As a law firm, most of your leads come from the local area, and chances are good that unless you’re in a very small community, you’ll have competition for new clients. With the help of local marketing software, it’s possible to reach more of your leads, build your brand, and help more people with their legal concerns with less time and money spent on the process.
For any busy lawyer, that’s a good thing: more leads with less time is always a good thing.
The American Bar Association makes it clear: It’s not enough to build your firm from word-of-mouth services. Technology is the differentiator for the most successful attorneys tapping into digital marketing.
What Is Local Marketing Automation?
Local marketing automation is the process of using a technology platform to customize marketing ads to reach your specific client base. It then enables you to place those ads where that target client sees them in the most effective and efficient way possible. These marketing tasks are typically tedious but critical to reaching your prospective leads. With automation, you’re more hands-off, and the work gets done anyway.
Why is marketing automation important?
Attorneys are constantly faced with a competitive market where there are more lawyers and services available than ever to tap into the client base needed to grow your firm. At the same time, you don’t have the manpower to reach as many leads as you need to on a daily basis. What makes it even harder is that there are so many different marketing challenges and tools out there that it’s just too much of a time investment for most law practices.
Marketing automation reduces this frustration, opens the door to getting more marketing work done, and allows your brand to stand out from the competition. Without solid law firm marketing automation, your practice could fall behind the competition.
The Benefits of Marketing Automation
Utilizing the best local marketing platform for attorneys, it’s possible to drive a significant increase (14% or more) in leads coming into your law firm without spending more time on your marketing. While not all local marketing tools are the same, there are some exceptional benefits that come from using our products at Surefire Local.
Improved efficiency
Simply using these local marketing tools saves time, and time is money. However, there are other benefits here, too. When you use automated tools like this, you minimize the amount of time your team is dedicating to tasks that a computer can do, allowing them to do something more creative and empowering to build your practice.
Marketing tools can help with automating:
- Social media post creation and posting
- Lead generation tasks
- Email marketing
What could your team be doing if they were not posting your links on social media or having to craft email messages and send them out to each individual client? They may be able to offer more hands-on support in the office or help with branding and in-person events to build your practice’s profile in the city.
Enhanced targeting and personalization
Also valuable to any law firm is creating marketing that’s more targeted to their ideal client. If you are a personal injury attorney, you have a very specific client in mind. You may be better suited for medical malpractice instead of car accidents, for example. Marketing automation cannot bring in very specific leads outright, but it can create a strong foundation to help them find you.
For example, it allows you to:
- Better understand who your ideal client is
- Learn what specific things your client is looking for that could help you to better market to them
- Creating more personalized marketing that pinpoints those challenges
A good example of this is allowing our small business marketing platform to segment the messages created based on the specific types of legal services your clients need. You can also create marketing emails that target people at various stages of reaching out for legal support, such as targeting those who may be more likely to just want a free consultation to those who are ready to file a lawsuit.
Better measurement and analytics
Like in any good legal case, evidence – data and figures – is always highly important and valuable. The same applies to the use of small business marketing software. It can help you provide far more insight and complicated data about your leads and practices, allowing you to reach them in a more meaningful manner. Your analytics can answer some core questions you need when managing your practice, including:
- Which areas of your marketing campaign are leading to the most lead generation?
- How many of those leads are converting into paying clients?
- Where are your key opportunities for improvement?
Ultimately, every dollar you spend on your marketing needs to produce a positive return on investment (ROI). With the best marketing automation tools for law firms, you can make every dollar go further, ensuring you are generating the best level of leads possible from every campaign you launch.
Greater reach and visibility
Small business marketing tools of all types play a role in building your practice’s visibility. This is not just an ad campaign to generate a few leads but a way to build your law firm’s brand within your community. With so much competition for law firms in most areas, it’s difficult to break into any area and stand out. However, if you want to be known as the go-to divorce attorney in the area or the best medical malpractice firm in your area, you need to provide a higher level of consistent branding. Automation can help you to do that in several ways:
- Expand your reach, including allowing you to target more of the potential clients you need and want within the same budget
- Improve visibility within your digital marketing channels, allowing your firm to stand out more readily within your target area
- Drive better results with specific target audiences and clients by providing highly on-point marketing campaigns to meet their needs and pain points
With greater reach and visibility, the logical outcome is improved revenue for the law firm. In this way, your campaigns (and your investment in marketing automation for law firms) aren’t just a one-time benefit. Rather, it continues to benefit you over the years as your firm becomes known for the services you offer.
Improved integration and collaboration
Another core benefit of using this type of small business marketing software is its ability to create consistency across all of your digital marketing platforms. Consistency – including how frequently you engage, your brand visuals, and the language you use – all contribute to your success in attracting new clients. With marketing software, you can create more consistency across all of your platforms. In this way, your marketing can help to:
- Integrate all of your marketing efforts across all of the digital marketing channels you have
- Ensure all of the marketing you do is on the same page instead of having numerous people trying to create consistency
- Improve collaboration and coordination of multiple campaigns you may be running at the same time
Local marketing tools can not only tackle this type of integration and collaboration but also complete the work for you. Automating these tasks means consistency, reliable results, and a clear analysis of where your investment is going.
More Leads with Less Time Invested
Utilization of local marketing platform tools means your firm – of any size – can compete more readily across the local industry and competition. At the same time, it means having the ability to expand your campaigns without having to significantly increase the number of people working on your campaigns.
For today’s lawyer, the use of marketing is essential, and with the right tools, it is easier to do than ever before. Consider that marketing automation can help law firms with the following:
- Being more efficient
- Creating ads that bring in the best clients for your firm’s needs
- Provide ongoing lead nurturing, turning those who visit your site into paying clients
- Manage all of the data and information for you, reducing tedious tasks
- Ensuring personalized marketing
- Bringing clients back to your firm on a consistent basis
- Building your law firm brand
With so many benefits, it’s hard to overlook the value of using a small business marketing platform like this. We make that process easy to manage.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo
One of the best ways to learn how Surefire Local can help you with our marketing automation for law firms is to see it in action – find out what you would be doing, what your prospective clients would see and experience, and what real results look like.
To get started, learn more about our business intelligence marketing software. Find out how our tools and software support our law firm clients at a fraction of the cost of other tools or agencies. It helps you manage – and maximize – the most important online marketing activities that drive leads to your firm consistently. Take a free demo now to learn more.