In today’s competitive legal market, you need a systematic scientific approach to your campaigns. A checkup of your early 2019 marketing should be done ASAP so you can make the most efficient changes possible to optimize the data and keep your case costs down. There is such a high level of inefficiency with how most law firms advertise that it’s a real advantage to know where you should spend your marketing dollars and more importantly – where NOT to waste your money.
Marketing Review
You want the best outcome from your marketing dollars. The first step to start with is a look at your current marketing activity to see if you have the tools in place to measure success:
- Have you set up your marketing initiatives with unique tracking features?
- Are you tracking and analyzing all responses from all your marketing weekly or in shorter time periods?
- Are you making strategic changes quickly to optimize both marketing channels and media that are delivering the best ROI?
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No More Shotgun Advertising!
If you’ve been using a “shotgun” approach to marketing by advertising everywhere or have been using Gross Rating Points to hit a market, there’s a very good chance that half of your ads are running at too high on the inefficiency scale (hitting wrong audience and no response). This can result in higher costs per case and makes competing in your local market even tougher. The old adage “you don’t know what you don’t know” is very appropriate at this point. And, not knowing is too expensive!
Law firms have so many choices to place their advertising, it’s overwhelming. The big question in a perfect scenario is what is the right amount to spend, and which marketing channels would result in the highest ROI possible? This is the million-dollar question that can only be answered by turning your marketing into a science; measuring will help determine the answer (Moneyball your marketing.)
The TAO of Marketing. Track. Analyse. Optimize. – I cannot say it enough!
Once you have data, how are you using it? Can you quickly switch your strategy to get rid of what’s not bringing you results and scale what’s bringing you phone calls or, better yet, qualified leads?
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3 Tools You Need in Your Bag of Tricks
Successful marketing in 2019 starts with a system to measure your marketing outcomes, analyze those metrics, and a way to use that information. With Response Driven Marketing, we refer to those activities as Tracking, Analyzing, and Optimization. You must track your campaign data weekly to determine what works. Being consistent is crucial. If you’re only looking at your data monthly, you can’t react quick enough to make changes while there is still time.
Once you have the right data, what’s the next step? Analyze your data and adjust your marketing. You need to have the agility to shift your focus quickly, to cut what isn’t working and expand on approaches that get results. All that may seem like a tall order, especially when you’re busy practicing law. How can you make this happen?
Optimization – Make Sense of This Great Data
Whether you’re running a single event or mass tort campaign, local marketing or national, your next step is Optimization. You need to apply that data to your marketing plan. To make sure you’re getting the lowest possible case acquisition costs, you need to focus your spending and efforts on what brings results. This is more granular than just saying “more TV” or “less radio”. This is station-by-station and looking at each daypart and programming to see where your best ROI is originating. ROI can be phone calls, qualified leads, web activity or cases signed, as it’s your choice what to measure and optimize.
Response-Driven Marketing – Buy What Works and at the Right Price
Successful marketing requires responding quickly to the right data. In other words, you don’t want to keep the meter running with ads that don’t bring you results. It can be confusing to track and analyze your activity and to be in a position to make changes quickly. Find an agency that has the experience, people, and technology to do all of this for you. It’s usually worth paying them their agency fee if they are doing their jobs right. This will lead to buying high performing media and cancelling media that’s not worth rebuying. This may also be helpful in negotiating media rates to a cost where the response would make sense with cost and warranty rebuying.
Consumer Attorney Marketing Group uses a proprietary and sophisticated media management system to track the performance of each ad on a weekly basis. CAMG consistently monitors and cancels the lowest performing ads each week and your firm’s weekly budget is allocated to the best performing networks.
The Take-Away
Before you are deep into 2019, I suggest you map out your marketing plans and take a hard look at what’s working and not working. Remove the waste, find places to advertise that can still deliver a sensible cost per case. Beat your competition by smarter marketing. We would be happy to help with a review of your current strategy and offer some Best Practices advice on changes that may be helpful.
This is the first of 8 blog posts in which we’ll share strategies to help you achieve the lowest possible case acquisition costs to sustain and grow your firm.
About the Author
Steve Nober, Founder and CEO of Consumer Attorney Marketing Group (CAMG), has been a major force in the Direct Response & Infomercial industries, Digital Services, and High-Tech Media space for almost three decades. Consumer Attorney Marketing Group assists law firms with the acquisition of new cases, applying efficient tracking, analysis and optimization processes to ensure case costs are as low as possible.
