7 Proven Marketing Strategies For Family Law Firms
Family law firms must tailor their marketing to address the emotional challenges clients face, focusing on empathy and trust. A strategic marketing funnel, including awareness-building videos and search-optimized content, helps engage prospects early and increases the chances of conversion when they are ready to hire a lawyer.
Family law firms, like yours, can spend a lot of money on marketing that goes nowhere. Marketing for family lawyers is important if you want to scale your firm’s client acquisition to 7- or even 8-figures.
But you’ve got to understand how marketing is a different process for family attorneys than for other businesses, even other law firms.
The psychological and emotional state of people going through a divorce or child custody battle is different. There’s a delicacy that’s needed during your sales and marketing process to convert them into prospects and eventually clients.
In this post, I’ll share the exact marketing funnel used by top-tier family law firms to get hundreds of qualified prospects every month.
Specifically, we’ll cover:
The exact marketing channels your family law firm should focus on
The type of content best suited to each channel
How to maintain delicacy and empathy for family law prospects to build trust online
How to engage prospects even if they’re not looking for a lawyer right now
Family Law Is Different Than Other Practice Areas…
Divorce, separation and child custody battles are long, painful, stressful and anxiety-ridden experiences.
A lot of the time people will start searching for information long before they’re ready to speak with a lawyer.
They might have just started fighting with their spouse and they’re not sure how things will go.
Or they may suspect their partner is cheating on them but feel it’s too early to take any action.
Whatever the case, they might start researching things like how to protect their assets in a divorce or how to get custody over their children.
It could take years before they’re ready to speak to a lawyer.
The problem is that, if you’re like most family law attorneys, a lot of your marketing is geared towards people that are in-market right now. You’re missing out on the much larger audience that you can nurture and bring into your ecosystem at the start of their journey.
Here’s how to tap into that larger pool of prospects.
They know how to deliver the right information, to the right audience, at the right time. They know the exact marketing channels that drive leads and they don’t waste money on those that don’t.
It’s not about doing expensive marketing like billboards, radio ads or TV features either. You can implement this right away even as a small family law firm on a tight budget.
It starts by understanding the family law firm customer awareness funnel. Understanding these concepts will allow you to invest into better marketing channels that actually produce results.
Awareness: This is the top of the funnel and drives top-of-mind awareness for prospects.
Recall: This is the part that produces leads after a decision to hire a family law attorney is made.
Discovery: This stage focuses on the channels prospects use to seek direct answers.
Selection: This is when prospects know they need an attorney and are deciding who to hire.
Let’s walk step by step through each stage of the funnel, and which marketing channels will help your law reach prospects, no matter where they are in their divorce or child custody journey.
1. Awareness: Planting Seeds For Future Returns
The process before someone decides to hire an attorney is very long, painful and requires a lot of research.
From the client’s side, the internet can provide a wealth of information for free. Your prospects are more likely to seek information from social media than to chat with an attorney in the early stages of their situation.
For instance, they’re likely to engage with short form videos about family law on these channels:
Tiktok
Instagram
Youtube
Facebook
Here are a good example of what I mean:
These videos tend to be under 30 seconds in length and answer very specific questions, often within the context of local laws.
A lot of attorneys focus so much on booking consultations with people who are ready to hire an attorney, they’re not taking the time to answer important questions ahead of time.
That opens up an opportunity for you to get your firm known by the people who will eventually become prospects.
It’s also going to heavily influence their selection process when it is time to reach out to an attorney, especially if they received a lot of answers to their questions from you. They would have built up a level of trust and familiarity that your competitors simply won’t have.
How to Capture Awareness Traffic With Video
The goal is to produce short-form videos that directly answer people’s questions.
You can easily film the videos on your phone in your office, in the car or out and about. The more relaxed and relatable the video is, the less intimidated and anxious viewers will feel.
Remember, they’re going through a stressful time in their life and anything you can do to help ease that anxiety is a step closer to them choosing to work with your firm instead of competitors.
To find questions to answer, you can try a few things.
Find attorneys answering common questions in other states and answer the same questions with relation to your local laws instead.
Read comments and questions people ask on social media, Quora and Reddit and answer them directly.
Answer the FAQs your prospects have during your intake process.
Focus on small tips for each video. For example:
5 ways to protect your business if you’re going through a divorce
What are the child custody laws in Florida?
Can a single father get full custody?
You might only get a handful of people watching your initial videos and that’s normal. The trick is to continue publishing regularly and these social platforms will distribute your content automatically.
They tend to reward people who publish frequently, so make sure you keep it up.
2. Recall: Generating More Referrals For Bread And Butter Clients
Referrals are the best types of prospects for most types of businesses, family law or otherwise.
They come in warm and based on the recommendation from a happy client.
They’re likely to be in a similar economic group to your past clients.
They won’t need as much convincing as somebody who’s never heard of your firm before.
The challenge for family law firms when getting referrals is that things like divorce and child custody are very private matters.
Even asking a friend for advice is very personal and many people don’t feel comfortable doing this.
For this reason, referrals are very difficult to baseline and they’re unpredictable. You also can’t forecast how many clients you’ll have based on referrals alone.
Having said this there are a few things you can do to get more referrals.
How To Increase Family Law Referrals
In order to have a healthy intake pipeline from referrals, you need to have a large pool of happy clients. There’s no shortcut here.
Build up your marketing so you’re working with more clients. Improve the experience you deliver them so they’re happy with your services and feel good about recommending you to their friends and family.
You can also ask them to leave you reviews and testimonials online.
Building your online reputation will help make it easier for them to vouch for you. It also increases your chances that the person referred will reach out and decide to work with you.
3. Discovery: Put Your Law Firm Where Prospects Are Searching For You
The discovery stage is the most important one in a family lawyer’s marketing funnel. Everything here is about search-based content.
In other words, you need to create content about the things people are looking for on Google and other search engines.
Searching for information online is a private and more comfortable experience for most people going through something like a divorce or child custody negotiation. Nobody’s going to know about what they’re searching and the anonymity makes it more appealing to the people who you want to connect with.
How Family Lawyers Can Capture Search Demand
The three places you’ll need to focus your efforts to capture search demand are:
Google (Organic Search, Local Search, Paid Search)
YouTube (Video Search)
Your Website
Ideally, you should aim to create as much content that covers most types of search results so you have a higher chance of showing up anytime someone in your area searches for advice you can offer them.
1. Local SEO (Rank For “Family Lawyer Near Me” Searches)
It is the backbone of every top tier law firm’s marketing strategy, especially when people are searching for family lawyers in your area.
You want to show up in the map results in your area, like so:
When you do this right, over 50% of your leads can come from your Google Business listing and the maps pack.
2. Local Service Ads (Get Leads For Divorce And Custody Searches)
Another way you can show up when someone in your area searches for a family lawyer is with Local Service Ads right at the top of Google search results.
There’s less control over how these will show up, however, there’s also lower competition since firms from outside your area can’t show up here.
It often means your firm will get a prominent position in search results for a lower price than pay-per-click Google Ads. That’s because with LSAs, you only pay if you get phone calls from them.
3. Google PPC Ads (Scale Lead Generation)
These are the standard ads you’re probably used to seeing in Google. Unlike Local Service Ads, which are designed to deliver phone calls directly from Google, these ads direct searchers to your website instead.
These ads show up for more searches than local ads since you can target more general questions and queries that aren’t tied to a specific location.
However, it also means you’ll pay per click someone makes to your website—even if they don’t call you or turn into a lead.
4. Organic SEO (Scale Your Traffic On Autopilot)
SEO allows your website to show up in the unpaid areas of Google search results.
People tend to trust these search results more than they do ads because they’re earned, not bought.
Unlike with ads, there are no limits to how many queries you can show up for with SEO. It can take a while to get going as your brand builds authority in Google’s eyes, but it’s well worth the effort.
5. YouTube (Build Brand Reach With Video Marketing)
Posting videos on Youtube is one of the best strategies I know for any law firm, specifically family law firms, to entice more prospects to contact them. There are so many things you can talk about here, so many questions you can answer!
You can include Youtube as part of the awareness funnel and post short-form videos on here.
However, the magic of this platform is in posting slightly longer videos, where you answer questions in more depth. Here’s an example:
These are great for engaging people who are closer to making the decision to work with a lawyer. A 30 second clip will often leave them asking more questions and seeking a more in-depth answer.
But a video that goes into more depth not only builds their trust in your expertise, it also helps get them closer to picking up the phone and calling you to book a consultation.
6. Website Content (Scale Traffic By Attacking New Keywords)
The last piece of the discovery puzzle is the content on your website. Usually, this content will be picked up by search engines if you’ve done a good job optimizing it.
For example, you should optimize landing pages for people who are ready to speak with a lawyer right away. They’ll generally search for things like:
Divorce attorney near me
Family lawyer Florida
Child custody attorney
These landing pages should encourage people to call your firm and book an appointment.
However, you can also have blog articles and resources that answer more detailed questions. If you’re going to the effort of filming videos to answer questions, why not also turn those videos into written articles and double the chances of people finding your content?
4. Selection: Capture Leads By Convincing Prospects To Choose Your Family Law Firm
The final stage in this funnel is the selection process.
Your content at this phase should encourage people who are seeking to work with a lawyer imminently to choose your firm.
There are a few ways you can do that.
1. Perfect Your Family Law Firm’s Intake Process
You should double down on streamlining your intake process so it builds trust and confidence from the very first moment someone reaches out to you.
It includes the exact scripts and intake forms you can use to book more consultations today.
2. Get Consistent Reviews For Your Firm
Getting reviews on your Google Business Profile is not only essential to convince people to trust you, it’s also a huge part of SEO rankings.
Beyond Google, you should also aim to build strong profiles on platforms like Avvo, FindLaw, Super Lawyers and more. Anywhere that your prospects look to get a sense of your credibility should feature prominent and positive reviews about your services.
Retargeting is a powerful advertising mechanism to reach people who have already engaged with your content.
Let’s say someone finds your article on how to protect their assets during a divorce on Google. After they read your article, you can then serve ads to them about the same topic.
These ads will show up on other platforms and build up their exposure to your firm so you’re always in the periphery when they’re browsing the web.
When they’re ready to speak to a lawyer, it’s likely they will click on an ad and book a call with you. Either that, or the familiarity they develop from repeated exposure predisposes them to selecting your firm when it’s time for them to decide who to work with.
4. Email and Text Messaging
Since it is a long process until your prospects are ready to hire a lawyer, it will greatly benefit you to build an email or SMS list so you can reach out to prospects regularly.
It’s all about staying top of mind until they’re ready to book a consultation.
Meta Ads are a great way to build an email list. Instead of making the call to action about booking a consultation, you could instead offer a free downloadable document.
For example, you could create something like “The Single Father’s Guide to Navigating Divorce”.
Anyone who downloads this is going to be pre-qualified as a father going through divorce. You can then share more information about child custody rights for fathers and other topics they’d be interested in via email to keep them engaged.
Want Us To Build This Marketing Funnel For Your Family Law Firm?
This is the exact marketing ecosystem family lawyers should focus on to get hundreds of prospects a month.
The more you engage people in the earlier stages of their journey, the better your chances are of securing them as a client when they are eventually ready to work with a family law attorney.
If you need help implementing any of this process, we can do it for you (or with you).
Our Traffic Projection Tool Will Show Your Website’s True Potential (aKA How Much Money You Should Be Making).
Using data from your website, our Traffic Projection analysis can accurately forecast how much traffic (and revenue) your website could be getting from Google.
