The Importance of Using LinkedIn for Lawyers and Law Firms

Lawyers and law firms may not real­ize the impor­tance of LinkedIn as part of their mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy but the pro­fes­sion­al plat­form can unlock a num­ber of mas­sive oppor­tu­ni­ties and poten­tial val­ue that oth­er­wise will be missed. LinkedIn isn’t just for job seek­ers and human resources pro­fes­sion­als. It is a pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing and net­work­ing tool that can be used for lead gen­er­a­tion and lever­ag­ing resources to gen­er­ate new busi­ness. Even as busy lawyers, LinkedIn can con­nect you to poten­tial clients. Scal­ing your law busi­ness and shar­ing your exper­tise through this pro­fes­sion­al plat­form is an excel­lent way to man­age your time and gen­er­ate inter­est in your practice. 

Marketing for Law Firms Made Simple

Times have changed. If you have no online pro­fes­sion­al net­work­ing pres­ence, you will become invis­i­ble quick­ly. Build­ing a law prac­tice is about rela­tion­ships and LinkedIn helps you start this process. It should be a part of an inte­grat­ed mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy that includes oth­er online com­po­nents such as a web­site, blog, and oth­er social media plat­forms where your cur­rent and future clients can eas­i­ly con­nect with you and your expe­ri­ence. Here’s why you should be using LinkedIn to mar­ket your law firm: 

• #1 chan­nel for busi­ness to busi­ness marketing
• 80% of busi­ness to busi­ness mar­ket­ing leads come from LinkedIn
• Exec­u­tives rate LinkedIn as their #1 choice for pro­fes­sion­al content
• More traf­fic is dri­ven to your blogs from LinkedIn than any oth­er social media platform

When build­ing your inte­grat­ed mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy, it should begin with a strate­gic approach using your spe­cif­ic law niche. A long term strate­gic approach can be imple­ment­ed using plans that are bro­ken down into tac­tics. These will all change and evolve over time as you achieve goals and make new ones. Keep­ing these goals in mind will help pro­vide a clear­er pic­ture of where you want your law firm to be. 

Importance of LinkedIn for Lawyers

For a lawyer that is new to using LinkedIn, the numer­ous fea­tures can be over­whelm­ing. Keep it sim­ple by focus­ing on a few uses that will gen­er­ate a return. Tar­get­ing your efforts for a spe­cif­ic niche will gen­er­ate inter­est from a high­ly tar­get­ed audi­ence look­ing specif­i­cal­ly for your exper­tise. This will give you the oppor­tu­ni­ty to present your val­ue propo­si­tion to an audi­ence that is ready to work with you. Here’s how to use LinkedIn to do it: 

• Rep­u­ta­tion — As a lawyer, you know how impor­tant it is to main­tain a good rep­u­ta­tion. Using LinkedIn, your online rep­u­ta­tion can speak vol­umes and encour­age poten­tial clients to hire you. You can start this process by craft­ing a detailed pro­file and mak­ing mean­ing­ful con­nec­tions. Your pro­file is a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of your brand posi­tion­ing so make sure to high­light the prob­lems you solve rather than prac­tice area descrip­tions. One of the most use­ful fea­tures of LinkedIn is shar­ing con­tent and pub­lish­ing. By shar­ing your exper­tise with your con­nec­tions, you build brand cred­i­bil­i­ty and aware­ness. As a lawyer, it’s impor­tant to con­nect to your audi­ence in their lan­guage. Keep this in mind as you devel­op, write, and pub­lish your content. 
• Tal­ent — When you’re look­ing to grow your law prac­tice, LinkedIn is one of the best ways to do so. Most of the audi­ence is edu­cat­ed and an open posi­tion can be adver­tised eas­i­ly to all of your con­nec­tions. LinkedIn also allows you to adver­tise your open posi­tion using pro­mo­tion­al tools in the Jobs section. 
• Net­work­ing — The abil­i­ty to build rela­tion­ships on LinkedIn is what makes this plat­form so valu­able. In fact, that’s what it was cre­at­ed for. Now, you get the oppor­tu­ni­ty to take full advan­tage of its pow­er­ful net­work­ing capa­bil­i­ties to build your law busi­ness. You can do this by using the search func­tion to fil­ter results by geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion, title, edu­ca­tion, com­pa­ny name, and indus­try. If you already have a good idea of who your tar­get audi­ence is, using LinkedIn will make it that much eas­i­er to find them. 

Con­nect with oth­er lawyers using LinkedIn groups. You can also use the search func­tion to find groups that are relat­ed to your law prac­tice. Just remem­ber that it is not enough to sim­ply col­lect a mas­sive fol­low­ing of con­nec­tions. It’s impor­tant to block out time to like, com­ment, and share with oth­er con­nec­tions online to tru­ly build rela­tion­ships. This will help you raise your vis­i­bil­i­ty and place you on the radar of peo­ple look­ing for your expertise. 

• Clients — When you think of find­ing new clients, LinkedIn may not be the first place that comes to mind. How­ev­er, in times like these, every­one is expe­ri­enc­ing legal trou­bles. You want to be the first per­son that comes to mind when they need a resolution. 

How do you do this? First, cre­ate and share con­tent on a con­sis­tent basis. This will draw atten­tion to your law prac­tice and show that you are a promi­nent pres­ence on the plat­form. If you have a blog con­nect­ed to your web­site, copy and paste the URL to the LinkedIn plat­form with a brief sum­ma­ry of the con­tent. You can also pub­lish direct­ly to LinkedIn and share it with your net­work. You don’t always have to share orig­i­nal con­tent. Repost­ing an inter­est­ing arti­cle or shar­ing an arti­cle by one of your con­nec­tions is an effec­tive way to deliv­er val­ue to your network. 

Next, engage in online dia­logue. You can mes­sage poten­tial clients and build rap­port through the mes­sag­ing sys­tem. Direct­ly reach­ing out to pro­fes­sion­als in your net­work in a mutu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial way through an intro­duc­tion can get the con­ver­sa­tion started. 

Last­ly, you’ll want to take con­ver­sa­tions offline to close the deal. Prospect­ing and estab­lish­ing rela­tion­ships through the plat­form is an excel­lent start­ing point. When you see a prospec­tive client fre­quent­ly lik­ing and com­ment­ing on your posts, make the sug­ges­tion to take the con­ver­sa­tion offline with an intro­duc­to­ry phone call, cof­fee meet­ing, or oth­er mee­tups out­side of LinkedIn. In con­trast to oth­er net­work­ing meth­ods, LinkedIn has a high­er ROI because more progress can be made in less time with­out ever leav­ing your com­put­er or phone. 

• SEO — Remain­ing active on LinkedIn can help your SEO strat­e­gy as well. Cre­at­ing a LinkedIn com­pa­ny page is the first step in show­ing up in Google search results for your law prac­tice. You can share con­tent from your com­pa­ny page which can increase the vis­i­bil­i­ty of your con­tent and encour­age poten­tial clients to vis­it your website. 

Call us for Expertise with Marketing for Law Firms

LinkedIn is just one small piece of an online mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy that can dra­mat­i­cal­ly increase the growth of your firm. All types of law prac­tices can uti­lize LinkedIn and any oth­er social media plat­form for shar­ing con­tent. The key is to com­bine all social media, con­tent mar­ket­ing, brand­ing, pub­lic rela­tions, web devel­op­ment, SEO, and tra­di­tion­al mar­ket­ing meth­ods for seam­less and con­sis­tent mes­sag­ing that dri­ves busi­ness growth and ROI. 

With over 25 years of inte­grat­ed mar­ket­ing expe­ri­ence, par­tic­u­lar­ly for top law firms, we have the strate­gic focus and exper­tise to help you build your online pres­ence and cred­i­bil­i­ty effort­less­ly. Our pas­sion­ate and award-win­ning approach will help you free up time to serve your clients and solve prob­lems. We are com­mit­ted to serv­ing small busi­ness­es dur­ing these chal­leng­ing times and look for­ward to help­ing your law firm meet the goals and objec­tives you’ve set. 

Give us a call to help your law prac­tice reach new clients!