Inbound Marketing - the next frontier in law firm marketing?
Inbound marketing is a new way to market your law firm. Done right, it can blend perfectly with the other tactics commonly utilised in legal marketing such as newsletters, email, briefing and events - and greatly enhance their success.
Leads created by inbound marketing tend to be better and ‘close’ quicker and with less effort than others. Sounds good in what can often be a long and frustrating process.
In simple terms, inbound marketing is the art of creating the right kind of content and marketing that content to your existing and prospective clients to get them into, and move them through the various stages of, the sales cycle.
It gets more complex (doesn’t everything) but by ‘the right kind of content’ I mean the right kind for the part of the sales cycle your prospect is in. Someone who is researching solutions will be looking for different kinds of content to those who are heading into a beauty parade. Likewise someone who knows your law firm will need different content to someone who doesn’t. Content can be video, slides, pdfs, blog entries, press coverage, infographics with lots of scope for creativity.
The only thing to bear in mind is it has to be useful enough for a potential client to give you something back - their details, their action and engagement.
Marketing of content needs to be undertaken via a variety of means such as social media, webinars, video, email, PPC and SEO.
It really neatly answers the questions heard so often: "what am I supposed to tweet about" or "when I call this prospective client up, what am I supposed to say", the answer being "have you seen our new piece about... thought you might find it useful".
The insights it can give can also provide real scope to kick off those CRM programs that promised so much and ate up so much investment a few years ago.
Inbound marketing for law firms is a highly measurable technique that can help answer the age old "what contribution have our non-fee earners made this quarter" too!
