• Legal Marketing Education, Marketing

Marketing Ideas for Law Firms: 5 New Strategies for Lead Generation

8 minutes to read

This is the second article in our “Marketing Ideas for Law Firms” series. In this piece, we’ll cover ideas for your law firm’s lead generation campaigns.

If you haven’t read the first in this series, click here to see “7 New Strategies for Social Media Marketing.”

If you have, let’s dive into strategies to generate leads for your law firm.

1. Create an exit-intent popup for an educational consultation
2. Create an email-gated webinar
3. Create an email-gated ebook or guide
4. Create an email-gated questionnaire
5. Create an email-gated video series

What is lead generation, and why does my law firm need it?

92% of your website visitors are just looking around. They want to learn more about you. They’re not ready to sign anything or (usually) even book a consultation.

However, they are looking to learn more, either about you or about the legal matter they’re concerned with.

And that’s where lead generation comes in.

A lead is any prospective client who has given you contact information. Most law firm websites already have a consultation prompt, but few consider any other lead generation tactics.

This article will give you strategies that turn your website visitors into leads so you can turn those leads into clients.

Lead generation ideas for law firms #1: Create an exit-intent popup for an educational consultation

Before we dive into the non-consultation lead generation strategies we’ll share below, you should maximize the chance of a prospective buyer booking a consultation.

Your law firm’s consultation is your #1 lead generation strategy, hands down.

However (as we said above), many of your website visitors may not be quite ready for an official consultation, but they may be ready for an educational chat with a legal professional.

They may be ready for a no-pressure conversation about their situation, whether a lawyer needs to be involved, how much representation might cost, and anything else they’re curious about.

And that’s where an exit-intent popup comes in. 

Exit-intent popups are an excellent way to prompt your website visitors to complete a less-intimidating ask than your site’s ultimate objective (a true consultation).

Exit-intent popups frequently increase a website’s total conversions by 5-10%. That may not sound like much, but over time those consultation bookings can add up to serious, bottom-line-changing numbers.

Here’s an example from Alexander Shunnarah Personal Injury Attorneys:

How to use this marketing idea to generate leads:

Exit-intent popups work by tracking your website visitor’s cursor. When it hits the top pixel of the page, a popup will appear that they’ll have to close to complete their departure.

Our recommendation, to avoid alienating people or delivering a poor website experience, is to only place your lead generation exit-intent popup on those pages which already have your consultation form.

Then, be sure your popup’s messaging includes something like the following:

Header: “Not ready to register for a legal consultation?”

Body copy: “Book a no-obligation chat with one of our legal experts instead.”

Call-to-Action: “Book a chat”

Law Firm Marketing Idea Top Tip:

To avoid annoying your website visitors, be sure you’ve disabled your exit-intent popup for everybody who has already booked a consultation with you, is an existing client, or is a past client.

Lead generation ideas for law firms #2: Create an email-gated webinar

You’re an expert in your field, and it’s a complicated field.

In the legal industry, your prospective clients have a vested interest in learning more about their case: whether they should pursue litigation, how to choose a law firm, how long their case might take, etc.

Running a webinar with your prospective clients is a great way to show your expertise, your face, and what you do for clients.

Here are a few webinar ideas for your law firm:

• Want to Win Your Case? Here’s How to Prepare
• Why Trusts are Preferred Over Wills
• A Walkthrough to Trying Your Case in Small Claims Court
• A Live Q&A With John Smith (The Most Successful Divorce Lawyer in Massachusetts)
• Have You Been Injured at Work? Here’s What You Can Sue For (and What You Can’t)

Here’s an example of a seminar promoted on Facebook by the Ettinger Law Firm in New York.

How to use this marketing idea to generate leads:

Create a webinar sales funnel.

A sales funnel is an optimized path which you send prospective clients through. There are four primary steps:

• Step #1: Create a landing page on your website that is designed to turn visitors into leads by filling out a form. Focus on optimizing this page for conversion (and just conversion). Include a countdown timer and prompt registrants to share with their network.
• Step #2: Create a social media ad campaign with the same messaging, images, and value propositions as your webinar’s landing page (consistency is key).
• Step #3: Run your webinar, remembering your goal of bringing on these clients. Deliver educational value, but also share the value of representation.
• Step #4: After the webinar, create an automated email drip campaign designed to turn webinar attendees into clients. Share more educational content alongside calls-to-action.

Lead generation ideas for law firms #3: Create an email-gated ebook or guide

Not all information works in the video or webinar format. Some things are better written down, saved, and used as a reference for the future.

That’s where an email-gated ebook comes in.

Ebooks work excellently as a “pre-consultation” piece of content. They educate your prospective clients before they’re quite ready to commit to signing anything.

They also introduce you to your prospective clients as a helpful asset to have on their side — someone who is interested in helping them before they’ve signed on the dotted line.

Here are a few ebook ideas for your law firm:

• The 10 Questions Your Car Accident Lawyer Will Ask
• 10 Things to Look For In A Personal Injury Lawyer: Alabama
• Tennessee Work Injury Law and Liability in Layman’s Terms
• A Guide to Divorce Law in California
• What is “Pain and Suffering” (and How Much is It Worth?)

How to use this marketing idea to generate leads:

Similarly to the webinar sales funnel, you need to have a strategy to encourage the people who download your ebook to sign the dotted line.

There are two primary ways to do this:

1. Create ebooks that are relevant only to your target market. The easiest way to do this (especially for the legal industry) is to create content that is location-specific, like many of the suggestions above. This ensures that only people within your law firm’s target market will care to download your ebook.
2. Create an automated email campaign that delivers more information to your ebook recipients alongside consultation prompts.

Lead generation ideas for law firms #4: Create an email-gated questionnaire

Some questions are better answered by questionnaire than they are by an ebook, video, or webinar.

For instance, the question, “Do I need a lawyer?” can often be answered by your prospective clients filling out a questionnaire before they get anywhere near a call with you or your team.

And that questionnaire can include vital information for your team. Not only can you expect a name and email address, but you can learn more about their case — information you can use to nurture them down the line with relevant messaging.

Here are a few questionnaire ideas for your law firm:

• Do I Need a Lawyer?
• Should You Seek Restitution From Your Employer?
• Will a Lawyer Take My Case?
• Should I Choose Arbitration or Small Claims Court?

How to use this marketing idea to generate leads:

Create your questionnaire, prompt your website visitor to fill it out, and then send them the results via email.

Not only will this tactic require them to submit their email address, but it positions you as someone who sends them valuable information (a position that will pay off down the line with your email marketing campaigns).

Lead generation ideas for law firms #5: Create an email-gated video series

Any of the lead generation suggestions above would also work in a video format, so (rather than give you more ideas), we’ll focus on how you would actually create an email-gated video series.

There are two options: 

1. Create a landing page that promotes your educational video series, embed your educational videos on unlisted pages of your website, then create an auto-responder (or automated email campaign) which, along with promotional email content, delivers a link to those pages to everybody who converts.
2. Invest in a video tool (or production team) that enables video-gating.

An example of the latter is Wistia — a video embedding tool with the “Turnstile” feature. This enables you to pause a video until the viewer has submitted their contact information.

It looks like this:

(image source)

Here’s an example of a high-quality educational video (which could be email-gated) from Sherrod & Bernard P.C.:

How to use this marketing idea to generate leads:

Whatever you do, don’t just take out your iPhone, put it in selfie mode, and start filming.

Your email-gated video needs to be awesome. It needs to deliver true value, be well-produced, and have great sound.

A poor-quality educational video will do more harm to your reputation than no video at all.

Imagine if your prospective clients provided their contact information in exchange for an educational video, only to find that video was low quality and shoddily-produced. Do you think they’d continue to work with you? Or do you think they’d unsubscribe from all emails and move on to a competitor?

Instead, consider working with a professional video production team, like Crisp, who have been creating high-quality differentiation tools for law firms for years.

Conclusion

These lead generation strategies are useless without two things:

• A way to drive traffic to them.
• A way to turn the leads you generate into clients.

This is why we’ve put this series together. The first piece (“Strategies or Social Media Marketing”) covered proven tactics your law firm can use to drive traffic through social media.

The next piece will cover email marketing: the best way for your firm to turn the leads you generate into clients.

To learn how to effectively incorporate these lead generation tactics into your law firm’s marketing strategy, connect with a Crisp Legal Marketing Strategist for a one-on-one strategy session today.