7 Skills to Look for
When Hiring a
Law Firm Marketing Professional
Selecting and Recruiting Skills
Are you a lawyer/attorney looking to hire a law firm marketing individual of agency to power your growth?
Do you know what skills you need to look for during the appointment process of the agency or professional?
Have you looked at skills like social media marketing, SEO, content marketing, etc., and have become confused and overwhelmed?
Marketing, a subject everyone knows delivers results; but unfortunately, no one knows how to get it exactly right!
Many lawyers and law firms looking to build their practice know that online marketing is the way to go. Sadly, they are too overburdened by their work to maximize their engagement with the same.
The normal option ahead of them is to hire a marketing professional or an agency to help. In this article, we look at seven skills lawyers should look at when hiring a law firm marketing professional or an agency.
Marketing Professional Versus Agency: Which is the Better Option?
Before we get to the list, we thought understanding this issue first would be important. If you are a lawyer or a law firm that wants to build its in-house marketing teams, hiring a professional can be the solution.
However, you need to realize that a single individual will only be able to do so much. While you will expect them to handle and manage everything from your website’s SEO to your social media pages, you cannot expect immediate results.
In such cases, working with an agency that has multiple resources and experts can be the way to go. This will ensure that your ROIs are delivered in a shorter time and that you always have multiple strategies being worked on at any given point.
However, this is a very subjective choice. While some lawyers and law firms prefer hiring a marketing professional, others feel more comfortable working with a full-scale digital marketing agency.
7 Skills to Look for When Hiring a Law Firm Marketing Professional
1. Digital Awareness
Before you get to the level of skills, you first need to ensure that the marketing professional has knowledge and awareness of online platforms. Digital is the way forward when it comes to law firm marketing. Having adequate knowledge of the same is critical. Traditional marketing skills are handy, but a focus on online and digital marketing will help you reach more customers, increase conversion, and build your branding in the best possible fashion.
2. Website Knowledge
Rather than opt for complicated PHP platforms, law firms should look at pursuing WordPress websites. They are simpler, easier, and more customizable. In terms of SEO, they work better. This means that a marketing professional should know his or her way around WordPress. This will also enable them to publish blogs and other resource material on the WordPress website. This is going to be your online address and location and you need to boost it accordingly.
3. SEO Skills
The key to success when it comes to law firm marketing is through SEO. In fact, in the last few years, many digital agencies have come up that specialize in legal SEO. Yes, you read that right. There is a particular brand of SEO that works best for law firms and lawyers. From guest posting, link building to online listings, legal SEO is important for climbing the search rankings and performing better. The higher you rank, the more sales queries you get.
4. SMM Abilities
Like SEO, social media marketing is also a great way to optimize the reach of law firms and lawyers. Platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter help in this kind of industry. A law firm marketing professional needs to know how to manage and handle such platforms. This means aligning both the tactical strategies with the creative content-making endeavors. The more you engage with your audiences, the higher are the chances of them contacting you.
5. PPC Campaign Executions
With Google practically spelling out the best practices of ads, you do not require someone with technical knowledge to run paid PPC campaigns for you. However, you still need a law firm marketing professional that has experience in running PPC campaigns. This is essential as you would be required to run campaigns from time to time. While PPC is not the mainstay, having the knowledge that you can run it is a bonus in most situations.
6. Content Marketing Expertise
When it comes to the legal industry, content leads the way. Every other strategy mentioned above requires high-quality content for increased performance and optimization. A law firm marketing professional needs to know the content in the best possible fashion. This will form the foundation of your inbound marketing (blogs), SMM copywriting, and guest posting. In 2021, content marketing is emerging in a big way, and having ideas about the same is essential.
7. Email Marketing Proficiency
Email continues to be the most professional medium to communicate and engage with your target audiences. For law firms, email newsletters can be a great sales funnel creating mechanism. With new rules, laws, and regulations coming up every day, informing and educating your audiences can lead to queries and client conversions. Running email marketing campaigns, coming up with templates, creating email copies are all important.
The Bottom Line
As you can see from the list of skills above, having a proper law form marketing strategy requires a lot of knowledge. This is why many of the best lawyers and law firms choose to work with an agency that has multiple experts operating the different strategies. This gives them breadth in terms of functioning in the best possible fashion. However, there is no reason to believe that a skilled and experienced digital marketing professional will not be able to single-handedly do all the above.
Digital marketing has evolved in a major way and lawyers need to understand and acknowledge this fact. While traditional marketing should be carried out, proper attention to online marketing can go a long way in increasing your practice.
About the Author
Mashum Mollah is an entrepreneur, founder and CEO at BloggerOutreach.io, a blogger outreach agency that drive visibility, engagement, and proven results. He loves sharing his experiences, knowledge, ideas by publishing informative, data-driven articles on various magazines like Search Engine Magazine, Blogstellar, Social Media Magazine. He blogs at MashumMollah.com