Sort of like setting an exam paper for a school subject, first you find out what the goal is – 100% and say 300 marks, then you decide what each question will be and which answer will give you the full marks for the question. Just so for marketing a law firm, what is the 100% and what are the questions being asked.
Remember the very important aspect of marketing your law firm, if you cannot measure your marketing success, don’t do it. Simple.
What is your 100%?
What is the end goal for your marketing campaign?
Are you trying to increase the number of visits to your website (let’s hope that the website does enough to convert the person visiting into a new client)?
Are you building your Facebook profile and what to accumulate more likes, so that you can start sharing information with a larger audience?
Are you trying to build up your newsletter subscriber base, to actively start a weekly newsletter to educate your client base?
Is the end goal getting a prospect to call in or make individual contact with your office?
And the answer is never “Growing our brand awareness on an on-going basis” – because unless you are doing active, costly surveys every month to measure your effectiveness, you are just flushing your money down the drain.
What questions are to be asked?
What medium are you going to use – Facebook, Twitter, Pay per Click on Google, banner advertising, speaking events by a partner, radio ads, TV ads, newspaper ads, community paper ads, telephone calling? You get the idea, each medium has to be treated differently and so each measurement process will be different as well.
Marking your exam papers
Now for the important part, how do you measure the success of the campaigns?
Telephone calls
Most of the time, marketing campaigns are there to get new prospects to contact your business and for you then to convert those prospects to clients.
Once the new prospect calls your office, your staff, mainly the paralegal or partner concerned, need to ask the prospect how they found out about your firm. As simple and as blunt as that, just ask.
Have a way for all client facing staff to be able to record the acquisition of new clients – whether it be in the CRM system, or simply by adding a new line to a spreadsheet.
If you are using a document assembly solution to compile a new client introduction letter, then have a question in the form that records the campaign responsible so that it can be measured against the campaign at month end.
Unique URL addresses when directing visitors to a webpage
Instead of having a regular standard page and sending clients there, make a copy of the page and give it a unique address, so that you can track how many people go to that address. For example: www.steptoeandsons.com/labour/?utm_campaign=radio5
Google Adwords
Google analytics offers tracking reports that show the path of the web visitor. This can show you where the prospect landed and where they go once on the site.
Unique email accounts for campaigns
For tracking purposes, have unique email addresses, which can be forwarded to regular email accounts, it makes it easier to reports and manage the emails that come in.
Facebook or Twitter
When you get new likes or followers, ask the people where they found out about your firm. Paying for likes and followers will just attract the wrong prospects to your profile, rather manage your new found friends individually – if the volumes are too large, find a social media management tool that can do this for you.
There are many other methods to track and monitor via marketing tools, but the above are ways you can do this right now.
Hope you set many good papers and that you achieve 100% in each exam!
