I’ve got some sad law firm marketing news for you. 70% of law firms have no CTA on their website and only 14% send automated emails after a prospect fills out a contact form.

That’s like only putting peanut butter on your peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It ruins the taste and really, you’re not actually making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Half-assing any aspect of your marketing is like leaving money on the table when you win the jackpot. Your potential clients will all go to your competitors who aren’t half-assing it.

The first rule of online marketing is to utilize the marketing funnel. Here’s how you do that.

1. What Is a Marketing Funnel?

Imagine you’re an ant lion. You dig a special sandy trap in the dirt and bury yourself in the bottom. You’ve carefully selected a spot right where the ants march on any given day. Whenever an ant walks through, it has a choice; it can either walk around the divot or it can walk through it.

If it walks through, it might start to enter, begin to slide and wriggle its way out. Or it might blindly keep marching thinking its going to make it out the other side. When the latter happens, you spring out of the bottom and pull the ant to its bloody doom.

That’s a marketing funnel. An ant trap (albeit less bloody and more enticing) for your clients.

You place the top of your funnel in places where your potential clients might frequent and hope they click and wander through your trap. They can either let themselves slowly sink to the bottom and become your clients or wriggle their way out and move on to other options.

Either way, you gain some sort of knowledge about those people either through a form or through a contract.

2. The Stages of Marketing Funnels

In marketing, we call the various stages of a marketing funnel “temperatures.” But for the sake of simplicity, we’re going to use more generic terms.

Awareness

The internet is so vast, how do you get clients to notice you? Your website isn’t a field of dreams, after all. You need to set the trap.

The edge of your trap should be something like a useful informational article on Medium with a link to your site. It could also be a weekly podcast, your own blog, an ad on Facebook, YouTube videos or really any content your clients might consume.

It must always be enticing and interesting and it must include a link to your landing page. A landing page will allow you to gather information on your potential client and help them move to the next stage. Click here to learn more about landing pages.

Interest

Your potential clients are falling into the trap. You just need to lubricate the surface of your funnel.

To increase their interest, use Search optimized blogs. Here you’ll capture the people who are genuinely interested in your service. Refine your keywords from general law questions to more specific ones. And be sure to pick easy-to-rank-for, high-traffic keywords.

Consideration

Here people are not only interested, they’re at the tipping point. If they were ants, they’d be considering whether to succumb to the sweet release of death or whether they’d rather keep serving their queen.

Here is where you show them that your practice is better than the alternative. Show them how you can solve their problem. You need to hit that pain point hard and nudge them into the bottom of the funnel.

Conversion

Unlike an ant trap, your funnel doesn’t have a point of no return until your client is in your grasp. They don’t automatically hire you as their lawyer once they’ve set up a time to meet. But once they meet you, they’re more likely going to say yes.

For a lawyer, the bottom of the funnel is going to be in-person. It’s up to you to convince them to hire you as their legal counsel. No amount of online marketing will help you with this stage.