Introduction
Having worked with many lawyers and professional service providers over the years, I came to appreciate that their most scarce resource is time.
I have met lawyers and accountants who kept asking themselves for years:
Can I attract business from abroad?
Can I open new sales channels?
Can I grow?
How do I promote myself?
And while I was trying to answer these questions for some of my clients, I realised that we were focusing on the wrong things. Because the real question is whether you can get out of your comfort zone and think of your business as a multimillion-dollar firm.
This guide draws on our specific experience in Cyprus, Europe and the Middle East, sharing tried and tested strategies.
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Table of Contents
Digital marketing for lawyers and other professional service providers: Industry-Specific Information
As a professional service provider, lawyer, accountant or anything else you must be well aware of ethical and in some cases even legal restrictions when it comes to advertising your services. However, practices such as content marketing through organic promotion, defining a brand strategy, establishing an online presence through a website with search engine optimisation, content distribution, audience segmentation and so much more are not in any case prohibited.
The web is already overcrowded with terrible examples of how not to promote your services. I would love to see the results of all those running campaigns like “Register a Company in Cyprus”, “Obtain IP Box in Cyprus and Europe”, or “Get your EMI license” and so on. This is like watching an ad for cereals with the tagline “Eat cereals every morning”. It will simply not work.
The power of an effective website: Establish your digital presence
What is important to realise is that your website, to the eyes of a foreign investor, a local client who never met you before, or an international client, is your virtual office. It needs to look and feel good.
In this section, I am mostly focusing on some tips on how to improve your online presence as a service provider or law practitioner without getting too much into the specifics of the visual elements of your website, although I do think that they are very important.
Keywords selection
There is only one tool that should resonate with everyone who is reading this guide. Google Ads Keyword Planner. This is a free tool by Google that helps you analyse keyword trends.
You can search for specific terms eg “Incorporation of a company in Cyprus”, and find other similar keywords that people are likely to search. For example “business set up in Cyprus”.
The focus should be on the so-called “low-hanging fruits” ie keywords with high search volume but low difficulty. Google’s keyword planner or any other paid tool are just tools that are supposed to elevate your understanding and approach. They are not meant to create it.
Now you have to create relevant, consistent, high-quality, value-adding content to your website.
With keyword planning, the strategy is to give answers to questions.
It is easy to forget that we are not talking to machines when creating digital content. Just listing some keywords will not get you anywhere. The overall content needs to be readable, relatable and follow your tone of voice.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Targeting
Unlike many publications you will find out there, SEO is not treated as a checklist here. Surely there are some strict Dos and Don’ts as explained below but doing just those will not generate any results.
Dos | Don’ts |
Create Visual content for your text | Do not publish pages that are less than 250 words |
Always include Header 1 (H1) on your pages | Do not publish heavy visual elements as this will affect the loading speed of your website |
Use website titles, tagging and meta descriptions for your pages | Do not publish repetitive content |
Ensure content is readable and relatable with a consistent tone of voice | Don't just list keywords without context - remember you're writing for humans |
Produce alt texts for the images and visual content | Do not have broken links on your website |
SEO is the process of optimising a business’s website content, structure, and overall online presence. To improve its organic (unpaid) visibility in search engine results pages.
So what else can you do apart from the checklist? Well, you want the users who land on your website to interact with it.
For example, if you are an accountant and you have a tax calculator for your users, people will most probably use it, gain value, and spend time trying to adjust the numbers. If you are a lawyer and you are trying to promote the Cyprus IP Box Regime, you can present the Nexus Formula and give an interactive scale with numbers that will facilitate someone’s understanding of the regime and increase the users’ engagement. Another example can be the integration of an AI chatbot allowing users to ask questions, get answers and book meetings.
Website loading speed
This is as simple as it sounds. The longer it takes for a page to load, the less successful it will be. To measure the loading speed, I would recommend the Google Inspection Tool which is free.
Studies have shown that users will leave a website before it even loads if it takes more than 3 seconds to view. This may vary between mobile and web users but the point still stands.
Content and professional language: Quantity Vs Quality
The ability to create great and value-adding content is not only relevant to online marketing but to every aspect of our everyday communication.
The rule of thumb here is simple. The content that you produce is good if it is:
Timely: discussing relevant industry updates.
Relevant: Establish a direct association between the problem that a user is trying to solve and the content that is produced.
Specific: Real people have real problems and real questions.
Trustworthy: Business relationships are built on trust. Referrals, testimonials and ratings are of great importance.
The aim is to promote yourself as a knowledgeable, trustworthy party, as an industry leader, not your services.
If there is one thing that you must keep out of this whole piece of information is consistency. Creating a website and leaving it there, is like saying I opened my offices and now is the clients’ turn to come and find me.
Prodyssey Solutions Ltd has developed the Siren App that aims to address exactly that. I do not mean to turn that into a promotion, but our approach while developing the app was to give to every service provider, law firm or accounting firm of any size, the means of achieving great, consistent results with minimal effort. The tool creates website and social media content together with newsletters, resulting in a 360 support of your online presence.
Finally, try to stay away from industry-specific terminology.
If you think that “Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 31 May 2023 on markets in crypto-assets, and amending Regulations (EU) No 1093/2010 and (EU) No 1095/2010 and Directives 2013/36/EU and (EU) 2019/1937 (OJ L 150, 9.6.)” is a more effective way of communication than the “EU Crypto regulation”, then go ahead and use it. But if you are a sensible human being, you have to appreciate that non-lawyers will skip it as soon as they see it. Because I am a user, and I have a problem, I am not looking for the numbers or the sections of the law, I do not care about them. What I care about is can you solve my problem? Yes or No? Can you be smart without trying to be smart?
Backlinks and expansion
Backlinks are incoming hyperlinks from one webpage to another website under a different domain ie the number of times that your website is referenced in other websites. Before you go crazy about it you have to know that this is not just quantitative but it measures quality as well.
Having links to my website from reliable sources eg the Cyprus Bar Association or the Registrar of Companies or high-profile magazines and publications is gold. At the same time having a batch of links from unreliable third-party websites, it may not hurt me, but it will not benefit me either.
How can I reach out to you?
Users will follow the path of least resistance. They will always choose the easiest, most convenient method to contact you. The focus should be on improving the user journey for now. What is important to realise? Different users will have very different behaviours.
Your target should be to establish the path of least resistance which can vary from one person to another.
You may have a great social media page but some people may prefer to be contacted via email, you may have a business WhatsApp channel, but still many will try to contact you via phone.
Newsletters: Stay connected with your clientele
What I saw fewer people focusing on, is the power of cross-selling through your digital presence.
The biggest issue that I have with professional service providers, mostly lawyers and accountants in this case is that they are not maximising the output of their existing clientele.
The best way that I found around this is through newsletter communications. This form of communication aims to land you on a regular basis within your existing clients’ inbox.
Newsletters are a great way to drive existing clients to your website and bring them up to speed with business updates while providing value.
Do not forget consistency is key.
Social media and organic promotion for professional services
An average user spends on average 143 minutes per day on social media. That is 2 hours and 23 minutes every single day on various social media platforms. This number may be different across demographics but the reality if somebody asks how much time a person spends on social media, my answer is a lot! The numbers are there, the population is there, and part of this population is your target.
The basics of effective content creation as discussed in the relevant section still apply here. Only this time, the attention spans are much, much smaller so you have to be as concise and comprehensive as possible. In addition, the main difference with the general content creation guidelines is that here you are not trying to answer a specific question that someone is asking because they searched for it.
If there is one checklist item, to have in mind however, is the action line. You can play around with different action lines and what works or does not work for you but a simple “Drop us a DM if you want to discuss this further” or “Send us an email to find out more”, will work just fine.
Now if you are still not convinced whether social media promotion can work for lawyers and professional service providers you may be right. This is because, I am expecting social media to work well in the space of legal, accounting and consulting services when combined appropriately with other digital marketing methods.
Do not forget Consistency, Consistency, Consistency!
Paid promotion for law practitioners and service providers
No matter what methods you are choosing for promotion, what you are trying to sell in reality is yourself as a service provider. Along those lines, I am sure that some ideas may be coming to your mind. As a service provider, there is nothing wrong with paying a social media platform to promote a free webinar that you are delivering, your newsletter to a wider audience etc.
In any case, paid promotion is as effective as organic promotion within the digital space so my recommendation is to stick to the plan and make your content as appealing and relevant as possible. When you get to a point where you need paid promotion to expand your activities then you are on a very good path already.
Cold emailing: The Do’s and Dont’s for the professional services industry
When I titled this section Cold emailing: The Do’s and Dont’s for the professional services industry, my immediate reaction was DON’T. This may contradict the general perception or the typical suggestions from your marketers (after all we are just trying to cross-sell more services 😊 ) but I am happy to say that in general and unless you do everything else that has been discussed here, it will not work.
Now, there is a big but here. I am not saying that you should not try it. But if you decide to do it in combination with everything else try to do it right. If your aim is to send a thousand emails to random people in order to get 10 responses and book 2 meetings (typical numbers for marketing campaigns) then what you are trying to do is to spam 998 people to land 2 new customers.
Chances are that I might be sounding a hypocrite to those of you who got here after receiving a cold email from my side. However, if you are one of those people, you must realise now that you landed here because I was communicating value-adding information that is relevant to you.
So when I say Don’t do it, what I mean is don’t do it if you are not doing it right.
Conclusions
This guide provides comprehensive insights into digital marketing strategies for lawyers and professional service providers in Cyprus, Europe, and the Middle East.
We would be happy to assist you in your journey to grow your firm and achieve new heights. You may contact us here if you want to find out more.
Do not forget that during the free webinar session, these aspects will be discussed in further detail.
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