5 Strategies to Reduce the Cost of Acquiring Legal Clients

Marketing can be expensive, but clients are the key to your success.

Learn 5 ways to find clients without destroying your budget.

Success for law firms big and small hinges on one thing. Clients.

Whether you have your own practice or it’s your job to generate leads for the law firm, you need enough clients and client work to keep the lights on, pay your team, and have something left over for partner equity.

At the same time how can you prioritize lead generation without breaking the bank?

In this article, you’ll see 5 strategies that cost next to nothing but pack a large punch when it comes to engaging qualified prospects that will likely convert into solid retainable clients.

Strategy #1: Leverage Your Network

You already know the importance of establishing a strong and extensive network of solid professional contacts. Through law school and job interviews, clients, and your previous and current employment situation, you’ve got a lot of power at your fingertips. 

Organize that information and put it to work for you. 

Email your list – not just to solicit business – but to keep in touch and share valuable information. Not only will this help you avoid Rule 7.3 violations, but you’ll deepen your connections with your network. You never know when a friend of a friend will need a referral to someone who knows what they’re talking about. 

Needless to say you’ll want to keep expanding your network. Whether business is booming or you’re experiencing a slow period, make time for this on a regular and recurring basis. 

Try to reach out personally to three or four contacts each week.

This will help you strengthen your pipeline and reduce stress when business is slow.  

Strategy #2: Become a Thought Leader

When people have questions, they go to Google. The same is true for legal questions.

Thought leadership and content marketing is important in every industry in today’s digital economy. Blogging is a simple, but powerful way to establish yourself as a thought leader and an authority, while expanding your marketing reach at the same time.

You have so much good information, insight, and experience to share with your target audience. Start writing.

If you’re not sure which topics to begin writing about, think about the 5 questions your clients ask you most often.

Chances are, prospective clients are wondering about the same items.

Blogging and content marketing enable you to drive visibility for your practice and share your unique value proposition that will set you apart from your competition. 

Strategy #3: Consider Practicing Online

In today’s digital economy, online law services are becoming more and more common. Attorneys can streamline their practice, connect remotely, save significantly, and provide the same quality service that they would in person.

Not ready to go 100% virtual? That’s ok too. Start small by automating your appointment scheduling and go from there.

When you pass along the cost savings to your clients, you make yourself more accessible to a wider audience. That means more clients for you.

Strategy #4: Let Clients Try Before They Buy

With GoReminders, save time and maximize billable hours with customized scheduling options, appointment reminders, and confirmation requests.

That’s why a free consultation is a highly effective way to capture qualified leads. Not only will you now have contact information to nurture the lead with additional outreach, but a free consultation accelerates conversion because of the human touch that happens in a 1:1 interaction. 

The free consultation is nothing new. Many law practices offer one, however, not many outline what kind of value the potential client will walk away with. Be clear about what clients will learn during the consultation. Potential clients will appreciate some instant gratification as well as the opportunity to ask questions and get to know you. 

Plus, you’ll be able to identify potential red flags and drive retention rates by only accepting clients that are the right fit for your practice.

By using automated appointment scheduling software you can the schedule free consultations efficiently. Send reminders ahead of time to increase your show-up rate. This will dramatically decrease your acquisition cost per client, especially if you’re paying for leads.

Strategy #5: Find Technology to Accelerate the Process

While larger law firms will have IT, marketing, and sales departments that focus on lead generation, SMEs can benefit from the many powerful tools now available. Anything digital you can imagine can be easily automated for a reasonable price in today’s market, including:

• Web design. Software products are available that can quickly generate various design alternatives to attract and engage potential new clients. Drag and drop editors enable you to combine different elements like images, texts and links.
• Content marketing. When you identify repetitive content marketing tasks, you can then outsource or automate them with various tools and apps. 

For example, calendar tools and workflow applications notify you when content needs to be created or updated. Companies like Hootsuite will automatically share content from your website to your social media platforms. 

Another way to engage potential clients is through an automated email nurturing campaign. Send out a daily or weekly newsletter to keep in touch with your network.

• Appointment scheduling and reminders. Scheduling a meeting with a new client or a free consultation is half the battle when it comes to converting leads into clients. The other half is getting them to show up. Save time and maximize billable hours with customized scheduling options, appointment reminders, and confirmation requests. 

And like we said before, when you increase your show-up rate, you dramatically decrease your acquisition cost per client, especially if you’re paying for leads.

Some automated appointment scheduling and reminder software is even customizable for any language your potential and current clients speak. For you, this means sending multilingual text or email reminders (or both) in any language you choose.

Automated scheduling and reminders can be helpful for internal appointments as well. Remind co-workers and current clients about virtual meetings, court dates, or anything else.

GoReminders is a calendar app that sends text and email reminders to your clients.