The Best Organic Strategies to Help You Grow Your Law Firm
If you have an unlimited advertising budget, it’s trivially easy to grow a law firm. Spend a few million dollars on a Super Bowl ad and a string of advertisements across Google, Facebook, TV, radio, and other channels, and I can guarantee you’ll see a surge of interest in your law firm.
But what if you’re interested in more organic results? Organic growth strategies are more nuanced and more focused on quality than traditional advertising and sales strategies. They’re less expensive, more focused on the long term, and have the tendency to help you find clients who are a better fit for your brand.
So how do you do it?
What Is Organic Growth?
Ask a handful of people what counts as “organic growth” and you’ll probably get several different answers. The same is true if you ask them what counts as “organic food,” by the way. That’s because the term itself is somewhat nebulous.
For our purposes, organic growth is growth that emerges naturally, rather than merely being a byproduct of aggressive spending or focused growth tactics. Instead of focusing on outreach and persuasion, you’ll focus on building a better reputation and providing more knowledge for your prospects. Then, when your prospects need legal help, they’ll think of you first – and they’ll be much more likely to work with your firm.
It’s a slow process that generally takes months to start paying off, but it’s much less expensive and has more momentum than traditional outreach strategies.
So what strategies can you use to organically and reliably grow your law firm?
Reviews and Referrals
You probably already realize the value of getting referrals from your existing client base. When a client refers your firm to someone they know, you get the benefit of a warm introduction and a high likelihood of acquiring a new client. The easiest way to get more referrals is to provide better, more consistent service; obviously, you’ll need to work hard to help your clients achieve their legal goals, but you should also take great care to provide excellent communication and peripheral support to your clients as well.
Similarly, it pays to optimize your customer reviews (which is a common tactic across a variety of industries). Getting more reviews and better reviews on a variety of different platforms will boost your reputation, make your law firm more visible, and could even help you rank higher in search engines (as we’ll see). It all starts with claiming your company profile on third-party review sites like Yelp – then asking your clients directly for reviews (when possible).
Content Marketing
One of the best marketing strategies for organic growth is content marketing, which has understandably become quite popular among law firms in recent years. The idea is simple, but the execution is tricky; your goal is to create high-quality content (including articles, whitepapers, videos, and eBooks) designed to inform and/or entertain your audience.
Do this consistently and it will help you improve your company’s reputation while providing value to your audience members. Content marketing is also useful because it has impressive tie-ins to other organic growth strategies, such as search engine optimization (SEO) and email marketing.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is a set of strategies designed to make your law firm rank higher in search engines when your prospects and clients search for terms relevant to your industry. There are more than 200 ranking factors that Google uses to selectively rank results, so unfortunately, there’s no simple or straightforward approach here. Instead, you’ll need to use a combination of different tactics to increase your rankings over time.
You can think of SEO in terms of onsite development and offsite development. Onsite, you’ll focus on making your website perform better and more reliably, while writing high-quality content that includes your target keywords (hence why content marketing has such a great synergy with this strategy). Offsite, you’ll focus on building links and boosting your authority so Google finds your site to be more trustworthy. You can also focus on local SEO, minimizing your competition and attempting to dominate a single geographic area.
In any case, your rankings should rise over time, resulting in more organic traffic flowing to your site – and ultimately, more conversions.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the glue that holds your other organic marketing strategies together. Over time, you’ll build and maintain a list of prospects and active subscribers; these will include customers, prospective leads, and other people relevant to your law firm and your industry. Consistently, you’ll send them email newsletters packed with content, special offers, and industry news.
This serves multiple purposes simultaneously; you’ll maintain brand visibility and brand familiarity with your existing audience while promoting yourself and incentivizing participation from newcomers. It’s also a great way to test your new content and try out new CTAs.
Social Media Marketing
Most lawyers know that social media marketing has enormous potential – but it’s hard to tap into this modern marketing juggernaut. There’s almost unlimited potential to how you can market your firm on social media, but that also means there’s unlimited potential to mess something up.
If you want to be successful, you can’t make social media posts arbitrarily. You have to have a focused strategy from the outset that allows you to reach your target market specifically and turn them into loyal followers. Great content and a consistent posting schedule are important ways to start.
Need Some Extra Help?
Content marketing, SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, and PPC ad campaigns all have a natural synergy that helps you grow your firm efficiently. But they all require expertise and coordination. Trying to manage all these campaigns on your own can leave your firm stretched thin (and compromise your results) – which is why it pays to work with a partner.
At Law Pro Nation, we have the experts and resources necessary to take your law firm marketing to the next level – so book your free consultation today!
