Word of mouth and referrals remain the primary ways law firms get new clients. But over 30% of new business comes from the web.
And the referrals? The first thing they’ll do is a quick internet search for your firm and see how you present yourself online.
WHY METRICS ARE IMPORTANT
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” management consultant Peter Drucker famously said. This holds true in business, whether you are looking at your firm’s overall key performance indicators or your law firm marketing ones.
With the investment law firms are putting into their digital marketing budget, it’s critical to properly track where these dollars are going, and what return you’re getting for them.
Many firms find themselves spending hundreds or thousands of dollars per month, without a clear picture of what return their firm is getting for it. What area should you spend money on? What metrics matter with the goals you have for your firm? It’s easy to get caught up in details that don’t get you any closer to your goal of a high-performing law practice.
Quantifying your marketing spend allows you to see trends, measure progress, and develop strategies.
DEFINING SUCCESS
First, you need to define success for your firm to have a successful campaign. For a large family law firm, that may be 50+ new signed cases per month. For a small personal injury firm, maybe that’s one or two solid cases per month.
Next, look at your past numbers. How many people contacted your firm? How many of those were cases that fell within your practice areas? How many of those became clients?
From that number, you can extrapolate the number of leads you need your marketing efforts to generate – with the number of leads, you will be able to give a solid goal to your marketing team and come up with a plan to hit the goal with the most efficient use of your marketing dollars.
IMPROVING YOUR CHANCES
There are a number of holes in the funnel to keep an eye out for. Variables all the way from the first time the contact hears your name through when they’ve hired you and you’ve finished up your work can either improve or hurt your conversion numbers.
That’s why it’s important to keep an eye on your entire client experience – how you answer the phone, how you communicate with clients, how you welcome them into your office – even down to the small details, like what their favorite drink is, can help make your clients feel right at home.
WHAT YOU SHOULD BE TRACKING
When it comes down to it, only a few metrics truly matter for an executive summary of your law firm marketing. How many people contacted my firm through my marketing efforts?
- Which ones became clients?
- Which channel did they each come through?
From these simple metrics, you’ll be able to determine the answers to how to plan and allocate your future spending:
- Which channels brought the most revenue to the firm?
- Which channels are the most profitable?
- Which ones aren’t working?
Below is a sample of a month of advertising. Organic is traffic generated from online searches. Pay per click is ads purchases on Google or Facebook. The online ads are banner ads purchased on Avvo or other legal-specific sites.
From this (admittedly simple) example, we can see that the organic is by far the most effective, the PPC is significantly less effective, and the online ad campaign should probably be cancelled. If this trend continued, we would have clear data to move some marketing spend to the campaign with a lower CPA and could get more return from marketing spend.
Once you have these key building blocks in place, you can work more effectively on your marketing plan and spend your dollars in the place where they can give you the best return on your investment. Brian Craig
