Law firms that market their legal services must consider a wide range of strategies in order to gain visibility, generate website traffic, and convert prospects into paying clients.
The competitive analysis is a fundamental step in learning about the marketplace and developing effective marketing solutions that produce lasting results.
By analyzing your competitors, you gain insight into new opportunities for reaching a larger portion of your target audience.
What Your Competitive Analysis Needs
The competitive analysis process helps your law firm identify industry competitors and the strategies they use to market their legal services.
Your analysis should consider the ways in which competitors improve search engine rankings, the audiences they target, and the keywords used to reach those users.
Activities related to blogging, social media, and offline marketing should be analyzed to determine how your law firm can leverage new opportunities or improve the strategies already being used.
How a Competitive Analysis Enhances Your Marketing Results
Your law firm’s competitive analysis helps you create a more comprehensive and effective marketing strategy. It makes your marketing more efficient, which reduces the cost of acquiring new clients and provides faster results.
Although industry competitors may be outperforming your law firm in certain areas, they may also be overlooking strategies that provide you with greater traction.
You’ll be able to identify the keywords that others are targeting successfully. This indicates what your prospective clients are looking for online and helps you improve your content marketing.
A competitive analysis directs your law firm’s short- and long-term goals. You’ll understand the areas that need improvement while identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.
You’ll invest your resources to achieve better results at a lower cost and more consistently over time.
A competitive analysis provides you with new ideas that you may not have considered. Innovative uses for existing platforms can be observed in your competitors, and you may discover new platforms or distribution channels.
These can all help guide your website design, content marketing, social media, and other branding activities.
Analyzing the Competition
Your competitors’ websites are the easiest places to begin gathering information about your industry. Websites provide you with information related to the marketing tactics they use such as newsletters, blogs, and online or offline events.
In many cases, law firms often include information about the clients they serve. This and other information helps you determine the best ways to outperform competitors in your online marketing.
You can sign up to receive competitors’ newsletters or email marketing campaigns in order to get information on how they reach and convert prospective clients.
Google Alerts makes it easy to receive news or any other information related to a specific competitor, keyword, or other search function. This automates part of the competitive analysis process and allows important information to come to you.
Follow competitors on social media to see how they market their services over time. Look at the language used in their online content and the response from users.
By understanding the ways in which competitors are reaching your target audience, you optimize your own marketing strategies to position yourself as an industry leader.
How has your law firm used a competitive analysis to improve its marketing strategies? Let us know in the comments below.
The competitive analysis provides you with the insight you need to optimize your marketing, improve results, and outperform your industry competitors in the long run.
