Law firms are businesses like any other, and they must promote their services to attract leads and turn them into clients. However, not all marketing strategies work for every law firm. For that reason, it is in your firm’s best interest to measure the success of marketing endeavors through different metrics. This can help you drop what’s not working and carry on with what’s helping you achieve your organizational goals.
But what types of marketing programs are relevant to law firms, and how can they measure their success? Keep scrolling, and you’ll find out!
What Types of Marketing Programs are Relevant to Law Firms?
Below are the top six marketing strategies and tools that every law firm needs:
An Optimized Website
A website is arguably the most vital tool, as it’s the hub of all law firm marketing activities. Gone are the days when potential clients would call customer service or physically visit your reception to learn more about your firm. Today, they simply search for your website to see if you offer the service they’re seeking and gauge whether you’re up to the task before deciding to call or visit your office. So, if you wish to create an irresistible first impression to your prospects, you better get a fully optimized website and fill it with relevant content.
Leverage SEO
SEO or search engine optimization works for most law firms, and you should consider leveraging it if you aren’t already. Lately, most people have been turning to search engines like Google and Bing to find an attorney, with the phrase – lawyer near me – being one of the most searched as per Google Trends. SEO is all about increasing your search engine visibility by ensuring that your website
- is fully optimized for easy scrolling and indexing,
- has top-quality content,
- gets quality backlinks,
- is accessible both via mobile and PC, and
- aligns its content with the topics and keywords that people are searching for the most.
Focus on Branding
Your brand is what defines and tells your law firm apart from the rest. And YES, it goes way beyond just the logo. Whereas a logo is a vital part of branding, your law firm shouldn’t be solely centered around it. You want to think of how a layperson would associate with or regard your law firm. Is it by reliability, performance, responsiveness, versatility, niche-specific, value for money, etc.? The bottom line is, you want your clients and prospects to have a certain mental view of your firm, and this should be vivid in your logos, websites, business cards, ads, etc.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads
Google Ads PPC promotion will get your phones buzzing faster than other forms of digital marketing like social media, SEO, content, mobile, and more. That’s because PPC works immediately, i.e., you bid on keywords and only pay when people click on them. For instance, when someone types, “I need a divorce lawyer,” they’ll see your ad in one of the ad positions depending on your bidding success.
Clear-Cut and Appropriate Calls-to-Action
Suppose someone reads your website content or comes across your ads on the radio, papers, TV, social media, etc., and they want to get in touch with you, is there a clear-cut way of doing so? If not, you need to improve on that. Inserting CTA buttons like “call us now,” “contact us today,” “subscribe to our newsletter,” etc., is a good start. On top of that, you want to attach phone numbers and contact forms on every page for a quick reach-out. Finally, don’t forget to make the CTA buttons different from the rest of the texts, both in size and color.
How can Law Firms Measure the Success of Their Marketing Efforts?
There’s nothing more fulfilling than knowing that your marketing metrics work for your law firm is as expected. You’ll know your promotional efforts are successful if your bounce rates reduce, the visit to lead ratio increases (you convert more leads to clients), your email click rates increase, you start getting more social media traffic, experience newsletter growth, and CTA performance improves.
That being said, here’s how to measure the success of your law firm’s marketing efforts:
Cost Per Client Acquisition
How much have you spent on activities aimed at attracting new clients (marketing), and how many clients have you gotten from your efforts? Getting that ratio defines client acquisition cost, and you know you’re successful if you get a positive result. When calculating, you should focus on the value each client brings to your firm versus the amount you spent to get that client. For instance, if you spent $1000 to get a client who earns you $10,000, you’re on the right track. But if you paid the same amount but the client you got only brings $500 in revenue, you should re-evaluate your marketing strategies.
Projects Profitability
Let’s face it; a law firm, like any other business, is in the business of making money. And if you’re consistently investing in marketing and productivity solutions, but the financial reports don’t reflect profitability, then something’s wrong. However, it’s worth noting that achieving profitability in a law firm goes beyond just marketing. It is also a result of accurate time tracking and automation of processes like billing and calendaring using a top-quality productivity tool like LawBillity.
Analytics and Reports
There are several proven tactics for analyzing and getting quality reports on your marketing endeavors, even without spending a coin. You can start by asking clients how they heard about your law firm. Although this is a shallow and anecdotal method that may not provide reliable results as to whether your marketing strategy is working, it’s an excellent start because, after all, your clients have no reason to lie to you. Perhaps the best way to analyze and get quality reports on your performance is by implementing website tracking. You can leverage Google Analytics, an excellent analytical tool, which is available in a free version. This tool can:
- Give you valuable insights on traffic to your website
- Provide advanced, customizable, and funnel reporting
- Provide reports on the sites people visited before coming to your website
- Automatically find your target audience by tracking user behavior
- Provide marketing analytics to help you improve your online advertising efforts
Client Satisfaction Surveys
Performing client satisfaction surveys is another ingenious way of measuring if your law firm’s marketing endeavors are spot on and even getting more valuable ideas. As the Canadian Bar Association puts it, “it’s not the quality of the services you provide that matters most; it’s your clients’ perception of the quality of your services.” The bottom line is, if your existing clients don’t find your services top-notch, the chances are that the new clients you’re trying to acquire through marketing will feel the same way. So, you should do everything in your power to please the current clients first.
Average Time of Conversion
Our final method for measuring the success of your law firm’s marketing efforts is by determining how long it takes to convert one lead into an actual paying client. Although it may seem like a daunting task, tracking the average time of conversion accurately shows whether your promotional processes are effective or ineffective. And after closing a new client, you can use LawBillity to automate the time tracking process to ensure that all billable seconds are recorded from any device, anywhere.
Over to You!
Hopefully, this comprehensive post was insightful, and it’ll help you approach marketing from a different viewpoint. Remember, it all boils down to leveraging analytical tools for valuable reports, calculating client acquisition costs, gauging project profitability, conducting client satisfaction surveys, and measuring the average time of conversion.
See how our legal time management and billing software, LawBillity, can transform your law firm with a free 14-day no-obligation trial today!
