April 24, 2021

5 LinkedIn Marketing Tips for Lawyers

The quality of your marketing campaigns can significantly affect your visibility and success as a lawyer. Crafting a robust marketing effort should be your priority because it allows you to sell your legal services, engage with customers, and build your reputation in the industry.

There are several platforms you can use for marketing today, and LinkedIn is one of the most effective. LinkedIn has over 740 million members and is the most trusted professional social network in the US. These numbers indicate that using LinkedIn will enable you to reach your target audience and build a positive brand in the market.

Here are five LinkedIn marketing tips for lawyers:

1. Understand Your Goals

Acquiring clients is vital to every lawyer’s success, yet different lawyers have varying tactics on how they plan to achieve that goal. While some intend to get clients by promoting their practice online, others want to establish themselves as a thought leader in the legal niche, so they can speak at conferences or podcasts.

Before you set up a LinkedIn profile, you should determine and understand your goals first. Marketing on LinkedIn without a goal in mind will make it very challenging for you to create an effective profile that speaks to your target audience and determine your progress in the long run. Without any goals, your efforts to market through LinkedIn will be directionless.

2. Create a Strong Impression With Your Profile

How your profile looks can set an impression—and having one that lacks important information (or one that’s made poorly) can convey a negative impression about your legal expertise. Hiring a lawyer can be expensive, so an incomplete profile won’t compel them to pay premium rates for your services.

For starters, pay attention to the following details when creating your LinkedIn profile to convey your expertise and professionalism:

• Use the right photo: The photos on your LinkedIn profile are important because they give your target audience an idea of who you are and what you do. Adding the right photo to your LinkedIn profile will make you 36 times more likely to receive a message.You’ll have to use two photos for your LinkedIn profile: one for your background photo and another one for your headshot image. Ideally, your background photo should show what you do every day—it can be a picture of you in your office or a meeting between you and your clients. Your professional headshot, on the other hand, should focus on your face and should be taken by a professional.

• Get the headline right: The professional headline on your LinkedIn profile can make or break your opportunity to connect with your target audience. Aside from indicating that you’re a lawyer, you should also mention the main services you’re offering in the headline. If you’re a tax attorney, state in your headline that you specialize in international tax and transaction services. If you’re a family lawyer, mention in your headline if you specialize in divorce proceedings or child custody, or both.Getting your headline right will increase your chances of grabbing the attention of your target audience and encourage them to learn more about you.

• Invest time in writing your professional summary: Your professional summary on LinkedIn is only composed of 2000 characters, which is why you should exert time in writing one. A well-written summary will showcase your expertise and confidence as a lawyer, allowing you to gain clients in the long run.When writing your professional summary, make sure that it’s clear and concise because online users will only see the first 200 characters unless they click “see more” on your profile. Your summary works as your elevator pitch, so include pertinent milestones and avoid using buzzwords in this section.

3. Complete the Profile Contact Info

The end goal of marketing is to gain more clients who are in need of your services. When you have clients, you can practice your profession, earn profits, and eventually build a name in the industry. However, your goal of attracting clients won’t become a reality if they don’t see any contact information on your LinkedIn profile.

Another way to market yourself through LinkedIn is to make sure that your contact profile information is complete. This will make it easier for your target audience to connect with you the moment they realize that your services meet their needs.

You can access your contact information in the front and center of your LinkedIn profile. When you click “contact info”, a dialog box with your full name and contact details will be displayed.

Aside from adding your website URL to LinkedIn, make sure to include as many contact details as possible. You can indicate your phone number, office address, and URLs to other social media profiles, such as Twitter and Instagram. The more contact information you add to your profile, the easier it’ll be for your target audience to reach you.

4. Add Skills, Seek Endorsements and Recommendations

Potential clients will research several lawyers before hiring to determine which one can meet their needs. Lawyers can affect the quality of their client’s lives, which is why clients are very careful about who to hire.

If you want to convince your target audience that you’re one of the best, update the skills and endorsement section of your LinkedIn profile. This section is vital because it establishes your authority through your skillset, helps you rank high in internal LinkedIn searches, and allows you to build credibility through the endorsement of other individuals in the industry.

Simply add any skills to your LinkedIn profile and seek endorsements from other people to demonstrate that you are the lawyer you say you are. You can add up to 50 skills on your LinkedIn profile, but it’s best to add ones that are relevant to your legal expertise.

Seeking recommendations from peers and clients will also boost your marketing efforts on LinkedIn. These recommendations will appear below your skills and endorsements and can do wonders in showcasing your credibility.

Recommendations are usually harder to obtain as you need to actively seek them from people who have worked with you. You need to ask these people to write a sentence or two about you, like how you were as a colleague or how you’re able to win a client’s case in court. The efforts you put into seeking recommendations will be worth it, however, as these can influence a client’s decision when hiring a lawyer.

To ask for recommendations from other people, simply click on “ask for a recommendation” when you edit the recommendations section of your LinkedIn profile. A popup window will appear, and you can follow the prompts from there.

5. Get Active

Your online activities on LinkedIn are important in increasing your visibility and ability to gain clients. Since LinkedIn is a business-oriented social media platform, it’s vital that you stay active once you have your profile set. In fact, your profile will be stagnant (and not very useful) if it doesn’t appear regularly when users type in the keywords you’re targeting.

LinkedIn has an activity section where you can see all of your interactions within your online community. This section is automatically updated based on your recent interactions. If you click “see all” in your activity section, you’ll be redirected to the main feed, you can see what your connections are liking, commenting, and sharing on their networks.

Because your activities on LinkedIn can affect your rank in the search results, you should prioritize liking, commenting, and sharing content for at least five minutes every day. This will make your profile more visible on LinkedIn and allow you to have a large and engaged network.

If you want to improve your activity on LinkedIn but don’t know where to start, take note of these tips:

• Regularly update your status: Just like other social media platforms, you can post a status on your LinkedIn profile as often as you want to. Updating your status regularly will not only improve your online activity; this will also increase your visibility in your community.Since your LinkedIn profile represents your expertise as a lawyer, you should be careful about what you post. Ideally, you should update your status with content that appeals to your target audience and contains thought-provoking and interesting titles. Adding a brief description or comment as an introduction to the content will also help catch the attention of your target audience.

• Get involved with your LinkedIn groups: There are over 1.5 million focus groups on LinkedIn, but it’s best if you join less than five groups that are relevant to your expertise. LinkedIn allows you to join 50 of these groups, but it’ll be challenging for you to remain active in all of these in the long run.Once you’ve chosen and joined specific focus groups, aim to publish ten pieces of content every month that showcases your specialization and experience as a lawyer. You can also include the services your law firm offers and how these services can impact someone’s life.

• Initiate a discussion in a focus group: Once you’ve been accepted in a focus group and learned how the members behave online, engage the community by starting a discussion with the group. This is a great way to highlight your leadership and increase your presence in the community.

Knowledge Is Power

LinkedIn is an effective marketing tool, but only if you know how to maximize its features and use it properly. Setting up a LinkedIn profile and using a pixelated photo or leaving the headline blank will do nothing for your efforts to market yourself as a lawyer.

If you’re looking for ways to effectively market your legal expertise on LinkedIn, following the tips in this article is a great start. It’ll be easier for you to create a promising LinkedIn profile if you know what information to include, and how this information should be written. If you need help bolstering your LinkedIn presence, feel free to reach out to us—we’d be happy to help.