Attorney KPI's: Marketing for your Law Firm

When you think about marketing as an expense, it's more than just that. Without marketing, you wouldn't have a way for clients to find you. Marketing is your sales performance guide. It's not just spending the money and hoping it works type of scenario. That's why this key metric is essential to track and analyze.

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What should a law firm be tracking?

You need to track the sale or non-sale from start to completion with marketing. Every profitable law firm spends money on marketing; whether it is Facebook ads, Google ads, paying someone to write a blog, or doing a blog yourself, it's your time that is the spending. A good marketing firm will help an attorney track their goals and track the marketing spending success.

You need to examine your marketing channels. What is working or not working? Is it social media marketing? Is it email marketing? Is it referrals? What is making the client walk in your door?

Below you'll find good marketing areas you should be tracking regarding your marketing:

How are your sales or leads coming in the door?

And I mean the good ones. Where there's an opportunity for the client to hire your firm? It's an easy metric to track, and we typically help the law firm set up a system to measure this vital statistic: viable leads vs. nonviable ones. 

Look at sales growth post-marketing spend

After you've determined the leads coming in the door, you want to look at the ones that become actual customers. Sales growth will involve some calculations to evaluate revenue increases/decreases/static and evaluate that against your expectations and projections.

What was the quality of the lead?

Is this going to be a client that's one and done or a repetitive client? Tracking this metric is tricky and varies by practice area. But if you know what you want to sell and, more importantly, what service is the most profitable for your firm, you want to direct the leads towards that specific sale.

What was the return on investment or ROI?

You spent the money to get the lead. What is your return on investment for that marketing dollar? Return on investment is probably the most common KPI regarding marketing.

Note: I didn't call us the most effective one. Don't get me wrong; it is essential but not the most important metric to track.

Measure customer acquisition costs

What did it cost the firm to gain this customer? Customer acquisition is a simple metric, but it will give you the information you need to know if your marketing campaign was effective. What did you spend on the marketing campaign, and what was the profit for the client? Tracking this acquisition cost is easily tracked in QuickBooks. Look at that percentage.

Next, we will examine best practices and KPIs for the various marketing methods at your law firm.

Email marketing

When measuring email marketing campaigns, you need to look at how many of the emails were opened. Did you have a call to action? Did the client or potential client click on any content or call to action?

Email Marketing is a delicate issue and should be handled by a professional. There's a fine line between potential spamming clients and providing good value. I've always recommended to our attorneys that they should look into giving value if they do an email campaign.

Sometimes a lawyer will balk at that and say, "why should I give away what I know?" But trust me, if you offer up your knowledge and share what you know, you will present yourself as an expert in your field.

The small nuggets of knowledge will seer in your potential client's memory and also your firm’s name. They will reach out when they need your services because your name has been in front of them multiple times.

Content marketing

I have seen some law firms successfully generate a YouTube channel and provide great content to their potential clients. Sometimes people don't want to take the time to read an email but will watch a short video. The other advantage is that if your clients are already on YouTube, YouTube may suggest your video offering up your potential client to watch.

With content marketing, the law firm should track keywords and website traffic. This YouTube video should be live on your website. Like seeing a rating, YouTube videos are effective because they let the client test you and see your knowledge before making that phone call to the firm. Another key performance indicator is to track visits to that page where your YouTube videos live. Tracking visits to the site is vital to understanding how well your YouTube videos perform and what content people seek.

The other metrics to track are the bounce rate and the amount of sharing happening for your YouTube videos.

Social media marketing

In today's world, everyone is on social media. Find your audience and target where your client post, shares, and views. You can share your blog post on social media or even create a private group to monitor where you answer questions and provide just enough information to a potential client. You can also share your content on a business page that would allow it to be shareable. Of course, social media posting takes a ton of time. The attorneys need to track likes and shares here as well.

I hope the above recommendations are helpful. We offer these recommendations to our clients to assist them in examining their marketing dollar spend. When we open up this conversation, we find that many law firms subcontract out this service to marketing firms. However, most of the time, no one at the law firm is tracking internally where the leads are coming from or if these leads become clients.

There are some great tools out there to track. We recommend HubSpot or Salesforce. Salesforce can be embedded into your QuickBooks program, which helps track your leads when they become clients. Intuit purchased MailChimp, a fantastic tool for sharing content and promotion. I look forward to seeing what Intuit does with MailChimp within the product of QuickBooks very soon.

If you are an attorney or work at a law firm and need assistance with tracking your marketing dollar, reach out, it's a service we provide. We can help your firm track all of these metrics and some more!