Marketing for small businesses continues to change and evolve, and online marketing is quickly turning into the most viable way to promote a small business. In the legal world, online reviews and testimonials are one of the most powerful tools, particularly for potential clients who can’t get a word-of-mouth referral. While billboards and print ads still have a role to play, 60% of potential clients will begin their searches for a service provider online, which means a powerful and positive online presence is important.
Yet having an online presence is only effective if it’s reaching the right local clients. Localization, therefore, has quickly become one of the most crucial strategies to implement in an online marketing campaign. Technology provides tools for small business owners, like lawyers, to streamline their marketing efforts and hone in on the right localization strategies to pinpoint their target audience with precision. Finding the right local marketing platform for lawyers and law firms becomes critical to a firm’s online marketing success.
Benefits of the Right Local Marketing Platform for Lawyers
Why should your law firm invest in a tool to support your local online marketing efforts? Some benefits of using a tool for local marketing include:
Benefit 1: Increased Time Efficiency
As an attorney, your time is literally money. You need as much time as possible to work for your clients and grow your firm. Time spent on marketing detracts from the time you spend with your cases. When you have the right local marketing platform, it streamlines your efforts so you reach more people with less effort.
Benefit 2: Enhanced Targeting and Personalization
When a potential client needs an attorney, they want to find someone in their particular area of law and geographic location. To reach this client you need highly targeted marketing, both to geographic area and to law specialty. When you use a local marketing platform, you can hone in on these specifics to make your ads as effective as possible. The tool will ensure the majority of the people who see your ad are people who can actually use your services.
Benefit 3: Improved Data Analytics and Insights for Local Customer Behavior
Each online marketing platform has analytics you can use to fine-tune your marketing efforts. Yet when your firm markets across Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Google, and email, you have multiple analytics pages to log into, read, digest, and adjust to.
A local marketing platform can combine all of these into one platform so you only have to log in to one location for access to these vital insights. Often, local marketing platforms perform some of the analysis as well, making it easier to understand what the data is telling you.
Benefit 4: Maximized Marketing Budgets
With easily accessed analytics and highly targeted marketing, your money does more for you. Local marketing that’s easy to access and understand brings a higher ROI than marketing that’s not targeted properly. In addition, a local marketing platform for law firms will help you create consistent messaging across multiple channels, which improves your ROI as well.
Benefit 5: Increased Impact and Relevance of Marketing Messages
According to Forbes, relevance is the key to effective marketing to the modern client. People need to see that your law firm has what they need at the exact moment they need it. An impactful marketing message is one that hits this relevance point well.
The right localized marketing platform will help you craft and deliver relevant marketing messages that make an impact. Through the analytics, you gain insight into your target clients’ behavior. You can then reach them where they are with the message that they need to transform them into contracted clients.
Benefit 6: Improved Positive Reviews from Happy Clients
Finally, one of the best ways to grow a law firm is through referrals and word-of-mouth marketing, but many people who need legal services don’t have a friend or family member who recently had a similar need. So, these people look at reviews to see what others say about your firm. Local marketing platforms make it easier to elicit, respond to, and track reviews, and they increase the likelihood of making your reviews positive by targeting your happy past clients.
Understanding the Differences in Approaches: All-in-One Versus Duct Take
Tools are essential to marketing for law firms, especially as you try to target a local audience. However, if you take a “duct tape” approach to this process, you may find yourself frustrated. The duct tape approach lets the brand find a different tool for each type of online marketing. You have one tool for your social media campaigns, another for your local SEO efforts, and yet another for your email marketing. While this may seem cost-effective, especially since many marketing platforms are designed for larger businesses, it wastes time and effort.
An all-in-one platform streamlines the process by putting everything in one convenient place. You simply log into your marketing platform and see all of your campaigns and strategies, along with their analytics, in one location. Finding an all-in-one approach that’s tailored to small businesses is the key to making this work for your law firm. Surefire Local provides just such a platform.
How Surefire Local Helps Small Businesses Like Law Firms with Localized Marketing
Surefire Local is a comprehensive marketing tool designed for local marketing. Created with small businesses in mind, it has everything you need in one central location. You can target local customers effectively, all while saving time and energy that you can use to serve your legal clients. Some of the features you find in Surefire Local include:
- Website and Local SEO—Our platform lets you create targeted content with the right geotags to reach your specific market, whether you market to a city, county, or zip code. Create the content on Surefire Local, and publish it with ease to all of your digital channels, including your website.
- Reviews—Send review requests to happy clients directly from the platform. When they respond, you can see them and reply back. With this tool, you can analyze the brand sentiment your law firm is growing in your local community.
- Directory Listings – Get listed on over 80 online directory listings, and ensure your name, address, and phone number are consistent across all of these platforms. Once you’ve claimed your listing, add photos and content to them from one location.
- Content Creation—Surefire Local gives you tools to create content that’s targeted and reverent to your audience. Then, you can publish that content in a scheduled manner on your blog and social media pages.
- Profile Management—Ensure your Google Business Profile, social media profiles, and business directories all share the right, accurate information about your firm to improve your online search results and keep clients in contact with you.
- Social Media—Social media is one of the top options for branding yourself as a legal authority in your community. Use Surefire Local to schedule posts, track engagement metrics, and engage with your audience.
- Online Advertising—Pay-per-click and other online ads can get even more people in touch with your firm, but you need to plan strategically to use these tools well. Our platform lets you target a specific geographic area so you can connect with the right customers with all of your paid ads.
- Email and Text Messaging—Use email and text messaging campaigns to keep your firm in the minds of potential clients as you continue to extend your marketing efforts. These tools also help you build your customer relationships.
- Analytics and Reporting—With all of your campaigns reported in one place and transparency that lets you easily see how your marketing efforts are paying off, and you will be able to find what works. The platform even offers AI-generated recommendations on specific actions to take to improve your campaigns.
What sets Surefire Local apart from other all-in-one platforms is our small business focus. We know what small businesses need and what they don’t, and our platform gives you the right tools to make your efforts effective.
Learn More About Surefire Local Today
Printmaking in this digital age requires highly localized strategies. Through the right local marketing platform for lawyers, like Surefire Local, your firm can easily accomplish this without spending hours on your marketing. You can increase your visibility to specific zip codes, improve your customer engagement, and grow your firm with effective and local online marketing.
Surefire Local is all about helping your firm establish and grow a local online presence through local signals that extend across platforms. We make it easier for customers to find you through consistent profiles, and we streamline your marketing efforts through an all-in-one platform design.
Surefire Local gives you everything you need for marketing in one place. See how it works for yourself by attending a Surefire Local demo.