If you are looking to do some online marketing for your law firm, it can be overwhelming trying to decide which method you should go for.
Google Ads, SEO, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, the list goes on.
Which is the best? Should you do them all?
In this post I am going to go through the process I use when starting marketing with a new client, and how I decide which method to go for.
For the purpose of this post I’m going to assume you’re a regular, smaller sized law firm offering general civil and commercial practice areas. If you work in a very specialised area (such as Crypto for example) that may require a slightly different approach.
So, generally speaking you’ll want fast results, especially if you are a smaller law firm or just starting out. Investing for months in an organic marketing method is not really practical, and may turn out not to work, so you don’t want to risk that right at the beginning.
That leaves us with paid methods such as Google or Facebook Ads.
Now, while paid methods may seem more expensive because you have to pay for the ads, they’ll actually end up costing less because you’ll see a return on your money and time a lot faster than most organic methods. Either that or you will find out quickly that they don’t work, and you have didn’t spend months wasting time.
Of all the paid methods, there are two that are most known and most commonly used.
You probably know what I’m going to say.
Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
These two are the giants in the online marketing world and both can work incredible well if used correctly.
So the question is which should you go for?
I will give you a brief explanation of how I see both of these and what I think each are good for.
Google Ads
Google Ads is good if people are already looking for what you offer. These people already need what you have are have taken the time to look for it, so they are usually a lot more ready to buy than just random people scrolling through Facebook.
You can easily check how many people are searching for what you offer by using the Google Ads Keyword Planner. This is a free tool within Google Ads that lets you look up any keyword you want and will tell you approximately how many people search this keyword from the location or locations that you set. You can then use this data to decide if there is enough volume to make Google Ads worthwhile (and subsequently SEO, which I will go into in a bit).
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads on the other hand lets you target anyone who’s on their platform whether they are looking for what you offer or not. Now, you are able to narrow that down by going after people with particular interests, as well as other factors like age, gender, location and so on.
This is fantastic if you are offering something new that people don’t actually know to look for, or if you want to expand beyond just the people who are actively searching and want to offer your services to others who may not know they need it, for example. It’s also useful if you have a huge budget and are not able to squeeze any more traffic out of Google.
So, which one should you do for your law firm?
My recommendation is to begin with Google Ads. Here’s why:
I know from experience and from talking to quite a number of lawyers that Google brings the best results for law firms.
The reason why is because there is an enormous amount of Google searches happening every month for just about every area of law.
People have legal problems and they are looking for solutions. This is a “starving crowd” who know they have a problem and want to solve it. And with Google Ads you can put yourself right in front of them.
Due to this, Google Ads is usually the best place to start with marketing your law firm, and is generally what I recommend for new clients. If you set it up right, you should be seeing results quickly, usually within the first month, and have leads coming in.
Once that’s happening, you’ve proved that Google works for you and you are getting leads. This means that it now makes sense to invest in doing SEO as well.
This is another reason I recommend doing Google Ads first. Before investing 6 months plus into SEO, running a Google Ads campaign for a month or two will show you if it’s even worth doing. This could save you a lot of headache and wasted money if you find out that for some reason you can’t get results from Google.
So that’s generally how I approach online marketing for a law firm. Like I said this applies primarily for smaller firms and firms that are just starting out who don’t have a huge budget.
I hope that was helpful. If you have any questions just hit the comments below.