There aren’t many absolutes in digital marketing, but if there is one essential pillar for excellent digital marketing strategy, it is understanding the fundamental relationship between your marketing channels and how they transform leads into conversions.
In the past, law firms used television, print, and billboards to advertise their services to prospective clients, and these channels are still relevant depending on the type of law you practice. However, in 2022, the main driver of law leads is the internet.
An effective digital marketing strategy for law firms requires understanding the buyer’s journey. You need to know how potential clients use the internet to find the things they need. After understanding this, you can tailor your marketing strategy in a way that successfully funnels potential clients directly to your website.
In this article, we will break down exactly how to do that. The first step is understanding the buyer’s journey.
Do You Understand the Buyer’s Journey?
The buyer’s journey refers to a person’s path toward purchasing a product or service. As one might imagine, there is an internal psychological process that leads a person to buy a good or service. People do not hire a bankruptcy lawyer spontaneously. There are stages of thought that lead a person to ultimately hire an attorney.
If you correctly understand the phases of the buyer’s journey, you can position your law firm at strategic points along it. That way, the buyer is effectively funneled toward your law firm when it is decision time. In 2022, this means effective content strategy, but we’ll get into that later.
3 Stages of the Buyer’s Journey (and your place alongside it)
The buyer’s journey is often broken up into three stages—awareness, consideration, and decision. An excellent digital marketer will take advantage of each of these phases when crafting a digital marketing strategy.
- Awareness
This is the realization that something is wrong, lacking, or needed. The awareness stage has potential clients realize an issue that needs to be solved. This stage is associated with information-seeking, as people will identify and define the problem.
You’ll want to have site content that addresses all of the questions potential clients may ask, and you’ll want that site content well-optimized for SEO so that when they go searching, it’s your information they discover.
- Consideration
This stage happens when a potential client has identified their problem and is now considering the potential solutions to it. They might not think they need a lawyer yet, but they are exploring their options.
As with the awareness stage, your law firm’s site content, whether in blog posts, videos, or service pages, can help make a case for why they need a lawyer to help them solve their problem.
- Decision
This final stage is where the potential client hopefully becomes an actualized client. Leading up to the decision stage, the buyer has identified their problem and solutions to it, and now they must make a decision.
This is where your call to action really needs to sell. Why are you the best lawyer for the job? Why does your law firm have the expertise to solve the buyer’s problem? Your site content needs to be ready to sell.
Use the Buyer’s Journey to Design a Digital Marketing Strategy to Boost Leads
So, how do you take advantage of the buyer’s journey when devising a digital marketing strategy? To be clear, there can’t possibly be a one-size-fits-all solution for every law firm. The marketing channels you choose should ultimately be relevant to the type of law you practice.
An Example: Medical Malpractice Attorney vs. Contract Law Attorney
Medical malpractice attorneys have to market to the general public, as it is a broad swath of the public that makes up their clientele. Compare this to an area of law with a much more specific target audience—contract law. The initial marketing channels used by a medical malpractice lawyer and those used by a contract law attorney must be different because their clientele is different.
Though the initial marketing channels are different, each’s marketing strategy will lead to the same place—the lawyer’s website.
All Paths (Should) Lead to Your Website
Let’s explore the marketing channels you should have in place along the buyer’s journey to get leads to your site and (hopefully) convert them.
Awareness
During the awareness phase, you want potential clients to define their problems and align your firm with a potential solution. You need to be producing content that answers any potential questions clients might have.
You want to have content that answers these questions ready on your website’s blog, optimized for search so that when prospective clients turn to Google with queries, it’s your blog that appears in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Additionally, you want to position these answers on all social media platforms that the typical client uses. This may be Tik-Tok, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, or even in-person events.
Consideration
As a potential client starts to consider solutions to their problem, you want to direct them to your website and justify why you are the solution. After engaging with your content, the prospective client will start to view your law firm as an authority on the subject.
Ideally, they’ll jump on one blog post, clicking through to others so that by the end of their visit, your firm will be positioned as the authoritative source as well as the solution.
Action
Then, you must deliver the final pitch—the call to action. Through strategic internal linking, a visitor to your site will find their way to the bottom of the marketing funnel, where they will have to make a decision.
This is how leads become conversions.
It All Starts with The Buyer’s Journey
Understanding the psychology of your clientele is absolutely critical to devising an effective content marketing strategy. Are you ready to walk the path of the buyer’s journey and bring more leads to your law firm?
About the Author
Roni Davis is a writer, blogger, digital marketer, and legal assistant operating out of the greater Philadelphia area. She writes for Villari Law, a successful medical malpractice lawyer.
