The Complete Guide to Marketing for Bankruptcy Attorneys
Clients only hire bankruptcy attorneys when they’re in a tough situation.
That means marketing is less about generating demand, and more about increasing awareness.
Or, in other words – marketing for bankruptcy attorneys is simply about making sure that you’re the first guy they think of when they’re hit with a tough financial situation.
You can’t just put a few ads on Facebook or Google and hope it reaches a ton of leads who just happen to have declared bankruptcy this week.
Your marketing strategy must be a long-term play, building trust and authority in your industry, so you’re the first name that comes to mind when potential clients are in financial trouble.
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Here’s how to do it.
Be Prepared
“To fail to plan is to plan to fail.”
An obvious point. We know, but give us a moment to clarify.
Before you can advance your firm and become the go-to bankruptcy lawyer, you need to take the time to establish where you are right now and where you want to be.
Before looking for the right agency and spending your budget.
This is what we call a marketing audit.
A marketing audit helps you identify weak spots in your bankruptcy attorney marketing strategy to ensure that you’re investing money in the channels that will give you maximum ROI.
Preparing your bankruptcy law firm marketing involves:
- Visualizing the results you’re trying to achieve
- Evaluating your marketing budget
- Choosing an agency specialized in marketing for bankruptcy attorneys
Like how you can’t work on a case without knowing all the details; you can’t build a strategy without knowing the essential components you need to address.
Know what you need
Audit your marketing situation as it stands, thinking about your:
- Website
- Social media
- Paid ad campaigns
- Goals
Here’s a quick overview of some questions you need to answer to get more clarity on knowing what you need.
| Major areas | Questions |
| Website | ● How’s your website branding?
● Is the information still correct and relevant? ● Are you getting enough traffic for conversation rates? |
| Social media | ● Are you present on the same platforms as your audience?
● What does success here look like to you? |
| Paid ad campaigns | ● Have they yielded good results so far?
● What channels deliver the best results? |
| Goals | ● What are your goals for your bankruptcy attorney marketing
● Are they SMART goals? |
Let’s dive deeper.
1. Website
Having a website that is the foundation of your online presence is non-debatable.
Your website needs to give your target audience a good experience, so they don’t add it to their list of problems.
An essential benchmark for a good user experience on your website is its page load speed.
39% of people will stop engaging with a website if images won’t load or take too long, and 47% expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
You can use to check your load speed.
Here’s a screenshot of a performance report from GTmetrix:
It takes about two seconds to fully load the web page so visitors can quickly access information.
Here are some tips you can use to give your website a better user experience:
- Build an organized navigation bar to help visitors find what they want quickly – we love the “search” option
- Add visual features to break up text
- Make sure it’s responsive to all devices
2. Social media
Besides websites, social media is another online platform where your target audience can engage and interact with your brand.
It gives your bankruptcy law firm marketing a full-circle effect as you can use your customer-centric posts to direct prospects to your website to learn more about your services.
Look at this:
- A prospect sees your post about bankruptcy chapter 7 on TikTok
- They follow the link to your website’s blog to read a more comprehensive article on the topic
- They finish the article to land on a CTA that motivates them to schedule a meeting with you for a free consultation.
That’s one step closer to securing a client.
The crucial factor is knowing where your audience is and aligning your content to fit best with the platform to drive better engagement.
Here’s an excellent example of this:
Some tips on getting better with social media when marketing for bankruptcy attorneys include:
- Understand the rules: Check out the law society and bar rules for compliance responsibilities and ethics regulations, and be sure you know them before you post or share anything.
- Don’t skimp on research: What is your target audience searching for the most? What essential tags drive the most views, and how can you tweak them to get better results?
- Build your content based on the platform: You need different forms of content for various social media – start small with one, and then develop it and leverage it to create accounts on other platforms.
- Track everything: By failing to track the most effective content, you risk wasting your efforts and budget on the wrong materials.
3. Paid ad campaigns
When done correctly, paid ads help you increase your reach to prospects that search for keywords connected to your services.
Getting paid ads right is like turning on a tap and getting more leads.
To evaluate your ad campaigns for bankruptcy attorney marketing, go through these questions:
- If you have run campaigns in the past, what kind were they?
- Did they prove to be effective in driving significant traffic or increasing your revenue?
- What keywords would you have targeted better?
- Did you learn something surprising, e.g., a keyword outperforming expectations?
The primary aim here is to evaluate if you can improve any aspect of your PPC campaigns to align them with your goals effectively.
We cover more on advertising rules for lawyers in this article, where we guide you through the dos and don’ts.
4. Goals
Clearly stating your goals is one of the most critical steps before building a strategy because, without a destination, how can you know the steps to take?
Your target might be getting to the top 5 results on SERP, as 67.6% of all clicks go to the first five results displayed in search engines.
Ask yourself, what do you want to achieve with bankruptcy attorney marketing?
Would you like to:
- Increase your client base?
- Position your law firm as a trusted authority figure on bankruptcy topics?
- Promote your brand better?
Goals are vital to set clear objectives on what you need to achieve, be straightforward about success, and better understand how you can assign resources according to your marketing budget to hit your target.
Evaluate your marketing budget
Goodwill, great content, and innovative ideas are not enough to support your marketing strategies. Especially without enough resources to market them.
37% of law firms with 10-49 lawyers, 68% of firms with 2-9 lawyers, and 86% of solo lawyers don’t have an annual marketing budget, indicating they only see marketing as an expense. Or in other words, so many law firms are winging their marketing expenses.
Imagine failing to achieve some of your goals due to unexpected costs.
For evaluating your bankruptcy law marketing budget, you need to be clear on:
- What are you working with
- Whether your goals and your budget are aligned
- The right amount of resources you can use to achieve desired results
Don’t forget to be realistic in forecasting your expenditure and planning your expectations.
Choose an agency that specializes in bankruptcy law firm marketing
So far, you know what you need and how many resources you can allocate to achieving your goals.
The next thing you need to do is to go out there and shop around – find the best agencies based on your current situation, goals, and budget.
Talking with a team of experts helps you save time and other resources when you have to learn from your experiences the hard way.
An agency brings all the insights from its wealth of cases to help your bankruptcy attorney marketing campaigns succeed.
Here’s an overview of what you need and factors you should consider when picking an agency that can handle marketing for bankruptcy attorneys:
| Factors | Why they matter |
| Case studies | These serve as a proven track record with results that show you that an agency knows what they are doing |
| Expertise in your industry | A marketing agency with skills and expertise in bankruptcy attorney marketing will better understand your target audience’s pain point to increase campaigns’ productivity |
| Personality | Good results and experience matter – but you should also get on with them! |
Once you have four to five agencies, you want to try, schedule a meeting with each of them, then select the one that ticks all the boxes and suits your preference.
Build a Strategy
Once you have an agency, this is where it all starts.
Set the proper foundation with a marketing strategy workshop where the key stakeholders of your law firm sit down with the agency to evaluate your current marketing status and goals to develop ways to achieve them.
Successfully building a bankruptcy law marketing strategy involves:
- Setting clear, straightforward goals
- Understanding your target audience better
- Refining your service offering
Set clear goals for your bankruptcy attorney marketing strategy
Having fairytale goals isn’t enough. They need to be clear so that you can:
- Set strategies to achieve them with certainty
- Know what success means to your marketing and measure it effectively
- Easily spot areas where your plan is lacking and handle them
For example, you want to increase your chapter 7 bankruptcy clients by 50% over the next three months.
Currently, you have 10.
A surface strategy with minimum requirements would look like this:
- Build your authority on social media by creating content on chapter 7 bankruptcy
- Link readers to your blog, where you use CTAs to motivate them to contact you
- Convert prospects who contact you to clients
When we break this down into SMART goals, we can have:
- 20,000 impressions, 2,000 engagements, and 100 website visitors per month from Facebook and LinkedIn
- 100 organic clicks from your content marketing (blogs, videos, and podcasts)
- A 3% conversion rate of website visitors into leads
Tying this back to your goal of increasing your content base:
- 200 new website visitors generated by our marketing activities
- 3% of which convert
- 6 new leads
- 25% become clients
- ≈ 2 new clients
- 6 clients in three months
- Client base goal achieved
Understand your target audience
Knowing everything about your target audience enables you to hone your bankruptcy law firm’s marketing strategy, so you don’t end up shooting in the dark and throwing your marketing costs down the drain.
Understanding your target audience starts with knowing your prospective clients:
- Who are they – age, demography, education, income
- What do they do – occupation
- Where do they spend their time – social media platform
When marketing for bankruptcy attorneys, here’s what typical demographics for your target audience look like:
| Demographic | Typical range |
| Age | 38–45 years old |
| Gender | Men to women ratio of 48:52 |
| Marital Status | More than 64% are married couples |
| Education level | 20% held a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 36% that have a high school education level |
| Income | Up to 60% of bankruptcy filers have salaries of less than $30,000 |
With this data, you can draft a 40-year-old male prospect that is married, has a bachelor’s degree and is working a job that pays $28,000 annually.
Some marketers make a blunder in their strategy by stopping at the demographics.
You need to understand your target audience’s search intention and pain points and develop a way to show them you have what they need to solve their problem.
Using marketing personas makes websites 2-5 times more effective and accessible, and here are some tips to build a persona that improves marketing for bankruptcy attorneys:
- Name the persona: Give a personal touch
- Clearly define their goal: Clarify and specify your CTA based on their needs
- Gather audience research: Know where to begin
- Analyze and segment data: Better distinguish client groups and target audiences based on behavioral and demographic trends
- Build their profile: Use what you have learned so far
Refine your service offering
Understanding your target audience is crucial to a better strategy.
You can notice the aspects of your marketing that don’t align with their situation.
Then adjust it so that when they come across your blog post, campaign ad, or social media content, they go, “ah, these bankruptcy lawyers get my situation and can help me!”
Refining your service offering helps you align your bankruptcy attorney marketing strategy to hit your goals.
Pro tip:
- Start with a significant pain point individuals filing for bankruptcy hope to address
- Address this point, maintaining the same tone and voice across your marketing channels in a way that adds value to the audience
- Study the results, improve them, and reproduce your success across other pain points
A highly underrated move is interviewing your past clients.
Such interviews will help you understand what scenarios you’ve been most helpful with, commonalities between clients, and language used to describe how you supported them.
Usually, what you think is the most valuable aspect of their service isn’t what your clients experience.
Execute – Inbound Marketing
Once you have built your bankruptcy attorney marketing strategy, you can use these two marketing methods to execute it successfully.
| Marketing type | Definition | Example |
| Inbound | Creating content or social media tactics that spread brand awareness, so people learn about you. | Publishing blog articles that provide value |
| Outbound | Involves traditional methods like paying for ads. | Sponsoring ad campaigns to target your specified audience |
While inbound marketing helps you develop content that attracts your target audience, outbound marketing means pushing out your information about your services on billboards or PPC campaigns.
You need a large upfront investment for inbound marketing, but it becomes more budget-friendly in the long run. The average cost per lead drops by at least 80% after five months of consistent inbound marketing.
From a good rapport, you can engage them with your offerings and help them solve their problem in a delightful, memorable manner so that they easily recommend your services whenever they come across someone that may need them.
Web design & website copy
A good website design can be all you need to give your prospect the best first impression.
The purpose of a good web design for your bankruptcy attorney marketing strategy is more than making your website aesthetically pleasing to your visitors. It helps you:
- Give an impressive first impression that leaves a lasting impact on your audience
- Improve the credibility of your law firm in visitors’ eyes
Here’s a good example of a good website design and copy:
This website has:
- A clear navigation bar for direction
- Direct contact information for prospects that want to make inquiries
- A search bar for finding more information easily
- “Languages” option to improve users’ accessibility
Another interesting example:
This website is an excellent example because it has a:
- Chatbot to get quick answers to queries – 68% of survey respondents like chatbots that answer their questions quickly
- Navigation bar that shows recent publications and cases to prove they are good at their work
- Web design with professional style and color textures
For web copy, agitate your solution in an engaging but supportive way:
For example, you wouldn’t want to use messaging like “Contact me or you may lose your home!”
Instead, try something like, “Worried about losing your home to bankruptcy? Help is only a phone call away.”
While both of these messages get the point across, one offers a solution to a real potential problem, while the other only increases anxiety.
For better inbound marketing for bankruptcy attorneys, you can improve your website by:
- Optimizing for mobile: About 60% of all web traffic comes from mobile phones. Making your web design more responsive improves its look on several screen resolutions and helps users easily read your content from any device.
- Personalizing your web copy: Personalized calls to action perform 202% better than basic CTAs. Strategically choose messaging that acknowledges the problem while providing a possible solution.
- Embedding videos: 25% of top landing pages use videos to increase conversation rates.
Video marketing for bankruptcy lawyers
Explaining the terms and conditions of filing a chapter 7 or 13 bankruptcy case can be challenging when all you have to work with are words and a couple of memes.
Videos add a personal, interactive touch to your marketing and give you more room to demonstrate or articulate your content.
You can embed videos on your website after hosting them on platforms like Youtube.
For YouTube, videos with longer watch times rank better. To help rank high, tease important info at the beginning of the video and spill the beans at the end, ensuring you also answer the questions your competitors don’t respond to in their videos.
To create better videos that drive engagement for your bankruptcy attorney marketing, ensure that you:
- Follow a well-prepared script: never wing it
- Set up a clean, professional studio: clutter distracts your audience from what you are saying
You can choose a key phrase and check the suggested topics to get inspiration on what to make your video about. Like this:
This example shows good lighting with a professional-looking space:
However, the lighting in this second example is so bright that it distracts viewers from getting the message:
Blogging
A prospect searches for a solution on tips for filing a chapter 13 bankruptcy.
They land on your blog, get value from your content and visit the blog regularly because your content keeps helping them.
After a while, they schedule a free consultation and become clients.
Marketers prioritizing blogging are 13x more likely to have a positive ROI on their efforts.
While blogs give impressive results, they take time, consistency, and the right marketing techniques for your target audience to see your content.
The lawyers shouldn’t write blogs – it’s too time-consuming and not billable. Specialized marketing agencies should handle it via their pool of expert legal content writers for writing new articles to updating old ones.
An example of a blog targeted toward marketing for bankruptcy attorneys:
Organic social media
This refers to non-paid posts on your social media. It can include written content like testimonials, quick tips, and straightforward advice.
The primary aim of organic social is to improve the audience’s trust, establish yourself as an authority figure, and build your brand.
So far, the example we love about using organic social media on marketing for bankruptcy attorneys is Jay Fleischman’s TikTok page.
Execute – Outbound Marketing
Inbound marketing can serve as the foundation for your campaign, while outbound marketing plays a significant supporting role.
While outbound marketing is costlier and usually less effective than inbound, it has benefits.
Outbound marketing has a potentially wider reach, and your ads get to people who may or may not be interested in your services.
PPC marketing for bankruptcy attorneys
Pay-per-click involves paying an advertising fee every time someone clicks on your ad. Rather than the traditional billboard or TV advertising, you use PPC campaigns to sponsor ads about your services on search result pages.
For example:
The first four results on Google’s SERPs are PPC adverts.
Every time a user clicks on one of these ads, Google charges the law firm that placed it on Google. The ad fee varies because the PPC system works on an auction-based model, meaning the price largely depends on:
- The competition for the specific keyword
- Your firm’s geographic area
- The quality of content you offer Google’s users
With PPC, you have more control over the types of audiences and can gain valuable insights into how your campaigns perform.
PPC usually works best for the bottom of the funnel and gives your leads that final push necessary for them to convert. If you specifically target organic visitors who have previously gone through your content and liked it, you can make your PPC costs even more efficient.
To get the most out of your PPC ads, you need a good landing page that immediately shows the visitors that your services are the solution to their problems. An effective landing page includes:
- About Us page
- A portfolio showcasing your expertise
- Testimonials
- Contact information
Like this example:
Paid social media ads
Paid social media ads involve sponsoring ad campaigns on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, so your ad pops up whenever someone in your specified target audience is using the platform (e.g., scrolling through their feed).
These ads compliment your social media posts to boost your presence and increase your reach. Take LinkedIn, for example, where your ads have a potential audience of 850 million professionals across the world (and 210 million in the US and Canada).
The customer persona you developed earlier is also beneficial here as you can specify the type of audience you want to see your ads and increase the chances of your prospects seeing your ads.
Elements you can filter include:
- Age
- Gender
- Language
- Job title
- Location
Here’s an example of what setting the elements on a paid social media ad on Facebook looks like:
To get the most out of your paid social media ads for bankruptcy attorney marketing:
- Target high-specific audiences based on customer personas to ensure your ads are relevant
- Ensure your ads are relevant:
- What language and tone do they prefer?
- What type of content appeals to them most?
- How do they like to engage with such content?
- What are their likes and dislikes?
- Always include a CTA – your ads are not meant for your prospects to view them and move on. Add CTAs that motivate them to engage with your brand.
Restrictions on PPC and paid social media advertising
Before you get started with either PPC or paid advertising on social media platforms, there’s something you need to know:
Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn place restrictions on debt-related adverts.
Google sets the following limitations on ads promoting services related to debt:
- They’re only allowed in select countries (which includes Canada and the US)
- You need to fill out the Google Ads Debt Services Certification Application for the country you operating and prove to Google that you’re licensed professional, e.g.,
- A licensed insolvency trustee registered with the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy in Canada, or
- An approved non-profit budget and credit counseling agency, as defined by 11 U.S. Code § 111, or a national nonprofit association representing non-profit credit counseling agencies. in the USA
Facebook’s policies state that ads related to “Financial and Insurance Products and Services” are restricted content with the following constraints:
- You have to disclose fees and your address on the landing page
- You can only target people over the age of 18
- You must avoid directly asking for a person’s financial information
LinkedIn simply notes that “Short-term Loans and Financial Services” are restricted content, so you need to deal with rejections on a per-advert basis.
If you run into any issues, the best course of action is to reach out to a legal marketing expert and leverage their experience in dealing with these policies.
Connect With the Community
From sharing expertise with others to improving your social and professional networks, being involved in the community helps you build your bankruptcy law firm’s image as the go-to for any bankruptcy-related case.
Participating in community service benefits your brand visibility. After all, 84% of consumers value law firms that support meaningful causes.
PR campaigns
PR campaigns ensure that your community sees your law firm in the right image.
Your community should see you as a lawyer that can effectively represent them in bankruptcy cases.
PR campaigns involve:
- Improving people’s awareness of your services
- Position your law firm as the one that goes the extra mile for your community
- Celebrating key milestones and sharing reviews of happy clients
Besides using social media and your website to share testimonials, certificates and awards, you can give talks at local conferences to connect with people in your community.
Offer thought leadership
Thought leadership in marketing for bankruptcy attorneys enables you to share expert insights on topics that attract traffic to your website.
You can share your insights through your website blogs, social media posts, and guest appearances on podcasts and videos.
Here’s an excellent example of a post talking about why filing for bankruptcy does not have to be the end:
Business directories & local SEO
Business or law directories are online platforms that list business websites for prospects to find them easily.
Directories like FindLaw help prospects look for lawyers with filters like legal issues and city.
Here’s an example of the search results for bankruptcy lawyers in Chicago:
Listing your law firm in directories can help you rank higher in search results around your area and improve your local SEO efforts.
Strategies for getting the best results for your bankruptcy attorney marketing on local search engine result pages include:
- Website optimization
- Mobile optimization
- Creation of relevant, high-quality content
- Google Business Profile optimization
Successfully putting all these together grabs you a spot on the Map and many, many leads:
We Take Care of Marketing for Bankruptcy Attorneys
Outsourcing your marketing efforts to experts will help you get the best results in attracting prospects interested in your services.
We take care of marketing your firm, so you can focus on doing what you do best – assisting clients in getting out of a financial rut.
Contact dNOVO today to learn how we can help you make your bankruptcy attorney marketing goals a reality.