Family Law Marketing

Prospective clients often find that there are many attorneys to choose from when they perform an online search for family lawyers or divorce attorneys in their area. The sheer amount of choices is even more significant the bigger the market a law firm serves, such as in major cities like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Dallas-Fort Worth, and others. So, how do you set yourself apart from the pack and get those prospective clients to reach out to you as a family and divorce lawyer? It comes down to how good your family law marketing is.

Of course, what’s “good,” especially when it comes to assessing marketing efforts, can be a bit subjective. From our perspective as an experienced legal marketing firm, we view success by looking at data like incoming client leads, first-page website rankings, views on the advertorial videos we produce, or improved engagement with social media posts we make on our law firm clients’ behalf—all factors that can improve brand awareness, which research shows is critically important for conversions.

Consumers in general, but especially those dealing with sensitive divorce or family law concerns, need to know that the attorney they’re considering to represent them can adequately serve as both a counselor and a zealous legal advocate for their rights. Do your current family law marketing efforts send that message to prospective clients? If not, then they need to.

GAVL is an award-winning legal marketing agency that helps our family law office clients stand out in some of the most crowded online forums. Our talented team has proven expertise in search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and law firm advertising video production. This omnichannel marketing experience matters more than ever to consumers, so let’s deep dive into how we can help you optimize your family law firm’s digital footprint so that you start receiving more relevant leads.

The Importance of Being Where Prospective Clients Are Looking

According to Harvard Business Review, at least 73% of consumers “shop around,” viewing multiple channels or “touchpoints” a company has before making a purchasing decision or otherwise committing to becoming a customer. If you think that this customer habit only applies to retailers selling physical goods, think again. Law firm clients do the same.

Even with that bit of insight in mind, you’re likely wondering where it’s most effective for family law attorneys to establish an online presence.

What Are the Best Places for Family Lawyers To Market Themselves?

While there’s never a one-size-fits-all approach that is appropriate for all family law practices, our experience as a legal marketing company is that most every legal practice should have the following digital assets:

• A family law firm website
• Accounts on social media platforms
• A Google Business Profile, formerly known as Google My Business
• Video marketing productions
• Facebook ads

We’ll look at how to best capitalize on the use of each of the above law firm marketing options below.

Your Family Law Firm Website

There are a few key components to a law firm website that, in our experience at GAVL, all legal practices could benefit from trying to positively impact rankings before pursuing costlier alternatives, like trying to run Facebook ads.

Your Website’s Design

Consumers have an expectation that an attorney website will have a professional, contemporary appearance. If it looks outdated, then it may be high time to hire a web developer to redesign it to give it a much-needed facelift.

Whether you set out to have your existing family law firm website redesigned or you’re launching your first-ever site for your private practice, it’s imperative that its design emphasizes ease of use (navigability). Your goal should be for your clients to be able to easily maneuver around your family law firm website and find the information they need and want.

Ease of website navigation is important to consumers. If they can’t, there are other “fish in the sea,” as the proverbial phrase goes. They will leave your site and find another lawyer if your site design isn’t on point. Navigability is also important to Google in crawling your website. If its purpose isn’t readily evident, then its ranking may be penalized.

The Type of Content You Place on Your Website Matters

There are certain pieces of content that are considered must-haves if you expect your family law firm website to draw readers in and convert them into clients. Those are:

• Web content: This is the content you may find on your site’s homepage, attorney biographies, testimonials, or the results page, where you potentially list details about cases where the court has ruled in favor of you and your clients.
• Practice area pages: These should be dedicated to legal matters your family lawyers can assist with along with geo-locations so that search engine crawlers will make your content viewable by your target audience.
• Blog posts: These pieces provide you with an opportunity to really narrow in on a niche within your practice area. Blogs tend to take on a more conversational tone, giving you an opportunity to wow your potential clients with your knowledge of legal issues and approachability.

Your Family Law Firm’s Google Business Profile

Data compiled by Search Engine Journal shows that over 99% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchasing decision. The reason we bring that statistic up in discussing Google Business Profiles is because when it comes to your family law firm, it’s highly likely that the first bit of insight prospective clients are likely to see about your effectiveness in representing past or existing clients comes from your reviews listed there.

Google has previously posted information suggesting that, to increase your local search ranking, you must actively maintain your Google Business Profile. To do this, you must:

• Claim and verify your Google Business Profile listing
• Choose a relevant category for your business
• Fill in the requested data on your Google Business Profile, like a description, address and phone number, and family law firm website
• Upload relevant and high-resolution photos to your Google Business Profile
• Ask for Google reviews for your law practice
• Regularly post content to your profile

It’s exponentially more beneficial if the content you post to your family law firm’s Google Business Profile is optimized so that it pulls up seamlessly in local search results.

Your Family Law Firm’s Social Media Accounts

There are many different social media channels nowadays that feature all types of content from text to images and even video marketing. It can be hard to know what to post where and how often.

Fortunately, there are social media strategists on our legal marketing team here at GAVL that know who the target audience of these platforms are and how to reach prospective clients in your geographic market. Our strategists also know the kind of content that’s most appropriate for the different audiences and platforms and when content is most likely to be viewed. This insight makes a difference as to whether social media posts generate leads on:

• Instagram
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• TikTok

Research published by Forbes suggests that consumers are more apt to find your content memorable when it’s posted in video format compared to text. Click-through and thus conversion rates tend to be higher with audiovisual content as opposed to written content as well.

While that statistic doesn’t mean that you should eschew all forms of written content, it does mean that having different types of content that may appeal to or engage new clients for your family law firm on different levels is a key component of an effective legal marketing strategy. Fortunately, one arm of the work we do here at GAVL centers around cinematic video production for attorneys.

Your Family Law Firm’s Video Advertising Campaigns

Audiovisual assets can convey information that resonates with viewers in a way that writing cannot. Videography also has the potential of reaching viewers who are on-the-go or don’t have a propensity to read.

You’re missing out on showcasing your firm’s personal touch and attorneys’ expertise if you’re not utilizing our lawyer marketing video services.

There’s a lot of value in being first to market. Professional, cinematic videos like what we script and produce at GAVL can really make a difference in prospective clients’ perception of your firm. As you’ll find out later on this page, sentiments and tone make a difference in the family law practice area.

Paid Ads for Family Law Firms

Some family law firms, and especially those in highly competitive markets like our country’s big cities (including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston) will often launch Facebook ads to get their offering of legal services in front of more potential clients. These ads are pay-per-click, which means that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, only bills you for running these advertisements when someone actually reaches out to you for help by clicking on the ad.

In addition to paid Facebook ads, we can also help with paid LinkedIn ads if that’s something you’re interested in.

Knowing Where Prospective Clients Are in the Sales Cycle When Viewing Your Family Law Marketing

Now that we’ve discussed the best places for family lawyers to market themselves, it’s important to understand the demographics for potential divorce and family law clients before devising a marketing strategy. More specifically, it’s important to understand where your prospective customers or clients find themselves within the customer journey when they come searching for your firm.

In our experience at GAVL, prospective family law clients spend more time at the prospecting stage than individuals seeking a bankruptcy, criminal law, employment law, or personal injury attorney’s assistance. Therefore, any content that exists on your website, whether it’s practice area pages, blogs, social media posts, or videos, must be reflective of where that potential client is within the buyer’s journey—both in terms of content and tone.

Content That Family Law Clients Expect To See

As you’re aware, the family law umbrella is quite an expansive one. Clients may be coming to you for all sorts of reasons, including:

• Drafting a cohabitation, prenuptial, or postnuptial agreement: According to The Harris Poll, 42% of American adults believe in using prenups and 35% say they’ll sign one if they get married. It’s also common for couples to sign cohabitation agreements before they move in with one another and those individuals often reach out to family lawyers about each of these.
• Help with a legal separation or divorce-related matters: Potential clients’ needs may include property division, alimony, spousal support or maintenance (depending on the jurisdiction), prenup enforcement, child custody and parenting time concerns, and grandparents’ rights.
• Establishing paternity and visitation or custodial rights: Setting up DNA testing, reaching an agreement about supervised or unsupervised parenting time, establishing a custody schedule and any disputes that arise surrounding it, and initiating the receipt of child support may be your specialty and thus new clients may look to your content marketing to address concerns relevant to them.
• Termination of parental rights and adoptions: A prospective client looking to facilitate a private domestic, international, or stepparent adoption may seek information on your family law website that explains what steps the biological parent must take and procedures they must follow as part of the adoptive process.
• Securing orders of protection or restraining orders: Family law firms’ clients are often moms who have courageously escaped a romantic partner or spouse who long subjected them and their kids to domestic violence and other forms of abuse. These individuals may look to your website for details about obtaining a restraining order or order of protection to keep them safe from further harm.

While there are countless topics clients may reach out to family law attorneys about, it’s likely that your target audience may only have a few of the above-mentioned needs. When creating content, the best digital marketing strategy is to ensure it centers around family law topics that appeal to the potential clients you want to attract.

Family law advertising that does this generally draws your target audience in. The longer they remain engaged, the further along the sales funnel they progress, giving you the potential of converting more clients, which is necessary to grow your family law practice at a faster rate.

Why Your Focus Needs To Be on Creating Optimized Family Law Marketing Content

When it comes to marketing, posting just any type of content won’t do. Instead, it must be backed by a sound family law marketing strategy that focuses on what performs well in search engines. While this affects all aspects of digital promotion, the website is your domain to deploy a multitude of optimization strategies. Devising that marketing plan for your family law firm may involve some of the following steps:

• Assessing what other competitor sites are ranking for versus your own.
• Plugging a competitor family law firm website into the Google Search Console to understand what content is performing better than others, then using online tools like Semrush to evaluate its viability.
• Researching the popularity of those competitor keywords versus other related or long-tail ones (i.e., child custody versus child custody laws or divorce lawyer versus divorce attorney).
• Homing in on localized search popularity—where might your target client live, which areas are your competitors marketing to, and which geographic locations appear to be untapped?

Ranking highly on search engine results pages is important to increasing clicks on your family law attorney site.

Optimizing your website for search engines is critical; however, it’s important that any images, video, and text you share on social media or your Google Business Profile account (and virtually anywhere else online) is also optimized.

Each time we write on your behalf at GAVL, optimization is at the focal point of what we do. However, we don’t let that distract us from also creating quality, informative content written for humans, which is critically important to comply with Google’s recent helpful content system update.

Sentiments Prospective Family Law Clients Expect To Resonate With in Your Digital Marketing

When it comes to making good first impressions, family law firms have a responsibility to not only impress upon Google’s crawlers that their site’s content is authoritative and warrants being ranked highly, but also to make a good first impression on potential clients. Strategizing also goes into identifying and then implementing an approachable family law firm tone.

Sentiments and tones that often resonate well with family law firms’ clients include:

• Empathy: This includes sharing that your family law firm understands that they likely find themselves in a vulnerable position and that you understand how uneasy it must feel.
• Reassurance: Any family law firm marketing materials you produce should reassure your prospective clients that you’ll be there when they need you. This is particularly important when those that were near and dear to them, like their spouse, in-laws, or children, may be estranged.
• Attentiveness: When potential clients approach you to represent them at a family law practice, they’ve likely felt unheard for a long time. They want to know that you’re going to provide them with that listening ear to help them navigate the newfound obstacles they’re facing.
• Advocacy: Potential clients want to know that you won’t back down in fighting for their or their kids’ best interests if negotiations become heated, whether outside or inside the courtroom. Family law clients want to feel confident that their lawyer will aggressively fight for them when handling their property division, spousal support or alimony, or child custody case.
• Competency: Legal consumers want to know that the attorney they’re considering have represent them has a significant command of this respective area of the law.
• A problem-solving mentality: Future clients want to know that you’re the type of person who can devise out-of-the-box solutions to reach an amenable resolution when the going gets tough.

While this is certainly not an exhaustive list of the attributes potential clients are looking for a family lawyer to have, it certainly captures some of the most important traits they expect their legal counsel to have to entrust their representation to them.

It’s important that any content you share on your website, in social media posts, in advertising videos, or elsewhere not only reflects your command of family law, but also your approachability and commitment to seeing their case through.

Why GAVL is an Ideal Fit if You’re a Family Law Attorney

Marketing for family law firms is unique. However, our GAVL marketers have the requisite command of this practice area and legal marketing necessary to create high-quality content for you that will gain the online reach that you’re seeking. Our family law marketing agency:

• Knows what steps to follow to highlight your niche in family law.
• Writes optimized content for search engines that drives organic traffic to our law firm clients’ websites.
• Drafts content that gives prospects ready access to the information they’re seeking, which increases the chances they will choose you when they’re ready to hire a family lawyer.
• Crafts memorable call-to-action statements that include social proof, the combination of which are effective at generating on-site conversions.

We’d like to spend more time learning about your past marketing efforts and future goals. Based on your stated needs, we’ll share with you how our family law attorney website design and content marketing services can help you achieve search engine domination, which is necessary in this era to carve out your niche in the market and generate the revenue you’re seeking. Connect with us to schedule a no-risk digital marketing consultation today.