Does Your Law Firm Measure the ROI of Marketing?
If your answer was “no” you should give it some serious thought.
More and more law firms are harnessing the power of return on investment (ROI) measurements. In years past, when a law firm chose to advertise, whether on the radio, on television or in print, they didn’t have any scientific measurement to determine how well their advertising campaign performed. If new clients started rolling in by the bunch, then firms would know that their advertising was working for them. The only problem was in trying to determine which form of advertising was most effective? Were clients coming in because of the television advertising, the radio spots, or the printed mailers?
In the past, one of the most common techniques used by law firms to try to measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns was to include a “how did you hear about us” question in the client’s initial paperwork. For a variety of reasons, some clients simply didn’t fill this portion out, or they checked any box because they didn’t think that it would really matter. This method of measurement was unreliable to say the least.
A set of new technologies is allowing law firms to measure which advertising elements produce the largest pool of potential clients. This process is called “measuring ROI” or “measuring return on investment”.
There are a variety of ways for small law firms and solo practices to measure their return on marketing investment dollars, in this article I’ll explain the most common, the easiest to use, and the least expensive measurement tools.
Landing Pages
One of the most cost effective ways for law firms to measures their advertising ROIs is to use a unique landing page. There are two basic ways to do this. You can create a unique page on your law firm’s website or you can use a separate domain that is routed to a landing page on your website. Then you use advertising to drive potential clients there. You do this by including the web address for that page in your marketing materials. Every time that someone goes to one of those pages, you’ll know that they got there from the advertisement you sent out.
For example, if the web address for your law firm is http://www.harrisonandjones.com, then a unique landing page could be http://www.harrisonandjones/now.com or rerouted domain would be http://www.hireharrisonandjones.com. You can and should use a different address for each marketing campaign and for each advertising outlet. For example, you might do two different mailings at the same time, but they each might focus on different aspects of your law firm. If you use different web pages for each mailing, then you’ll know which one was the most successful.
Similarly, if your law firm is doing a multi-faceted advertising campaign that utilizes print, radio, and even television, then you can use a different landing page in each advertising outlet to determine which one was the most effective. Surely your law firm can’t sustain advertising in all of these different venues forever. Knowing which advertising outlet works the best will allow you to focus your law firm’s dollars on the most effective advertising strategy. The bottom line is that unique landing pages save both time and money.
Web Analytics
Once you get potential clients to your law firm’s website, you need to know what they’re doing when they get there. This information will help you to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of your law firm’s website and the effectiveness of your ad campaign.
For example, if you get a high number of people coming to your landing page, but very few go to the contact us page, and you don’t see an increase in clients, then you’ve gained some valuable information. A few things might be going on. One option is that the marketing piece is spot on, but your law firm’s website is not strong enough. It may not be designed in a way that makes it easy to navigate or it may simply not look professional enough for the clients you’d like to land.
This leads to another possibility. If a lot of people are coming to your law firm’s site, but no one is trying to figure out how to contact you or where your office is located, then your original advertisement may have targeted the wrong demographic.
Web analytics programs allow you to dissect and to better understand exactly what potential clients are doing when they visit your website. More than just learning about which pages they visited, you’ll be shown patterns that will help you to make strategic decisions about your law firm’s website and its marketing campaign. Google offers a comprehensive web analytics software that is free, it’s called Google Analytics.
Proxy Phone Number
Proxy phone numbers work a lot like landing pages and they can be integrated into any existing web analytics program. Basically, you get a proxy phone number from a phone company and then you list it in your law firm’s marketing materials. Whenever someone calls that number, the phone company places a browser visit on your firm’s landing web page. In this case, the landing page is “hidden”. It is used only for this purpose.
The great thing about using proxy phone numbers and unique landing pages or domains, is that one free web analytics package can analyze and break down all of the information for your firm. You can do one or several different types of tracking and then have all the information integrated into a single reporting system. Two companies offering these innovative solutions are Who’s Calling and Mongoose Metrics.
Before the development of return on investment measurement tools, law firms were in the dark about how effective their advertising campaigns really were. With simply solutions like landing pages and proxy phone numbers, law firms can know with certainty if their advertising is adding to their bottom line or just taking away from it.
Trackbacks:
The trackback URL for this entry is:
There are no trackbacks for this entry
