How Can Compensation Lawyers in Win the Online Marketing Battle?

by Rachel Erin Media Manager at Australian Accident Helpline

Those with the most experience and knowledge will be the most successful right?

Wrong! In the technology-driven world of 2018, being the best compensation lawyer is no longer enough. New legal practices and small to mid-sized firms who have yet to start taking online marketing seriously are losing work to those who have.

It's no secret, modern-day advertising is costly, time-consuming and is no longer about placing ads. The days when a quick advert in the yellow pages will no longer suffice. So, what can you do?

Whether you are going to do it in-house or hire someone to do it for you, to win the battle you need to understand how online advertising works.

There are countless law firms out there spending thousands of dollars each month with agencies and getting very poor ROI. A lot of the so-called marketing companies that target law firms will simply take your money and run.

In this article, I'm not going to teach you how to do it by yourself, however, I am going to list the 5 most important steps to follow if you want to take your companies online presence to the next level.

In this article I’m going to cover:

1 Where to start if you're going to do it in-house

2 The benefits of doing it yourself

3 Tools that will help you

4 What to look for when choosing an agency

5 Other alternatives

Where to start if you're going to do it in-house

The best place to start learning about online marketing is, you guessed it, online. At the time of writing this piece, there were well over 1billion different websites on the world wide web.

Search engines are programmed to sift through websites an place them in order. The most informative and reputable websites in a search engines eyes will be placed on or closest to the first page. Page one of Google is pretty much a university for any compensation lawyers wanting to learn about growing their businesses online presence.

Once you begin learning, you will notice that you keep coming across the same websites. Brian Dean, Mathew Woodward and Neil Patel run some of the best blogs to help you master the SERPs.

The advantages of doing it yourself

By doing it in-house, you will more than likely save yourself thousands of dollars a month and be in full control of your law firms marketing campaign.

Another advantage of understanding how all this works is, if you decide to hire an agency to do the work for you, you will know whether you are being ripped off or not.

Tools that will help you

There are hundreds of tools out there that can help you, however, the first ones you should get yourself familiar with are Google search console and Google analytics. Both these tools are totally free and will be your go-to place to check your law firms websites traffic, stats and overall performance.

There are also some premium tools out there that will let you spy on any rival compensation lawyers keywords and give you insights on how to outrank them. However, these types of tools such as AHREFS come at a cost.

What to look for when choosing an agency

If you decide to let an agency do the marketing for you, there are a couple of things you should take into consideration before you get yourself into any contacts.

Firstly, make sure they are located in the same country as you or at the very least, speak the same language. The reason for this is that a significant part of search engine optimisation involves writing, lots and lots of quality writing.

Secondly, you should carry out some serious research on any prospective candidates because outsourcing your companies web work is far from cheap. Ask any bidders to show you how their service will benefit you and how it has benefited others.

Advertising is a cut-throat industry with no guarantees, so it pays to do your homework.

Other alternatives

If hiring an agency is out the question, don't worry as there are other alternatives your business can use to acquire new clients. These include:

Referrals

This method of customer acquisition is an efficient and cost-effective option for any compensation lawyer because referrals are usually leads which have already been confirmed by the referral company.

However, one important thing to consider to protect your law firms reputation is, where the leads come from, and how have they been sourced?

Please note that many case referral companies use overseas telemarketing companies to generate leads on their behalf, often illegally.

Network, Network and Network

How many times has somebody called you wanting help with a legal matter that doesn't fit your criteria? Well, this happens to other solicitors too.

Reach out to all the solicitors in your area who practice in a different area of law than you and make an arrangement with them and help each other out.

Like it or not marketing has become as important, if not more than your core business. In 2018, the way that practices connect with new clients is becoming ever more challenging.

Your law firm may be losing the battle, but you can still win the war!

About the author

Liam Millner is the operations manager at Australian Accident Helpline, a company that manages a nationwide panel of compensation lawyers.