How can good digital communication ease workloads for law firms?

For many a law firm, life can be very busy. If business is going well, you may have plenty of clients and there will always be people who will make a lot of demands of you. Meeting their expectations is vital for retaining their custom, but this also provides you with opportunities that can be embedded in your marketing strategy.

What makes for a good digital communication strategy?  

The development of the internet has provided law firms, like so many other enterprises, with a range of new ways of communicating with people. This is an age of mobile websites, social media and any external platforms on which you can post material as part of a legal content marketing strategy.

It is important to consider two factors that apply due to the availability of all these platforms. Firstly, it provides a wonderful opportunity to reach more people. At the same time, it also generates more expectations that you should stay in touch with clients.

• This is especially true if your buyer persona includes a lot of young people, who will never have known the age of snail mail and landline telephones  
• Consequently, your law firm needs to offer accurate and useful information all the time, as well as responding to enquiries quickly
• Achieving this is a central feature of your communications strategy and should be applied across all your marketing and communications activity.

How can a good communications strategy ease your burden?  

It may seem that adding more ways clients can seek information will burden you more; that you might become inundated with requests for further answers and details of the progress of cases.

However, a good communications strategy will reduce the number of times your clients are chasing you for more information.

• The way this works is by being upfront with the provision of information.
• For example, research has shown that the most common complaints made by clients arise from not being kept up to date with the progress of their cases.
• Therefore, if provisions are in place to make sure they are kept informed and can find out what they need to know, they will spend less time chasing you for information and you won’t have to spend time handling complaints about this issue.

What can you do to establish an effective communication structure?

Having established that keeping in touch with clients is a priority, it is important to ensure this is done in a consistent way.

To do that requires a structure, which is where the use of key performance indicators (KPIs) can come into play.

• KPIs set clearly defined goals of what needs to be done and by when.
• This sets a standard that can then be used to provide guarantees to a client about the service they will receive.
• For example, suppose one KPI is to respond to any email sent during the working week within 24 hours. By establishing this requirement, you can then promise your customer that this is how soon you will get back to them. 
• Similarly, you could apply a KPI to social media contacts to reply swiftly to client engagement. Indeed, in that case a rapid response will be very wise, as any negative comment on your social media site will be visible to other site visitors.

Providing quick, constructive and positive replies to social media posts is an effective way of generating good PR for law firms, whereas failure to do so could have a negative effect for your image.

Why will good communication help market a law firm?

It is important to note that there are several phases to the buyer journey, the process by which an individual goes from first finding out about a firm and its products or services to becoming a loyal customer.

Of course, through content marketing, social media and other means your law firm can help create awareness, then help consideration through to the point where they make a purchasing decision.

However, it is important to understand that someone becoming a customer is not the end of the journey. By delighting an existing customer, you can not only help ensure they will come back to you, but also that they become an advocate for your services as they tell their friends, family and work colleagues what a great job you did.

If good communication is treated as an essential element of the service from the very outset, this will be one of the things your customers will endorse you for.

What can BeUniqueness do to help?

At BeUniqueness we have extensive experience in producing SEO for law firms, content strategy, social media management and brand development. We can help you to make great client communication a key part of every aspect of your marketing strategy. 

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