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The elder law market is booming, and not because its main audience consists of baby boomers.
The number of seniors in the US and Canada will increase by more than 50% over the next 30 years, which means that a lot more people are going to need help managing their finances and making decisions for themselves when they can no longer make those decisions on their own. That’s where you come in!
In this guide, we’re going to talk about things that your law school didn’t reach you; mainly, how to determine your target audience, what online marketing tactics you should pursue (SEO, social media, and paid ads), and analyze the results.
Do you want to get ahead in elder law and estate planning marketing? Read on!
Profile Your Target Audience
As you reach out to the elderly population or “baby boomers” who are looking for quality long-term care facilities, your marketing tactics must resonate with them. To do so, a persona must be created and profiled properly to understand what will work best.
To help narrow down your market area into a buyer persona of your prospective clients, ask yourself the following questions:
- What is their gender?
- How old are they?
- Is the person married or single?
- Do they reside in a retirement community, assisted living facility, or nursing home now, and if so what type of care do they need for that setting (basic daily assistance vs. 24/hour care)?
- What types of medical needs does this population have – dialysis, diabetes management, mobility impairments, etc.?
- How much disposable income do they have available each month on average ($0-$30k+)?
- Do they live independently without any help from outside sources such as family members or caregivers? If not how often do these external forces intervene with day-to-day life tasks due to memory impairment, an inability to complete tasks on one’s own, or inability to use the bathroom independently?
There are other questions you may want to ask people, but the ones above should help you get started for now.
To get answers to these questions, you need to run a survey campaign by sending emails to your previous and current clients or embed a survey or form on your website for visitors to answer. Using a tool like SurveyMonkey allows you to build surveys in a few minutes and deploy them in seconds.
Once you’ve gathered their answers, you should have a better grasp of who your potential clients are and promote your expert services in elder law to them directly.
Developing Your Elder Law Practice Marketing Strategy
With a clear target audience in mind, you now have access to insights and strategies that will help you start growing your practice properly.
Keep in mind that your marketing works as part of a sales process. Its objective is to help increase your online visibility to drive more leads. From there, you should establish ways to help you close leads into clients.
For now, below are the top marketing tactics you need to pursue and the different subsets of each.
Rank on Top of Google Search
Generating lots of traffic from organic search for your practice is the realm of SEO.
Many professionals from financial planners to insurance professionals attest to the power of SEO. It’s not only one of the best ways to acquire clients but also cost-effective as spending money isn’t a big issue.
So if you’re serious with your elder law practice, you must include SEO as part of your marketing plan.
Below are the different branches of SEO and how you can leverage them to help you close new business.
Research for Keywords Related to Elder Law
Your website must rank high on Google. To do so, your main focus is to unearth keywords that qualified prospects are searching for and build pages optimized for each intent. You’ll want to draw a clear line between your content and other law practices. Adding information about family law or criminal law will only detract from your goal of ranking for the best keywords related to your practice.
Source: Promodo
The best keywords to find are those where answering questions is a must. Search phrases that start with”how,” “why,” and “what” fit this category.
Create Great Content
Once you have these terms relevant to your elder law practice, you need to create landing page content that’s optimized for each keyword.
Source: Mad Lemmings
The infographic above should give you a clear step-by-step guide on how to optimize for your keywords in your content and get it to rank on Google.
By optimizing your website for people and search engines, you can drive new prospects to your practice site and convert them into prospective clients.
Build Links to Build Your Authority
Aside from optimizing your pages, you need to launch a link building campaign for your website. One of the best ways elder law attorneys can do this is by signing up on online directories. This tactic is part of a broader local SEO strategy which includes generating online reviews to help grow your rankings on Google.
Source: Score
Boosting your SEO via local link building helps you increase your authority in the community and bring you one step close to your attorney marketing success.
Developing a Social Media Engagement Strategy
Social media is another referral network you can tap into to raise awareness about your elder law services.
Your initial focus with your social strategy as an elder law attorney is to determine what accounts you want to set up and how many. You might start with a Facebook page for the law firm, one or more Twitter accounts (one personal account and one professional), an Instagram account if applicable, and a LinkedIn profile for business purposes.
Once you’ve registered accounts on these platforms, below are things you can do here:
Social Media Management
Different types of posts will be appropriate on different platforms due to their specific market audiences so it’s important to get them all sorted before doing anything else.
For example, tweets are shorter messages that can be sent quickly while Instagram captions typically have a longer word count so they should be posted less often than tweets but not as infrequently as Facebook status updates; this means scheduling both sets of posts (posts for Instagram and posts for Twitter) is key.
Social Listening
Ultimately, think of social media as a conversation. People use these different channels as platforms to share their thoughts.
And as an elder law attorney, your objective is to listen to what they have to say regarding your expertise and
Use tools like Buffer and Awario to help you browse topics related to your expertise and engage with your audience using the right tone in listening, responding, or posting.
Brand Reputation Management
Your reputation for offering estate planning and elder law services is everything. Therefore, you must do whatever is necessary to keep your brand squeaky clean to help attract as many clients as you can to your legal services.
With the help of the same social listening tools, track your brand name and find posts about your clients and what they think about your business.
If the posts have a negative sentiment in them, reply to their posts and make them change their mind. Whatever the reason may be, make sure to get back in their good graces and acquit yourself well in the process at the same time.
A great example of this is by handing them a gift certificate to encourage them to try your business out again. The gift certificate should grant old clients a discount to make it worth their time, especially when they’re on the lookout for lawyers such as yourself.
If done right, your interactions with past clients could lead them to refer clients your way, making social media a legitimate referral source for clients.
Paid Ads
Paid search ads and social media advertising are efficient ways for elder law attorneys to generate revenue by targeting the right audience for your business.
Unlike newspaper ads, paid ads allow you to get in front of potential customers on Google or social platforms like Facebook and Instagram at a fast rate.
Source: Cool Infographics
But unlike SEO, you must allot a budget to keep your PPC campaign running. That also means you must know the best practices of running a high-converting paid ad campaign so you can sustain your campaign until you’ve exhausted
Analyze the Results of Your Digital Marketing Efforts
Once you’ve deployed your digital marketing plan for your elder law practice, it’s time to determine whether your campaigns have been a success or not. This is where website analytics comes in.
Source: Spiralytics
As you can see, the number of visitors your site received isn’t the end-all-be-all of your marketing campaign. Your goal is to turn these visitors into new clients for your legal services. And you’ll only be able to do that if you have the data to analyze at your fingertips.
You can do this by using Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
The former helps you make sense of the traffic you’ve generated from your landing pages and content. It identifies the top referral sources for traffic, how long have they stayed on your page, and other variables to consider.
The latter gives you insights into your site’s SEO performance. It provides information as to what keywords you’re ranking for, how many impressions your page is receiving from each query and page issues your site may have.
Need Help With Marketing Your Elder Law Practice?
You now know how to develop a marketing strategy for your elder law firm or practice. Whether it’s by rolling up your sleeves and doing the work yourself or partnering with a legal marketing expert, there are plenty of ways for lawyers like you to get this done.
However, if this sounds overwhelming, it’s because it is! Unless you have a staff who can help you apply everything above, you can’t expect to get all these done immediately.
Therefore, take advantage of our services at Constellation Legal Marketing so we can help make things easier for you! Our team has years of online experience in finding new clients through SEO, PPC advertising campaigns, blogging, and social media management—all while maintaining excellent customer service standards.
With us as your partner in business development, promoting your practice will be more than possible – it’ll be easy!
