Digital marketing is popular because of its proven effectiveness. With more and more people using online services for their needs, digital marketing has become more crucial than ever. After all, you want to be where your target audience is.

That said, digital marketing requires that you put in time and effort to ensure everything is working as seamlessly as possible. Hence, many law firms will hire digital marketing services, learn to use tools, or buy ads to keep things in order. However, it’s also possible to implement it without spending anything.

The general rule is the effectiveness of your law firm marketing efforts depends on several factors, including:

• Knowledge of marketing strategies like lawyer SEO, content marketing for lawyers, social media marketing, and so on.
• Access and knowledge of marketing tools like Google Search Console, keyword tools, auditing software, analytics tools, content management tools, etc.
• Current law firm marketing status, including current SERP rankings, social media follower counts, email lists, brand awareness ranking, etc.
• Budget for law firm marketing, including paying for ads, law firm marketing agencies, paid tools, etc.

In other words, you can implement digital marketing strategies at every budget. What changes in each budget tier are the marketing tools and services you can afford.

So, what can you get for each budget tier, anyway? Is it possible to do everything for free? Let’s take a look at your options:

Law Firm Marketing At Little To No Cost

Digital marketing is still considered an accessible way to market firms and businesses because you can do everything yourself should you want to. You can also learn everything about lawyer SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, and other lead generation strategies online for free.

In short, what you need to invest in this scenario is time. First, you need to learn marketing strategies, implement them, and make sure you’re consistently managing them. Then, you can optimize your website for law firm SEO, start a legal blog for attorney content marketing, create an email list, and run a social media page all on your own.

This is no small feat, especially if you own or run a Charlotte law firm. However, it’s still doable as long as you set goals and workflows to cater to what you need to do to get more clients for your law firm. Additionally, there are a lot of free tools like Google Search Console, Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and analytics tools. There are also limited free versions of popular SEO and marketing tools you can try.

Using Paid Tools

You can spend a little more by purchasing paid law firm marketing tools to improve your process. You’ll be able to find better keywords, data, ideas, and other necessary boosts to the many moving parts of law firm marketing.

For example, some SEO tools will give you more detailed data, allowing you to properly audit and adjust your website optimizations. Likewise, you can also use grammar and writing tools to write better and edit the content that will go up on your website, social media, and email drips.

Using tools will also make your process more efficient, cutting down the time needed to work on aspects of your law firm marketing implementation. This means you’re spending less time on your law firm marketing efforts without sacrificing the quality of your optimizations and implementations.

Using Paid Ads

Paid ads are a great way to boost your law firm website, landing pages, or social media profile visibility and traffic. For example, if you’re running a great legal blog that’s not getting as much traction as you think it should, you can run an ad campaign promoting it so people can find it.

That said, the attention and traffic you get from paid ads must be maintained even after the campaign ends. You don’t just want traffic and engagement; you want people who click on your ads to stick around and keep coming back. If you cannot maintain a consistent increase in ROI, then you’re not leveraging paid ads to their fullest potential.

So, while paid ads bring a sudden, temporary spike in attention, you still need to ensure you have great landing pages, site design, content, and lead generation strategies to get the long-term benefits of doing so.

Hiring Specialists For Specific Roles

Speaking of reducing the time you need to spend on law firm marketing implementations, you can hire specialists to help with certain parts of the process. For example, people often hire an SEO expert to advise them on what to do next, a legal content writer consistently producing content, or a social media manager to help with the profiles.

Basically, you’re hiring someone who knows what they’re doing. This saves you time while ensuring the parts of your law firm marketing efforts you’re not handling are still done right.

Of course, even when you’ve relegated some of the work to someone else, you still need to manage and look after other aspects of law firm marketing. For example, if you hire a legal content writer for your blog, you’d still need to optimize and audit your website continuously. Likewise, you still need to pay attention to rankings and data associated with the blog, though you won’t have to write the content this time.

Hiring Full-Service Law Firm Marketing Agencies

The most expensive option among entries on this list is just to let a law firm marketing agency run everything for you. These agencies will also have access to paid tools and experts to ensure everything is running smoothly and you see a boost in ROI. In short, you get to go back to managing and running your law firm while lead generation strategies are implemented in your stead.

That said, one of the most crucial considerations you have to make is choosing which type of services you need. Some law firm marketing agencies will offer packages outside of their full-service one, which could come in handy if you don’t have as big of a budget for your law firm marketing services yet.

Bottom-line

The more you spend on law firm marketing, the less you’ll have to do to make it work for your law firm. However, even if you’re spending little doesn’t mean you can’t fully benefit from the strategy. You’ll still see an increased ROI if you put time and effort into the implementation.

You need to decide how you want to divide your time and spending to get the full benefit of law firm SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, and so on.

Author’s Bio

JC Serrano is the founder of 1000Attorneys.com, one of the very few private enterprises certified to process lawyer referrals by the California State Bar. His marketing strategies have continuously evolved since 2005, incorporating ever-changing SEO strategies into lawyerleadmachine.com.