Is your firm on track to hit its 2022 revenue goals?
If not, you certainly aren’t alone. We are almost halfway through the year, you should be beyond the halfway point towards meeting your goals, as fewer clients sign over the summer months. Right now is a great time to look back at the successes and failures of your marketing strategy, and aggressively adjust accordingly. It’s not too late to make a change and ensure you’re getting the most out of your law firm’s marketing spend if you aren’t already.
In this blog, we’ll talk about how you can go about tracking your law firm marketing ROI to better understand the effectiveness of your campaigns and determine areas of improvement.
Track Time
A lot of lawyers don’t think that going to lunch or playing golf is business development or marketing, but if the purpose of these activities is to acquire new business, they should be considered marketing efforts. As such, you should be tracking your time for all intentional marketing activities, whether that's in the realm of digital marketing, or on the golf course. You should have general categories in place (such as phone calls, face-to-face, email, etc.) that make it easy to track how your time is being spent across channels.
Once you have a time tracking system in place, you can begin assessing the productivity of each of your marketing efforts based on the time spent generating each lead. For example, if you notice that you have been spending 5 hours a week for the past 6 weeks posting on social media, and these efforts have failed to produce any leads, it’s likely wise that you start spending that time elsewhere.
Firms tend to focus on media costs (such as Google advertising budgets) when calculating marketing ROI, forgetting about the labor costs associated with marketing and neglecting to factor those hours into the ROI formula. If you’re spending hours on end on marketing, that’s hundreds or thousands of dollars that should be accounted for.
Leverage Google Analytics
Has your firm set up any funnels in Google Analytics? How often are you analyzing that data? You can quite easily set up intuitive funnels in Google Analytics that tell you what the journey of your website visitors’ looks like. You can set what your ideal funnel looks like (ie; what actions someone should take when they reach your website) and see how that compares to what people are actually doing.
You can also use Google Analytics to conduct page-specific analysis such as determining which pages people are flocking to on your site, and what their behavior looks like. Do they immediately leave the site after seeing a certain page, or do they explore further? All of this information can help you determine if your marketing initiatives are having the impact you want, and if your investment is paying dividends. Regardless of what your goal is, whether that be anything from increasing your site traffic to bringing in a higher volume of qualified leads, you can leverage Google Analytics to observe the behavior of your website visitors and evaluate the return you’re getting on your marketing efforts.
Understand Your Goals & How To Get There
In order to properly track your law firm marketing ROI, it is critical that you understand what your firm’s financial goals look like as it relates to your marketing program. The key metric that we recommend using is customer acquisition cost, commonly referred to as “CAC.” In short, CAC boils down to what you can afford to pay for a new client in order for your marketing efforts to be financially viable. As a partner, you should be aware of what your target CAC is, and what your sales funnel looks like. Once you have a target number in mind, you can assess the effectiveness of your marketing efforts against that.
Another huge component of tracking law firm marketing ROI is tracking pipeline over ad spend. Pipeline is the amount of potential revenue associated with the opportunities and deals in your CRM. Say you play a round of golf with a potential client, and you discuss a certain price point or array of services you can offer, and there’s legitimate interest on behalf of that potential client. That would be considered an opportunity, with an associated pipeline value. Healthy marketing programs achieve 15X pipeline over ad spend, thereby demonstrating a productive demand funnel.
* * *
Is your firm struggling to get the most out of its marketing efforts? If so, you’re far from alone. FullFunnel can help your firm build its reputation and win new business with customized marketing plans. Request a free consultation today to learn how FullFunnel can help your firm accomplish its marketing goals.
