If you are like most other business owners, you are wanting to reduce the size of your tax payment to Uncle Sam. One of the smartest ways to reduce your tax liability is through digital marketing, especially since it’s an expense that lead to increased revenue for your law firm. An often-overlooked strategy is taking advantage of digital marketing expenses at the end of the year.
Marketing as a Deductible Expense for Law Firms
Most law firm owners know this, but not enough take advantage of it. The IRS allows businesses to reduce their taxable income by deducting expenses that are considered necessary and ordinary for running the business. Digital marketing falls under these deductible business expenses. This includes a variety of costs such as website development, online advertising campaigns, search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, and social media marketing. All the ideas below qualify as deductible expenses. So, here are 9 marketing ideas for you to consider as we approach the end of 2023:
1. Law firm videos to increase website conversion rates
In a recent study, 90% of consumers aged 30 and up said that having a video about the firm would help them in their decision process of hiring a law firm. Video is one of the best ways a law firm can increase the conversion rate on their website. Of course, a video that does not impress visitors can also hurt conversion rates, so not all videos improve conversion rates. At iLawyerMarketing, we regularly conduct consumer studies to learn how consumer think and what they respond best to. We utliize this insight and make sure we create law firm videos that will increase the consumers trust in your firm, which ultimately leads to more leads and signed cases. If you don’t have great video on your site, consider having video created for your firm, improve conversion rates and lower your tax bill all at the same time. Here’s a sample of our work below.
2. Run Video Ads on Social to increase brand awareness and leads for your law firm
Running awareness ads on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube (and depending on your target audience, possibly TikTok and LinkedIn) is another marketing idea. If you are looking to create more brand awareness, video is a great way to do this. With the use of demographic targeting on these platforms, and depending on what types of cases you are looking to generate, this may make a lot of sense for your practice. Since video production is a tax deduction, this is a smart investment for most law firms.
3. Run OTT (Over The Top) Ads to increase awareness and lead volume
Have ever considered running OTT ads? OTT refers to streaming services that provide content over the internet, bypassing traditional cable or satellite television platforms. When you see advertisements on platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, or other streaming services, these are OTT ads. These ads can be highly targeted based on the viewer’s interests, viewing habits, and demographics, making them an effective tool for marketers. For law firms, this is another branding play that can increase awareness for your law firm in the geographic market you want.
4. Have a linkable asset created for your website to help improve rankings
Linkable assets are share-worthy pieces of content on your site that can help your website improve overall rankings by generating more links for your website. Depending on the type of asset you have created, they at times can also help you attract attention from local media outlets. We’ve had many linkable assets and clients featured on local news sites (and even TV).
These aren’t your standard pieces of content on a law firm website, but are usually data driven content that can be very helpful in the link building process. Some of most successful law firm clients have our team create multiple linkable assets every year. Considering they can also help lower the amount you owe on your tax return, having a linkable asset created for your firm makes a lot of sense.
5. Run ads on Facebook & Instagram to create more awareness for your law firm
Since advertising costs are tax-deductible, you might consider running ads on Facebook and Instagram. Retargeting ads, awareness ads, or both may make sense for your law firm. There are hundreds of millions of Americans that use Facebook and/or Instagram every single day. Combine that with the ability to demographically target users makes it an option that most law firms should consider.
6. Run a Google Ads campaign to increase leads and new signed cases
Most law firms are familiar with Google ads, but most law firms who have tried running ads on Google in the past have not had a great experience. Click costs and LSA leads costs are constantly on the rise, which make it a big challenge. The reality of running Google Ads is that just like SEO, it takes time to optimize the campaign. However, if managed correctly and with the right sized budget, Google Ads can be a powerful way to help you sign up more new cases. It takes a great landing page that will maximize conversions, manually managed ad campaigns by highly experienced law firm paid search experts, offline conversion reporting (which our proprietary sofware does) and the appropriate budget. Over the years, we’ve had plenty of clients pre-pay ad costs to help lower their tax payments at the end of the year.
7. Have a specialty website developed to help you target specific cases
Are there specific types of cases that you would love to generate for your law firm? Bicycle accidents? Truck accidents? Child custody cases? Wrongful termination? Creating a specialty website dedicated to the types of cases you want has proven to be a very powerful way to generate leads and cases.
8. Add additional content to your website to increase traffic and leads
Adding more content to your site, as long as it’s not low quality or simply auto-generated, is always a good idea. This helps to increase the number of keywords you could be found for, can help improve your topical authority and can help improve trust and rankings with the search engines. If you are adding 2,000 words of content to your site each month, you may want to increase to 4,000 or 8,000 words, or even more depending on what your needs are. This content can be used to create new pages, add new blog posts, refresh existing content or increase the length of your current content to convert standard length pages into long form pages. Most importantly, creating consistent content should help you increase your lead volume.
9. Expand Your SEO to target a bigger geographic area
Last, but certainly not least, is expanding your SEO efforts. You may currently only be targeting your local city or county, but it may make sense to target additional cities, counties or even the entire state. The more local geo areas you appear on the first page of Google results, the more leads and cases you will be able to generate for your law firm.
Any questions?
We’d be happy to answer any questions you have. Feel free to call us our fill out a contact form below if you would like to discuss any of these ideas further.