Whether you’ve just won a significant case or you’re holding a community event, the importance of sharing your public relations efforts doesn’t change. After all of the preparation that goes into any press release or media opportunity, how do you juice the lemon to ensure that your firm gets the most out of it from a marketing perspective?

This is where most attorneys and law firms struggle. How do you get that press out to people? They certainly won’t stumble upon it on their own without proactive, mindful planning around what happens after the story appears in print.

Therefore, it’s important that you consider the right strategy to maximize all of your press opportunities. After all, these are the best ways to help set your law firm apart from the thousands of others who are competing for your market share.

While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, there are many ways you can reach more people and get your name out there. If you already engage a PR firm, they will take care of this strategy for you; however, it’s not hard to do it yourself with the right guidance.

There are several simple tactics you can use. We recommend that you utilize the following options if you would like to get the most exposure out of your law firm’s press opportunities.

Post to Your Website

One of the easiest ways to share your news is through your website. Some organizations prefer to post press releases separately from their blog stream. Others like to turn their press opportunities into a more in-depth blog post. In either case, regularly posting to your website is a great tactic to help visitors differentiate your law firm from the many others on Google or Bing.

If you’re going to include your press releases and media placements on your website, you don’t want to do it haphazardly. Instead, we recommend that you consider the following tips for the best results.

Treat Your Press Release as a Home Page

As you are writing and creating your press releases or the website they sit on, you should treat it as your homepage. Why? The prevalence of SEO means that many visitors may very well land on one of your press releases in a Google Search first – even before reaching your actual homepage. Therefore, it’s important that you provide all the information they need to know who you are and how to contact you. It’s also essential that you don’t neglect the design if you want to make an excellent first impression.

Use Local SEO to Reach Your Area

Since millions of attorneys and law firms are likely to be competing for regional, or even national, market share, it’s critical that you establish your geolocation to reach your specific audience. Though you might think that leaving your page open to a broader location would put it in front of a wider audience, it does the opposite. For example, instead of competing against all New Jersey law firms, you should write content geared towards Newark clients. It also helps to include your physical address in your website’s footer.

Create Shareable Content

One of the most challenging aspects of creating website content is making sure it is engaging. Is your press release providing value to your readers? Will they want to share the article with their network? If the answer is no, we suggest you revisit the content and find creative ways to enhance its value. Creating a piece of high-quality content can help you reach a broader audience and establish credibility.

Post to Social Media

Social media has become one of the most powerful marketing tools over the past decade. These platforms allow you to reach a broader audience of users, and they also allow you to share more information highlighting the capabilities of your law firm and its practice areas. This also applies when sharing notable press releases and the media opportunities that emanate from them.

We advise you to use caution, however. When posting about cases, you should always maintain client confidentiality. You may have to omit specific details, request permission, or wait until a case has been closed beyond appeal before you can post about it.

When you do decide to engage on social media, we suggest that you stick to the following platforms:

• Facebook: While many social media networks have come and gone, Facebook has proven that it is here to stay. It has one of the highest monthly active user counts, with about 2.9 billion users.
• Twitter: With Twitter’s limited character count, it is a good place to share links to press releases on your website. You could also use it to weigh on hot legal topics in concise posts or longer threads. Doing so will allow you to increase your reach through trending hashtags as well as position you as an expert in your field – especially since Twitter is a hub for journalists and reporters on the hunt for sources commenting on themes related to their beats/areas of coverage.
• LinkedIn: As the leading professional social network, you can’t ignore LinkedIn. It is a great place to establish credibility as a thought leader by expressing your ideas and achievements through short or long-form content.

Email Marketing

If you haven’t always viewed email marketing and public relations as two complementary tactics, you’ve been missing out on a valuable opportunity. Both emails and press efforts shape how your clients and prospects perceive your law firm.

While the obvious action item to take at the intersection of email marketing and public relations is to circulate noteworthy press releases to your contacts, it is also worthwhile considering: (1) maintaining a list of reporters and journalists relevant to your practice area to circulate these emailed releases to in an effort to reinforce your expertise and develop a solid working relationship with them in order to keep your practice top-of-mind as they seek sources for their reporting, and (2) distributing any media placements that stem from your public relations initiatives to your firm’s contacts via email as a standalone notification or as part of a larger newsletter.

For best results, we recommend that your content team work together with your marketing team to get press timelines and email schedules on the same page. Coordinating these two tasks ensures that the right content gets shared with the right people at the right time.

Secure Backlinks

Not only are backlinks essential to your SEO strategy, but they are also great ways to further leverage press opportunities. If you can secure backlinks with leading publications, industry bloggers, and related newswire sites, you will be able to get your story in front of more readers as well as reap the benefit of citations across the web that guide readers back to your site.

Even if you can’t reach out to these publishers directly, you can still position your press release in front of others who might be interested in backlinking to you. Your law firm’s marketing and business development team can do this by using keywords. More specifically, you should focus on LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords, which are search terms related to the article’s main keyword.

As your article ranks higher on search engines, it’s more likely that other bloggers will link to it in an attempt to build authority for themselves.

It is also worth noting that, if your law firm or attorneys are members of organizations such as Chambers of Commerce or industry associations that publish member news on their sites, it is incredibly worthwhile to share your releases with them to gain the benefit of backlinks from authoritative .org domains. The same applies for undergraduate and law school alumni web-based publications and their .edu domains.

Request More Information on the Intersection of SEO and Public Relations

Are you feeling a bit overwhelmed by all of this information? Are you still unsure of where you should start with your press release? If you answered yes to either question, then you’ve come to the right place!

9Sail has been helping attorneys and law firms with their SEO marketing strategies since 2015. Therefore, we are confident that our team of experts can help you generate more traffic to your press release through SEO and PPC strategies. We encourage you to call or submit our online contact form to get started.