While many lawyers may be hesitant about online marketing due to a saturated market of over-promises, when executed effectively, it can yield great results. However, it’s crucial to be aware of ineffective strategies. To measure the success of your law firm’s marketing efforts, you need to calculate the return on investment (ROI). This metric not only quantifies the outcomes of each campaign but also promotes accountability and growth. By tracking your marketing ROI, you can discern which tactics are most profitable, allowing you to optimize your budget allocation accordingly.
How To Calculate Law Firm Marketing ROI
Digital marketing ROI is usually calculated by determining the cost to do something minus the outcomes generated as a result.
The standard formula is:
(Attributed Sales Growth—Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = ROI
However, the challenge with this formula is it assumes all sales growth directly correlates with digital marketing efforts.
If you want to account for organic sales, you might use this formula:
(Sales Growth – Organic Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = ROI
Or, you may wish to calculate ROI through customer lifetime value (CLV), which illustrates the value of each client’s relationship with your law firm. This assesses long-term ROI across the client’s lifecycle, in which case you’d use this formula:
Customer Lifetime Value = (Retention Rate) / (1+ Discount Rate / Retention Rate)
Because every law firm is different, you’ll need to consider unique overhead costs, margins, and industry factors unique to your practice areas.
Remember, ROI isn’t just about how many new clients you received. You also need to consider less tangible benefits, like how your online brand awareness and reputation have improved.
Comrade Digital Marketing Agency can help you with the above if you’re unsure how to go about it. Schedule a free consultation.
What Is a Good ROI for Law Firms
The Digital marketing experts’ rule of thumb for a good ROI is a 5:1 ratio (Making $5 for every $1 spent). Truly exceptional and rare ROI is around 10:1, whereas anything below a 2:1 ratio is not profitable.
However, sometimes costs and overhead lower than 50 percent of the sales prices can see profits on their efforts at lower ratios, but this is relatively seldom.
How to Improve Law Firm Marketing ROI
The good news is if your ROI falls below the recommended ratio, you can always improve it. The more specific your marketing law firm goals and objectives are, as well as tracking, the more accurate your data and effective your digital marketing strategy will be.
To begin, avoid making these common marketing mistakes:
Use Your Law Firm Social Media Effectively
While social media can improve your law firm’s visibility online, it is not worth pumping all your marketing dollars into it from the get-go. Rather, use it as a supplementary marketing tool.
Why? Prospective clients don’t use Facebook or Twitter to look for lawyers. The first place they turn to is Google search. So, if anything, you should be focusing on your SEO strategy to improve search engine rankings.
If you’ve already listed your law firm on lawyer directories, then you can use social media as a distribution channel for content marketing, as well as for asking clients to leave a review on various social platforms.
Discover how social media marketing for lawyers can amplify your visibility and reach.
Create an Outstanding Law Firm Website
If your website looks and functions like an online brochure (no engagement), it will attract few prospects and deliver poor performance, of no more than 1% conversion rate, if not less.
This means that, for every 100 people who visit your website, only 1 will call your office or fill out the Contact Us form.
This is a destitute performance. High-performance websites in the legal industry — like the websites for lawyers we’ve designed — convert at or above 4%. This means that for every 100 visitors, 4 four or more call the office or fill out a contact form.
Having a high-converting website is even more important if you’re investing money to bring in traffic to your website. If your law firm website is underperforming, a potential client visits your site, does not see what they expected to, and leaves, having wasted your money.
This is why so many lawyers think that “digital marketing doesn’t work.”
Explore the key elements of a successful law firm website.
Invest in Better Advertising
Speaking of investing money to bring in traffic: always do this with a law firm marketing expert. Hiring an amateur or a cheap marketing company usually leads to a huge waste of money. Why? Because, in the highly competitive world of law firm marketing, advertising correctly is a science, not children’s play.
If your ads do not match up to what people are searching for, they fail to attract as many clicks as your competitors’ ads, and Google will charge you more for every click you get.
If your ads do not lead to landing pages that have content that matches the content of the ad, which matches the search terms a potential client used, they will quickly leave the page, and you will lose money.
Lastly, the settings in Google Ads are relatively advanced. So, DIY or doing it with a cheap agency can lead to a total waste of marketing budget spend.
Drive targeted traffic and generate leads with strategic advertising for law firms.
Comrade Digital Marketing Agency can help you with the above if you’re unsure how to go about it. Schedule a free consultation.
Use Google Analytics to It’s Fullest
Google Analytics and other marketing technology have made it easier to track your client’s behavior and marketing campaign performance. Not using these tools is equivalent to gambling on your law firm’s marketing efforts and hoping for the best.
Before launching any legal marketing campaign, you should have clearly defined KPIs so that you know what to track. Many law firms make the mistake of having fancy tech but track the wrong metrics, which also doesn’t help.
A good legal marketing strategy has overall KPIs, which are achieved through numerous smaller campaigns, which also have their own KPIs. This small example illustrates why and how important it is to measure your marketing strategy.
Explore how lawyer analytics can fuel effective marketing strategies for law firms.
Results From ROI-Focused Marketing for Lawyers
So, you stopped wasting time and money on ineffective marketing, started to track your return on investment, or maybe even started working with a marketing firm that has expertise in your industry. What results should you expect?
Website that Generates Leads
As we already mentioned, a high-performance website for attorneys converts at a high rate of 4% or above. If your website converts at this rate, and every 4th prospect becomes a paying client, this means you can expect to get about one paying client for every 100 web visitors.
Knowing your average revenue per client and the cost of getting 100 people to visit your website should make it very easy to estimate what your law firm budgeting for marketing should be, as well as an expected ROI.
Having a mobile-friendly, optimized website with a fast loading speed and clear calls to action will convert prospects into clients.
Your law firm’s website is like a storefront. It should convey your firm’s ethos, and accomplishments, and convince potential clients you are the only law firm they should do business with.
Enhance user experience and drive conversions with a visually appealing and functional law firm website.
Positive marketing results in Google Analytics can be indicated by increased website traffic, high engagement metrics, a low bounce rate, a high conversion rate, and a positive ROI from marketing campaigns
Marketing That Brings In New Clients and Grows Practice
Your marketing mix includes all the different tools that an expert marketing agency would use in order to help you achieve your goals and reach your target audience.
For law firms, these include SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay per click advertising), listings on the right online directories, and more.
If your marketing plan is designed correctly and executed well, you should expect to get $8-$10 in revenue for every dollar you spend on marketing.
In order to achieve it, though, you need to use the right marketing channels. For lawyers practicing personal injury, criminal defense, family, bankruptcy, elder, trust litigation, and other consumer-focused law, Google and, to a lesser degree, YouTube are the best channels to attract prospective clients.
One of the most important questions to ask law firms is about what results you should expect from working with them and how they plan to achieve those results. They should also be able to show you some case studies without revealing the names of their clients, but take you through the process of what they did and how it worked out.
Ray Dalio, the manager of the largest hedge fund in history, says you should “trust in believable people.” This means trusting in people who can prove that they can do what they say they can do. Only when you follow this advice can you have high expectations from your digital marketing — and your expectations will be met and exceeded.
Stay ahead of the competition with actionable marketing ideas for lawyers.
Get a Better Lawyer ROI with Comrade
We know that most law firms are too busy with their current clients to focus on attracting prospective ones through legal marketing online. And that’s perfectly okay because developing marketing campaigns with high marketing ROI for law firms is what we do best!
Comrade Digital Marketing Agency specializes in website design and marketing for attorneys. Contact us today to schedule a consultation with a legal marketing expert.
Frequently Asked Questions
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