Anyone reading this probably doesn’t need to be convinced about the potential of legal practice management software to increase productivity, improve the customer experience, and grow law firms.

But no solution will work unless you have the right strategy in place.

To grow your firm, your practice management software should have a solid digital marketing strategy behind it.  This will help you reach out to more of your target audience; attract new leads, and convert more prospects into paying customers.

Referrals are all well and good but relying on them as the foundation of any law firm marketing strategy is asking for trouble.

If you want to create a solid base for growth, it pays to be proactive in four areas in particular:

1. Growing traffic to your website
2. Nurturing leads
3. Improving conversion rates
4. Managing and marketing to clients more effectively

Below I highlight what to focus on in each category, with a few tips sprinkled in so that you can achieve some quick “wins”.

1. Growing traffic to your website 

To grow your firm through digital marketing, you first need to increase the amount of qualified traffic to your website. 

First, get very clear on what “qualified” means. Who are your target customers? This will vary for each law firm.

Then work on the following:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Building your social media online presence (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• Investing in paid advertising (Google Ads, Facebook ads, etc.)

There are no shortcuts with any of the above. They all take a little time. 

The logical starting point is SEO but it’s usually most effective when all three work in tandem.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Don’t underestimate the power of getting your website to rank on the first page of Google for your main keywords.

To improve your chances, focus on the following areas:

• Build a website for great user experience – Google will reward you for it.
• Hire an SEO specialist to optimize your website structure and ensure pages are loading quickly.
• Remove dead pages or old URLs that no longer work.
• Create a clear value proposition and call to action from the homepage onwards.
• Make your website mobile-friendly or Google will penalise you.
• Target specific keywords and specific segments of your audience with your practice area pages.
• Use multimedia (video, podcasts, infographics) to engage users and keep them on your site for as long as possible.
• Gather 5-star reviews from past clients – especially Google reviews.

Check out our law firm SEO article for more SEO tips.

Social media

If you’re pushed for time, social media might take a backseat in your digital marketing strategy.

But neglecting it completely will cut you off from potentially huge numbers of your target audience. 

It’s especially important for customer-facing law firms, such as those practicing family law; commercial or corporate law firms may find it less so.

To drive traffic to your site, work on:

• A Facebook fan page
• A Twitter account
• YouTube videos
• An Instagram account (if you want strong visual branding for your law firm) 
• LinkedIn marketing (for B2B law firms, this is a must)

Paid advertising

Facebook ads are one form of paid advertising for customer-facing law firms to consider.

Virtually any law firm can benefit from Google Ads too if you run optimized campaigns. It’s the most popular pay-per-click platform for good reason: the prominent ads that feature at the top of Google search pages can drive large amounts of traffic to your website.

But you need to get your Google Ads strategy right:

• Look for specific ‘long tail’ keywords related to terms that suggest intent to hire a lawyer: ‘DUI lawyer Toronto free consultation’ is usually better than simply ‘DUI lawyer’.
• Employ the use of ‘dynamic keyword insertion’ in ad copy: this allows your keywords to exactly match what users are searching for.
• Define any search terms that you don’t want your ad to appear for: these ‘negative keywords’ can save you lots of unnecessary clicks – which cost you money. 
• Are you targeting a specific geographical area? Use zip codes as well as city names in the ad copy.

If your Google Ad strategy fails, you’ll find it a very expensive way to generate leads. Learn how you can develop an effective Google Adwords Strategy and floods of new targeted traffic can hit your website.

2. Nurturing leads

Is all that traffic hitting your website? Some – but not all – of your leads will be interested in hiring a law firm immediately.

What do you do with those that are just gathering information? Those with questions and seeking out what their options are?

Your customers will generally be at one of the following stages of the buying cycle:

1. Research stage
2. Evaluation stage
3. Buying stage

Your digital marketing strategy should look to cover each stage of this cycle: 

1. Research: Include FAQs and other content designed to educate people and provide tips about their legal matter.
2. Evaluation: Develop customer reviews, testimonials, case studies, awards, etc., which highlight your credibility, authority, and success in your practice area.
3. Buying: Ads, emails or other content that encourage hiring your firm.

Consider these stages for your website content as you develop your “lead nurturing” strategies.

How you play this will determine how well you turn traffic and initial interest into a decision to choose your firm over the competition.

So how do you best nurture leads? 

One of the best ways is via email ‘drip’ campaigns. This is a series of emails that educate your target audience and encourage them to take the next step when they’re ready.

To do this most effectively, your practice management software should integrate with your email software, helping you automate and manage the process effectively.

3. Converting leads into paying clients

Traffic arriving at your website from SEO, paid advertising, social media, or through lead nurturing campaigns is no use to your law firm unless you can convert a proportion into paying customers.

What’s the first step you want leads to take?

They aren’t going to arrive with a credit card in hand so it’s usually a case of convincing visitors to call, email or fill out a form. 

Here are a few ways to ensure that your hot leads convert rather than going cold…

Build landing pages for conversion

Understand where your traffic is coming from and build unique landing pages that speak to the needs of these leads (hire a professional designer and a copywriter).

Optimized landing pages are typically:

• Closely related to the language of the target audience: a Google Ads visitor clicks through from an ad using a search term like divorce lawyer free consultation. They expect to see a landing page relating to a divorce lawyer offering a free consultation. Sound obvious? It’s amazing how often firms get it wrong.
• Related to a specific service, such as a free consultation for a DUI charge or a free webinar on divorce law in Chicago.
• Clutter-free: high-quality landing pages only include relevant information and avoid distracting or confusing visitors.
• Focused around the visitor taking a specific action – via a clear call to action button.

Optimize your contact forms

Your contact forms should be easy to fill out and encourage your target audience to get in touch with you from desktop or mobile.

This usually means:

• Using easily readable text
• Keeping forms clutter-free
• Making them mobile-friendly
• Populating fields automatically, if some information is known
• Including a clear call to action button

Offer click-to-call 

Offering click-to-call on your law firm website makes it easy for those who are ready to hire a lawyer (or who have a question they’d rather ask in person) to request a call from you from mobile or desktop.

Don’t make potential customers wait or scribble down a phone number. They may forget to call you later or misplace the number.

Most leads go cold within 24 hours and it can be a challenge for busy lawyers to follow up. Click-to-call will automatically dial leads as a member of your team becomes available to talk.

This prevents leads from ‘perishing’ and is a simple conversion tool that could help most law firms.

4. Managing and marketing to clients more effectively

The law practice management software you choose is key to determining the level of service you can provide for new and existing clients.

It’s much easier to retain existing clients than find new ones so you need a system that caters to the needs of both.

Managing your client base becomes easier with a cloud-based practice management solution, which can help you:

• Automate day-to-day tasks, improving turnaround times for clients
• Manage contacts and communication more easily, improving the customer experience
• Manage case records anywhere at any time on any device
• Create and organize the documents you need and provide timely access to what you need when you need it
• Boost productivity by freeing up time
• Get more organized by setting appointments and deadline alerts 
• Manage clients from intake to settlement – even remembering their birthdays!
• Better track the ROI of marketing campaigns

When your cloud-based practice management software works alongside a well-considered and executed digital marketing strategy, it’s an unbeatable combination.

Together, they can help you increase traffic, leads, and conversions for your law firm; while also ensuring that servicing new clients doesn’t come at the expense of providing an excellent service to existing ones.

By: Calin Yablonski

Calin is the founder and lead strategist at Inbound Law Marketing.

Since 2009, he has been working with law firms to design websites and develop comprehensive Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Google Adwords Marketing campaigns.

The post How to Attract & Manage Legal Clients with Digital Marketing & a Practice Management Solution appeared first on The Legal Assistant.

1. Preparing for the financial summaries of transactions
2. Preparing for the necessary arrangements for closings
3. Preparing for the preliminary negotiation documents
4. Preparing for legal documents like purchase contracts, and listing agreements
5. Gathering information associated with taxes
6. Analyzing mortgage and financing commitments
7. Eliminating possible title problems
8. Determining the status of the title
9. Conducting property surveys
10. Determining scope of inspections
11. Drafting of instruments of conveyance
12. And so on…

It is fortunate they have highly skilled paralegals at hand who know how to handle these tasks competently but undoubtedly, the problem of human error can and will happen, leading to situations where office conflicts and attorney-client disputes may arise.

Aside from these concerns, another problem that real estate lawyers have to face today, is simply remaining in business. Lawyers are not exempt from the recent recession and many law firms are trying their best just to stay in business. Many have resorted to different methods in which they can save expense and one of the first things that is often considered is reducing the headcount which includes associates, paralegals, staff and non-productive partners in the firm.

This is a great cost-cutting strategy but who will then manage all of your files, schedules, as well as document and correspondence preparations? Do you think you will solely be able to handle all the above tasks?  You definitely need an aid which will not bring you any additional worries.

LPO(Legal Practice Optimization) compliant case management software is the perfect solution to all of these problems. It helps lawyers with their case management worries and assists them with their cost-cutting issues and it massively reduces risks of human error. It will not require you to hire additional staff members just for him or her to operate the system for you. It is very simple and convenient to use. It has a friendly interface that allows users, even non-technical types, to navigate through it without any hassles.

Let’s take for example your task to remember important dates related to particular cases that your firm is handling. Traditional real estate lawyers will most likely have a big white board inside their office. This serves as his reminder of the things that needs to be accomplished for the month. He or she may not be the one who updates this gigantic work calendar but this is enough for him to be reminded of his or her tasks for the month.

The problem with this office management approach is convenience. There is no way you can bring this giant white board everywhere yet Case management software provides you the luxury to always have all of this vital information at the comfort of your laptop or mobile device. Now you can have access to a colossal weight of information wherever and whenever. Once a system is installed in your laptop or desktop, you can conveniently click on its designated button and the information you sought for will instantly be presented before your eyes. There is no need for you to call your paralegal and search for files. You simply need to familiarize yourself with the case management software and you can handle it on your own.

Aside from this, it allows you to automatically generate and send letters.  Legal Case Management tools typically come with tons of templates for all your letter needs. It can even install your letterhead into the system as well as your virtual signature so you can send and print letters conveniently. They also contain trackers for different kinds of correspondences that you have traditionally mailed or electronically mailed to your clients. Just signal the system to proceed with mail delivery and it will be done within a few seconds.

A reliable case management application is the ultimate paralegal you may ever need. It is not susceptible to human error and performs its duties 100% efficiently.  Any calculations that must be done can be done in an instant. Any client, broker, lawyer, or any other contact type can be instantly retrieved. In this manner, you can reduce your headcount, benefit, compensation, and even office expense without worrying about the quality of work it will deliver.

Real Estate Legal Software such as The Real Estate Assistant module, part of The Legal Assistant software suite, provides your firm with custom databases that will include the following:

1. Lawyer Database
2. Clients Database
3. Bank Database
4. Real Estate Broker Database
5. Real Estate Agency Database
6. County Clerk Database
7. House and Pest Inspector Database
8. Surveyor Database
9. Municipality Database
10. Title Agency Database
11. Letter Database which contains more than 150 letter templates
12. HUD-1/RESPA

It will assist you with time and billing management, inter-office communication, scheduling and calendar management, notification and reminder management, generate the HUD-1 RESPA form at the click on a mouse, and additionally document management and letter generation features.

One major advantage offered by The Real Estate Assisant is the nature of combining multiple  features into a single product, unlike many offerings out there which require one package for handling billing, another to let you create the HUD-1 or GFE settlement statement,  The Real Estate Assistant has in-built HUD-1 Software right out of the box.

There is no other legal practice management software developed which can so much cater to the needs of real estate lawyer than The Legal Assistant.

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The Legal Industry is probably one of the top culprits behind massive tree cutting in the past years. In a recent survey of paper use, results revealed that an average attorney generates more or less 100,000 sheets of paper a year which is enough paper to wrap the entire U.S. Supreme Court Building 66 times over and is equivalent to twelve 40 foot trees in a year. If the numbers can be reduced then imagine how many trees lawyers can save! But is it possible?

It is impossible for any lawyer not to use paper since document production is an inevitable part of his daily transactions. Voluminous amount of research and paperwork is a common site in the work place of these lawyers thus it is not unusual to encounter heated arguments amongst office personnel because of frustrations associated with finding specific files. If only there could be a way to get rid of these office annoyances and clutter.

Law Practice Optimization or Legal Practice Optimization (LPO), as others may call it, is the solution offered by software developers to the legal industry. It was developed and designed to help provide assistance to law firms by allowing them to obtain a better and more efficient office management in the work place. It introduces modern technology through the use of computer systems and LPO compliant case management programs such as The Legal Assistant that will aid lawyers with their daily routines.

Law Practice Optimization allows the Legal Industry to continue with their daily office routines without the regular office-paper hassles like regular filing of case folders, client files, letters, memorandum, billing statements, pleas, notifications, petitions and the like. Instead of the usual paper and file system, lawyers and their paralegals can simply click on their desired information and key-in specific commands for them to see the information they are looking for. These liberate them from long hours of searching which only brings frustrations and additional stress to the body.

In addition to the above benefits of LPO to the regular office works of lawyers, it also makes their lives more convenient since it allows lawyers to connect to their clients faster and more effectively. The designed software gives lawyer the luxury to receive their mail and even reminders or court notifications electronically or through SMS messages. Thus it puts an end to last minute formulation of Responses to the court simply because you or one of your assistants fails to remind you of the Court’s deadline.

Law Practice Optimization is the perfect tool for the modern law firm.  It is in accordance with the Go Green Campaign advocacy to help save Mother Earth from destruction while assisting legal personnel and lawyers with their daily office work. It brings an end to cluttered offices and needless use of papers while providing you more time to handle family matters and other pressing issues which need to be attended to in the office.  Moreover, it also helps increase the online exposure and marketing of law firms which ultimately enhances your chances of getting more clients and cases to handle.

For further information on LPO software or to arrange a live one on one demonstration of the software, read more on The Legal Assistant, our Legal Case Management Software suite.

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