Grow your immigration law practice by employing these proven marketing techniques to attract immigration cases.
If you have a firm that specializes in immigration law, you know how difficult it is to build a practice. Sure, once you get well established, you may be able to rely on word-of-mouth referrals. You may even be able to afford advertising in the newspaper or on TV, but that may be years away.
Consider the following questions:
A copywriter for immigration lawyers, someone who knows how to write marketing copy for your industry, could be an economical and effective way to grow your law practice.
Today’s immigration lawyers face extraordinary competition. There are more lawyers than ever before in nearly every city. And access to low-cost legal services and DIY options purchased online has also chipped away at the potential pool of clients.
The result is that immigration lawyers must be more proactive and deliberate in marketing if they’re to thrive.
Any type of promotion for your immigration law firm must start with a quality website, preferably one written by a professional copywriter for lawyers. An impressive website accomplishes two goals: 1) It helps clients seeking immigration lawyers find you, and 2) It converts visitors to your website into prospective clients who contact you.
Even clients who’ve been referred to your law practice by a friend or an existing client will probably visit your website before calling you for an appointment. They want to be sure you’re professional and well-matched to their needs, so your site needs to impress.
Assuming you already have a website – if not, you certainly should – ask yourself these five questions:
Unless your answer was “yes” to each of those questions, you’ll want to begin investing resources into improving your immigration law website if growing your firm is a priority.
When someone lands on your website, you want them to like what they see. Your copy should explain what makes you different and better than your competition. Website visitors must be able to get an accurate understanding of your firm within a few seconds of landing on your site.
Your site can’t look unprofessional. First impressions count and those impressions are often made within a few seconds. Your message must quickly make the best case for your immigration services and prove you are an expert in the field.
A skilled copywriter for lawyers can help you create a website that builds your brand, positions you well against the competition and converts visitors into qualified prospects for your services.
Under the umbrella of immigration law are a variety of specialties. If there’s an area in which you excel, you should use your website to promote that unique capability. It’s a great way to stand out in a crowd.
Immigration specialties may include:
Once you’ve identified your specialty, your marketing can then be focused on appealing to the needs of that particular target. Keep in mind, you can eventually grow your practice to include multiple specialties and diverse services.
A skilled copywriter for lawyers can help you craft your website around your specialty, develop your online profile and position you as the authority in that niche. You want website visitors to immediately know that you’re uniquely qualified in that area of expertise. And most people will choose to work with and pay more for an expert in the field over a generalist.
Beyond promoting your specialty, you should think about promoting your firm locally. Geography is important because the typical law firm client is likely to seek out a local attorney, someone who they can easily meet with in person.
From a marketing perspective, it’s a lot easier to compete with all the lawyers in your city who have the same specialty as you than to compete with all the lawyers in that field across your state or across the entire U.S.
So all your marketing needs to be geo-targeted to your specific city (or the nearest large city if you happen to be located in a small town). That means your website, your ads and any other marketing materials should mention your city by name as your service area.
For example, you’re not just an immigration attorney; you’re an immigration attorney in Miami, Florida.
While your first marketing tool should be a website about your immigration law firm, it doesn’t have to be your only tool. A copywriter for law firms can also help you create:
Ideally, you want to use a variety of marketing tools to increase the number of new clients and cases you attract to your law firm. With consistency and repetition in marketing, your immigration law firm’s name will become more familiar.
By promoting your law firm’s services within your chosen specialty across various media, prospective clients and referral sources, such as other attorneys, are more likely to find you and send business your way.
Most people are put off by a pushy sales approach. And that’s why so many companies today use an educational tone in their marketing. Telling versus selling seems to work especially well for immigration law firms.
Working with a skilled copywriter for lawyers, you can use your everyday legal work to create content for marketing purposes. A copywriter who understands SEO can write copy and employ proven techniques to help you rise in the rankings on Google, which will drive traffic to your site.
Consider these examples of items you can publish on your website to attract clients and cases:
Don’t worry about clients not calling you because they’ve read your published information and now don’t need you. Reading an article does not a lawyer make.
By offering useful information that is just enough to answer potential clients’ initial questions, you’re positioning your law firm as an authority on a given issue or topic, and they’re more likely to contact you for help with their individual situation.
Once you get in the mindset of creating content, you’ll find a plethora of topics for you or your professional copywriter to write about.
Today’s immigration lawyers have plenty of competition. Simply setting up an office downtown and posting a sign does not a successful practice make. Hoping prospective clients will find you is not a strategy.
Instead, you need to work at building your brand and promoting your services. You want to become known as the authority in their space and use proven marketing tactics to gain visibility.
Also, marketing shouldn’t be a one-and-done function. You can’t build a website and forget about it. You should continually be updating and adding to it with new information that their clients will find useful. And you should also be using multiple methods and media to attract a continual stream of new clients.
To see the best results and eliminate the feast-or-famine cycle so many law firms experience, your marketing efforts need to be ongoing.
A copywriter with a marketing background can help you find opportunities to promote your immigration law firm and position you as the leading attorney in your field.