3 Quick Marketing Tips for Law Firms

Any law firm is of course a professional venture and as much as the law is a calling, running a law office is also a business which does need to be treated as such in order to be successful, especially in its early stages of growth. Now of course, most, if not all law firms have an online presence as well or are working to create one that helps their current clients communicate with the firm as well as hopefully attract new business. While online marketing isn't everything, it is important to the future of law firms of any type or size; the following tips can help your firm to get more results from your marketing efforts.
Build trust, online or offline
The legal profession is all about trust; the first thing a potential client wants to know about you and your firm is whether you are trustworthy and can be counted on to give them the competent legal representation they need.
Of course, when you meet in person with a prospective client you can demonstrate your knowledge and close the deal, but when a potential client's first point of contact with your firm is your website, you need to provide information which tells visitors quickly that yours is the right firm to represent them in their case. According to studies of consumer behavior on the web, your website has less than thirty seconds to sway a visitor. Present biographies of the lawyers in your firm as well as case studies which show your visitors that your firm is qualified to handle their legal matters.
Optimize your firm's website
Your website should incorporate the search terms which your prospective clients are likely to use to find law firms online; to find these, you may want to work with a marketing firm to find terms (or keywords, as they are called in the online marketing business) which are well suited to attract new clients to your site. Of course, you can add or remove these terms according to the kind of results you're getting; it just takes a little fine tuning of your site content. This process is known as search engine optimization (or SEO for short) and can help your site to become more visible to web users.
Try Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
One of the more cost effective methods of advertising online is to buy pay per click (or PPC) ads. These ads are created using search terms which are frequently used by consumers looking for legal services (these may even be the same as the search terms used on your website). Since you only pay for these ads when they result in visits to your website, they are much more cost effective than conventional advertising; if nothing else, you're guaranteed that you'll at least get visits to your site every time you pay for your ad. Again, you might want to consult with a marketing firm to put together a PPC plan.
There are plenty of other things you can do to market your firm both on the web and offline. The choice of tactics ultimately comes down to what you think will work best for your firm, so do some research and begin working to draw in new business.