Why Your Law Firm Needs to Invest in Social Media Marketing in 2022
By: Jen Sanfilippo
Tags: Lawyers, Social Media Marketing, Marketing, Law, Social Media

In the last few years, social media marketing has matured and become a leading form of marketing for all different kinds of industries, especially law. Social media marketing is one of the most efficient and cost effective ways to market your firm. Social media will save your firm if you let it. Here’s how.

Attention

Social media is the biggest growing area of digital marketing and return on investment can be 100 times compared to other forms of marketing, even online marketing. Every day, you and many you love spend hours and hours deep in the social feeds. Engagement on social media is better than any other form of advertising. The feed is designed to pull you in and give you a dopamine rush every time someone likes, comments, or share something that you post.

Attention has shifted from television to social media. Instead of wasting money on TV ads, radio ads, and billboards, why not meet your consumers where they are — social media.

Easy and Cost Effective

One of the things that is great about social is that it is perhaps the lowest barrier to entry of all the digital marketing products. The platforms themselves are free. There are plenty of free resources to use to make your social marketing pop. You could spend as much or as little as you want on social media marketing, making it accessible to all, no matter what stage your firm is at, what your budget is, or what your needs are.

And because it is essentially talking to people that you already know, it is very natural to post things in your own voice. You don’t need to hire an expensive consultant or set aside hundreds or thousands of dollars to be able to compete in social media. And one of the things I like the best about social is that it can be accomplished in just a few minutes every day, not hours. You can literally post for about five minutes in the morning and then engage when you have some downtime or within five minutes at night and slowly build up your existing network to think of you first when they or someone they know has a legal problem that you can solve.

Data

One of the amazing things about social media is the unbelievably detailed data they have on you. Everything you do online is tracked, and this means you can identify the people you want to target and build relationships with them so that you are that top-of-mind lawyer. Think of anything that is unique to your target audience and you can find them and their cohort on social. And by engaging with them and giving them the type of content that they like, you can be the competent lawyer that they know, like, and trust.

What Makes Social Media So Great?

For lawyers reluctant to jump into digital marketing because they have been burned before by unscrupulous salesmen preying on their naiveté, social media marketing truly is most like the traditional methods of marketing employed by lawyers over the last century or more. The role of lawyers has always been to connect with people and offer knowledge and guidance. It is natural to look to lawyers as social connectors, and they do it every day with cross-referrals to other lawyers in other concentrations. If you think about your best clients and your best cases, I would hazard to bet that your absolute best cases have come by way of a personal relationship of some kind.

The wonderful thing about social media is that by using it, you can become the person who people know, like, and trust. People will want to send business to you. And that’s the goal of all of us every day who want to be the best at our craft. We want people to know us, to like us, and to trust us because you might be the best lawyer, but if nobody knows you, you starve.

Branding is the way of the future, and branding is easy with social media. Brands give a person confidence, brands give a searcher solace, brands allow people to feel like they are making the right decision because of the social proof others accord them since other people buy into the same brand. And if you don’t like the word brand, think reputation. This is the one reason online reviews are so vitally important in the modern legal economy.

The reality is in that situation where you have a limited time to make a decision and limited resources to do so, the brand or reputation you have becomes the safest choice for people to make.

At the end of the day, with every marketing tactic, you should heed this message because by doing so, you put yourself in a position to always be remembered. How many times have you run into someone you know and haven’t seen in a while and been told, “oh, darn, I forgot you were a lawyer, my so-and-so needed a lawyer for almost exactly what you do and we didn’t know where to send her, so she just Googled someone”? By having a strong social presence and connecting with your network, you can avoid this terrible thing from happening to you ever again.

These are a few of the many advantages that a social media presence has for lawyers. By working with your community in a space that already has their attention and utilizing platforms that do not require a lot of time or money, you can influence and compete in your community in a new way. For help with implementing a social media marketing plan, check out www.getfirmflex.com.