I once faced a legal dispute, found it difficult to get information online to aid my case and ended up relying on A.I. to help with court processes. That led me to take an interest in legal marketing, and I ended up helping a law firm tweak their website design and with their client acquisition process.
Here are the five tweaks I implemented for Kelvin Ong’s law firm. Kelvin founded Contigo Law LLC. You can visit his website at https://contigolawllc.com
Tweak #1: Proof Over Promise
Every lawyer has his or her curriculum vitae. Go through your case studies for that particular practice area, create a table, and include it in your practice area page. Yes, specific case studies for that specific practice area page.
Kelvin has a ton of past legal experiences and case studies. I used Claude (you can use other LLMs such as ChatGPT or Grok) to sort your curriculum vitae out.
Prompt: “Sort my cases by practice area”. Then boom. Here’s the marketing principle: proof beats promise. Time and time again.
Then we created another table specially for debt and credit recovery for Contigo Law, and furnished it on the landing page.
Tweak #2: Tell Your Story
Having cold emailed a bunch of lawyers and looked at many of their websites manually, I found that most law firms’ websites are filled with dry corporate legal speak.
The lawyer’s profiles are often stuffed with academic credentials, their past cases and membership of legal associations. There’s nothing wrong with putting all of that. In fact, it’s necessary. But it can seem intimidating and unapproachable.
For clients who are already in legal trouble or require legal assistance, I do think that they need more relatability.
Storytelling has always been how humans connected. You were told stories from a baby, to a child, to school to help you better understand the world!
So! Try to tone down on dry corporate legal speak on your website. Tell the audience why you and your team got into law. Tell them why you practice law. Make it compelling!
Maintaining this story section throughout his website was intentional, especially on the practice area page we’re driving Meta ads to.
In his case, I tried to accentuate the story behind Kelvin starting his own law firm, why he practices law, and what his law firm means to him and the market.
“The term Contigo means with you in Spanish.”
This highlights the service oriented nature of his law firm’s proposition, highlighting the great support that he’ll put into aiding you as a client. (In my experience interacting with Kelvin as an agency, it’s also true. He responds super fast!)
Stories make you, as a lawyer, feel relatable to the lay individual. It can be the differentiating factor why a client engages you over others.
Tweak #3: Drive Traffic to Practice Area Pages
Through my research for our legal marketing agency services, I’ve observed many law firms (and probably their hired digital marketing agencies) driving traffic to their home page.
You’re risking drop off traffic there, and from Google and Meta’s standpoint, users only want to land on pages that are contextually relevant to the ad.
You’ll want to drive specific traffic STRAIGHT to the intended key practice area. This means traffic from employment law keywords should be sent to the employment law practice area page. Traffic from family law keywords to the family law practice area page… so on and so forth.
This is for SEM. Likewise for other media channels.
If you’re running Meta ads for your debt recovery or credit recovery practice area, send users straight to your debt recovery page. Not your home page.
For Contigo Law’s campaign, we sent all of our debt recovery campaign’s traffic to the debt recovery page, and none to the home page. That’s how we got pretty good conversion rates (at a good cost!) for Contigo Law by driving traffic to a specific key practice area page!
Tweak #4: Educate and Relate in a Layman Manner
Whilst going through my personal legal case, I found it difficult to get legal information online to help me. Yes, there are resources on Singapore’s courts websites but more often than not, they are written in a “government” styled manner that may not appeal to the lay individual.
I also ended up relying on myself and A.I. to craft my originating claim.
I had a favourable outcome, but going through the court process, writing arguments, facing a registrar… it was intimidating. I certainly proceeded out of courage, and not technical expertise.
I feel the law has to be “better marketed” in Singapore, and lawyers can enable this process through content on their websites.
First, keep the legalese on your website to the bare minimum. Lay individuals like us do not understand complex legal jargon. Second, be willing and able to tone down complex legal terminology and processes into something that’s understandable to the lay individual.
I guess that’s where marketing comes in.
We managed to boil down a simple debt recovery process into a three step table that is understandable to the consumer.
The goal of this is to show potential customers the process and options if they used legal recourse as a strategy to recover their debt.
Tweak #5: Social Proof
Lastly, I went to look at Kelvin’s SingaporeLegalAdvice.com profile and Google reviews for his law firm. Then I picked out testimonials that didn’t sound too “template like” and that had human profile pictures attached to them.
Then, we implemented related testimonials to the practice area on the landing page. For example, for his debt recovery page, we made sure they were civil litigation related, as the campaign we were running was in that practice area.
Social proof is one of the strongest signals of trust. Leverage the social proof that you’ve accumulated.
Conclusion
Many small business owners think that their website has to be well designed, look super classy, and be impeccably professional in order to impress potential customers.
Yet, that’s not always the case. From my years of digital marketing experience, the more relatable the copy and content is on your website, the better the conversion rates. In the service industry, I’ll say it’s 80% content and 20% design. Funnily, you can get away with poor design and 100% great content and positioning.
Relatability can really help for smaller boutique firms or small medium businesses where the target market isn’t big MNC companies or government boards. Their target market is the man on the street. The average consumer out there.
So, instead of spending thousands on fancy website designs, stock photos of gavels and handshakes, focus on connecting with potential customers about their legal problems in a way that they can understand. That’s ultimately what differentiates you from your competitors!
