Let’s Talk Legal Marketing With Stephan Futeral Part 2

Welcome back to our blog series, in which we talk legal marketing with real law professionals. In this edition, we continue our conversation with Stephan Futeral, CEO of JustLegal Marketing, a digital marketing agency exclusively for lawyers.

Missed part one of our conversation? Read it here.

We hope hearing the thoughts and ideas shared by the people in these blog posts, will inspire you to make positive changes to your marketing strategies. We also know that marketing legal services these days is more complex and challenging now than ever before, and hope that some of our readers may identify with some of the marketing struggles presented here, and perhaps be able to offer solutions.

The biggest goal of this blog series is to get the conversation going, so let’s dive in.

Continuing Our Marketing Conversation With Stephan Futeral

In our below chat with Stephan Futeral, we discuss the value of pay-per-click advertising campaigns, whether attorneys should be reaching out for professional marketing help, and the importance of blogging.

Answering Legal: Pay-per-click advertising can seem a little daunting for some lawyers who don’t know much about it. What might you say to lawyers to convince them to give PPC a try?

Stephan: First, PPC ads can be created and distributed rapidly. If your ads are set up and maintained properly, you’ll get top placement immediately. What’s more, you’ll get leads more quickly than with content marketing or by focusing on SEO for your firm’s website which may take many months to pay off.

Second, with PPC ads, you can target your audience and the geographic locations of your ads with near pin-point precision. What that means for your law firm is that you can pre-qualify your site’s traffic based on your location or other factors to make sure you are driving the right people to your site.

Lastly, with a PPC campaign, you can immediately track the performance of your keyword and phrases, which ads bring in the most traffic, conversion rates, and your ROI.

AL: Should lawyers take the time to develop quality landing pages?

Stephan: Absolutely. When a visitor skims over your homepage, the visitor probably sees lots of text, images, and links. It’s a lot to take in all at once, so the site visitor may end up “wandering” around your site with lack of any clear direction. A landing page gives your site visitor one clear, concise direction. Wherever your site visitors are coming from, you only have a few seconds to prove your worth to them. A landing page to get your message across quickly and clearly.

AL: Is email marketing still a top way to reach today’s legal consumers?

Stephan: Email marketing is still an inexpensive, easy, and effective way to drive repeat business from existing clients and to generate referrals. That being said, many state’s ethical rules prohibit or restrict the use of such marketing to reach new consumers who don’t have a previous relationship with the lawyer.

AL: In your opinion, should all attorneys seek out professional legal marketing help?

Stephan: Most lawyers have neither the time nor the experience to effectively market their practice. Executing an effective, comprehensive legal marketing strategy requires experience with web design, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, content marketing, social media marketing, reputation management, and much more. Additionally, effective marketing requires an understanding of how to gather and interpret various analytics and marketing data to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategies. In all, a lawyer’s time is best used in managing their firm, their cases, and their client’s expectations.

AL: What’s your top piece of marketing advice for an attorney just starting out in 2018?

Stephan: Of all the strategies available to lawyers to market themselves online, such as search engine marketing, social media marketing, and pay-per-click campaigns, blogging is perhaps the most important aspect of any successful digital marketing for lawyers.

One of the primary goals to successful internet marketing by attorneys is to rank well in Google’s search results. Google serves up original, relevant, and quality content first. So, if you don’t have content besides a few landing pages with calls-to-action, then your site will never rank well organically. Of course, you can pay for clicks, but that can be costly, and the ads stop when your budget runs dry.

A well-written blog post that provides value to the reader is an excellent form of soft-sell marketing that will turn your website’s visitors into calls and leads. When a visitor reads your blog article, there are two positive and immediate results from your post:

(1) You’re Establishing Your Authority Over Your Competitors -There’s no better way than blogging to establish your law firm’s online authority over your competitors. I oftentimes ask new clients why they chose my firm over others they found online. Nearly every time, the response is that they found my law firm’s website more informative and helpful than other sites.

(2) You’re Building a Relationship of Trust – By providing helpful information to consumers, you’re instantly building a beneficial relationship that can easily turn into an attorney-client relationship. It’s my experience that client leads from my law firm’s blogs tend to be very comfortable during an initial consultation because they feel that they’ve gotten to know us from our firm’s site and posts.

You can hear more from Stephan Futeral at his blog site: https://www.justlegalmarketing.com/legal-marketing-blog/

That’s it for today’s blog post, but the legal marketing discussion doesn’t have to end here. Join the Let’s Talk Legal Marketing discussion groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, and start communicating with other top legal marketing minds today! Also be sure to follow the Let’s Talk Legal Marketing Twitter account (@letstalklm), for all of the latest legal marketing news and info.