Law firms need a wide array of software to run efficiently: Client intake, case management, time tracking, and billing are just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to all of the administrative work, you want to ensure you have effective marketing tools to bring you more qualified leads, helpful features to ensure a smoother sales process, and a platform that ensures all of your clients’ questions are answered promptly — while still prioritizing those where time is of the essence.
One of the top competitors that can cover all of the marketing, sales, and support functions is HubSpot. So take a break from that discovery that’s draining the life out of you and take notes on how this platform will make your day-to-day easier.
There are many benefits of using HubSpot to run your law firm more efficiently; and once you start experiencing them, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without the platform. The most helpful ones include:
Running a law firm means you have a long list of contacts — colleagues you’ve met at networking events, clients, former clients, co-counsel, people who’ve called for an initial free consultation, vendors, mediation offices, pro bono organizations, judicial assistants, other professionals who refer you business, etc.
It can all get disorganized quickly, or full of duplicate or outdated information. HubSpot’s customer relationship management (CRM) software makes it a lot easier to keep your contacts segmented based on their categories. This makes it a lot easier to send them targeted relevant communications — such as follow up emails, newsletters, information about any new services, invitations to events, etc… You can also keep the CRM updated by scrubbing it regularly.
In addition, HubSpot’s CRM stores data regarding each website visitor’s engagement with your content. For example, if someone keeps coming back to read your blogs about marital settlement agreements, or how mediation works, you can use this information to send them lead nurturing emails pertaining to those subjects.
Maybe they’re not ready yet to call your office to inquire about your services, but if they receive useful information that can answer some of their most pressing questions, slowly but surely, they’ll begin to see you as a reliable, helpful source. And as they move along their buyer’s journey, they would be more likely to reach out to you when they’re ready to hire an attorney.
Marketing a law firm can feel like a full-time job — which makes it even more tiresome, considering that you have to do it after a full day of actually practicing law. But you have to keep doing it to keep those phones ringing.
HubSpot makes marketing a lot easier by providing all the tools you need for effective inbound marketing, ad management, and lead nurturing.
For example, let’s say you want to have a competitive advantage by publishing regular blogs about your area of law (if you’re not doing this, it behooves you to consider doing so. The more pages you publish, the higher the likelihood of one them ranking on Google. More on that later).
HubSpot’s content management system (CMS) has a wide array of templates, drag-and-drop functionalities, and CTA (calls to action) creators so that you can make each page match your brand. No coding knowledge required.
By the same token, you can integrate your social media accounts so that you can monitor and manage engagement. Plus, it also offers email templates, personalization tokens, and workflow settings so that you can create, personalize, and automate your marketing emails.
Clients have questions at all hours of the day. For you, it’s just another case. For them, it’s their entire life. But truth be told, many of these questions can get repetitive. HubSpot enables you to install conversational bots to answer FAQs, as well as to create a knowledge base so they can research topics at their leisure. In addition, you can create customer portals so that they can browse through prior communications, check the status of their case, and whatever else they may need, without having to call you every couple of hours. Yes, there are court dockets and email sent folders, but the portals keep everything in one centralized location.
You can also keep all communications together, regardless of where they originated (email, text, social media, or live chat). You already spend enough time getting ready for litigation. Piecing together your history of conversations with a client shouldnt be something else to add to your plate.
In addition to the administrative aspects mentioned above, HubSpot has additional tools to optimize your law firm’s website, including:
Just because your website’s URL mentions your area of law and your city doesn’t mean that you’ll rank high when people search for what you do. There are many search engine optimization (SEO) best practices that come into play, including having a good meta description, including alt text, and having a link strategy, to name a few. HubSpot comes with built-in SEO recommendations so that you can implement each of them as you get your content ready for publication.
You can set up your website’s content so that whenever a visitor comes to your website, they are greeted with information that pertains to their specific needs. For example, a first-time visitor can see your regular homepage, while a returning visitor can see featured information related to what they read about the most when they come to your site.
Not sure if one call to action would be more effective than another? Try both, and let HubSpot track their performance, then implement the one that gets more engagement. You can also use adaptive testing to see how minor changes to webpages would affect their performance.
HubSpot’s workflows feature lets you preset specific user behaviors that would trigger certain communications from your firm. For example, if someone subscribes to your newsletter, you can deploy personalized, automatic Thank You emails. If they reached out to you, then went missing in action, you can automate reengagement emails.
The adage has become a cliché, but it’s still true: You can’t improve what you can measure. Your website is your presentation card. Even if you’ve been practicing for decades, have billboards off the freeway, and a constant source of referrals, it’s still good for people who look you up online to be able to determine whether they’d like to hire you over someone else. With HubSpot, you can customize your reporting dashboards to track what’s important to you at a given moment: website traffic, email open rates, clickthrough rates, and site conversion rates.
We understand that every business is different, and that you may have specific questions relating to the daily administration of your law firm. We're also aware of industry regulations and ethics concerns all of your software needs to comply with. Contact us for a free HubSpot demo, so that you can determine whether this is the right tool for you.