Most, if not all, law firms are discoverable on the internet. Having an active online presence is what will help you reach your target audience.
One form of online marketing is to use is a sales funnel. Every business, regardless of the industry it’s a part of, can create measurable growth using a sales funnel. Lawyers, specifically, can rely on online marketing to find new clients. A sales funnel refers to the path that visitors of your website will pass through to complete an exchange. However, not all people reach the end of the sales funnel. It will be your job to make your sales funnel to generate leads for your firm.
Here, we’ll break down how a sales funnel works, and how you can apply this model to your firm and experience increased traffic to your business.
Why Sales Funnels are Important
In the case of law practice, a sales funnel is the path that website visitors take from being interested in your firm to actually contacting an attorney from your team. The term for those visitors that reach the end of your funnel is conversions.
Obviously, you want people to see that path through to the end. The more organized and error-free your funnel is, the more likely you’ll be to get new clients and keep current ones.
Getting Started
Before you get started on the sales funnel, take a closer look at the structure of your entire website. A well-optimized and organized website that hosts compelling content is essential to success with online marketing.
Rather than have a plain website that simply lists your services, think about including a dedicated ‘About Us’ page and a contact page. If you want to go the extra mile, consider publishing a blog and posting content regularly.
Diversify the content that you offer and create webinars, infographics, guides, videos, and more. Find a medium that works for your brand and its target consumer. This establishes credibility for your firm and gives your business a stronger identity.
Step 1. Creating a Checklist
Before you can create your sales funnel, you should create a checklist that outlines the structure of your funnel and your short-term and long-term goals. Here is some important information to include in this checklist:
- Create a client persona to identify your target audience. Having a clear image of the types of clients and cases you want will help you appeal to that prospect.
- Identify all of the ways that clients typically learn about your practice. This could include organic search queries, Google Ads, or referrals. Make sure you have a clear grasp of all of the advertising/marketing efforts that your firm is actively pursuing.
- Know where your leads come from. It will help you learn what you’re doing well and what you’re not doing effectively.
- Outline your sales process. Track your leads carefully to figure out why some leads aren’t converting. Do you interact with clients in in-house consultations, or do you rely mostly on phone consultations? You could run an experiment and see which of these practices is more successful. After you’ve met with them, ask whether they want to take you on as their lawyer immediately, or if they wish to consult with other firms first.
- Clearly state your primary offerings. What can you give your clients that they won’t find at another firm? You could offer a discount or free consultations. Having some sort of active promotion will entice potential clients.
- Track how long it takes for members of your team to respond to inquiries. Some lawyers aren’t successful with online marketing because they fail to communicate with their leads. It’s understandable that, in some cases, you may not have someone available to answer the phone. For that reason, you might consider hiring a virtual receptionist. That’s just one example of how you can find resourceful solutions to the holes in your sales funnel.
- Find out how many times your firm followed up after a prospect decided not to work with you. You should always follow up with people who rejected your offer. Consistency is key with a sales funnel.
Step 2. Setting up the Funnel
Create a Landing Page
One of the most effective ways to convince prospects to enter your funnel is to use a properly optimized landing page. Landing pages are destination pages that search engine users are directed to when they respond to an advertisement, organic search, or email.
A useful landing page is clear, concise, and direct. You want the content that you feature to be exactly what the lead is looking for. Use CTAs (Call to Actions) so your prospect knows how to complete whatever action you’re asking them to do.
- Your first goal should be to create awareness. This will help you earn leads. One strategy for creating awareness is to suggest that you have the solution to a common problem that people have. To do this, you have to understand your demographics and the problems that they face.
- Build a database of your leads. Encourage your prospects to supply you with their contact information in exchange for content that you promise them. Eventually, you can automate the process of following up with leads.
- Once your lead database begins to grow, you should take the time to segment these leads into groups. This means differentiating between hot, warm, and cold leads. The information that you give to these groups should be tailored to them. For example, you might send hot leads an offer that promises a free consultation if they contact your firm within the next few hours.
- Also, make sure the SEO on your site is strong, and that you are actively marketing on social media. Another thing you can set up is an email drip campaign.
- Send your contacts engaging content regularly. At the same time, you shouldn’t crowd their inbox with pointless emails. Gradually build-up to the development of your client-lawyer relationship by establishing trust and being consistent.
Educate Your Prospects
Your next goal should be to educate your prospects.
- Provide factual information about your success rates as a law firm. Doing so will not only position your firm as a solution to a potential client’s problem, but it will establish credibility.
- Now that you’ve done that, you have to convince the prospect to contact your legal practice. You can do this by listing your educational background, prices, and positive testimonials on your website.
- The last step in your funnel is when you and your prospect complete the exchange.
Step 3. Managing the Funnel
All effective funnels usually have one thing in common: they should be self-sufficient and simple. Your funnel shouldn’t have your prospects jumping through hoops to speak to one of your attorneys.
As a law practice, you have to show your potential clients that you are there for them and can be an ally to them.
Other than remembering to keep the process simple, don’t neglect to produce new and diverse content so you can keep your lead database interested.
Organization is critical with a sales funnel. Have a clearly defined process to successfully manage the funnel.
Using ClickFunnels to Automate Your Process
Managing a sales funnel requires a lot of time and effort. You’ve probably spent a lot of time establishing a brand identity for your law practice. It can feel daunting to rethink your entire process to build a successful sales funnel.
Therefore, ClickFunnels is an online tool that can do the heavy lifting for you. It can help your business market your legal services.
You can use ClickFunnels in many ways. Here are the best features of the software:
- Create landing pages for your funnel
- Easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor
- Automatic notifications
- Accurate statistics
Here are the steps to creating a sales funnel in ClickFunnels:
Step 1. Navigate to your dashboard and click the button that says, “Build Funnel.”
Step 2. Choose your goal. As a law firm, your goal isn’t likely to be selling a product since you want to work with clients. Your goal as a law firm could be to collect email contacts.
Step 3. Give your funnel a name and then click “Build Funnel.”
Step 4. Select one of their customizable templates and edit the page.
Step 5. Using the different customization options and style elements they have given you, build your funnel.
Measuring your Success
If you don’t understand where your success is coming from, you run the risk of neglecting to continue that process. When you measure your progress, it allows you to create more successful content and scale your business.
One way to do this is to track the rate of your conversions. How many of your prospects respond to an ad you’ve put out? How many people take you up on a free consultation offer?
Making a note of things like this allows you to find out whether you are capturing your audience’s attention. Do they find your law firm credible enough to trust with personal information?
Measuring your success allows you to find any holes that lead to customers slipping out of your funnel.
Final Thoughts
As a law firm, your main goal is to establish a relationship with clients and get them to entrust you with their cases. Even if you are confident that you can develop this relationship, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get clients. The only way to ensure that you can help your demographic is to use online marketing and sales funnels.
Spend some time creating a self-sufficient sales funnel that clearly outlines your services and offers potential clients a solution to their problem. Continue tweaking this funnel as time goes on. Try different approaches and see what produces the best result.
However, you decide to set up your funnel, remember to stay in touch with all of your leads and existing clients. Following up is essential to the success of a funnel. Don’t just focus on the path of the funnel. Remember to engage with prospects that have either left the funnel or reached the end of it.
Remember that a sales funnel is intended to grow with your practice. And, remember to maintain a website that has strong SEO on the backend of the site. This means employing simple strategies like:
- Targeted keywords
- Meta descriptions
- Image tags
Using ClickFunnels, you can easily automate this process and monitor your conversions. ClickFunnels can help you get new clients and establish trusting relationships with your existing client base.
While sales funnels can be intimidating at first, they’re quite easy to set up. We hope you found this review informative and discovered some new strategies to create the perfect sales funnel.
If you’d like to learn more about sales funnels or explore some of our other in-depth guides, click here.