Some businesses succeed or fail based purely on their messaging, but family law firms are among these. You can create demand for fad products out of thin air, and if all you do is create Internet content, then your product and the perception of your product are inseparably linked. It is a good thing that you are a lawyer and not simply a seller of widgets, or worse, vibes. Lawyers actually do something, instead of just talking themselves up and hoping that others buy into it.
Family lawyers must market their services directly to prospective clients more than lawyers in some practice areas do, though, so when you go to your law school class reunion or receive messages in a Whats App group chat of your former classmates, you might feel that your classmates who took jobs as corporate drones have it made, while you have to keep recruiting new clients. Furthermore, the work never ends unless you end up with a client whose track record with marriage gives the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and King Henry VIII a run for their money. The good news for family law attorneys is that, when it comes to marketing, a little goes a long way.
To Build a Successful Family Law Firm, Know Who You are and Who You are Not
Law firm marketing efforts should represent what your law firm is and not what you hope it will be in the future. When clients hire a lawyer, they do not do it on a speculative basis. They want to hire someone who gets clients through high-conflict divorce cases, not someone who hopes to break into the high-conflict divorce market.
Your law firm’s website is the cornerstone of your marketing strategy. It should talk about the practice areas you work on, and only those practice areas. This way, people who are likely to hire you will find your website, and those who are not will not. Law firm marketing is about quality, not quantity.
The first step is to limit yourself to a few practice areas, only the ones you are comfortable working in. If you are a family law attorney, then take the divorce and co-parenting cases, and leave the criminal defense cases to the criminal defense lawyers and the immigration cases to the immigration lawyers. Practicing “door law,” where you agree to represent every client who walks through the door, regardless of the nature of his or her case, can sink any small family law firm, even if you live in a rural county with few law firms.
Build a Usable, Informative Website and Let the Clients Come to You
The most common way for clients to find the lawyers they end up hiring is by Google searches. Advertisements on billboards and public buses may build your name recognition, but when it comes to family lawyers, the clients come to you. If you wish that you could get more clients, so you make aspirational social media content to put people in the mood to modify their parenting plans or torpedo their marriages, and it works, then you should be careful what you wish for.
Your client base is already there; they already live in your city, and they are already dealing with a family law-related issue to which they need a resolution. Assume that they are going to search for a family lawyer in your city. Now your goal is to make it easy for them to find your website, and when they do, make them stick around until they decide to contact you.
Website glitches are your worst enemy. When prospective clients navigate away from your website, it is not because the images on your website are insufficiently eye-catching; rather, it is because your website frustrates them and causes them to go back to the list of search results. The images do not have to be exquisite, but they should appear instead of just being generic thumbnails. Your content should format properly on mobile devices. Furthermore, it is not 1996, so no yellow text on a purple background; a law firm’s website should look professional, not like a passion project Geocities page.
Diversify Your Marketing Content, but Remember That Less is More
If you have a functional website for your family law law firm, then you have already implemented the most important part of your marketing strategy. Updating your site with new blog posts every week will keep it fresh on Google’s radar screen. If you have any time or energy left for marketing, try writing guest blog posts or making videos of varying lengths to post on your site or on YouTube. Find out what works for you, but remember that a law firm is not a media empire.
Sources
https://www.clio.com/blog/family-law-marketing-tips/
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