Growing your law firm and establishing your services as an authority within your community comes down to trust.

To build trust within your services, you must create efficient internal processes and generate marketing materials that speak to your unique expertise and qualifications. Finding effective ways to manage a small law firm will also help your firm grow over time.

If you’re looking to generate more leads, convert more clients, and expand your reach, tune into our guide on how to grow your law practice.

1. Digital Marketing and Branding

In this day and age, digital marketing and branding are paramount to the growth of most businesses.

In fact, business experts will even say they’re a necessity to remain visible in the rapidly growing digital marketplace: Recent studies show that 70% of people looking for legal services will begin their search online.¹

So, what does that mean? Well, for starters, you must create a well-designed, informative, and easy-to-navigate website. But it’s also vital to incorporate and utilize digital marketing tools, such as:

Brand identity
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Social media marketing
Content marketing

Brand Identity

Branding goes beyond standard logos and color patterns—it encompasses your firm’s values and how you plan to engage with your clients in-person and across digital mediums. To determine your brand identity, identify your business goals and ideal clientele.

For example, a personal injury law firm may aim to provide high-quality legal services to low-income clients.

You can showcase your firm’s personality and ethos through:

Cohesive marketing materials, including billboards, videos, and social posts
Mission statement
Employee bios
Customer reviews

A strong brand identity will establish your firm as a trusty authority within your field and attract the attention of clientele. It will also help your law firm stand out from the others in the area.

SEO

In today’s digital marketing world, having a well-designed and easily navigable website is not enough if you want to be seen. To improve your website’s visibility among organic search results, consider implementing SEO for your law firm.

Essentially, SEO practices analyze search engine algorithms to implement search marketing strategies, such as keywords. Adding keywords to the content of your website, be it the home page or informative blog posts, can boost your firm’s ranking on popular search engines, such as Google and Bing. The more potential clients who visit your website, the better the chances that someone will call, chat, or fill out a form and become a client.

Social Media Marketing

According to some studies, 54% of internet users use social media channels to research products and services. However, a majority of law firms do not think social media is important for their firm or for generating leads or promoting brands—which means less competition to stand out on these platforms.² As such, law firms can leverage Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to attract, educate, and convert clientele through:

Informative posts, infographics, or videos
Social media ads
Live workshops
Direct messages

Content Marketing

Suppose you want to grow your presence online and generate more leads and traffic. In that case, your website must have plenty of content. Whether it’s service pages or blog articles, this content can help improve SEO. Plus, informative content can help build a firm’s reputation while simultaneously driving referrals, leads, and more traffic to your website.

Content can also be a powerful tool for improving your relationships with your clients by educating them, informing them about your process, and teaching them what to expect when working with a law firm.

2. Delegate Non-Billable Hours Effectively

Running a law firm requires a lot of administration and other supportive tasks. Unfortunately, those to-do list items may not fall under billable hours that generate revenue for the firm. Yet the average number of billable hours per month recently fell to a 15-year low.³

So, if your firm’s lawyers are finding themselves stuck on non-billable work, it’s time to delegate as much of it as possible. Be sure to reflect on your daily workload and note the tasks that others may be able to complete as well, or perhaps even more efficiently, than you.

Learning how to delegate tasks isn’t only essential for your firm’s growth but an effective way to create professional development opportunities for team members—providing them with new or better expertise within their roles. And as time goes on, the impact of delegation increases—you can either delegate more tasks or spend less time reviewing employees’ work.

Delegating tasks throughout the firm can:⁴

Enable you and your team to focus on billable hours
Help you to achieve more by allowing time to focus on more critical tasks
Boost productivity and efficiency among your team
Build communication skills and empower partners to utilize an array of skills
Retain your best employees by offering them professional development opportunities

At first, it may be challenging to put your trust in others. Still, with clear communication, support for team members, and open feedback channels, you’ll be surprised how much you and your team can benefit from delegating effectively.

3. Don’t Be Afraid to Outsource

On the topic of delegation, don’t be afraid to bring in outside help. Outsourcing is a crucial strategy to consider for any growing business—especially one where many of its administrative tasks don’t translate to billable hours. And even if your firm is building momentum, you might not have the resources to hire (more) employees.

In that case, outsourcing is your answer. It can help your firm save resources and recover the bandwidth to focus on critical internal tasks. In fact, 83% of law firms hire external agencies to handle their marketing strategy.²

In addition, many firms also outsource the following jobs:

Customer service
Virtual assistants
Live receptionists
Finance
Information technology (IT)

4. Referrals—Word of Mouth and Online

Even with the rise of social media and online business platforms, nearly 60% of people looking for legal services ask their personal contacts for a referral.⁵ Word-of-mouth remains one of the most effective ways to generate leads—this form of marketing drives $6 trillion in annual global spending and may be more effective than paid advertising.⁶

But somewhat surprisingly, people seem to hold online reviews in a similar regard.

As such, it’s beneficial to pad your website and social media pages with client reviews that detail their exceptional experiences with your firm. Positive reviews can improve your firm’s reputation and generate trust in your services.

Abby Connect: Virtual Receptionists Redefining Customer Support

Effective law firm marketing strategies must implement digital marketing alongside internal processes—both delegation and outsourcing—that improve efficiency, conversions, and the bottom line.

If you’re looking to save time and money while growing your law firm and keeping your clients happy, Abby Connect is a team of award-winning virtual receptionists that can take your customer support to the next level. With Abby Connect, you don’t ever have to worry about missing a call from an existing or new potential client. Leave the tedious office tasks to our dedicated team of attorney virtual receptionists, and focus your time on building concrete cases and customer trust.

Our bilingual receptionists manage calls, field questions, and schedule appointments, and we offer 24/7 coverage to keep your clientele updated, even after business hours.

So why wait? Start converting more callers to clients today with Abby Connect.