Lay Down the Law Like Tim Misny
There is one reigning champion in Cleveland for marketing when it comes to one specific law firm, and that’s Tim Misny. If you have not seen this face staring you down on your morning commute it is hard to say you really live in Cleveland, right? Regardless of what you think of Tim as a law practitioner, there is no doubt that this guy can advertise himself better than most people dream of accomplishing. Here are some effective advertising strategies for Cleveland lawyers and law firms.
So, what is he doing exactly to garner all this attention? How does he have such a wide reach and thorough strategy?
We are going to use Mr. Misny as a reference because his advertising campaigns contain a lot of insight, and we recommend taking a note out his marketing playbook because the man has brand recognition. “Misny Makes Them Pay.” See? He even has a catch phrase.
Some unique challenges a law firm might face in Cleveland are the different sections of law that can be practiced and how do you market that niche effectively. A public defender might not want to say “Make them Pay” but they could work in “Keep Yourself Out of Jail” somewhere in there. The importance of an all-encompassing market strategy is important but let us get some basic groundwork out of the way.
- Make sure your website is up to date and SEO optimized.
- If you do not have accounts on social media, make them.
- Update your Google and Bing business accounts.
Assuming you are at least this far along the rest of this insight will help you brainstorm ideas on increasing your client acquisition and retention. An improved online presence is tantamount in today’s marketing world, and having a flushed out social media presence will only ever help. These tips will help you advertise your law firm with reasonable and effective marketing strategies.
Advanced SEO Adjustments
Three main things will help your name pop up in that Google search, and they are:
“BRB” is a great acronym for advanced SEO strategies. Backlinks are when other websites direct traffic to your own site with clickable links. Reviews, well, when someone likes your services, they leave a review on Google or Bing. Blogs are articles you write about with useful information or your own take on a specific subject matter. You are a lawyer, bring out your case studies and write about your successes, difficulties, or unique circumstances revolving around a case and how you oversaw it. Case studies are loaded with keywords and will pop up on search more often if someone is looking for a specific trial or type of trial.
Backlinks are by far the most difficult part of SEO but remember there is quantity and quality. Having lots of backlinks to smaller sites with hardly any traffic will not do you as well as a few backlinks from highly reputable sites. Google and Bing assign a “Domain Authority” to sites, and if you have backlinks from site with high domain authority then Google and Bing will recommend you more often in search results.
If you go the route of writing blogs and articles, make sure to take time and create a decently sized outline, find 5-6 images loosely related to your topic, and make sure your blog pages link to outside sources, other pages on your own site, and to your contact form for potential clients to reach out to you if they like your work. Blogs are a decent way to build up your own domain authority and give you a chance to talk about topics that might register on Google and Bing a little easier. Take a look at this very blog you’re reading, see all those hyperlinks, images, and keywords all over the place? Yeah, this is all purposeful.
Let us say you are a divorce lawyer, but you have plenty of experience in accidental injuries. Write about the injury experience and flush it out as much as possible as often as possible, then the odds of someone inquiring about your services in an injury settlement skyrocket as you are showing up in search results more often. Think of the lawyers around Cleveland, is there a striking deficit in a specific area of law? Use that to your advantage and write about topics that pertain to that deficit.
This might sound blasé, but we only need one word for getting more reviews on Google and Bing. Ask. Having more reviews tells Google and Bing that you are dependable and will present you more often in search results. Ask your former clients, your current clients, your friends, and family, ask everyone. Getting a good review for your law firm will help other clients find you, and most people look towards reviews when making their decision. Reviews are a natural way to market your firm, and will be an ever-growing asset.
Leveraging Social Media
You should have a business account on every social media site available. They are free and super easy to set up. As a lawyer you need to really think about where you are going to reach potential clients. LinkedIn is a wonderful site that can put you in touch with many people who participate in business dealings, and if your area of law focuses on business this may be the best platform for you to focus on. Facebook casts a wider net and let us say you are a bankruptcy lawyer and focus on middle-to-lower income clients. Facebook would be perfect for you in that scenario.
You are going to pick three social media sites that truly have the potential to target your audience, and you are going to lean into them hard. Create all the accounts on every platform, but you are going to want three major ones that you use and work on consistently. It could be Facebook, LinkedIn, and X for example. There are plenty of social media posting apps out there that can manage posting to every application every time you want to post, but just in case you’re like us and you can only handle a few social media news feeds in each day we recommend just focusing on 3.
After completing the generic “about us” descriptions and filling in the addresses and linking your website to your social media pages, it is time to be social. It is SOCIAL media, you must socialize. Sitting down and creating a branded content strategy is the best option, but it is also a clever idea to have a small post-it note you make every day that has an outline like this written on it:
- Like twenty posts of potential clients.
- Share five posts with valuable information or are entertaining.
- Comment on five posts pertaining to your area of law.
Making a little note like this before you open Facebook or LinkedIn for an hour will keep you focused on socializing. The more you socialize, the more these social media companies will treat you as an “active” business account, and you will be recommended more as well as building relationships in communities on those platforms naturally just by interacting with users on their platform. Marketing your law firm means you need to be interactive with the communities you wish to draw clients from. Being social is an inexpensive way to cement your firm in the minds of potential clients.
Creating unique content can look like a million different things, but this is where we go back to our old friend Tim Misny. This guy took a super close-up photo of his eyebrow raised with no words whatsoever on a billboard and everyone knows his name and catchphrase. It does not sound unique, per se, but it is incredibly effective what posting his eyes around Cleveland billboards has accomplished. You might not have the photo chops to model, but putting your face online with a simple, “Call me for a quote” can go a long way. Another easy social media strategy is to take the blogs you are already writing for your website, link it on Facebook, add a brief description with a relevant hashtag and post it. You have just created content for a new audience, built yourself a backlink back to your own website, and you did not have to write a completely new batch of ideas, it is win-win for you.
Now that you have created a couple posts, a picture of your office or a link to a blog with a picture added, then you can boost that post. This is not unique to any one social media site, as every site has a paid option to have the platform artificially push your post in front of thousands of people around Cleveland. This can be incredibly effective at creating a rapport with potential local clients.
Google and Bing Business Upgrades
You may be appearing, but is your profile completely flushed out? You created these accounts at the beginning of this blog, now it is time to utilize them and grab Cleveland’s attention. Link up all the social media profiles you have been flushing out. Upload all the pictures you took of yourself and your office. All those customers you had asked to leave a review, make sure you respond to them and thank them for their kind words.
Double check your hours, your website links, everything. You want your google business account and Bing Places for Business to be 100% finished and nothing less. If you are missing some aesthetics that you see on other law firms google listings then you need to write out a list, get/create those things and upload them. Not enough shots of the office from the street? Walk outside and take a picture. Is this tedious? Yes. Will it be done for quite a while? Also, yes. Making sure the evergreen sections of your business pages are flushed out is a great way to advance your marketing effort, and once it’s done, it’s done.
No matter what your demographic, for perspective clients there will be a huge chunk of Cleveland that might not even look at your business listing if it does not have a picture or a review. You can consistently post updates about your business, and we recommend you gauge what would be best, maybe a special rate for a limited time only could be a hook to draw people in. Post it on your business listing.
After your profiles are completely polished, you should start running ads on Google and Bing. Since you have filled out all your information, posted pictures, and fully accessed these sites you should be able to go straight over to the ads tab in Google or Bing, enter a credit card, pick your demographic, and launch an advertisement. All the work you already did earlier in this post will make launching an ad incredibly easy. We searched “Cleveland Lawyer” on Google today and look who is staring at us right in the first sponsored slot, mister Misny himself. It is like he followed all these tips at some point.
The most advanced thing we can open your eyes to is Google Search Console (GSC). This is not a direct function of Google My Business, but it compliments it incredibly well. GSC will give you detailed graphs of your website’s placement on the average Google search. We will go into more detail on this tool in another insight, but if you are curious and want to get a head start make sure to check it out.
Combining Everything
Just to recap, here are the steps you are going to take to show up in front of Clevelanders in search results and social media sites when they need a lawyer:
- Create every social media profile possible, pick three to focus on.
- Update/ your Google My Business and Bing Places for Business
- Start writing blogs and case studies for your website.
- Begin posting those blogs on social media by linking to your web page.
- Interact with social media platforms, make post-it notes with goals.
- Boost those social media posts you created.
- Update your business profiles on Bing and Google with images and links.
- Pay for a Google or Bing ad campaign.
- Make sure to keep updating your website with blogs and cross posting them all.
- Sit back and watch as your online presence in Cleveland skyrockets.
This is how you do this. These steps are a coordinated marketing effort to get your law firm in front of perspective clients right here in Cleveland. When you see Tim Misny staring at you on that billboard just remind yourself that have all the tools to do exactly what he is doing. It will not be long until you are putting your face up on billboards yourself.
We here at Acclaim have created multiple websites and testimonial videos for multiple Cleveland law firms. If you ever want to call and ask us about SEO strategy or marketing advice for your law firm just give us a call.