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Estate planning is a challenging industry.
The fact it involves assets, properties, and finances means that there’s a lot of money to be made in this business.
However, you have your work cut out for you with thousands of attorneys and law firms vying for the same clients in the market.
These sharks will do whatever it takes to provide their service to clients and get paid in the process.
Therefore, it’s sink or swims for you in these ravenous seas…unless you have a digital marketing plan in place!
Just like you’d help clients plan in advance regarding their properties, marketing requires you to employ a strategy that puts you ahead of the pack by leveraging the resources you have at hand.
In this post, we will discuss what these marketing solutions are so you can make your estate planning business thrive against fierce competition.
ESTATE PLANNING LAW CASE STUDY
See how The Law Office of Paul Black went from relying on referrals
to receiving over 100 leads per month on average.
The Challenge
Estate planning is a sneaky competitive practice area. It’s widely known how difficult and expensive it can be to win personal injury cases, but based on our research, estate planning is right up there.
The Law Office of Paul Black is an estate planning attorney in Atlanta, Georgia. Paul had built a successful firm, but he was overly reliant on referrals from his colleagues.
Referrals are great, but they are infrequent. The Firm wanted a more predictable and scaleable way to generate new clients.
In a highly competitive market like Atlanta, this is a tall order.
The Solution
We’ve helped The Law Office of Paul Black go from 0 to over 160 first page positions on Google. This has led to consistently receiving over 2,500 users per month from organic search.
These stats are great, but the real payoff has been consistently adding over 100 leads per month, all from free, organic traffic.
The Law Office of Paul Black continues to grow and thrive in a hotly-contested market.
Define Your Brand
Your online brand consists of everything you stand for as an estate planning lawyer.
Therefore, it’s your responsibility to promote a well-defined identity as an estate-planning practice or law firm to your target audience.
Aside from that, you need to ensure that you have a unique brand that’s discernible from other estate planning attorneys.
To do this, you need to identify your unique selling proposition. You need to answer the question, “what makes you better than other lawyers and law firms?”
Do you offer a free consultation? Do you have one of the most cost-effective rates? Is there an area in estate planning that you specialize in (asset protection, elder law, trust decanting, etc.)?
Consider your answers to these questions when building your brand from the ground up.
Next, research your competitors in the estate planning practice.
Even if you feel you’ve differentiated your brand from the market, you’d still see a few overlaps with other attorneys and law firms.
In this case, compare lawyers who share similarities with your brand and see other things you can capitalize on.
For instance, if you received higher online reviews than they have, you could use this to your advantage and say that you’re one of the highest-rated estate planning attorneys in your area.
Even a seemingly small differentiator like this could help pay big dividends in your business especially where prospective clients are torn between choosing you and your competitors.
Finally, you need to determine the colors you want to use on your online channels like your website and social media.
There’s the psychology behind each color, and you want to choose the color that best describes your brand.
Source: Gate City Signs
When choosing brand colors, you must strike the balance between picking a color that reflects your values and qualities as an estate-planning attorney and picking one that your competitors haven’t chosen yet.
Set Up Your Online Platforms
Now that you have a brand, it’s time to set up online platforms where your target audience can reach you online.
It’s important to have an online presence nowadays, especially that 100% of people seek legal advice online.
Without any platform where people can ask you online, you’re essentially leaving a lot of money on the table!
Among the different platforms you can set up for your practice, the website is arguably the best one you can use for now.
The biggest advantage of having a website is you have full control of how you want to make it look and appear to your audience.
You can add blog posts and landing pages, as well as opt-in boxes, chat widgets, a contact form, and other elements that make it easier for your target audience to find and engage with you online.
Website
Among the different website platforms available, (the self-hosted) WordPress is arguably the best of the bunch.
It’s fully customizable and allows you to install plugins to supercharge and increase its ability to convert visitors into leads or clients.
When using WordPress, you also have to choose a WordPress hosting provider where you can install its files online and serve your websites to visitors.
Other choices include Wix and Squarespace — fine website builders that don’t offer the full flexibility of WordPress. But if you’re looking for a much easier and more convenient way to create a website, you can’t go wrong with either one.
Social Media
Next, you want to sign up on social media sites.
Unlike a website, social media has millions of users on each platform. This makes reaching out to your audience with your legal services much easier and more straightforward.
However, don’t sign up on every social platform you find. Keep in mind which social media most of your prospects are using, no matter how few they there.
The goal here is to focus all your energies on engaging with potential clients on these channels instead of spreading yourself too thinly.
And by getting them to connect with you, it’s much easier to turn them into clients if they would need your services later on or know someone who does.
Among the different social networking sites, Facebook brings in the newest clients to the fold.
LinkedIn is similar to Facebook in that you can engage with other users of the site by publishing posts or by commenting on theirs. However, this website is more about networking with other attorneys and keeping in touch with the latest news in the industry.
However, that doesn’t make LinkedIn any less of a marketing channel compared to Facebook. In fact, more law firms are learning of the platform’s power in terms of growing their brand online.
For both sites, you need to set up the page of your practice and edit it to include pictures of yourself or a law firm and give it a personal touch. You should also post articles that you’ve written and share relevant and useful content from other sites to help position yourself as an authority.
Optimize for Target Keywords
Going back to your website, you need to find a way to make it easier for people to find.
Aside from promoting your site on social media, you can make it appear on search engines like Google.
To do this, you need to do search engine optimization (SEO). In a nutshell, this marketing strategy requires you to find the best keywords to optimize for your site on Google.
For example, as an estate-planning attorney, you want to rank on top of Google for your location. So it’s best to optimize for the search query “estate planning attorney Michigan” if you’re from the area.
Or if you specialize in a specific subset of estate planning, you could rank for “elder law attorney Michigan” instead.
The idea here is to find keywords that best describe the services you offer. This way, whenever someone is looking for legal services and they’ll see you at the top, you have the best chance of getting hired for the job.
According to Advanced Web Ranking, the top three positions on Google search receive 30%, 12%, and 8%, respectively, of the overall clicks for a keyword.
But to rank on top of search engine results pages (SERPs), you need to find keywords that people actually search for and have low difficulty.
In a cutthroat industry of legal services, finding these keywords are difficult instead you have tools in place.
Keyword research tools like Ahrefs not only provide you these data, but they also show you related searches to help expand your research.
Once you’ve found your keywords, you must observe the best on-page SEO practices to help your pages rank for their respective terms.
Create Content
Content is the bedrock of any marketing strategy. Without effective content created for its intended goal, promoting your estate planning service will be much more difficult.
We’ve already touched upon making sure that your content is optimized for the best on-page SEO factors.
Right now, you want to identify the different sales funnels in your sales funnel.
Source: GetVOIP.com
Below are the possible stages that you should observe in your sales funnel as estate planning lawyers:
- Leads – Potential clients are interested in your legal services but are not sure whether to hire you yet. You still need to convince them that you are the guy for the job.
- Sales Calls & Follow Up – Prospects are interested and somewhat sure that you are the estate planning lawyer they are looking for. You just need to keep following up by offering your legal services to them without being too pushy.
- Conversion and Sales – Leads are ready to become your new clients. You simply need to onboard them properly and make sure that they’re doing the right thing.
Among the different types of content, articles enable you to hit on different stages of your sales funnel.
And to help people find the articles you’ve published, you also need to optimize each for their respective keywords.
You can create informational, how-to content that shows your knowledge in estate planning and allows you to establish yourself as an authority. From here, website visitors become aware of your services, which turns them into leads.
Most keyword research tools allow you to search for questions that people type on Google related to the keyword. Optimize for those with a relatively high search volume to increase your chances of getting found.
For the succeeding stages, you must post content that will help you close leads into sales.
Examples are client testimonials and successful case studies that showcase your ability as an estate planning law firm should hire.
You can optimize them for their appropriate keywords, but you don’t have to if it’s not impossible. If the latter, make sure to link to these pages from your blog posts so people can view them.
Manage Promotional Channels
Once you’ve published your content, it’s not enough to just rank them on Google.
You also need to diversify your traffic sources by advertising them on different channels.
We’ve already talked about social media and how you can leverage it to increase your online reach. But it’s not ideal to log in and out of each platform to share your content and engage with your audience.
It’s better to use a social media management tool in this case. It allows you to monitor all your social media activity on a single platform.
Also, you can schedule posts and plot out your content calendar in advance. This way, the tool automatically shares your content even if you’re away.
If you have the budget, you should also consider reading paid ads for your landing pages.
Unlike SEO, you can make your ad appear on top of SERPs immediately. You just have to bid on the keywords (for Google Ads) or determine the demographic of people you’ll promote your ad to (for Facebook Ads). You also have to determine how long the campaign will be, which factors into the cost of the entire campaign.
On the downside, ads can be expensive depending on the factors above. Also, you must convert people with your ads to get your ROI from the money you spent.
ESTATE PLANNING LAW CASE STUDY #2
See how Faulkner Law has increased their monthly lead count by 126% since last year.
The Challenge
Prior to working with Constellation, Faulkner Law was only showing for 72 keywords, with five appearing on the first page of Google. The firm was only ranking for their own name and found new leads outside of referrals hard to come by.
Even though Faulkner Law is located in suburb outside of Atlanta, competition is fierce. There are multiple players in the area who are all investing substantially in digital marketing.
As a solo attorney, Faulkner Law needed a partner who could jump in and take marketing off their plate.
The Results Speak for Themselves
Faulkner Law now receives over 100 leads per month!
It didn’t happen overnight, but through our formula of proven strategies, the firm’s visibility online has skyrocketed. They now receive over a thousand users per month for free from organic search.
The firm is increasingly adding the most lucrative positions in their market and even ranking on the first page for highly-competitive keywords in Atlanta!
Monitor Brand Reputation
If your online brand is up and running and you have been hired by clients, it’s time to understand what people have said about your services.
Your brand’s reputation determines the perception the public will have of you, which in turn affects your ability to generate new clients.
For instance, if customers weren’t happy with the services you rendered, their negative reviews could create a trickle effect that will keep your prospects away from your business.
To avoid this from happening, you must stay on top of what people are saying about your estate planning law firm and find tweets and posts that mention your name.
You can sign up for a Google My Business (GMB) account to manage everything you need for your local business. The tool allows you to collect questions from prospects and answer them and to answer reviews you may receive.
Also, tools like Awario and BrandMentions detect tweets, posts, and other social media messages that GMB doesn’t collect.
From here, you need to address negative reviews gracefully. Try to find a resolution to their issues and do whatever it takes to help them out within reason.
Even if you weren’t able to resolve the issue, the best thing you can do here is to always acquit yourself in a positive light
Analyze Results
The purpose of your internet marketing efforts is to put the word on the street about your estate planning practice.
Therefore, you want to see if any of the traffic turned into clients. And if so, how many of them did.
To help you with this, Google Analytics (GA) and Google Search Console (GSC) are free solutions for monitor the quality of site traffic you’re receiving.
In particular, GA breaks down the traffic of your site into different factors to help you unearth insights on your marketing strategy.
It shows you the following data:
- Referral traffic (which sites sent traffic your way)
- Average time on site
- Bounce rate (what percentage of visitors bounced away from your site)
- Goals and conversions (what percentages of visitors performed your call to action; to gain access to this, you need to manually set up the goals from the GA dashboard)
With GSC, you can see which keywords your visitors are typing on Google to find your site.
There are other tools you can use to dig deeper into your site’s performance. But the aforementioned tools should do for now.
Conclusion
Digital marketing for estate planning requires a lot of research, implementation, and testing.
You must keep developing your online assets and properties to grow them further until you increase your reach and get to convert visitors into clients.
Some of the strategies above take time before the results manifest themselves. However, if you plan ahead, you can reap the benefits of proper planning soon enough.
Therefore, it’s best to get started now and raise more awareness of your estate planning practice!
