As a digital marketing company for law firms, we’ve worked with small, medium and big budgets and can tell you from experience that there is a law firm marketing budget that’s just right for accomplishing your objectives, and it’s important that you know it. Spend too little and you won’t get the results you want. Spend too much and you won’t be able to handle the caseload, which will result in overworked employees, poor performance, and bad reviews.
So, what is the right budget for you? It depends on your goals and is actually a percentage of your target gross revenue. That’s why you always start planning with your goals. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all budget. Law firms typically spend a percentage of their target gross revenue. Your law firm’s budget is also dependent on your company goals. That’s why we always start by asking what our client’s business objectives are. In this blog, we provide budgetary guidelines as well as tips on how to utilize your marketing spend.
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What Are the Average Marketing Budgets for Law Firms?
Most digital marketers operating in the legal industry recommend spending between 2-18% of your firm’s gross revenue on marketing. Of that, 65% should be allocated to online marketing, which usually falls into three areas: marketing strategy management, media creation, and Martech (marketing technology) subscriptions.
Implement these practical legal marketing statistics to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing budget.
A Typical Marketing Budget
Let’s assume up until now you’ve spent zero on law firm marketing strategies. So, how much do you have to invest during 2024 to achieve the results you’re looking for?
According to the American Lawyer, large-sized law firms spend anywhere between 2-5% and smaller law firms between 5-10% of their gross revenue. In major metropolitan areas where competition is fierce, expenditure ranges between $2,500 to $3,000 per month. Smaller law firms tend to spend more to capture their share of the market, especially if they’re not as established as legacy firms. And then there’s also practice area to consider. For example, personal injury law is the most expensive type of law to market, while B2C is pricier than B2B.
Discover the secrets to effective SEO for personal injury lawyers and attract more clients.
If we use a hypothetical example and say your firm earns $500,000. So, you set aside between 7% to 10% for law firm marketing costs. That’s roughly a $35,000 to $50,000 marketing budget for the year. We know it sounds like a lot, but high-performance marketing campaigns are an investment. If you could put $50,000 in a bank and get $500,000 at the end of the year, you’d do it, right?
The only thing preventing you from spending marketing dollars is not knowing whether you will really get a high return on investment, and that’s a valid concern. To ensure you make the best of your marketing budget, we recommend that you work with a high-performance, experienced Chicago digital marketing agency. When interviewing potential digital marketing agencies, use this list of questions.
How Should Law Firms Budget for Digital Marketing?
When determining law firm marketing costs, you need to consider several factors:
- Law firm age: Younger firms typically have higher marketing budgets.
- Areas of practice: B2B and B2C have different needs and sales funnels.
- Firm location: Competitors in the same location will increase your budget spend.
- Current marketing context: Law firms that have no or a very limited online presence will need to spend more.
- Marketing strategy: The level of marketing aggressiveness needed to achieve the results you’re after.
- Competitors’ spend: Occasionally, bigger law firms can push up marketing investment for all firms.
Marketing budgets for law firms differ according to business goals. For example, are you trying to increase client acquisition or advertise a particular service?
An established firm might focus on running retention campaigns through email marketing, while criminal defense attorneys might want a campaign that brings in a steady flow of leads over a long period of time. Therefore, they will need to invest in website development, SEO, and content marketing.
As you can see, it’s highly personalized, so much so that it’s best to determine business goals first before attempting any marketing.
Discover the secrets to successful law firm marketing.
Delivering Business Results: Our Digital Marketing Case Studies
How Much Should a Firm Spend on the Marketing Funnel
Knowledge of the marketing funnel is also useful to help determine marketing spend. There are roughly three stages a lead goes through before becoming a paying client; awareness, consideration, and conversion.
- Awareness: At this stage, the goal is to develop content that attracts leads and encourages them to become potential customers. You probably want to set aside 10% of your online budget for this type of top-of-mind promotion that involves social media advertising and display ads.
- Consideration: This is where your marketing content plays a crucial role in positioning your law firm as a viable option for your target audience. Here, you should spend 20% -50% of your budget on SEO and targeted PPC ads to increase website traffic.
- Conversion: All your marketing efforts should aim to get as many leads as possible to this stage, where you establish your law firm is the only choice for them. This takes the most budget, between 40%-70% and involves retargeting ads, SEM ads and high-intent PPC.
As you travel down the funnel towards more conversions, you’ll spend more money on tried-and-test techniques. However, you should always have some leeway for experimentation. Trying new campaigns and approaches can lead to business development.
Optimize your marketing funnel for better client acquisition.
Which Social Media Channels Should I Invest in?
The research shows Facebook continues to dominate the social networking market. While it is slowly declining in use, this channel remains a valuable source for marketers.
Although there is no direct investment evaluation for this study, some notable trends among social media platforms indicate a focus should primarily be given to law firm advertising on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
According to The National Law Review, a realistic budget for law firm advertising on social media can range from $10,000 to $50,000 per month depending on your practice area. This is likely with an incredibly aggressive marketing strategy.
Social media marketing can help you build an online presence and generate leads that convert into paying clients. When using social media, it’s important to gear your messaging to your target audience. If you stay consistent, use the right keywords, monitor your campaigns, and tweak tactics as you go along, you’ll be on the right track to success.
Again, your actual budget depends on your goals and is actually a percentage of your target gross revenue. That’s why you always start planning with your goals.
Harness the power of legal social media for your law firm’s marketing.
How Much Do Law Firms Spend on SEO?
While social media marketing is valuable to build brand awareness and establish your law firm’s credibility, it can’t replace the bedrock of digital marketing; search engine optimization (SEO).
This costs anywhere between $2,500 and $15,000 per month. However, law firms with fewer competitive areas of practice might pay less than $2,000.
Because SEO is a long-term strategy, it’s generally advised to have a contract with an SEO agency for a few months. Just be sure to do your homework and select a reputable legal marketing agency that has a robust track record of delivering results.
SEO services generally consist of on-page, off-page, technical and local SEO, as well as website development.
The exact services your legal firm needs depends on the standards of your current marketing and goals like:
- Do you want to launch a PPC campaign to provide short-term results while you wait for your organic strategy to pay off?
- Do you need to develop an SEO-friendly law firm website first?
- Do you want to target multiple locations with local SEO?
At Comrade, we’re big advocates of SEO services for lawyers, and believe it’s one of the best marketing investments you can make.
Elevate your law firm’s online presence with Comrade Digital Marketing Agency. Schedule a free consultation.
The more SEO-friendly your website and marketing efforts are, the higher your firm will rank on Google. The higher you rank, the more traffic you’ll receive, which means more leads and profits.
Drive more organic traffic to your website through SEO for lawyers.
How Much Do Firms Spend on Advertising?
A small caveat: There is a difference between marketing and advertising.
The American Marketing Association offers the following definition:
“In basic terms, marketing is the process of identifying customer needs and determining how best to meet those needs. In contrast, advertising is the exercise of promoting a company and its products or services through paid channels. In other words, advertising is a component of marketing.”
In this context, we might consider pay-per-click campaigns as advertising. Unfortunately, there is no magic dollar amount. Pay-per-click can be expensive, however, if you pay $100 for a click but make $4,000 off one client, then it’s worth it.
A ballpark figure for pay-per-click ranges from $1,000 to $3,000 and more per month on ads.
Discover how PPC for lawyers can generate leads and increase conversions for law firms.
The Importance of Smart Marketing Goals
At Comrade, we follow a SMART marketing framework that stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. The mistake most law firms make is setting goals that aren’t measurable. For example, an attorney will tell us they want to improve their revenue and leads. While these ambitions are great, they don’t help because they don’t provide any metrics to work with or quantify growth.
Instead, it’s much more useful if they tell us they want to improve revenue by 20% and leads by 30% within six months. This gives us a time frame and clear KPIs to work towards. Implementing SMART goals creates successful marketing campaigns and ensures your attorney marketing budget is well spent.
It’s also a good idea to break up your goals into quarterly KPIs. This way, you can track how close or far you are from hitting your long-term objectives. More importantly, you can make adjustments to your campaigns and marketing budgets if need be.
Set clear objectives for law firm website to achieve success for your legal practice.
How to Allocate Your Law Firm Marketing Budget
Another aspect to consider when developing your law firm’s marketing budget is retention vs. acquisition marketing.
- Retention marketing. This reminds your former clients about your services. At some point, they may need you again, and you want to be the first firm they call. As a rule of thumb, it costs seven times more to get a new client than to retain an existing one. So, for every $7 you spend on acquiring new clients, spend $1 on retention.
- Acquisition marketing. Your law firm budget for new clients should be distributed among SEO, PPC, content marketing, online directories and traditional advertising.
With that in mind, 70% of your content marketing budget should support brand building and attract target customers to your website, while 20% should be allocated for premier content that’s more costly but has a higher chance of expanding your client base, like high quality video content.
The key is to consider all factors and create a bespoke law firm budget, rather than using an arbitrary figure you found on Google.
The creation of a budget for your legal marketing is the start of your law firm’s marketing journey, and it deserves time and attention. If you follow this legal marketing budget guide, you are far more likely to succeed in growing your business and winning more customers.
Maximize your law firm’s profit with actionable tips and techniques.
Minimum Marketing Budget for Lawyers
To reiterate, your attorney marketing budget is a percentage of your targeted growth. However, there is an exception to this rule.
Let’s say you want to increase your revenue by $100,000. This doesn’t mean you’ll achieve that goal with a $7,000 yearly marketing budget. The legal industry is highly competitive. If you invest too little, you won’t achieve the visibility needed to turn a profit. That’s why most law firms spend far more on marketing on average in comparison to other industries. So, what’s the absolute minimum you should spend on digital marketing to achieve active growth?
Based on our experience with digital advertising, we’d recommend no less than $2,500 to $3,000 per month in a major metro area. If you’re absolutely new to digital marketing, you’ll want to ensure your website is up to scratch and SEO-friendly. Once. your website is up and running, then you can think about digital marketing, and allocate a monthly budget to increase leads. Be wary of marketing agencies that only charge $500 per month. This is unrealistic and won’t produce the results you want. Like all business investments, marketing does cost, but it delivers a high ROI.
Learn how to calculate and optimize your marketing ROI for law firms as a lawyer.
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Comrade is an internet marketing company that specializes in website design and digital marketing for lawyers. Read more about our content marketing service for law firms.
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[showhide more_text=”–Show Video Transcript –” less_text=”–Hide–“]Natalie: Hi everyone.
Sasha: Hey, this is Sasha Berson.
Natalie: My name is Natalie and today the question that we received … we usually get this question often. How much should I spend on marketing, and why the budget that you are suggesting is the appropriate budget for me?
Sasha: Alright, and this is what from industry?
Natalie: This is legal.
Sasha: Alright, so for an attorney, how much money as a percentage of total revenue should be spent on marketing? There are a couple of things we really need to think about. Number one is you should spend an adequate amount that will get you to the objectives that you have. So for example, right now, as we’re recording this, this is the end of 2018. And I’m going to use hypotheticals, right? So, let’s say that your firm generates one million dollars in gross revenue by the end of 2018 and your goal for 2019 is to up it to 1.5 million dollars. How much should you invest in growth?
Sasha: Let’s say that today, you do zero marketing. And now you are aiming to add another $500,000.00 in revenue, what should you invest to get there? It’s fairly simple. When you think about marketing, it’s an investment. If it works right, it delivers a result. For legal clients, we usually propose to spend anywhere between 7 and 10% or invest 7 to 10% into future growth. So, if you’re looking to grow by $500,000.00, you should be aiming to spend anywhere between $35,000.00 to $50,000.00 a year to get that growth.
Sasha: Now, why is that amount? Should you spend too little, you will usually not get the result that you need. Should you spend too much, you may actually overshoot, and actually bring in more business than your capacity can sustain. And growing uncontrollably fast could be incredibly detrimental to the business because now you will have issues with turnover because your employees will be overburdened … clients that are underserved, so they will be posting bad reviews on Ava or Yelp or Google, you obviously do not want that.
Sasha: So you want to be just right. Now how do you allocate this budget? There are actually a couple of things that you always need to think about when you think about your marketing budget. Number one, you want to allocate some portion of the budget, and that portion is usually small, much, much smaller than the rest of it toward reminding your former clients about your existence. Why does that matter? It’s because, at some point, they will probably have some referrals for you. And if they don’t remember your name, your phone number, your firm’s name, guess what, chances are they will not know how to refer you.
Natalie: Like yesterday, we spoke to a prospective client and they were saying that they were getting a lot of their new cases from previous clients, clients that worked with them in the past, but they moved to another role or a different company. So this always good to remind them of your existence.
Sasha: Absolutely, you want to remind them. And here’s how you break your budget into two parts. One is to communicate with former clients and referral sources, and another much larger chunk, to attract new clients. Historically speaking, statistically we know that it is seven times less expensive to retain an existing client than it is to attract a new one. So your ratio should be about seven to one. So for every seven bucks that you spend attracting new clients, spend a dollar on maintaining the relationship with existing clients.
Sasha: Now, when I started off, I started saying that you should be spending 7 and 10% of future revenue. Let’s focus on the round number, and say it’s 10%. And a lot of attorneys will say, “$50,000.00 to invest to get new business is a lot of money.” But this is a wrong way of thinking. This is an investment. So, if you could put money in a bank, if you could put $50,000.00 in a bank, and at the year’s end, or whatever a reasonable timeline is, you could pull out $500,00.00, would you invest that money? Without a doubt.
Sasha: It is the same thing with high-performance marketing. And the focus should be on high-performance marketing because there are a lot of bad players in the marketing industry that will do marketing but will not deliver results. And this is where you also have to apply logic. Am I spending enough, to get enough results? There are some players that will charge 500 bucks a month and say they will do digital marketing for you. How much talent can you actually buy for 500 dollars a month? Probably not much, probably none at all, because it’s just too little of a spend.
Sasha: If you are considering substantially growing, you should be investing a lot more because this is when you can get serious firepower. And the way I think about bringing on vendors or employees, I always want the best. And the best, usually initially cost a lot, but at the end of the day, they’re always free because they deliver much better results, much better outcomes, a much higher return than what you put into them. Whereas mediocre people, mediocre vendors, usually cost you a lot more because there is the money that you pay them and then there is the opportunity cost that comes on top of that. So if you spend 500 bucks a month on new marketing, and it runs you $6,000.00 a year, and you get no new clients or you get a couple new clients, that $6,000.00 is a lot more expensive than $50,000.00, if for the $50,000.00 you get one hundred new clients. So, there is that opportunity cost.
Sasha: So, always invest right. Always ask a marketing agency that you’re about to hire the right questions. And I know there is another video that we shot about the questions that need to be asked of a marketing agency. So, we’ll refer to that in the link below.
Natalie: So what’s interesting, when we need to stress out, when you come to an agency or you’re thinking that you’re thinking that you need to spend few thousand, few hundred dollars on marketing, and sometimes we do get clients who come and say, “Okay, I am ready to spend $2,000.00 a month. Let’s go and let’s do some marketing.”, which is not the right way of thinking about this right?
Sasha: Right.
Natalie: You always need to tie in the goal, what are you trying to accomplish and how many results are you going to get out of this $2,000.00, $3,000.00?
Sasha: Yes, one hundred percent. And this is a common theme. Yesterday we had a discovery workshop with a midsize law firm, shouldn’t call them midsize, they’re 16 employees all in all. Eight of whom are attorneys. And they’ve been in business for a very, very long time. And throughout the discovery process, what we understood about them is they’re in the business of practicing law and they’re running their business as a law practice, rather than a business. And the attorneys that are on staff there have been practicing law for 30 years, and they’re incredibly good. They solve incredibly complex business challenges. And they could have grown a lot larger and retired with a lot more money, except that they won’t, for the reason that they have always approached their business as a law practice, rather than a business.
Natalie: Explain a little bit what you mean.
Sasha: So they never focused on running the business as a business. So they always focused on the thing that they have done for the clients, and they have done incredibly well.
Natalie: And they love doing it.
Sasha: And they love doing it. But they don’t love the outcome because now the founders are getting somewhat close to retirement age, and now they’re thinking, “Where is this thing going to take us in the next five years?” They didn’t have this conversation with us, but I know that if I were in their shoes, I would probably think, “Do I have enough money saved up for a comfortable retirement or not?”
Sasha: Because they have always focused on doing the thing that they did. So I asked them, “Well, what is your revenue today, and where do you hope to be next year and five years from now?” And they couldn’t answer that question because they don’t think about their law firm in terms of business, but rather as law practice. So, I always think about it in terms of business. Where are you today, where do you need to be a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now? And how to formulaically get you there, because marketing and sales are very, very formulaic. And by the way, if you hate the word sales, and you probably do, always replace it with the word help, because sales are nothing, but marketing brings you a prospect and you talk to them and answer their questions. And you ask them questions, and they answer your questions. And in the spectrum of that conversation, you learn if you’re a good fit for them, and they learn if they’re a good fit for you.
Sasha: And this is the sales process in a nutshell. It’s just two parties deciding on whether they’re right for each other. That’s it, there is no BS that needs to be in that process. You don’t have to sell anyone, to hype up anything. You’re just communicating so both parties can decide whether this is a good fit.
Sasha: So, running a law firm as a business is very different than running a law firm as a practice. And I think we should shoot a different video about that, because this is a much longer conversation, right?
Natalie: Agree. So to finalize, how much should I spend on marketing? What would be your short answer?
Sasha: So, a short answer is you’re always aiming 6-7% of the growth that you’re looking to achieve, with one huge caveat. If the growth you’re looking to achieve is $100,000.00 and you think that you could get away with $7,000.00-$10,000.00 a year, that is probably not going to work because there is such a thing as simply investing too little. You do need to have certain firepower to get certain results. If you invest a minimal amount of effort or a minimal amount of money, it’s simply not going to work. What is that threshold? I can’t tell you scientifically, but if you’re not spending at least $2,500.00-$3,000.00 a month, depending on where you’re located in the country, how competitive your market is, there are always competitors that are going to simply outspend you, and you’re not going to show up where you need to show up. Which for most of you is going to be Google, and we talked about it extensively in a few episodes before. And if you do not show up, you really don’t need to spend the money, because the magic is not going to happen for you.
Sasha: And by the way, the same thing applies to most other businesses. This is not just for law firms. You need to make sure that you’re investing on par or better than some of your competitors to get the business that you need because it’s a very, very competitive game. And if you’re underspending, your competitors are simply going to beat you day after day after day after day. And then you’re left with the crumbs that they’re going to come off their table. And you don’t want that.
Natalie: And if you’d like to know how much your competitors are spending, you can always just ask us, and we’ll be happy to show you. We do have a lot of tools that we can check.
Sasha: Yes, that’s absolutely true. So analytics are there to tell us that Firm A, Firm B, and Firm C spend x, y, and z, and here’s how they do it, and here’s where they are. And you’ll know your more successful competitors and we can tell you what it is they do and how to beat them at their own game. So, it’s very sophisticated. I think this should be a wrap, it’s taken a little while.
Natalie: Yes, thanks.
Sasha: Bye, thanks for watching. [/showhide]
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