Competitor Analysis for Law Firms: A Guide to Staying Ahead
- Identify & Benchmark Rivals: Research top competitors, collect data on pricing, services, and digital presence, and establish benchmarks for performance.
- Analyze Strengths & Weaknesses: Use SWOT analysis to uncover opportunities, address threats, and refine marketing messages to better resonate with clients.
- Turn Insights into Action: Develop strategic improvements across services, pricing, marketing, and customer experience to capture market share and build trust.
In marketing, competitor analysis can tell you more about not just who your top competition is, but what your clients are looking for out of your web presence. If you want to learn more about the top rivals in your area, we’ll look at how you can use competitor analysis to your advantage and what steps you can take to come out on top.
What Is a Competitor Analysis in Marketing?
A competitor analysis compares your performance against your top competition across key performance indicators (KPIs). This can include anything from total spend to reputation management to turnaround time. When many people find legal services via a digital search, as opposed to, say, going through their family and friends, it typically makes sense for a firm to focus largely on their digital presence and efforts.
When it comes to how people perform a competitor analysis, it differs based not just on the industry but also on the location. A local SEO competitor analysis may reveal very different search terms from town to town (let alone state to state). A good analytics program can provide you with several key metrics, but it may not reveal the relative strength of your competition, which can lead to frustrated clients and lost revenue.
The Importance of Benchmarks
Most people understand that each legal service location differs based not just on the clientele, but also on the individual quirks of the area. For example, corporations in highly regulated states will naturally have more demand than those with laxer laws. However, these general assessments are not the same as pinpointing benchmarks that ultimately determine your overall performance.
For example, if your competition is besting you based on their lower prices, your team has to set the pricing benchmark and then determine how to market to budget-conscious clients who are largely basing their decisions on budget. In this case, you might run a campaign that proves that your clients save money overall based on your more thorough services.
The ranking of each benchmark will not only help you allocate proper resources to your marketing efforts, but it will also help you keep a sense of perspective about your competitor’s advantages. More than just targeted campaigns to your demographics, you can ensure that your marketing messages speak to the heart of the client’s problem.
Analysis Across Platforms
Legal services may not be a traditionally exciting industry, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t stretch to nearly every corner of the internet. Google Business Profile, Facebook, TikTok, affiliate ads, Reddit: your competitors may be driving traction on platforms you’ve never even heard of.
This is why it’s so important to consider your analysis from every angle, looking at how your competitors define their services and who they’re appealing to. For example, if your top competitors are aggressively targeting divorcees on Facebook and personal injury victims on Instagram, this not only speaks to the user demographics on any given channel in your area, but also to the demand for these services on the platform.
Key Steps of Digital Competition Analysis
We’ve covered some of the general logic for the steps behind analysis, but there’s no one-size solution. Some legal services won’t try to reinvent the wheel: their analysis will simply look at the competitor landscape, ‘borrow’ their ideas, and hope that their rankings skyrocket.
This wasn’t necessarily a bad strategy in the past, though today’s algorithms are far pickier and far more likely to penalize a business for this. If you want to be a little more sophisticated, you may need to put in more effort.
Find Your Competition
You likely already know the top competition, but you can also use Google searches, industry directories, your marketing team, or even your customers to identify up-and-comers. You can both compare yourself to competitors that offer roughly the same services as you, as well as ancillary services that might eat into a portion of your business. For example, if you’re a full-service real estate legal service firm that loses business to a title services company.
Collect Data
You should have a full list of not just the services provided by other legal services, but also the features and quality of each service. For example, if you and your top competitor both offer custom contracts but you happen to specialize in these legal documents, you might run a campaign that touts your expertise in these matters. This way, you can use your marketing to show how sloppy or otherwise incomplete contracts can lead to a lot of headaches and hassles.
From there, you can start comparing their price, marketing efforts, and customer experience. Consider not just whether they have a presence on certain platforms, but also the relative resources they invest in each channel. Compare the patterns behind customer reviews, such as poor customer service or a lack of attention to detail.
Run a SWOT Test
Running a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) test will essentially organize the data that you’ve already collected, giving you an easier way to spot trends that determine your bottom line. The opportunities should detail how you rise above your competitors and what types of campaigns you can run to help yourself stand ahead. The threats should detail how you think that a competitor might gain even more ground based on their relative marketing position.
For example, a competitor analysis law firm might list one of the strengths of their competition as a sterling reputation. The threat to your firm might be your competition’s ability to seamlessly scale even as their client base grows. The opportunity might be the chance to carve out your own reputation, ensuring that prospective customers know that you’re every bit as reliable as your top rival — and that you can do it all for less.
A SWOT test should give you a way to pick out the biggest points that you want to focus on. For example, you might decide to go head-to-head with your biggest competitor on your pricing and your second-biggest competitor on your stronger customer service. This way, you can put your resources into the campaigns that are likely to have the largest ROIs.
Develop an Actionable Plan
At this step, you’ll turn all of your research into a comprehensive plan. This is a tricky step because it’s important to strike the right balance. You don’t want to spend too much time in the weeds of your competitor’s relative market position because the market can change in the blink of an eye. However, you don’t want to rush through the initial steps of your research because you’re liable to miss a big piece of the puzzle.
If you’re having trouble prioritizing your plan, consider some of the most common improvements legal services take after looking at their local competitors:
- Services: Improving your services might mean expanding your menu or hiring new talent. For example, if your location has seen a spike in personal injury claims, you might consider hiring a specialist consultant to dig into some of the more complex cases.
- Marketing: Marketing to the right people takes both strategy and the right digital tools. For example, you may need to invest in software that helps you calculate the merits of your competitors, who they cater to, and where different demographics stumble across the service.
- Pricing: Pricey services can turn customers off immediately, but lower prices can cause them to wonder if they’re sacrificing quality over quantity. If your clients seem particularly budget-conscious, you may want to adjust your prices and, if not, start running numbers on both the perceived and actual value of your services.
- Customer experience: Sometimes, the best change that you can make comes down to how you treat customers. Stepping up your customer service, whether that’s hitting more deadlines or increasing your communication, can pay off in spades for a legal services firm — both in terms of digital and word-of-mouth reputation.
How to Streamline Your Competitive Analysis
A competitor analysis can take up a lot of time and energy for a legal service firm, particularly if they’re in a very competitive city. If you don’t have the resources to go into an in-depth analysis of each and every competitor, the right marketing firm can give you the insights you’re looking for and, what’s more, the tools and help needed to switch up your approach.
Surefire Local helps firms learn not just how they fit into the market, but how to leverage that fit based on demand. As that demand changes, as it inevitably will, we help our clients stay on top of the trending tides, so they’re less likely to fall behind. If you want to learn more about what our services do and how they help you grasp your market advantages, schedule a demo with us today!