that you can use to enhance your methods.
Converting Visitors Into Leads
Getting more website visitors is the first step in lead generation, but another huge part of lead generation is being able to entice a website visitor enough to move them down the sales funnel. Usually, this can be done by offering different content for different stages of the buyer’s journey and offering gated content to warm visitors in order to convert them into leads. Gated content is valuable content that is offered in exchange for an email address, so your law firm can capture their contact information and warm them even further.
Some types of gated content you can offer for lead generation are:
- eBooks
- On-demand webinars
- Infographics
- Checklists
- Video series
- Free service offerings
How to Optimize Your Website for Lead Generation
1. Add Forms to High Traffic Pages
If you notice a page, such as a practice area page, is garnering more traffic, add a specific lead-capturing form to that page. This will help you gain more contact info and insight into these leads’ needs.
2. A/B Test
A/B test, also known as a split test, is when you change one variable of a marketing asset in order to test which variable is most successful with your audience. Consider testing items like copy, CTA, button placement, form attributes, etc.
3. Include a Live Chat
Nowadays, one of the easiest ways to move leads down the sales funnel is to talk directly with them. If you can answer visitors’ questions instantly with a live chat, they’re more likely to keep searching your site and moving along the buyer’s journey.
4. Include Clear CTAs
Your website visitors should have no question about what the next steps are if they want to keep engaging with your firm. Every blog, practice area page, video, and webinar, should have a clear CTA that makes the next steps clear for visitors. Them taking action means they’ll go from just a visitor to a lead.
5. Solid User Experience
Your law firm’s website navigation should be easy to follow, so visitors know where to go for whatever stage they are in of the buyer’s journey. Users shouldn’t have to waste time searching for your blog, case studies, or practice area pages. Navigation should be easy and seamless and user experience should be the top priority.
Takeaway:
These tactics, implemented successfully, can increase the quality of traffic visiting your website. The key here is quality traffic. Not all traffic is created equal. Quality traffic and a properly built website with rich and engaging content are where you start. Digital marketing is how you succeed.
This post has been edited and republished from April 27, 2018.
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