How to Get the Most Out of Your Law Firm PR Efforts for Your Best Results

Date: January 10, 2024

The ringing in of a new year brings about a level of introspection and evaluation for any business, necessary for purging adverse habits and tactics while incorporating fresh ideas to bring your law firm to the next level. One place to start is with your public relations (PR) efforts. If maximizing your brand awareness, exposure, and reputation is a professional goal for 2024, updating your law firm’s digital PR strategies is the first step towards best results. 

Focus Your PR Goals

To turn your PR efforts into a well oiled machine, you must begin with a well-defined and focused goal. Are you looking to receive more call leads than the year prior? See increased website traffic? Push Google reviews from existing clients? Whatever improvement your firm wants to see, identifying a focused goal creates a consistent strategy for your PR content and subsequent call-to-action.  

Evolving this strategy may require market research, in which you can identify the needs and challenges of your target audience to help guide your focus. This will additionally help identify what content needs to be created to directly respond to the desires of potential clients and reach your goal. Once your team and PR content are aligned on a mutual target, it will center your strategy for more results with a higher payoff. 

Stay Updated on Legal Trends

Your learning shouldn’t end with law school; in the ever-changing landscape of our world, staying up to date with what’s new in the legal market is critical to maintaining your firm’s presence as a relevant player. Some recommended sources for studying breaking legal developments include JDSupra, Reuters, Law360, and Above the Law. 

Daily or weekly reading on the latest agreements reached, ongoing litigations, and newest technologies will guide your firm in the right direction when crafting content. Whether it’s blog posts or thought leadership, being the first on the scene for trending topics will generate more traffic for your PR content, and more opportunity to attract potential clients. 

Strengthen Your Authority

With this knowledge, it’s time to craft PR content that proves your benefit to a customer. One of the best ways to boost your reputation and credibility with potential clients is by proving your authority as a law firm. To identify your firm as a leader within the market, there are a few content options you can incorporate into your strategy that pull directly from your team’s experience.

Thought Leadership

Thought leadership pieces are a great way to share your firm’s take on rising movements in the legal sphere. Turn to the senior partners at your firm, who hold a wealth of knowledge and experience that is just begging to be tapped. Whether sharing this insight in a blog or social media post, or working together to publish it with a legal publication or magazine, incorporating thought leadership works into your strategy will make you stand out from the crowd as a reliable and trusted source. 

Guest Articles

Guest articles offer a long-form opportunity to further showcase your firm’s expertise, this time in collaboration with an already trusted news source. If you’re working with a PR or SEO agency, utilize their industry expertise to identify the top outlets to get the most bang for your buck. For those firms that are DIY-ing their PR strategy, sites like Cision and Muck Rack are great tools for scouring publications that cover your area of interest. SEMRush and Ahrefs are also ideal for pinpointing the domain rating of a given website, and whether it’s high enough to attract a substantial audience back to your site. 

Blogs and Press

If your firm already has a blog section on its site, allow it to perform to its best ability with consistent posting. For top results, a content schedule will keep your posts relevant and results steady. Depending on your firm’s bandwidth, you may be able to craft up to four blogs a month. Adding a Press section to your website that links to your guest posts, thought leadership articles, and other media mentions also allows interested customer’s a further look at the knowledge your firm has to offer. All of this content will create a stronger, more respectable image of your firm in a client’s mind—especially if said content is based on an extensive knowledge of industry trends and past experiences. 

With all of these content options, it’s crucial to include backlinks where applicable. This involves citing your website as a source for the topic you’re covering, or for related subjects mentioned within your article. Especially when your content is living on another media outlet’s site, a backlink within the copy means new, fresh readers will go straight to your firm for further details on the topic at hand. Plus, potential clients aren’t the only ones who will recognize this as good industry authority. If Google sees your firm being referenced via backlinks across the internet, it will also use this to identify your site as having high authority, pushing your firm’s position on Google’s search results closer to the top.

Measure Your Success

Finally, with the writing and the pitching done, one of the last steps in the PR cycle is breaking down the results of your campaign. The only way to ensure you’re getting the most out of your PR efforts is to observe, reconfigure,—if needed—and keep pushing forward. Look back at your goals from the beginning of the campaign: where did you overachieve? Where did you fall short? Take into consideration the actions of this campaign, and brainstorm what you can tweak to go even further with the next one. Maybe that involves refocusing your call-to-action, or targeting media outlets with a higher DR. Whatever decision is made, measuring and revising as needed is a crucial step to getting your firm where they want to be.

If this sounds like a lot to take on, there’s no need to go at it alone. Contact us today to learn more about our digital PR and marketing services. Together, we can help your law firm solidify its PR strategies to push you ahead of the competition and maximize your results.