Whether you are a sole practitioner or a nationwide brand, law firm marketing is essential to your practice’s growth. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the UK legal industry is growing with an average 8-10% growth in fees, with firms remaining largely resilient in the post-pandemic landscape.

On the other hand, claiming your piece of the cake requires marketing campaigns that excel beyond your competitors. According to an assessment from Thomson Reuters Legal UK, too many law firms still only see marketing rather than trying to understand the dynamics of each market.

This philosophy shows that it’s time to level up your game. One way of sharpening your legal marketing efforts is digital marketing tools. Let’s look at the most effective solutions for the year ahead.

Should law firms use tools for their marketing?

Online marketing is where the money is. Today, over a third of potential clients begin their search for a solicitor online.

Although you can carry out your marketing processes manually, this isn’t the best way of handling it. Using tools increases accuracy, efficiency and performance. In one study from Think With Google, marketers using five or more tools for analytics alone were 39% likelier to see a performance improvement.

Taking advantage of cutting-edge technology can save you time while delivering better results. However, not all tools were created equal, so choosing your tech stack carefully is vital.

How digital marketing tools can help law firms

Despite the clear benefits of digital marketing – and marketing generally – UK law firms spend just 2% of annual gross revenues on their marketing efforts. This is evidence of an industry that’s still somewhat edgy about throwing money at marketing.

However, digital marketing tools deliver positive ROIs when wielded correctly. Some of the advantages of investing in these solutions include:

Better Understand Your Audience – Digital marketing tools deepen your understanding of your target audience. Acquiring detailed real-time data helps you refine your marketing strategy by understanding what your prospective clients really want.

Maximise Your Reach – Use tools to reach as many people as possible with your marketing content. This is especially helpful for UK law firms operating nationwide or looking to expand into new regional markets.

Measure and Optimise – Stop fumbling in the dark using a costly trial-and-error strategy. Instead, use state-of-the-art tools to determine what’s working for your firm.

Save Time – Time is precious in the fast-paced legal trade. Digital marketing tools automate many tedious, time-consuming tasks like social media scheduling, lead tracking and email marketing.

Reduce Your Spend – Switching your focus to technology-led marketing can enable you to cut out many of the usual expenses associated with traditional marketing. Plus, it’s not uncommon for tools to offer flexible plans, mitigating your costs.

Intelligent Segmentation – In the past, digital marketing focused on hitting a broad market and hoping some of them become future clients. Today, tools are helping lawyers to initiate hyper-targeted campaigns, increasing their returns.

It’s easy to shirk away from spending hundreds of pounds on building your marketing tech stack, but think about the big picture. Digital marketing tools are a proven way for legal eagles to reduce their outgoings while increasing their returns.

Ultimately, the firm that uses marketing tools will always beat the firm that doesn’t.

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Best digital marketing tools for the legal industry

Thousands of marketing tools exist for every task and process known to man. If you’re unfamiliar with legal marketing, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the options available.

This is why many lawyers bury their heads in the sand and continue managing everything manually. If you’re confused, we’ve compiled a list of the best digital marketing tools specifically for the legal industry.

Legal Marketing Strategy Tools

Before you can launch a marketing campaign, you must plan one out. Strategising is where your marketing efforts rise and fall.

Here are our favourite tools for constructing your next campaign from the ground up.

Google Search Console

The Google Search Console is part of a suite of Google-made tools for improving your SEO efforts. With the Search Console, you can conduct an initial analysis or refresh an existing strategy with an updated set of keywords.

This tool aims to do more with keywords, find errors on your site, and test how mobile-friendly your platform is. It’s also where you can see how your pages are doing on Google.

Plus, Google Search Console integrates with all other Google tools, including Google Analytics.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

By far, the best web analytics platform is GA4, the fourth iteration of Google Analytics. Lawyers can use this tool to acquire a comprehensive overview of how users interact with websites, apps and other platforms under your banner.

Ahrefs

Law firms looking for paid SEO tools with more advanced capabilities should look to Ahrefs. The value of this tool is that it examines your website to produce a range of actionable data, including:

Keywords and search volumes
Link profiles
Ranking profiles

Other features include a site and content explorer to enable you to evaluate the performance of everything you’ve ever produced on your website.

AlsoAsked

Question-based long-tail keywords can provide opportunities to demonstrate your expertise and capture niche markets. The AlsoAsked platform gives you all the most commonly asked questions from real searchers.

For example, we typed in “personal injury law”, and some of the questions we got back included:

How long does a personal injury claim take?
What’s the average payout for personal injury claims?
Should I get a solicitor for personal injury claims?

LowFruits.io

Finding keywords is one thing, but the key to good SEO is discovering high-traffic keywords with low-competition signals.

Designed for website owners, LowFruits is a bulk SERP analyser that uncovers those signals, helping you to find blue-water zones to build your authority through.

Google Trends

Evergreen content is essential, but plugging your firm into current legal trends can help you join the conversations and address real people’s concerns.

While Google Trends doesn’t offer granular data, it effectively shows the legal topics and ideas people are currently exploring.

Website and Hosting Software

In the online world, your website is your most valuable asset. This is the digital equivalent of your office. Since it’s often the first thing prospective clients see, you’ve got to get it right.

Let’s examine the best way to get your site up and running.

WordPress

In 2023, WordPress continues to reign supreme. It’s the engine behind approximately 43% of all websites on the Internet – and for a good reason.

WordPress has millions of free templates, customisation options and plugins to create the ideal legal website without coding experience.

Even better, WordPress is completely free.

Kinsta

Free web hosting doesn’t work for every business. We recommend Kinsta because of its high-end performance using Google’s C2 cloud platform (our Kinsta review gives more details!).

Kinsta’s infrastructure includes state-of-the-art security features and world-class support. Moreover, it’s highly flexible, with starter plans costing less than your monthly coffee budget.

Its lowest-cost plan includes 10 GB of storage, a premium migration and a 14-day backup.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective avenues to explore. According to one study, email marketing has a 4400% ROI, meaning for every £1 invested, the average return is £36.

However, you need the right platform for email. Check out these two options.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is an excellent email platform choice for most law firms because of its fair pricing system. It has all the features you need to send out highly targeted campaigns to your list.

Plus, you can customise your campaigns and split-test email subject lines with ActiveCampaign to determine what engages your list the most.

MailChimp

MailChimp is another prominent email marketing platform for lawyers. Like ActiveCampaign, it possesses all the features necessary to create custom emails and gain detailed analytics from each campaign.

Moreover, building custom templates is simple due to its drag-and-drop interface. However, beware that MailChimp tends to get expensive with larger lists.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM software streamlines how you interact with current and prospective clients. With a solid CRM in your tech stack, you can simplify building client relationships and supercharge the processes that lead to more business.

In our opinion, there’s only one choice for CRM software.

HubSpot

HubSpot isn’t a dedicated legal CRM, but it works equally well for all professional services. Some of the standout HubSpot features that make it the most effective CRM on the market include:

Automated execution
Well-configured databases
Marketing source capture
Marketing channel evaluation
Full integration with other systems

Social Media and Youtube

Social media is critical for growing your legal practice. As you’d expect, plenty of tools exist for managing your social media channels, including ones designed around specific platforms.

Here are our top social media tools:

Linkinbio – Share all your most important links in one URL to maximise your bio space.
Actual Platform Analytics – The fact is that all of the most prominent platforms have built-in analytics tabs that provide all of the data you could ever need.
TubeBuddy – YouTube SEO, analytics, keywords and tags. TubeBuddy is specially built for the world’s largest video-sharing platform to help with law firm video marketing.

Link Building

Getting backlinks to your content signals that your content is relevant, trustworthy and authority-led. Even today, backlinks are among the most effective ways of getting your content to the top of Google SERPs.

Other than reaching out to known bloggers directly, we recommend:

HARO – HARO allows journalists to ask questions of professionals. If they choose your answer, they’ll reward you with a link to your website.
Directories – Backlinks from general directories also provide some juice for your website. Ensure you’re listed on Yelp, Yellow Pages, DMOZ and others.

Supercharge your Law Firm Marketing with Tao Digital

Building your tech stack with legal digital marketing tools is the first step to accelerating your law firm. With Tao Digital, our team can help you assemble everything and gain the competitive edge you need.

If you want to learn more about the secrets of digital law firm growth, contact the team today.