5 Tips For Spending On Law Firm Digital Marketing
Digital marketing strategies, like Lawyer SEO and law firm content marketing, have been proven to be effective tools for boosting traffic, visibility, and conversions. In addition, they help both small and big businesses adapt to the new online-based consumer.
Unfortunately, not everyone has the time to implement these marketing strategies on their own. You'll have to learn, plan, implement, and monitor your marketing strategy to ensure great ROI. Hence, law firm marketers buy tools or hire agencies to manage their digital marketing.
That said, spending on law firm digital marketing is a huge deal, especially for small law firms that might have limited resources. Therefore, you want to ensure you get your money's worth every time you allocate a portion of your income toward digital marketing.
So, before you spend on your digital marketing efforts, here are some tips and considerations to ponder:
1. Identify Your Digital Marketing Goals
The strategies, tools, and platforms you need will depend on your marketing goals. For example, do you need more traffic on your website? Social media followers? Email drip subscribers? Each of these goals will need various approaches to reach the optimal ROI.
Once you have a list of goals, you can start looking for potential solutions. For example, if you need more traffic on your blog, you might need a content writer, a content marketing agency, an SEO management tool, a keyword research tool, word processors, and other research tools. You might also need access to stock images and a Domain Authority checker.
If you're looking to increase your social media following, you'll need a different set of management tools. You might also have to hire other experts and legal content creators to do the job.
Of course, this is a good time to estimate the budget you'll need to achieve your goals. Look through your options, weigh the benefits, and decide whether it's worth spending your marketing budget on.
2. Identify The Tasks You Can Do Yourself
One of the most significant expenses in law firm digital marketing is hiring agencies to do the implementation and management for you. If you have a tight budget, consider if you should do some of the marketing implementations yourself.
Remember, there are tons of free educational content on lawyer SEO and digital marketing. If you have the time and determination to do so, you can watch countless free articles, videos, and online courses to help you.
If you have a bit more to spend, you can look for digital marketing agencies that can do the work for you. Then, you either pay an agency to do all the work, or you could do some of them yourself to reduce the expense. Again, you want to consider your current status so you know which is the best option for your current budget.
3. Look For Free Digital Marketing Tools
There are a lot of free but excellent digital marketing tools out there. The best example is Google Search Console, which is still heavily used by SEO experts. Google Ads also offers a free keyword tool to help with SEO and content marketing.
Social media sites also offer some access to your data for auditing. For example, Twitter Analytics is an excellent way to gauge your progress through basic data like monthly follower count increase, best-performing posts, impressions, and so on.
Additionally, limited free versions of paid tools like Ahrefs and AnswerThePublic could get you a long way with website and content optimization.
Of course, if you want better tools to improve and manage your digital marketing efforts, you could always purchase or subscribe to paid services. If you hire a marketing agency, they'll use their own tools and resources. However, looking for free alternatives is necessary for those with limited budgets.
4. Consider Hiring Someone To Do Specific Tasks
If you don't want to pay for full marketing services, you can always hire someone to do portions of the task.
For example, you can hire a legal content writer to be in charge of blog posts while you do all the optimizations yourself. Content writing is one of the most common services in digital marketing. After all, content is crucial in SEO and content marketing but also extremely time-consuming. So, it's very likely that you'll find someone or an agency that will offer content writing services that fit your law firm's budget.
Likewise, you can hire a web developer to build your website while you write and publish the content. You can also hire SEO specialists to build and organize your site to fit what search engines are looking for.
This is often a comfortable choice for small law firms who want to test the waters with paid SEO and law firm marketing services. It's a good middle-ground between doing everything yourself and spending a considerable amount of money to have an agency automate optimizations and lead generation.
More importantly, some agencies will offer more affordable packages if you don't want to pay full price. You can get one of these packages if you don't have the budget to pay for full-service digital marketing implementation. Then, you could do the rest of the work that the agency doesn't cover.
5. Research Your Prospective Digital Marketing Agency
Even the cheapest packages from digital marketing agencies cost a lot of money. So, you want to ensure you get your money's worth.
Hence, it would be best if you took the time to consider which agency or marketing service you want to avail. Then, try looking up the marketing companies, check their experience, and read about what they do and how they do them.
Do note that some agencies have more niche target clients. These types of agencies are more familiar with the unique challenges associated with their niche. For example, there are law firm marketing agencies specializing in law firm keywords, content, and site automation. Likewise, some agencies prefer to take on clients who run eCommerce businesses.
Usually, these agencies will have websites or run legal blogs. You can check their "About Us" and landing pages to get an idea of what they do and who their clientele is. You should also look up reviews and see what other past clients say about their services.
Author’s Bio
JC Serrano is the founder of 1000Attorneys.com, one of the very few private enterprises certified to process lawyer referrals by the California State Bar. His marketing strategies have continuously evolved since 2005, incorporating ever-changing SEO strategies into lawyerleadmachine.com.
5 Ways to Allocate Your Budget for Branding & Marketing
Marketing determines your competitiveness, your performance, and your sales. Therefore, it’s safe to say that in order to grow your enterprise, you need to increase your marketing investments. Now, proclaiming that you need to invest more in marketing is a statement that really doesn’t say much.
- How much more?
- What kind of marketing?
- Which methods will you give priority to?
You see, marketing itself is an umbrella term and as such, you need to understand the complex layers and areas that it consists of. With that in mind and without further ado, here are five things you need to keep in mind when allocating your budget for branding and marketing.
- Budget according to your industry
Depending on the competitiveness of your industry, your marketing budget can be anywhere between 10% and 50% of your average annual revenue. You see, in education, an average marketing budget is roughly 11% of your overall budget but in the consumer-packaged goods industry, the number goes as high as 24%.
The key thing is that you want to spend enough that you get a competitive edge but avoid overspending. Allocation of resources is important but being resourceful means predicting bottlenecks ahead of time and using the optimal number of resources to solve these problems. Overspending leaves, you short on the other end, and understanding the specifics of your industry can help you get a better idea of where you stand.
- Focus on the ROI
It’s not just about the amount of money that you spend but the ROI. In other words, what you want is to know exactly how much you can hope to get back for every $1 that you invest. Finding methods that yield you the best ROI also means that the way in which you spend resources matters more than the amount that you spend.
You see, if you’re using a method with an ROI of 200%, this would mean that you’ll get $2 for every $1 you spend. However, what if there’s a method that yields an ROI of 300%. In this scenario, every $1 invested would give you a return of $3. In this scenario, going for the 200% ROI would also mark a 50% of opportunity loss.
To oversimplify, why spend $1 to make $2, when you could use it to make $3?
Now, there are different kinds of operational expenses that you’ll have to handle as an enterprise. When the budget is tight, you need to start assigning a priority to different expenses, and, make no mistake, marketing is your top priority.
- It’s a priority
Sure, paying salaries to your employees and covering operational expenses are mandatory but once you find yourself in a situation where you can’t afford a marketing campaign, you’re in a pretty bad spot. So, you need to find a way to provide the necessary funding.
There are a lot of scenarios in which you have the money on paper (account receivables) but the payments just haven’t arrived yet. In these scenarios, companies handle their marketing payments in different ways. Looking for affordable bridging loans is one of the methods. Selling invoices (factoring) is another thing worth considering. All in all, it’s a priority and if you don’t have enough money, you better find it.
- Long-term planning
In one of the previous sections, we’ve discussed how you need to focus on the ROI. The problem is that there are some marketing methods that take time to unleash their full potential. In SEO for instance, the growth in traffic, rank, and even revenue, is gradual but exponential. In three months, you won’t see your traffic increase three times, the results are likely to be far more impressive.
This is why you need to be ready and willing to engage in some short-term methods that will result in great long-term gains. Branding, of any kind, also takes time to reach a certain critical mass. It takes time to establish brand recognition and for this recognition to grow into brand awareness. What this means is that (in terms of revenue increase) the growth will be moderate, early on, but sizable the longer these methods are active.
- Justifying costs
One of the biggest challenges when it comes to allocating a budget for branding and marketing is the justification of these expenses. First of all, marketing presence is a resource, which means that by investing, you’re actually buying your share of the market. Without it, your business doesn’t have any influence in the field that you’re trying to compete in.
Second, you can always use data in order to justify your investments. Previously, we talked about the ROI, however, putting all of this on paper and presenting it through data will give you far more persuasion power. Remember to keep these reports short, to the point, and as descriptive as it gets. This is really the only way to achieve your respective goals.
In conclusion
In the end, money invested in marketing is money well-spent. John Wannamaker once said that even though half the marketing he invests in marketing is wasted, he can never know which half. Fortunately, in the era of digital marketing, this is no longer the case. Instead, you get to track every dollar in your marketing budget, follow all the latest trends, and get all your feedback in real-time. All of this gives you an extra incentive to look at your organization’s marketing spending from a completely new perspective.