Digital marketing is the promotion of products or services via one or more forms of electronic media. One of the reasons why digital marketing is gaining increasing popularity and importance over traditional marketing is the targeted nature of digital or internet marketing over traditional marketing channels.

The fact that, much more often than not, when it comes to the use of search engines to power that digital marketing, your customers are the ones who are actually and actively searching for you. This is what makes digital marketing much more powerful, compared to traditional marketing or advertising channels, which are often a hit and miss, whereby the marketer would often mass distribute their message to as many people as possible, in the hopes that a few of those people would be interested in their product or service.

Because of the targeted nature of digital marketing, engagement with the messages of these marketing campaigns is also often much higher, which again is yet another reason for the prominence it has attained.

While digital marketing is particularly effective for law firms, there are a few trends that you should always be aware of. These trends often change how firms conduct their digital marketing and advertising campaigns and strategies, and any lawyer or law firm that is able to keep abreast of these trends will often have an edge in the race to the ‘top.’

The Importance of SEO

Over the past few years, SEO or search engine optimization has become increasingly important in the overall ecosystem of digital marketing. Although it has always been a key to law firm marketing, it is perhaps even more important today. As more law firms use SEO to connect with and put their services in front of people searching the internet for their services, you need to stand out as best as you can. Simple SEO tactics may not get the job done as there are probably a million other lawyers doing the same thing. Optimizing your website for better user and search engine friendliness, ensuring that the technical aspects of your website are taken care of, having a robust and comprehensive content strategy, being on the hunt for high-quality backlinks to your website, and more, are just a few of the things that you should ensure you do to stand a good chance of making SEO work for you.

While SEO is effective for all types of firms and businesses, it’s particularly effective for some niches. For example, a firm that is looking to represent in a personal injury claim would use SEO to target customers. Other types of common niches for the marketing technique are malpractice firms, divorce firms, and criminal law firms. Of course, there are many other types of firms that could benefit from SEO. This is because it has had incredible results, so people are willing to spend more money and time on it.

Higher conversion rate

A study by LexisNexis has shown that the cost of winning a new client is 10 times greater than the cost of retaining an existing customer and the chances of selling to a new customer are between 5 and 20%, while the probability of selling to an existing customer is between 60% and 70%.

As previously mentioned, the nature of search marketing, also referred to as inbound marketing, means that the customer is the one actively searching for a service provider. From the LexisNexis study above, it is, therefore, safe to assume that, if you are able to put your law practice in front of them while they are searching, that 10x acquisition cost drastically reduces, but more importantly, the conversion rate increases. This is yet another advantage digital marketing has over other forms or types of marketing.

Businesses that use online marketing as the preferred mode of marketing are able to measure their conversion rates in real-time using simple and often free data analytics, such as Google Analytics.

Conversion is simply identifying the percentage of leads who end up becoming customers, whatever the definition of a customer is for that particular business. SEO, Social media marketing and Email marketing are methods that have a high conversion rate as they are able to generate a quick and effective communication channel with the consumer.

While email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, it remains very powerful and cost-effective when used correctly, even in today’s search-dominated world.

The Rising Importance of Mobile

All the stats point to the fact that the use of mobile devices to surf the web and perform whatever needed task has outstripped the use of the personal computer to perform those same functions.

Smartphones are capable of doing almost everything a PC can do. With their ease of use, mobility, compactness, and increasing extended battery life, more people are using their phones to look at websites. It is for this exact reason for attorneys and law firms, or at least the people responsible for their marketing should pay particular attention to this fact, and be sure to incorporate mobile best practices into their marketing.

The website someone sees on their phone may not be the website you designed. Websites need to be optimized for mobile phones, otherwise, they may go unnoticed. Google even started to phase out non-optimized sites by ranking them lower in search engines. It is important for your website and your content to work well on phones as well as computers. If the content that you’re posting takes too long to load or looks uninviting on phones, people won’t read it.