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You don’t need a big budget to leverage powerful marketing tools. Check out our list of seven tools that can help small law firms achieve their marketing goals.
As a small firm or a solo practitioner, you may not have endless sums of money to pour into your marketing budget. Budget concerns don’t have to hold you back from leveraging the power of effective marketing tools to grow your practice. While there are certainly plenty of tools out there that can help a small firm achieve its marketing and growth goals, here are seven of our picks to help you get started on your digital marketing strategy!
1. Canva
Canva is a graphic design platform that can help even novice creators develop visually appealing graphics for social media and even other marketing collateral such as business cards, letterhead, invoices, presentations, and more! While Canva is not a substitute for a professional graphic designer, it is a beginner-friendly solution that can help you edit photos and create new graphics that help your law firm create a more professional online presence. Free courses are even available to help you better understand design basics and Canva usage.
The platform currently offers free plans to help you get started with 250,000+ templates and various design types, but the upgraded Pro plan allows 1-5 people to create for only $119.99/year and 10 people to create for $419.99/year.
2. Screaming Frog
Search engine optimization (SEO) is very important for increasing online visibility. With Screaming Frog’s Spider Tool, you can crawl up to 500 URLs for free and check for common SEO issues, such as broken links and errors. You can also analyze your page titles and meta-data, as well as discover exact duplicate content pages and generate sitemaps.
For as little as £149 (about $194.74 in U.S. dollars), you can remove the limit on pages crawled and access advanced features to help you better understand issues and optimize your site.
Watch this video to gain insights into Screaming Frog’s Spider Tool.
3. MailChimp
To create effective email marketing campaigns, you likely need the help of an email marketing and automation platform. Enter, Mailchimp. MailChimp allows you to effectively leverage email marketing with automation and template services to better create and track your email campaigns.
The platform’s free option is basic, but includes a marketing CRM and other basic features, with a cap of 10,000 monthly email sends. However, the Essentials and Standard plans both offer more features for DIY marketers at a low monthly cost ($11/month and $17/month respectively).
4. Justia Connect
Justia Connect is a free membership program connecting lawyers with exclusive benefits and resources to achieve their professional and practice-growth goals. Through their Justia Connect membership, lawyers can access discounts and savings on everything from leisure and business services to legal technology and more through the Justia Deals platform. Members also receive a free Justia Profile in the Justia Lawyer Directory and access to attorney-written daily summaries of recent decisions from appellate courts in their chosen jurisdictions. Additionally, members can leverage the latest in legal marketing with updates from the Justia Onward blog delivered directly to their inbox.
5. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free service that allows you to take a peek at your law firm’s website performance and leverage useful insights for both SEO and marketing. While many lawyers do need professional help to get their website set up and optimized and their Google Analytics account appropriately customized, there is a wealth of knowledge out there online that can help your law firm take advantage of this powerful tool.
Watch this Justia Webinar playlist on YouTube to learn more about Google Analytics 4.
6. Lawyer Directories
Lawyer directories can help you expand your practice through increased online visibility to better reach potential clients. Many of the leading lawyer directories, including the Justia Lawyer Directory, offer free profiles for U.S. lawyers. Your potential clients often use these directories when searching for lawyers, so completing these profiles offers you no-cost exposure while ensuring the public can access accurate information about your practice.
Watch this clip to learn more about lawyer directories.
Want to know more about the free directories in which you should claim your profile? We’ve compiled a list of the best free directories for lawyers and law firms.
7. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that creates an integrated dashboard for your law firm’s various social media accounts from Twitter and Facebook to LinkedIn and beyond. Through Hootsuite, you can manage multiple networks and measure your performance on these networks too, offering you additional insight into areas of opportunity for your marketing strategy while simplifying the social media management process.
The company does offer a free plan with up to two social accounts for one user. However, for just $49/month, you can upgrade to a professional plan that allows you to manage ten accounts, schedule unlimited posts, and access all of your social messages in one place. You can even test it out with a 30-day free trial.
Final Thoughts: Why Do You Care?
An effective digital marketing plan is crucial to growing your business in today’s connected world. You do not have to have endless resources to get started in the digital marketing space or to utilize effective digital marketing tools. Even a small firm with a limited budget can use some of the leading tools in the legal marketing and digital marketing industries!
