How to Create a Winning Law Marketing Plan for Maximum ROI

A proper law marketing plan makes a compelling case with detailed client insights, a unique brand identity, local SEO, and strategic placements in legal directories — all designed to overrule the competition and capture the most market share.

When people want answers, the Internet is usually their first stop — those seeking legal services are no exception.

According to Google Trends, keywords like “free legal aid” and “legal advice near me” have consistently attracted high traffic in recent years. A strong law marketing plan is a fast track to bringing these prospective clients to your firm’s doorstep.

For law firms, brand authority and client trust are everything. 

That’s why we talked to Ian Dawson, lead strategist at HawkSEM, about proven strategies he’s used for our legal clients. He breaks down expert marketing tips and insights to craft a winning digital marketing plan for law professionals.

According to an American Bar Association survey, only 46% of law firms have a marketing budget. (Image: Rawpixel)

How to create a digital marketing plan for law

People need lawyers for criminal defense, family matters, wills and estates, business deals, and so much more. No wonder the U.S. legal industry was valued at more than $372 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow annually by 2.5% through 2030. Meaning?

There are plenty of law firms competing for the same clients. A well-developed law marketing plan is crucial to stay competitive and snag your share of this expanding market.

To set up a successful plan, you’ll want to:

1. Know your audience
2. Analyze your competitors
3. Develop a brand identity
4. Set SMART marketing goals
5. Refine your SEO strategy
6. Optimize for local search
7. Harness PPC advertising
8. Create a legal content marketing strategy
9. Take your marketing campaigns offline
10. Fine-tune website design
11. Conquer legal directories
12. Carve out a marketing budget
13. Stay compliant and ethical
14. Never stop optimizing

1. Know your audience

Not everyone who needs legal advice will be a fit for your legal services. The more specific you are in who to target, the better your firm can tailor its marketing efforts to align with your ideal clients’ needs.

For example, legal licenses are location-specific, which means you need a defined service area to attract clients you can actually represent.

One way to zero in on your audience is to create detailed client personas. These are semi-fictional representations of your ideal clients based on market research and existing customer data.

To create a client persona, find out the following about your ideal customers:

• Demographics like age, income, education, and marital status
• Pain points and challenges addressed by your practice areas, like personal injury, criminal defense, etc.
• Preferred communication channels, like social media or email, and best times to reach them
• Location and languages

Once you know your target audience, you can create bespoke content to attract the types of clients most likely to book your services.

You can even create negative client personas, such as individuals who may not be the right fit for your law practice. For instance, those who lack the budget to afford your services. This helps you focus your marketing efforts on attracting the right clients, saving time and resources on those who may never convert.

Understanding your audience is important, but scoping out the competition is just as critical.

2. Analyze your competitors

Did you know we kick off every partnership with an in-depth competitive analysis?

That’s because when you understand what the competition offers and how each competitor positions itself, you can use those insights to develop unique selling points and set your law firm apart from the rest.

Competitive analysis also reveals market trends, client preferences, and potential service gaps, so you can tailor your marketing to meet your target audiences’ needs.

Competitive analysis for law firms

Here’s how to approach a competitive analysis in legal marketing:

• Identify the competition: Direct competitors offer similar legal services in your area, while indirect competitors offer services that aren’t the same but might interest your customers.
• Assess their services: Identify their specialties, practice areas, and unique selling points to understand their current market share.
• Study their marketing: This includes their preferred marketing channels, messaging, branding, and how they engage with audiences.
• Size up their online presence: Peep their SEO performance, online reviews, and listings in legal directories. Note their keyword rankings, website traffic, and online interactions.
• Examine their pricing: Gauge your position in terms of affordability and value.
• Get to know their client base: Look for patterns in competitor customer demographics, needs, and preferences to understand their target audience.
• Pinpoint strengths and weaknesses – Create a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) for each competitor. This helps you identify areas to differentiate your services.
• Compare and contrast – How does your firm stack up? Identify areas where you can excel and improve.

3. Develop a brand identity

Most law firms conduct similar marketing activities, which makes it easy to blend them all together. However, if you create a unique, emotional narrative around your law practice, you weave a thread of authenticity and humanity into a traditionally formal industry.

Take Bay Area real estate attorneys, Bornstein Law. This firm has positioned itself as a trusted advocate for landlords, property managers, and real estate pros.

Then there’s Texas-based personal injury firm DFW Injury Lawyers, which uses slogans like “Bring in the muscle” to exude strength and confidence, signaling a determination to fight fervently for their clients.

Just like client personas paint a picture of your ideal clients, you can create a brand persona that reflects who you are, what you stand for, and how you sound.

To start, ask yourself questions like:

• Who’s our ideal client?
• What makes us unique?
• How do we want clients to feel about us?
• What values are most important to us?
• What tone fits our brand? Casual, formal, relatable, serious, funny?
• What emotions do we want to evoke?
• What’s our core message?
• What sets us apart from competitors?
• How do we want to be remembered?

4. Set SMART marketing goals

Measurable, realistic goals are the hallmark of any effective law firm marketing plan, so it’s time to get clear on what you want to achieve. SMART principles are clear, focused objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely.

For example, without using the SMART framework, your goal might be to simply “increase website traffic.” The issue? It’s not specific or measurable, making it hard to know when you’ve achieved it.

With the SMART method, you could reframe your goal to:

“Increase website traffic by 20% over the next three months with targeted SEO strategies and two new blog posts per week.”

Dawson highlights our secret weapon for monitoring and optimizing all your legal marketing metrics:

“Similar to companies engaging in lead gen, a law firm should measure success with closed leads/new clients,” says Dawson. “When ConversionIQ [our proprietary tech] fully integrates into your sales cycle, it becomes possible to measure not only the number of leads but the number of clients as well.”

With many customer relationship management systems (CRMs), you can send data signals to ConversionIQ when a high-quality lead turns into a client, which helps pinpoint keywords, ads, or campaigns that made it all happen.

5. Refine your SEO strategy

You want prospective clients searching for your services to be able to find you. One way to make that happen is to snag prime real estate on the search engine results page (SERP), and search engine optimization (SEO) is your ticket to getting there.

Law firm SEO begins with high-quality keyword research. As you get going, you’ll likely encounter a variety of high-volume key phrases that people typically plug into search engines like Bing or Google search.

Once you identify the keywords you want to rank for, you can create content (and ads) that strategically incorporate these terms.

For example, Dawson used an effective keyword strategy to reduce one firm’s cost per client, which in turn amped up their reach and overall market share.

Keyword relevance posed a major challenge for this client, as many leads proved unqualified despite initial interest. By using conversion data to refine keywords and ad copy, we increased the percentage of qualified leads and expanded ad spend to capture more.

Here’s how to find keywords:

• Review the keywords you currently rank for to determine which drive the most traffic to your website
• Leverage tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Ahrefs
• Brainstorm relevant terms people might use to find you online (like “Los Angeles divorce attorneys” or “estate planning lawyer near me”)
• See what keywords your competitors currently target
• Review social media discussions and frequently asked questions from clients for relevant topics and terms
• Explore legal directories (like Avvo or FindLaw) to see what potential clients search for

6. Optimize for local search

Local SEO focuses on location-specific SEO tactics.

Why is this pertinent to your law firm’s marketing strategy? Because most firms serve specific geographical areas. Therefore, local SEO lets you target clients in your immediate vicinity, tying your services with local needs.

Since local searches often have strong intent, potential clients are more likely to convert into paying clients when they find a local firm. 76% of these searches happen on mobile devices, putting your firm on local maps, which makes for easy access to your contact information and directions.

A strong local SEO presence, including positive reviews and accurate business information, is a powerful marketing tool to build up your firm’s credibility and trustworthiness.

And since it targets local clients actively seeking legal services, you reap higher conversion rates with lower costs.

But Dawson warns against a common misstep:

“Law firms can waste advertising budgets by casting a wide net in terms of broad keywords or incorrect geographical targeting,” he explains.

“A firm’s marketing strategy would address these potential pitfalls with extensive research into the types of keywords their ideal client would use and ensure their geographical targets are only covering areas the firm is licensed to serve.”

Organic search tactics? Check. What about paid search?

7. Harness PPC advertising

PPC, or pay-per-click, is an online advertising model in which you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. This lets you target audiences that actively search for specific legal services or visit related sites.

For example, suppose your firm specializes in business law. In that case, you might place your ads on professional networking sites like LinkedIn or on business-oriented publications, using terms like “corporate attorney” or “contract lawyer.”

However, if you practice family law, it makes more sense to advertise on parenting websites or Facebook groups.

High-impact PPC comprises:

• Compelling ad copy that targets your customers’ pain points
• Keywords and long-tail keywords
• A landing page that ties back to your ad, highlights value, and features a strong call-to-action (CTA)
• Continuous monitoring of ad performance and strategy adjustments
• Detailed tracking of conversions and other metrics to measure ROI
• Curious what this looks like in action?

Our client, Real Estate Law Center, wanted to kick off paid search that drove more high-quality leads at lower costs.

We swooped in with a meticulously planned keyword and bid strategy, engaging ad copy, a conversion-focused landing page, and ongoing optimization backed by performance metrics.

The results? Consistent month-over-month improvement with higher lead volume and lower cost per lead, thanks to HawkSEM’s digital marketing strategies.

Those in the law field must be extra mindful about what they share on social media. (Image: Unsplash)

8. Create a legal content marketing strategy

Do you know only one in three law firm websites have a blog? Talk about untapped potential.

Content marketing is essential to solidify your firm’s online presence and position yourself as a thought leader. The right content builds trust with your target audiences, which helps them feel more inclined to trust your brand with a high-ticket purchase (like legal counsel).

But what qualifies as “the right” content? The best content is helpful, original, and, above all, answers your prospective clients’ questions.

This can be through blog posts that discuss legal advice, legal industry news, client reviews, or case studies. You should also extend your content creation to social media marketing, email marketing, and even short-form video marketing, like @thelawyer on TikTok.

(Image: Tiktok.com/@thelawyer)

We know, we know; legal jargon isn’t exactly the most enticing reading material. But with content marketing, you can inject life and readability into dry, convoluted topics (kind of like what we do with digital marketing).

On top of being helpful and entertaining, it needs to be quality content in the eyes of search engines, too. That means adhering to two essential Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines:

1. Your Money, Your Life (YMYL): Content that’s influential in a consumer’s decision-making regarding money or life.
2. E-E-A-T: Experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness

These guidelines protect readers from misinformation that could harm them. When your content adheres to them, you rank higher on the SERP, foster trust, and safeguard your reputation.

Ignore these, and risk a wave of penalties, diminished trust, and loss of credibility. Case dismissed.

9. Take your marketing campaigns offline

With such an emphasis on local online marketing, it’s just as important to get your firm offline and engage with its community in real life. These interactions build a strong local reputation and make your firm a familiar face.

Here are some ways to do just that:

• Sponsor local events, like fundraisers, festivals, or sporting games
• Offer pro-bono legal advice or workshops on specific practice areas
• Host educational seminars or webinars on different types of law
• Join local business chambers or professional associations
• Support local mentorship programs or sponsor scholarships related to law
• Encourage referrals from existing clients by offering incentives
• Partner with local media to put out PSAs about legal rights or resources

These opportunities help you forge local connections, humanize your brand, and turn you into a trusted industry leader within your community. Plus, they make for excellent content material.

One firm that sets the tone? Your Insurance Attorney, which operates in Florida, Georgia, and Colorado, sponsors three-time NBA champions Miami Heat. Now, that’s a slam dunk for offline marketing.

10. Fine-tune website design

Your law firm’s website is your virtual doorstep and most coveted digital marketing tool. Make sure it welcomes potential clients with a professional, informative, and intuitive experience. Otherwise, you risk losing over 40% of potential clients.

The makings of good web design include:

• Clear and compelling messaging that conveys your firm’s unique value propositions (UVPs)
• Straightforward navigation that’s accessible, aesthetically pleasing, and intuitively structured
• Seamlessly optimized for mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets
• Fast loading times to keep visitors engaged and boost SEO rankings
• Clear CTAs that compel audiences to take a desired action
• Short, breezy lead forms that make it easy for prospects to get in touch
• High-quality images, videos, and graphics
• Relevant keywords integrated naturally throughout your content
• An About Us page that covers your brand story, introduces your team, and practice areas
• Other relevant pages such as a blog, awards/recognitions, case studies or testimonials, frequently asked questions, and security/data protection page

11. Conquer legal directories

When people research legal services, they often end up in legal directories. Here, firms and attorneys can list their services, which makes it easier for potential clients to find legal assistance. Some well-known directories (like Avvo or FindLaw) even beef up your credibility and SEO.

So, how do you tap into this resource? Start by listing your firm in free directories, then evaluate which ones may be worth the investment for a paid listing.

Some of the top online legal directories include:

• Avvo
• Nolo
• FindLaw
• Expertise.com
• Lawyers.com
• Lawyer.com
• LegalZoom
• Martindale
• Super Lawyers
• Justia

Already listed? All that’s left to do is “claim” your listing so you can make sure all information is accurate and up to date.

You can also create, claim, and optimize your Google My Business Profile (GBP) for your physical office. This free Google feature is yet another way to extend your reach, post updates, and interact with people who’ve reviewed or asked questions about your firm.

12. Carve out a marketing budget

According to an American Bar Association survey, less than half of firms have a dedicated annual marketing budget. And listen, we get it; good marketing can be costly.

But then again, so is legal representation. It makes sense that your marketing campaigns mirror the high quality and value of your services.

If you’re just starting to plan your marketing budget, Dawson says it’s best to start small and scale as you go — no matter the size of your enterprise.

He predicts that small law firms might focus on converting every possible lead into a client, regardless of settlement amounts. As these small victories accumulate, they provide a foundation to justify and support a heftier budget.

Larger firms, on the other hand, might explore expanding their reach into new networks and different types of campaigns as they scale.

“For example, a larger firm might spend large budgets on Google Ads, so they could test and scale up even more by testing Bing Ads,” suggests Dawson.

When you adopt this approach, your marketing investments will truly reflect the caliber of your firm’s legal services.

13. Stay compliant and ethical

Similar to the finance and medical sectors, the legal industry has strict marketing rules you’ll need to follow to get in the game.

For example, some states prohibit lawyers from using terms like “expert” or “specialist.” Meanwhile, others state that contact details should always accompany information about legal services.

Each state has its own bar association guidelines that set the tone for what’s acceptable. That said, they typically encompass the same basis: no false promises, always be upfront about your services, and make sure your ads speak truthfully.

Before you launch a new ad campaign, brush up on the dos and don’ts via the:

• Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
• American Bar Association
• General Bar where you practice

Double-checking that your legal ads align with marketing regulations is an essential step that will help you avoid potential fines, reprimands, or even suspension. No one wants ethical breaches that could compromise your firm’s impeccable reputation you’ve worked so hard to build.

14. Never stop optimizing

If the jury doesn’t react as you had hoped they would mid-trial, you might shift your tactics.

The same goes for your law marketing plan. To stay effective, you’ll need to keep tabs on its performance and be ready to pivot on the fly. This proactive approach ensures your marketing efforts stay as dynamic and persuasive as a courtroom argument.

But don’t get discouraged if you don’t see immediate results, either. This is especially true for SEO marketing, which can take some time to kick in.

Fortunately, tools like Google Analytics 4 and ConversionIQ offer detailed performance reports to give you a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not. From there, you can A/B test elements like landing pages and ads to see what resonates best with your audience.

Sure, it’s a demanding and time-consuming process. However, as time passes, you can refine your strategy and reset your goals to aim higher and higher.

What is a law marketing plan?

A law marketing plan outlines a firm’s efforts to promote its services, bring in new clients, and grow its business.

It lays out the business objectives, target audience, and marketing tactics to achieve those goals. This includes market analysis, SEO, budget breakdown, and more.

We know what you’re thinking: doesn’t this apply to marketing in any industry? 

There are a few nuances exclusive to the legal sector, such as:

• Shorter buying cycles
• Trust and credibility
• Specialization
• Urgency
• Strict regulations
• Localized focus
• Word of mouth

Shorter buying cycles

Legal clients typically need help right away, which means shorter buying cycles. This is because they don’t usually have the time to shop around and compare pricing like they might with other products or services.

Trust and credibility

Legal services typically involve high-stakes matters, leading potential clients to seek trustworthy professionals. This differs from other industries where purchasing decisions involve lower stakes.

Specialization

Dawson highlights that legal services often involve specialized practice areas, like product safety, employment law, family law, and so on.

“These constraints pose unique challenges for [legal] marketing and lead generation,” he says.

Urgency

The pressing nature of legal assistance makes availability key. That’s why the best legal marketing campaigns provide as many touchpoints as possible.

Strict regulations

Legal marketing faces unique regulatory restrictions, like prohibiting certain terms or requiring specific disclaimers. Other sectors tend to have more flexibility in their advertising.

Localized focus

Dawson states, “While other industries can scale to national and international markets, many law firms and legal companies work in smaller regions more dictated by licensing.”

Word of mouth

Referrals and word of mouth play a significant role in legal marketing, while other industries might rely more on broader advertising campaigns.

With these unique hurdles, a smart digital marketing plan for law helps you navigate these differences more smoothly.

A marketing plan vs. marketing strategy

A law marketing plan and a marketing strategy are synonymous, aren’t they? Not quite. According to Dawson, it’s the strategy that shapes the plan.

“A law firm’s strategy outlines how to achieve success by reviewing the competitive landscape and the type of cases the firm wants to attract,” he explains. “The marketing plan outlines how to navigate your competitors and specifically attract these desirable cases.”

In other words, your strategy provides the blueprint for success, while your marketing plan lays out the specifics for execution.

As for bypassing a digital marketing plan for law, that might not be a risk you want to take.

A solid law marketing plan helps you build trust with a discerning audience, but your in-house resources might be tapped out with your caseload. (Image: Rawpixel)

Why you need a law marketing plan

Could you get by without a law marketing plan? About half of all firms already do. But if you want a leg up on the competition, investing in a solid marketing strategy is a no-brainer.

Other benefits your firm will reap include:

• Better client acquisition
• More referrals and client retention
• More brand awareness
• Clear direction and focus
• Measurable return on investment (ROI)
• Data-driven decision making
• Swift adaptability to market changes
• Optimized marketing spend
• Scalability and growth potential

But as Lady Justice would tell you, great rewards come with great risks. Are you ready to shoulder that burden of proof solo?

The takeaway

A solid law marketing plan helps you build trust with a discerning audience, but your in-house resources might be tapped out with your caseload. That’s where a legal marketing like HawkSEM comes in:

“A marketing agency carries a host of tools and proprietary knowledge, as well as the wisdom gleaned from both successful and failed marketing strategies,” says Dawson.

“When an agency makes a recommendation for a client, it does so with the experience of that recommendation working for scores of other clients.”

Long story short: Why start from scratch when you can leverage proven practices and an average of 4.5X ROI right out the gate?

HawkSEM’s team brings decades of experience, exclusive tech, and multichannel strategies to capture your target audience and tip the scales in your favor.

Partner with a top 3% agency and seal the deal with a winning strategy.

This article has been updated and was originally published in January 2022.