Lead Generation for Law Firms: Our Tips
Winning a big client who decides to keep your law firm on retainer is the dream. Realistically, most of the UK’s 208,000 law firms must continually generate new business to thrive. Although many firms continue to rely on traditional marketing, the true rewards are online.
According to the latest stats, over a third of clients start their search online before examining any other channel. This is an opportunity, and lead generation is one of the most impactful ways to snag this group.
Want to know how to make lead generation work for you? Let’s dive into everything you need to know about lead generation in the legal trade.
What is lead generation for law firms?
Leads are anyone interested in using your law firm’s services. For example, if you specialise in helping your clients through messy divorces, anyone searching for a divorce lawyer would be a potential lead.
Leads can come from anywhere. They could be someone local Googling for a “business lawyer in Manchester” or someone asking about a “road traffic solicitor in Durham” in a local Facebook group.
Lead generation aims to acquire those leads and get them to choose you as their lawyer. In other words, it’s the business of attracting and selling to clients who can benefit from your services.
The benefits of lead generation for law firms
Lead generation is viewed as a priority for marketers in every sector. According to one figure, 53% of marketers sent 50% of their total budgets to lead generation, which shows how powerful it is.
So, what’s the benefit of doing this in the legal sector?
- Grow your client base.
- Increase your conversion rates.
- Reduce your marketing costs.
- Turn to precision targeting.
- Gain a competitive edge.
- Save time and resources.
- Build brand awareness.
Finally, strong lead generation campaigns can establish yourself as the go-to legal authority in your niche. Whether you help clients with speeding fines or criminal law, lead generation positions you as the number one brand in your playground.
The lead generation process for law firms
Lead generation isn’t about throwing up a few ads and hoping for the best. In the past, this was marketing’s best-kept secret, but times have changed. Today, 61% of marketers claimed generating leads was now their biggest challenge.
Most guides treat lead generation as an abstract concept. Let’s consider what it might look like for a solicitor in the field.
- John is being sued for libel and needs legal advice. He discovered your firm through Google and signed up for a free consultation. This makes John a lead.
- You already know John is interested, but he’s probably taking free consultations with several solicitors. During your call, you learn about his case, which is scheduled for next month.
- Throughout your call, your rep found out he can afford you and lives in the same city. This makes him what’s known as a “qualified lead”, meaning John is worth pursuing.
- Your firm will then “nurture” John as a lead. This could be through personalised offers, discounts, or something else. If successful, John will convert from a lead into a customer.
Successful lead generation relies on your marketing and sales team working in tandem to bring in leads and guide them down the sales funnel. The problem is your competitors are also doing the same thing.
How can you ensure that the leads generated are high-quality?
Not every lead is worth your time. Just because someone needs legal services doesn’t make them a good lead.
For example, if you’re based in Southampton and someone in Edinburgh has found you, that makes them a low-quality lead because most lawyers aren’t going to travel the length of the UK for a single client.
Here are some simple ways to ensure the leads you’ve generated are worth pursuing:
Increase the Number of Form Fields
Add more fields to your lead generation forms. Not only does this provide more information, but it also scares away people who aren’t serious about hiring you.
Ask Complex Questions
Make your lead generation questions more thoughtful. Again, it’s all about separating the serious people from the window shoppers. The last thing you want is to waste your secretary’s time on free consultations that won’t lead anywhere.
Use Focused Targeting
How you target will determine lead quality every time. Aim for a smaller niche instead of focusing on vanity metrics like web traffic. Always avoid heading for volume because this will only cost you more.
Although providing more hurdles to jump through and reducing the number of people you target may seem counterintuitive, it’ll actually increase your success rates while reducing the drag on your resources.
Plus, you might even find a relatively sparse niche and gain a competitive edge!
Generating leads for multiple legal practice areas
Generating leads for multiple legal practice areas is often a point of contention among both marketers and solicitors. However, since law firms may address several areas of law, you’ll need separate lead-generation campaigns for each.
It all begins with your law firm’s website. Since you’ll drive 90% of your traffic here, you need individual landing pages for each practice area. Furthermore, this will likely mean running multiple paid marketing campaigns, including SEO, PPC and social media advertising.
SEO is especially pertinent because growing your brand’s visibility as a whole will support each practice area’s lead-generation campaign. This is where hiring an SEO agency that can build these foundations proves its value.
Ultimately, you must also consider resource allocation if operating in multiple practice areas. Does it make sense to allocate half of your resources to individual libel when most of your business comes from business libel? Of course not, so campaigns must be tailored to your firm.
Measuring the success of law firm lead generation
How do you know if your lead generation campaign has been successful?
Measuring any campaign’s success is critical to optimising future campaigns. Directly attributing new business to your lead generation efforts tells you whether you need to continue with what you’re doing or change.
Follow these tips to measure the success of your lead generation campaign.
Focus on the right metrics
Concentrating on core metrics provides actionable insights into what’s working. Here are the top metrics to use:
- Conversion rate
- Cost per lead
- Revenue per client
- Return on Investment (ROI)
Set up analytics and tracking
Analytics and tracking tools are essential to working out where your new business is coming from. Without certain tools, you’re entirely blind to your marketing efforts.
Basic tools like Google Analytics will tell you about the performance of your website and its landing pages and offer insights into how your visitors are behaving. In terms of lead generation, you also need conversion tracking tools. Several platforms have native tools, such as Google Ads Conversion Tracking and Facebook Ads Manager. However, all-in-one suites are also available.
Use a reliable Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system
CRMs are essential for tracking and managing your leads. Some of the benefits include:
- Tracking interactions.
- Centralising lead data from each channel.
- Analysing lead behaviour.
Some of the most common CRMs law firms use include HubSpot and Salesforce. Some firms may prefer niche-specific CRMs, though.
Launch A/B testing
A/B testing is a technique for measuring lead generation ROI. It involves creating at least two variations of your landing pages, copy, campaigns and more. Each variation is tested against the other to see which performs best.
Constant A/B testing will tell you what works, but it relies on making incremental changes to see which alterations have the most impact. After all, the secret of lead generation is that you’ll never get the best possible results from your first campaign. It’s a long-term process.
How to generate leads for your law firm
There’s no getting around the fact that lead generation is time- and resource-intensive. Get it right, and you will see your leads increase exponentially. The transformative potential of mastering lead generation is undeniable but requires expertise.
Legal professionals are busy people and may not have the time to learn about and run lead-generation initiatives, and that’s where Tao Digital comes in. In the past, our efforts have led to one law firm increasing its leads by 174%.
If these types of results are what your firm is looking for, reach out to the team today.