Does your law firm need more clients, more cases, and a solution to get ahead of its competitors in Virginia Beach? Would you like to avoid the huge costs of TV, radio, and billboard advertising? If your answer to these questions is affirmative, then yes, your law firm needs a digital marketing strategy.
According to a Pew Research Center survey from January 2018, only 11% of Americans don’t use the Internet. This means 89% of them do, and digital marketing can help you reach out to them. Sure, you could reach out to them through the traditional newspaper ads, flyers, and TV and radio commercials. However, you cannot be sure they still read newspapers and you do not know for a fact that they watch local TV channels, listen to local radio stations, and don’t change them during commercial breaks.
While traditional marketing pays some results, it is also expensive and does not allow much control over the audience you target. Digital marketing, on the other hand, allows you to plan and control your costs, target the right audience, and reach out to potential clients through more than one channel.
In theory, the ideal solution is to combine traditional and digital marketing into one comprehensive marketing strategy. However, it can be costly, especially for a small law firm in Virginia Beach. If you have to choose between the two marketing strategies, the obvious option should be digital marketing, and we will explain why.
What Does a Digital Marketing Strategy Mean for My Virginia Beach Law Firm?
Let Focus DMG help you develop the best digital marketing strategy for your law firm’s needs.
Any digital marketing strategy, no matter how simple, should cover the following:
- Search Engine Optimization and Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
For a better understanding of why these are important to your law firm, let’s look into them one by one and see what they involve.
1. SEO and SEM
Digital marketing begins with creating an online presence for your law firm, namely a website that tells and shows who you are, what you have to offer, and why people should trust you.
Unfortunately, having a website for your business is useless if no one can find that website, and that is where SEO comes in.
It means optimizing your website according to the ranking criteria of the search engines in order to make sure it is displayed among the first search results for queries related to your business. It is a complex process that involves keywords research and placement, inbound and outbound linking, content creation, and many other processes that take time, skills and knowledge to complete.
Until SEO begins to pay out, SEM can help drive some business. It involves targeted advertising through the search engines. Have you noticed how once you’ve visited a website, you keep seeing its ads on many other websites you visit, or how, when you search for information on a particular subject online, you get a few free paid results for that search?
Simplified, search engine marketing will let you place your ads on third-party websites your potential clients visit and will let you sponsor your website’s position among the first search results for your queries of choice.
2. Content Marketing
As you may have realized, SEO relies on content. You need fresh, original, keyword-optimized, and valuable content published regularly to convince the search engines that your website is worth their attention and should rank among the first in their results pages.
For a law firm, that would mean clear and convincing quality content relevant to your practice areas, like service pages explaining the main Virginia laws governing your practice areas, your services, and the benefits those services bring to your potential clients.
It would also mean regular blog posts and guest posts educating potential clients on various legal issues, answering their questions, explaining various Virginia laws and legal procedures, and providing solutions in simple language anyone can understand.
It is important to note that “content” marketing is a broad term covering not only the use of text for marketing purposes, but also graphics, and even video broadcasting. It also involves promoting that content through various channels, from social media to articles and video directories.
3. Social Media Marketing
Most of your potential clients use social media platforms. Out of them, according to Pew Research, 73% use YouTube and 68% use Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Snapchat and others receive their fair share of attention as well.
Social media marketing basically involves creating social media profiles for your law firm on the most popular platforms, creating an audience, interacting with it, and expanding it and legalizing it through the content you share.
Your profile and the content you share will inherently drive potential clients to your business, raise awareness about the services you provide, and help you expand your clients’ portfolio. They will also promote your SEO and content marketing efforts.
The Bottom Line About Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy for Your Virginia Beach Law Firm
Things are simple in today’s market: if you are not online, you do not exist. To get online and spread the word about your existence, you need a solid digital marketing strategy that will cover at least the basics reviewed above.
At Focus DMG, we can create and implement an effective digital marketing strategy for you, just as we have done for many other law firms in our portfolio. We customize our marketing strategies according to our clients’ needs and budget and to the specifics of the Virginia Beach market to obtain results fast and with minimum investments. Contact us now and let’s work together to obtain those results for your law firm!
