Which legal marketing trends should your firm be aware of?
We bring it up because a new decade is approaching. And with the passage of time comes innovations that marketers (legal marketers especially) strive to get a leg up on.
For instance, that digital watch on your wrist will soon have capabilities that we’d never even imagined for our mobile phones once upon a time.
As the web design and marketing trends mount, legal marketers will have a variety of options to choose from to ensure their digital marketing services evolve and bring in new clients. For more digital marketing insights, check out what legal marketing services we can provide for your firm.
So bearing this in mind, we thought you could do with a way to cut through the clutter and understand the best ways to future-proof legal marketing.
Suffice to say that HubSpot plays a big role in sorting out these trends, and to illustrate its effectiveness, we’re not stopping at the eBook. To help you meet the tricky terrain of the curve, this post will share three helpful HubSpot tools - including one tool directly from the eBook itself to whet the appetite!
For good measure, we’ll even throw in a bonus tool.
Let’s tackle these trends and ensure your law firm marketing straightens the curve.
2. HubSpot Competitor Analysis
1. HubSpot CRM
Are you spending money on your CRM software?
Well, stop!
Did you know that HubSpot provides (you might want to take a seat for this) a free CRM tool?
That’s right, FREE.
OK, we know what you’re thinking: “But free products don’t have all the functionality I need.”
We appreciate you’re wary, but you can relax. HubSpot’s CRM provides you with everything you need to store, develop, and organise your contacts in just one place - for free (you get it).
It’s your own integrated garage for prospects.
One of the best things about the tool is the ability to align your sales and legal marketing together by syncing with HubSpot Marketing and Sidekick, the HubSpot Sales tool. This way, you can ensure everyone has the same understanding of your prospects and leads.
Here’s where it gets even better. With HubSpot CRM, you’ll be able to organise, automatically track, and nurture your leads and customers. This cloud-based software gives you complete visibility of your progress across a single dashboard and cuts back work spent on unnecessary spreadsheets.
Do more with your integrations with HubSpot CRM
- Notify sales reps when their important leads reappear on your website
- Segment your contacts by category to build targeted lists
- Personalise your email outreach sequences
- Supplement your contact records
- Place calls with the click of a mouse
- Set up more meetings with your prospects
- Discover the legal content your leads consume
- And so much more
With HubSpot CRM, you can ensure that all the functionality you need for your sales and marketing lead nurturing will be right here.
2. HubSpot Competitor Analysis
Whether you’ve been a legal marketer for a while or are just starting out, we always recommend performing a regular marketing audit of your competitors.
Using HubSpot’s Competitor’s Report, you can have the power to monitor competing companies in the legal sector.
This is an important bit of software for your marketing efforts. By keeping up to date with your competitor’s position, offerings and brand in the legal industry, you will be able to understand your own brand’s positioning and the areas you can improve.
Such insights allow you to benchmark your marketing and sales capabilities, and employ SMART goal tactics to measure a considered set of goals for your law firm to aim for.
You’ll Learn How To
- Identify direct (and indirect) competition
- Measure your marketing grade
- Compare your traffic ranking
- Determine your head-to-head social media followers
- Do competitive SWOT analysis
- Record your site’s authority
- Set up organised tracking
- Analyse your results
- And more
Using a competitor analysis tool such as HubSpot's will help you learn how to constantly improve everything from your social media and website to your company's positioning in the legal sector against your competitors.
3. HubSpot Forms
HubSpot Forms address a major gap for today’s legal inbound marketing strategies. 66% of law firms don’t have forms on their website to capture information from interested customers.
Forms are an important tool for data collection and information on your leads. This information can be used to build a better idea of the prospects that come to your website.
So where should you place forms? One of the most common places to utilise a form is a Landing Page.
Landing pages, by definition, offer a gateway for interested prospects with a downloadable offer, such as an eBook, checklist, SlideShare, whitepaper, case study, or infographic. In these instances, your offer is basically a downloadable source of information that provides value to a prospect.
Adding a form to a landing page offer (or even in an email subscription bar) gives you a way of capturing exactly who is interested in your thought leadership. Such data allows you to analyse the performance of your offers and how effective your form placement is. Through HubSpot Forms, you can track analytics such as:
- Number of views
- Form submission rates
- Pages they appear on
With HubSpot Form creator you can learn:
- How to create a new form from the Forms Dashboard:
- How to edit details of a form: such as the name of your form and which fields you want:
- How to edit fields on a form: using the Fields tab to see the available field options to use:
- How to add and remove fields on a form: by using drag and drop functionality and even move around the order of fields:
- How to edit field labels: by using the Field Options Editor to change the labels to something more appropriate to your branding:
- How to save and preview your form: so that you can see the final product and how it will appear on your website:
By using HubSpot, you can start learning how to use forms and how to get the best out of utilising them for your law firm.
4. BONUS TOOL: Canva
People have an incredibly short attention span. So the more eye-catching and interesting your content looks, the more likely your readers will be to engage with it and, in turn, want even more from you.
To illustrate this, consider the power of visuals. Images such as infographics are three times more engaged with that any other type of content.
We recommend using an online tool such as Canva. You can:
- Create or upload your own images
- Use pre-built templates for different purposes
- Have access to pre-designed layouts
- Have access to a huge range of images, fonts, shapes and filters
And of course, it’s free and easy to use! We enjoy it because, much like HubSpot, Canva continuously offers new and exciting templates and updates that meet your content needs. Sizing for social media, presentations, documents - Canva doesn’t mess around.
Imagery offers engaging ways to reach customers uncertain about your industry, but looking to learn more about your services. So for your legal content strategy, legalese and wordy language need to be toned down and broken up with images and visuals that invite.
Through tools like Canva, there’s no need to shell out for a designer to create images.
But because we’re HubSpot folks, we can’t just walk away from the images trend without throwing in this little freebie. By signing up for HubSpot, you gain access to over 60,000 free Shutterstock images.
CONCLUSION
With an understanding of the trend-setting tools you can go forth with (not to mention some tantalising freebies!), your marketing and sales teams can align to save time, money, and see faster results.
The best part of going forth with HubSpot is that it’s a future proof option. Picture the benefits of a free to use social media tool that continuously adds new features. HubSpot gives you similar free amenities, but without requiring an upgrade and across your entire marketing, sales and CRM output. Just take a look at all these reasons your business should use the inbound marketing platform.
It’s a major reason why we think so much of HubSpot and its ability to help law firms:
- Realise benefits
- Save time
- Save money
- Exceed industry trends
Be honest: who knew that legal marketing could be so trendy? See what we can do for you today. Download your free copy of our eBook, Future-Proof Your Marketing.
