Ada Parker The criminal defense advertising principles and techniques covered in this article will help you attract new customers. Just keep in mind that no strategy works for everyone.
Criminal law is a complicated and dynamic area of study. A universal marketing strategy is challenging to develop because each case is unique. False verdicts can occur because every case is unique.
To win, criminal defense attorneys must have a well-thought-out strategy that is tailored especially for their clients.
Table of Contents
What Does a Criminal Defense Lawyer Do?
A criminal defense attorney represents a client who has been charged with a crime. The role of the attorney is to protect the client’s rights and present a solid defense on their behalf. Criminal defense attorneys have a reputation for being tenacious, sympathetic, and client-focused. Criminal attorneys will also be completely honest with their clients about the possible outcomes and offer guidance on how to get the best result possible. A criminal defense lawyer needs to be extremely knowledgeable about the intricate criminal justice system in their region.
Why Advertising for Criminal Defense Attorneys is Unique?
Due to a few factors, including financial constraints and the competitive market, criminal defense attorneys frequently face a challenge when trying to market their services.
Financial Limitations of Prospective Clients
Criminal suspects may opt to represent themselves in court or hire a public defender if they are limited by funds. Public defenders frequently have heavy caseloads and may not be able to provide the individualized attention required to effectively represent their clients. It may be difficult to persuade potential clients that the value of individualized representation would pay off due to a lack of financial resources or access to court-appointed attorneys.
By emphasizing your involvement with the criminal justice system, you can overcome this. You should also include instructional materials or videos on your website.
Standing Out in the Competitive Market
Given how crowded the field of criminal defense is, you might find that you need to take some action to stand out. This can be accomplished by concentrating on specialized areas of criminal defense, such as assault, DUI, etc.) or highlighting connections to the local legal community. You will distinguish yourself from your rivals thanks to your reputation, their reputation, and their involvement in the community. Obtaining recommendations and other forms of social proof from previous customers and colleagues will help you to highlight your involvement.
How to Get Your Criminal Defense Clients?
Define Your Brand and Communicate It Clearly
The legal profession of criminal defense is oversaturated. Your business will need a distinct brand identity to succeed in such a crowded market. For it to become a well-remembered brand, it must convey professionalism and expertise. This necessitates being deliberate and consistent with the testimonials, copy, and images used across your marketing channels.
Try to imagine yourself in your client’s shoes, give yourself time to understand, and establish trust. It goes beyond merely selling legal services for a good criminal defense attorney to elicit an emotional response. Make sure your brand resonates with what makes your clientele feel confident by learning what it is.
Build a Responsive and Well-designed Website
33% of all clients begin their search for a lawyer online, according to a recent study. You already cut out one-third of your potential customer base if you don’t have a website. Your website serves as a sort of online residence for your law firm. Build a safe haven that is consistent with the goals and values of your company.
When designing websites, don’t cut corners. You want a website that conveys a strong message, projects the right image, is user-friendly, responsive, and aesthetically pleasing, is simple to use, and offers helpful information.
Your firm’s website should:
- List your specialties and provide specifics about your services.
- Tell them why they ought to choose you as their legal representative. (provide testimonials, list years of experience, and display your criminal case results).
- Indicate the best ways to get in touch with your law firm (phone, chat, email, or appointment scheduling).
Your website must adhere to strict standards of excellence, just like every other website. It must be safe, quick to load, and responsive on mobile devices. If you neglect to take care of these technical aspects of your website, the majority of your efforts will be wasted.
Create Relevant Content
A surefire way to improve your reputation is to regularly publish educational content that demonstrates your knowledge and authority in criminal defense-related topics. Creating videos and blog posts, for instance, that discuss law changes, go over aspects of court cases that could have an impact, and respond to some of the most frequently asked questions.
You should aim to publish two types of content on your firm’s website:
- Authoritative content: If you are an authority on a certain subject (for example, Blogging will help your criminal defense firm establish itself as an authoritative voice in the field of DUI defense. People who are accused of a crime are typically terrified and spend a lot of time looking for useful information online. If you post information that allays their fears, they’re also more likely to get in touch with you.
- Practice area pages: These are web pages that list all of your specialties. These practice areas for a criminal defense attorney can include sex assault, immediate roadside prohibitions (IRPs), fraud, and more.
Video is a crucial format to take into account for your business. With 65% of people learning visually, visual content is frequently easier to engage with. Your company can boost website visitor conversion rates, enhance your company’s online reputation, and differentiate itself from the competition by adding high-quality videos to your site. You can create:
- Videos on your profile that give potential clients a quick and simple look at your services, your strategy for criminal defense, a description of your firm, and more.
- videos of client testimonials who are happy.
- FAQs are answered in brief videos.
Encourage Reviews
You shouldn’t be hesitant to ask a happy customer to leave a positive review on Google or another review site after they leave your company’s doors. In a sense, even a supportive status or comment on social media builds the online reputation of your brand. Even though not every customer will leave a dazzling five-star review, good feedback and reviews help to foster a sense of trust, particularly with local customers.
Never Underestimate Word of Mouth
Despite living in a world that is becoming more and more digital, word-of-mouth recommendations continue to be one of the most powerful marketing ripples produced by the splash of positive feedback. A potential employer’s choice to hire you may be influenced by what others are saying about you.
You can host a free lecture, take part in community activities, offer your services for free, and go to networking events as a way of getting your name out there the old-fashioned way.
On-site SEO
There is still more to learn about SEO strategies than just building your website and writing educational blog posts. Here are a few additional pointers to assist your business in moving up the search engine results page.
- Conduct keyword research, then naturally incorporate keywords related to practices into the site’s content.
- By setting up a Google My Business profile, you can increase organic local searches.
- Obtain top-notch backlinks from other websites that focus on criminal defense. These may be periodicals or websites of other law firms.
- Your website’s meta titles and meta descriptions should be understood and optimized.
In contrast to other areas of law, a criminal defense attorney frequently has several sub-practice areas. On certain days, you might be assisting someone in avoiding a mishandled verbal assault conviction or defending a client against charges of driving while intoxicated. This creates a variety of opportunities for you to rank your original, high-quality content for key words that will increase natural traffic to your website.
The traffic to your website is also influenced by technical SEO factors like user friendliness, mobile friendliness, and quick page loads.
Don’t Forget About Social
Social media gives you the chance to strengthen your brand and convey your values in addition to serving as another channel for connecting with and reaching out to potential customers.
Although there are many social media platforms available, your business should prioritize quality over quantity. Although trying to juggle multiple platforms can be tempting, it can become overwhelming. When this occurs, the general caliber and speed of all your social media profiles may decline. A few times per week of posting on Facebook and LinkedIn may be sufficient for a smaller business.
It makes sense to create profiles on Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms if your budget is big enough to dedicate a small team to content creation and social media management.
Tips for Marketing Your Criminal Defense Practice
Tip 1: Identify Your Niche and Consider Your Audience
It’s critical to think about your target audience if you want to attract the right clients for your business. By ultimately boosting the quantity of high-quality leads your company receives, knowing your target market will help you get the most out of your investment in digital marketing channels.
An internal assessment to determine your niche and the type of client your company serves is frequently required when defining your target audience. If you are a criminal defense lawyer, for instance, and your area of expertise is defending those charged with murder or other serious crimes, you probably don’t want to find many clients looking for help with a traffic ticket.
What kinds of cases does your firm typically handle? That is a good place to start. To name a few, you might deal with violent crimes, all felonies, DUIs, incidents involving minors, traffic tickets, or business fraud. Your firm might have a few key areas of expertise or handle a wider range of cases.
In any case, once you’ve determined your niche, you can create a profile of the kinds of customers you cater to. Take into account important demographic information like location, socioeconomic status, gender, age, and the sex of the person. You can better define your target audience and comprehend the most effective channels for doing so with the help of the answers to these questions.
A lawyer who established a DUI defense practice in a college town will likely have a different target market, messaging, and marketing plan than one who handles securities fraud cases in a big city. There are probably a number of tactics that both of these attorneys could use to their advantage. While the second attorney specializing in white collar crime wants to increase her visibility in business circles and heavily advertises in professional settings, such as webinar presentations, the DUI attorney in a smaller town may want to invest more resources in targeted local marketing. By having a better understanding of their target audience, these attorneys can make these decisions and allocate their resources more effectively.
Tip 2: Prioritize SEO
Whatever your field of practice, you should put a priority on being visible on Google’s and other search engines’ search engine results pages (SERP). It’s no secret that society is going digital, and more people are looking for lawyers online than ever before. However, criminal attorneys should pay special attention to search engine optimization (SEO), as long-tail searches can generate a lot of traffic and potential clients.
SEO has to do with appearing in organic search results. In contrast to other SERP results that show up as a result of paid marketing strategies, the organic results are websites that appear as a result of the way search engines crawl, index, and rank content to provide users with relevant information for their queries.
While many lawyers will need to hire consultants and outside legal marketers (like our team at Justia) to effectively develop an SEO strategy, SEO is free in this sense. Regardless of where you are on your SEO journey a few key things remain certain:
- For your law firm website and any legal blogs that your firm runs, produce high-quality, original content. This includes using natural keywords that don’t sound overly optimized in your content. To get you started, you can look at our advice for writing a blog post that will be effective and our pointers for writing legal website content.
- Establish trustworthy backlinks from free resources, such as lawyer and law firm directories. Keep in mind that you should never purchase links. Link building schemes are disfavored by Google and other top search engines and will probably have a negative impact on your SEO efforts.
- Ensure the stability of your foundation. You should make sure that your site is structured using industry best practices. Despite the fact that there are too many best practices for an industry to cover in a single blog post, some fundamentals include making sure your site is secure, accessible, and mobile-friendly.
- Create a quick, mobile-friendly website. Despite the fact that making a responsive and mobile-friendly site is already mentioned as a best practice, it still deserves a separate mention because it is so crucial to this practice area. On their phones, many people might be looking for assistance in a criminal case or in an emergency when time is of the essence. As a result, it is crucial that you put speed and mobile friendliness first.
The good news is that effective SEO strategies typically improve your site’s usability as well. This enhances the user experience that potential customers have on your website and blog, which could result in more leads for your business.
Tip 3: Bolster Your SEO Efforts With Other Paid Ads
You should concentrate on improving your presence on that SERP, as was mentioned in Tip Two. There are a number of ways to show up on the SERP and get first-page search visibility, but SEO is primarily focused on the organic website listings. Paid search advertisements are one such method.
The proportion of paid advertisements on the first page in comparison to organic search has significantly increased in recent years thanks to Google and other search engines. Therefore, you greatly increase the likelihood that potential clients will find your business by utilizing paid ads on the SERP. We advise taking into account both conventional pay-per-click (PPC) ads and Google’s Local Services Ads (LSAs). With LSAs, you have the chance to rank above all other paid ads, any local listings, and organic search results in the SERP.
LSAs are the only way to achieve the coveted “Google Screened” designation. LSAs also stand out because they are pay-per-lead, meaning you only pay when a real contact results from your advertisement. A lead may or may not be generated when someone clicks on a traditional PPC ad, but you still have to pay each time.
Traditional PPC ads are displayed below LSAs but above organic results. In addition to the top of the page, they occasionally also show up elsewhere on the SERP. PPC advertisements, however, give you a better chance to control the SERP and attract more customers. You can expand your brand, better manage your online reputation, and attract more customers by bidding on targeted keywords and developing a strong PPC strategy.
Tip 4: Up Your Local Marketing Game
Criminal defense attorneys are typically not an exception to the rule that local marketing is important for attorneys in general. While some specialized areas of criminal law might permit a more regional or national practice, the majority of clients for many criminal defense lawyers come from the neighborhood.
Residents make up a large portion of this local clientele in many areas. However, in tourist hotspots and other places where visitors are common, you might frequently get clients from outside your town who have been charged with a crime there. In any case, if you optimize your local marketing strategies properly, you can reach both of these groups.
Optimize your Google My Business (GMB) profile first. Update all of your contact details and finish setting up your profile. The accuracy of your name, address, and phone number (NAP) must be verified. This information needs to be accurate throughout the internet, including on your website and in any directory profiles that you and the other attorneys in your firm may claim.
It’s crucial to choose your primary location(s), properly set your hours, and include a link to your law firm website when creating your GMB profile. You should also include images and videos on your page.
GMB is not a one-time task, keep that in mind. If anything changes for your company, make sure to consistently update this information.
Once your GMB presence has been optimized, you can focus on creating free lawyer directory profiles in the various, reputable directories. Avvo, FindLaw, Martindale, and our very own Justia Lawyer Directory are all good places to start. After that, you can continue with creating your profiles in the other directories for attorneys and law firms.
Your NAP should then be optimized across the web and you should update your profile in other local business directories. Services like WhiteSpark and Yext can make this effort simpler and improve your consistency.
Because people value other people’s opinions, reviews play a significant role in local marketing as well as your overall marketing strategy. Ninety percent of consumers read online reviews before making a decision to visit a business, and 88% of consumers say they trust those reviews as much as they would a personal recommendation.
As a result, you should ask for reviews on Google as well as on directories like the Justia Lawyer Directory and Avvo. You should also pay attention to any reviews you might receive on social media platforms like Facebook, Yelp, and other search engines.
Visit this post for more details on controlling your reviews in search results. You can read this post to learn more about the ideal methods for managing reviews on social media in particular.
Tip 5: Consider “Jail Mail”
The concept of “jail mail” marketing is generally not a digital marketing tactic, but is a practice that has been around for quite some time in the criminal defense marketing world. Traditional letters and other forms of marketing have been successful in getting the attention of those accused of the kinds of crimes that lawyers typically handle.
It’s possible that some areas are overly saturated with this practice because it has spread so widely. It’s possible for attorneys interested in taking on the case to send 15, 20, or more letters to the defendant charged with DUI. Some criminal lawyers, on the other hand, firmly believe that jail mail is a powerful component of their marketing strategy, much like how many personal injury lawyers continue to use conventional marketing strategies because they have discovered that they serve their practice objectives.
As a result, attorneys who aren’t using this strategy might want to think about whether it would be beneficial for their firm to try it out. Always check the regulations set forth by your bar association to confirm that your plan and content comply with all applicable ethical standards as well as any restrictions pertaining to the promotion of attorneys and unsolicited direct marketing.
Final Words
In 2022, criminal defense marketing must incorporate digital marketing strategies because the majority of consumer journeys today begin online.
Remember that the competition for legal clients is fierce, so you must have an ongoing marketing strategy that you will tweak along the way.
I sincerely hope the tactics in this article assist your marketing efforts and reach many potential customers.
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