After analyzing legal marketing strategies with hundreds of lawyers and law firms of every size, Tanner has discovered that there is a “secret sauce” for effective digital advertising within the legal industry. A secret sauce that has a simple ingredient.
The secret sauce for effective legal marketing is accountability.
In this post, Tanner will first address the central problem facing lawyers and their marketing budgets as they seek to grow their firm online.
Then he’ll explain the importance of developing a plan, and centering your legal marketing strategy on the concept of accountability.
And finally, he’ll walk through Consultwebs’ new Client Connect Dashboard and offer a few tasty suggestions on how you can use these legal marketing tips in your law firm. Take it away Tanner…
The Problem with Digital Advertising and Marketing for Law Firms:
“Spending a ton of money on digital marketing for your law firm with no transparency on allocation and no understanding of return or value.”
We have a saying around here when it comes to marketing for law firms: “everything you do is marketing.”
Whether it’s the tone of your receptionist, your tone in a demand letter, or a handshake at a seminar, every interaction a lawyer has in the public marketplace is essentially marketing (at a minimum, one could argue that they each influence marketing).
So, marketing for lawyers is already a costly affair with a confusing ROI.
Getting the word out about your practice into your community takes man hours, printing costs, overhead, and gas in the tank to drive to a networking event. Now add in digital advertising investments like web design, SEO, PPC, all in one of the most expensive industry verticals and you have a recipe for investor anxiety. And, rightfully so.
With digital marketing, lawyers are paying for the ingredients to an amazing feast, but they are struggling to read the menu. When it’s plated up, it’s often difficult to recognize where all the money went and what value was earned.
How do legal marketers connect all of the costs of digital advertising going out the door with all of the cases coming in?
The Plan:
After speaking with lawyers across the country, I came to realize that every law firm requires a unique marketing strategy to grow their desired caseload, but no system, no matter how custom-tailored or well-funded, would ever properly function or be complete without accountability.
If lawyers and legal marketers can connect their marketing activities to measurable results aimed at achieving concrete business goals, they can understand where their dollars are being used and can verify they’re getting the best return.
And so, for a legal marketing agency to deliver the best value and prove ROI, accountability needs to be at the core of their strategy.
The Resolution:
Closing the loop on your marketing activities to more clearly understand which marketing campaign drives what result is imperative.
At Consultwebs, we help our clients establish cost-per-case metrics and other important benchmarks that are connected to firm goals. Each Consultwebs client has a dedicated account manager, keeping them up-to-date with campaigns, ensuring objectives and campaigns are focused.
We work with our clients to create custom marketing strategies and help them establish baselines and trackability on calls and clicks. Now, with accountability at the heart of our service, we are connecting all of this in a central location with our new Client Connect Dashboard.
Consultwebs Client Connect Dashboard Walk-Through:
Digital advertising for a law firm can be costly, complex, and confusing. But with our new dashboard, we’re trying to help our clients see their marketing investments at work and better communicate the ongoing impact on their bottom lines.
With tracking software in place at the intake level, along with knowledge of the firm’s sales pipeline that reaches into case sign-ups, our dashboard can show legal marketers what is happening with the digital advertising and how it’s affecting their business.
Let’s walk through a demo version.
The home page is where you can receive an overview of traffic and lead activity for the previous month, as well as a yearlong trend line for any of the websites or URLs you choose to monitor.
You can also view any upcoming projects or sites that are being built.
You can see the different types of leads that are coming in (chat, call, contact form fill) on the leads page and move the dates around to spot weekly or monthly trends. Among many benefits this data provides, it can guide staffing management decisions for future intake, identify lead to client sign-up ratios and other important health-check metrics that offer you peace of mind each week.
Scrolling down, lead review allows you to score calls and get granular with your lead-tracking. With a strong connection to the firm’s pipeline, this dashboard can generate reports that track both sales and marketing in a way that, once again, brings accountability to the table.
If your firm is running any paid digital advertising or PPC, you can monitor all of the activity on the Google Ads/PPC page. You can view the impressions, the click-through rates, the costs, and, most importantly, conversions at a glance. And if you need to export the whole enchilada to PDF, it’s just a click away.
Wrap-up
At Consultwebs, we focus on the practice of marketing your law firm so you can focus on the practice of law.
Digital advertising, SEO, content, social media – these can be important and even critical to your firm’s success. But your advisory work, the legal advocacy work you do every day on behalf of your clients, that is what powers the firm. Lawyers deserve a law firm marketing agency that understands this and helps them bring accountability to their investments.
Whether you choose to hire Consultwebs, hire another marketing agency, or go it alone, the choice is clear: the secret sauce to your law firm’s marketing strategies will always be accountability. Making sure all of your advertising initiatives are backed up by measurements you can trust and guidelines you understand is essential to success.
About the Author
He also has been featured numerous times in Lawyers Weekly newspapers as well as Attorney at Law Magazine. Tanner is regular contributor to the Consultwebs online legal marketing blog. A native of Waynesville, North Carolina, Tanner earned a degree in Business Management (with a minor in Economics) from Berea College in 2008.
He recently moved back to the mountains of North Carolina with his wife, daughter and son and enjoys camping, hiking, fishing, hunting, golfing and playing “any other competitive sport available” in his free time.
Learn more about Tanner Jones here.
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