4 Things You Must Include in Your Marketing as an Estate Planning Attorney

As an estate planning attorney, the services you provide to your clients involve intimate, emotional, and difficult conversations and situations. That’s why it’s crucial to show your clients that you’re someone they can count on, focusing on humanizing your brand and pivoting away from the stereotypical “all attorneys do is charge a ton of money” persona.

Your marketing plays a key role in building trust with your audience and allowing them to know who you are during this important time in their lives. Instead of letting your marketing be a “catch all” place where you post things every once in a blue moon as they come to you, be intentional with your approach and work to establish that know, like, and trust factor. It’s especially important to have a marketing strategy in place when you’re busy, as if a time comes where you might need to generate more business, you’ll want to know that you’ve spent the time to build up your audience throughout.

As you’re preparing your marketing strategy for your firm, take a look at the five components that are absolutely essential for estate planning attorneys.

Share Your Story

This may be the most important part of your marketing. What’s your story? What made you want to become an estate planning attorney? Craft that message and share it everywhere:

• On the about page on your website
• In social media posts
• Through press features

Whether you witnessed a family member pass away without an estate plan in place, leaving their loved ones in a mess, or you personally experienced the need for estate planning, articulate what exactly it is that made you get into the profession and be transparent about it with your audience.

Why is this important? It’ll be relatable to your audience.

If someone sees you share your experience about a loved one passing away without an estate plan and they had a similar situation with a family member, they’ll immediately know that you “get it” and will want to work with someone like you who can prevent that from happening to them. Sharing your story also allows you to humanize your company by proving that there are real people behind your firm who care deeply about your clients rather than making your clients think that you just want to run them for their money.

It may take some getting used to for you to start to feel comfortable with sharing your story, but over time, you’ll find people commenting on it and pointing it out, proving that it’s valuable for building trust with your audience.

Offer Free Resources

If you really want to prove your expertise to your audience, providing free resources to them is an easy and effective way to accomplish that. What do we mean by free resources? They can be a variety of things:

• Video library covering several topics about estate planning
• Webinars that are available to watch on-demand
• Workshops or events, hosted in-person or virtually, that cover the intricacy of estate planning
• PDFs, guides, checklists, etc. that are helpful throughout the estate planning process

And more. Ultimately, you want to use these resources to achieve two outcomes:

1. Demonstrate your knowledge on the topic to build trust with your audience, helping them to see you as the expert in your field and therefore persuading them to work with you once they’re ready to put together an estate plan
2. Build your email list by capturing the email addresses of anyone who registers for a webinar, attends an event, or signs up to receive a resource you offer so that you can continue to market to them and nurture them

Any time you can find a way to be of value or help your audience, always do it. It may not seem like there’s any return from it right away, but you’ll surely start to see the benefits of it in the long run.

Build a List of Referral Partners

What could be a better way to get more clients without costing any money or requiring much of your own time than by building a list of referral partners?

Your referral partners should consist of any professional who serves the same demographic and shares a similar clientele as you. These professionals may consist of:

• Real estate attorneys who have clients that just closed on a home together and need an estate plan to protect their assets and each other in case something happens
• Accountants and financial planners who work with individuals to create their financial future
• Council on aging organizations who work closely with seniors
• Home care agencies or assisted living facilities who also support seniors

And more. Keep in mind that your relationship with these professionals should be mutually beneficial, so if they frequently refer clients to you, you should be proactive about doing the same for them.

Highlight Case Studies and Client Testimonials

As you likely know, positive testimonials and reviews from clients build social proof and further encourage individuals who are debating on hiring you to end up taking the plunge. Any time you’re able to capture testimonials from clients you’ve worked with who have valued your services–whether the testimonials are on Google, Facebook, your website, or somewhere else–be sure to share them for your audience to see.

It’s especially helpful to build deeper case studies that outline the problem that clients had before working with you, the solution you provided to them, and the end results afterwards. These case studies are great for having on your website, helping to drive website traffic.

Are you starting to think about developing a marketing strategy for your estate planning firm and how you can be successful online? As an agency that specializes in working with estate planning attorneys, we’re here to help. Request a consultation to chat with us!