Family Law Firm
Marketing

a laptop showing a law firm website homepage

Marketing Agency for Divorce and Family Law Firms

The right marketing agency to help develop your family law practice has a diverse skillset and the results to back it up. Beyond the skillset to run effective marketing campaigns, you need a team that has specific experience in family law and a deep understanding of the unique process of high net-worth contested divorces.

At MeanPug, our founders have helped lead some of the largest plaintiffs’ law firms in the US and have allocated hundreds of millions of dollars in legal marketing and advertising.

What Type of Family Law Do You Want To Practice?

The first step you should take when you are looking to expand your law firm is to clearly map your case criteria. Two firms could practice the exact same type of law in the same venues and run two completely different types of businesses based on the criteria for the cases they are willing to represent.

For example, some firms may only take on a small case count of very high-quality cases, while others have looser criteria and a practice that relies on a steady volume of clients. These two firms would need wildly different marketing strategies.

In the world of family law marketing, high net-worth contested divorces are typically regarded as the “best cases.” These cases are typically driven by referrals and strong branding. The reason for this is simple: A vast majority of divorces will be uncontested and/or not have large enough assets to justify the fees associated with a long, drawn-out legal battle.

Marketing Channels of Importance for Building Your Family Law Practice:

Referrals
Branding
Organic Search (SEO)
Directories
Paid Search (Branded Paid Search and Non-Branded Paid Search + LSA)

646.461.4213

Referrals for

Divorce Attorneys

Referrals are by far the most important marketing channel for divorce attorneys.

Family law referrals can come from three main sources: attorneys, professional service providers (accountants, private wealth managers, therapists, etc.), and past clients.

Important referral sources for divorce attorneys:

Attorneys
Tangential Professionals
Accountants
Private Wealth Managers
Therapists
Past Clients

You need to have a strong reputation and a good brand to win referrals consistently. That’s why branding and thought leadership are also highly important for family lawyers.

Branding for Family Law Firms

What’s it going take to become the go-to celebrity or high-net-worth divorce referral source?

It takes having a good track record of crafting that identity and telling a story with strong branding. Successfully building a strong family law brand takes years and a small army. You need creatives, PR professionals, social media managers, and email marketing.

The first step toward crafting a stronger brand is by creating a foundational Brand Bible. The purpose of this is to create a source of truth for all assets and vendors to turn to when working on campaigns for your family law firm.

Having an extremely high-quality website is the next step in creating a winning brand for divorce attorneys.

It’s the only place many new referral sources will judge you and your competition from
It’s how clients will directly compare you to your competition
It’s the foundation for setting up a top-quality framework for ranking well in Google’s organic search listings

Organic Search (SEO) For Family Law Firms

Organic search is important for family law firms. Having the right content marketing strategy targeting informational keywords associated with high net-worth divorce is vital in the client search process as they seek out the right divorce lawyer.

Ranking in the top position gives your firm access to not only a higher volume of cases, but also the highest quality cases. The reason for this is that people who call firms in lower positions on Google have already been rejected by the firms higher on the page that they already called.

This is often why folks that don’t understand marketing will say things like “the quality of leads from digital marketing is low.” While it is true that you will get plenty of calls that won’t be retained by your firm — which is the case for all marketing channels — the higher you rank on Google’s search results, the higher quality cases get, too.

Ranking in the top positions on Google also results in a strong lift in your conversion rate as readers gain a level of trust and sense of authority with your firm. No one is seeking out an attorney from the second or third pages of search engine listings. In other words, it also harms your brand if you are unable to rank in the first page, as there is one less touchpoint with a potential customer.

Directory Listings for Family Law Firms

Do directory listings get you more clients? In a lot of cases, the answer is simply no. The reason for this is relatively simple. They place your listing on a site against 50 other attorneys who do the exact same thing in the exact same area. It’s not surprising that the majority of clients for these directory listings come from Google organic traffic.

This means that the directory not only has shared that lead with a dozen other firms, but that same potential client has also potentially reached out to other firms prior to using the directory. Directory listing intakes often have the lowest conversion rate of any marketing channel.

However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you shouldn’t pay for the listing. A lot of this depends on how well these listings rank organically in your geographic area. If a particular directory is ranking well for high-quality legal intent terms, it might make sense to buy sponsored listings just for the mere exposure as an additional touchpoint to potential clients.

It is rare for a family law firm to gain quality clients solely through paid directory listings. Attorney marketing and advertising is way too competitive in this day and age for single-channel marketing campaigns to be effective. When a reader sees the same attorney or firm everywhere they look, it increases the perceived credibility of the firm.

Branded Paid Search Terms For Family Lawyers

How would you feel if you were given a referral for a high-quality contested divorce and you lost the client after they Googled your firm’s name and ended up on a competitor’s website only to be poached from your firm after years of hard work and building up your reputation? Well, this exact scenario happens every single day. These campaigns are called “Conquesting” campaigns. Agencies bid on prominent firm names or attorney names, as those terms are oftentimes cheaper than bidding on the practice area or case type terms.

This isn’t something unique to attorneys, though. The same thing happens if you look up any products on Google.

Non-Branded Paid Search On Family Law Firm Terms

Paid search advertising for lawyers is the most competitive vertical within all of digital advertising. Many terms for asbestos litigation have the most expensive cost per click in the world, reaching north of $1,000 per click.

Luckily, family law is not as competitive as asbestos litigation or personal injury. However, the same principles also hold true for paid search ads for divorce and family lawyers.

To even begin thinking about running effective PPC campaigns to acquire more divorce cases, you will need several things set up first:

A great website with the following attributes:
- Super fast load times
- Branded differentiation (How are you different?)
- Verdicts / Settlements / Case Studies
- Lot’s of calls to action (Calls, forms, live chat, etc.)
- Great content tailored exactly to the searcher’s query (Example: You can’t send all traffic to the homepage or a single “family law” page, and you will need separate pages for every single sub-case type.)

EXAMPLES:

Family Law
Divorce
Property Division
Child Custody
Child Support
Spousal Support
Visitation
Etc.

Costs and Timelines for Family Law Firm Marketing Campaigns

So, it’s clear that full-service marketing plans are more effective for getting both the highest quality and the best clients, but it sounds expensive, and how do you start?

Certain forms of marketing have dependencies on other tasks being done. This is why marketing campaigns can drag on for long periods of time with little results shown. Below lays out the order of operations of how and when certain aspects of your marketing strategy would be launched.

a person's hand holding a piece of paper

What You Get When You Work With MeanPug:

Full-Service Marketing

We are not a single-service agency promising some quick silver bullet that will solve all your marketing problems. Simply put, that doesn’t exist, and agencies that make these claims never last. The legal industry is too competitive for a single-channel marketing campaign to be effective long-term.

An Experienced Team

You will get a team of specialists who are all the best in their respective crafts. You will have designers, videographers, software developers, legal content writers, editors, SEO specialists, paid search managers, paid social marketing managers, PR specialists, media buyers, and project managers all on your team.

Exclusivity in Your Region

We don’t believe you can service two clients in the same region for the same case type. We go exclusive with all our clients.

What’s next?

Here are our typical stages in which we do work for our clients:

Stages:

step 01

Initial Audit

We look at where you currently are and find the areas with the easiest room for quick improvement at low costs.
step 02

Competitor Audit

We analyze how competitive every marketing channel is in your market to evaluate which marketing investments make the most sense for your particular family law firm.
step 03

Strategy & Scope of Work Formation

We are ready to develop and execute every part of your marketing strategy in-house with out-of-the-box solutions. Backed by data and fueled by creativity, we create informed strategies aligned across all digital marketing avenues. Our team puts your goals, objectives, and deliverables into charts and graphs that are easy to understand — because your caseload is heavy enough. Whenever possible, we keep things brief so you can focus on your briefs.
step 04

Brand Bible & Branded Assets

After collecting all the information from the previous steps, it’s time to create a Brand Bible. Your Brand Bible is a long-form document that has everything you need to know about your firm’s identity, from logo designs to typography to tone and voice to how they’re implemented. Expect this stage to last two to four weeks, depending on the number of iterations required or delays in feedback.
step 05

Web Build / Tech Infrastructure

Our team of top-notch developers can either build from the ground up or help improve your current site. When the first thing potential clients see after Googling “family law firm near me” is your site, we want you to make the best impression possible.

Check out our portfolio to see some of the sites we’ve created for our clients.
step 06

Content Creation & SEO

Whether you need content for a new homepage and all new landing pages, blogs, or more, we can get that done for you at this stage. Our streamlined content review process makes this easy. If you already have content, we migrate that content to the new site, either redirected or mounted at an identical URL. Content creation paired with SEO best practices helps your site rank higher on Google, displaying your expertise in your field. Time frames can vary widely for this step, but anything from one to three weeks could be expected.
step 07

LSA + Paid Ads Launch

We set up your LSA (Local Services Ads by Google) and paid aids targeting your ideal demographic. With LSA, you pay per lead, and with Google Ads, you pay per click. We finetune your ideal approach and get it live.
step 08

Referral Network Building Site Launch

Referral networks are a powerful tool for family law firms looking to expand their professional network and still profit off the cases they don’t take. We design a website purely for your referral network so that it’s easier than ever for you and your colleagues to bring people the services they need.
step 09

LexConnect Referral Tracking Integration

The platform LexConnect makes legal referrals seamless and transparent. Utilizing CRM integrations makes it easier than ever to send referrals from lawyer-to-lawyer or from another service-provider-to-lawyer. With LexConnect, we can help you grow your reach in a way that benefits you and your connections.
step 010

KPI Tracking

We measure the site’s progress every step of the way for our specific long- and short-term goals so that we can adapt at a moment’s notice, if needed, bringing in the highest quality leads to your firm.
step 011

Operations Consulting / Campaign Refinement

We look for continual improvement and are never satisfied with “good enough.” We search for new ways to streamline your campaigns and keep them relevant as trends, Google, and user needs change.
step 012

Reinvest, Rinse, and Repeat

Digital marketing is always changing and adapting. We have to adapt to the new ebbs and flows that come our way. From continual inspection reports to refreshed strategies, relevancy is key to winning the first place spot on Google. The work is never over, and we’re here to walk with you every step of the way.