IMS takes care of the online marketing for your estate planning and Elder Law firm, but until we get our virtual reality lawyer marketing system up and running, there are a number of activities that still require your live participation. With proper time management, you should be able to incorporate the following into your law firm marketing schedule:
Speaking engagements to professionals and to the community should be part of your strategic marketing plan. Even if you only speak four times a year, twice to professionals and twice to consumers, you will have reached the audiences, the people who received information about the events but were not able to attend, and you have content to blog about and four additional photos for your social media accounts. Your credibility online and IRL is enhanced when your name appears on other’s websites, like those belong to bar associations and community organizations.
Publish or perish is not just for academics. An estate planning attorney who stands out from the crowd shows up in print, online and hard copy. That could mean an article every six months in the local bar association’s newsletter, where you will be seen by your peers in different practice areas, or a monthly column in a local community newspaper. Similar to speaking, you leverage these articles by posting them on your blog (with the publisher’s permission and appropriate copyright notice being used) and use them on social media. You can also use them as a reason to send out an email blast, with a link to either the PDF on your website or a link to the article’s home site.
Step up to AdWords or Facebook ads to ramp up your website traffic and conversions. In a highly competitive market, where you face off digitally and daily against other law firms and digital marketing giants in the online legal services space (you won’t mind if we don’t use their names, they don’t need further promotions), the basic website and social media will be strengthened with the use of these additional tools. Not a fan of Facebook? That’s fine, but make sure you are appearing regularly on other high-profile social sites, like Twitter and Linked In.
You’ll also need a tactic called “offpage SEO.” This relates to how popular or authoritative your site is. This includes links to your site from other robust websites and social shares of your content. Another offpage SEO technique: guest blogging on websites that are complementary to yours. Do you have a colleague who has an estate planning practice in another state who does not complete with you? Guest blogs on each other’s sites, with links, could be helpful to your SEO.