Adopting these three simple techniques will help you create a law firm marketing plan that will successfully achieve your 2016 financial goals.
The first month of 2016 is coming to a close and you might want to consider if your current marketing efforts are going to be effective enough to help you achieve your goals this year. If you want to make more money in 2016 than you did last year, then you need to start by reviewing your law firm’s marketing strategy.
Spending more time on your law firm marketing may not sound ideal; however, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every year. When it comes to your law firm marketing, you can evaluate the performance of your current efforts and make small changes to produce better results.
Implementing these tips will help you cut out what isn’t working in your marketing strategy, and focus your efforts on the activities that bring in new clients:
1. Review your performance
If you aren’t reasonably certain of what your firm will earn over the next year if you continued to implement your current marketing strategy, then you’ll risk setting your firm up for failure. Taking a close look at your previous performance can help you predict future profitability.
When evaluating your marketing plan, understanding how your firm has performed in the past and how you want it to perform in the future is the only way to accurately plan.
To do this you will need to prepare a profit and loss statement breaking the numbers down on a month-by-month basis with totals for the past three years.
Next, you should be reviewing your numbers to identify unusual seasonality indicated by spikes or dips in revenues or expenses.
Finally, look for any trends in terms of expansion or contraction for your firm’s revenues, expenses and profits.
2. Analyze where your clients come from
The best way to select the most effective marketing strategies for your firm is to take a look at where your existing clients came from. This will allow you to make informed adjustments to your marketing plan and significantly improve the productivity of your limited marketing time.
Evaluate your law firm marketing strategies by looking at where your clients came from. Click To TweetMost attorneys have a general idea of where their clients are coming from, but taking the time to review the numbers can reveal where they are wasting time on marketing activities that are ineffective.
You can use a simple spreadsheet to quickly review your firm’s client revenue information to make smart modifications to your law firm marketing plan.
The below videos will walk you through how to use a spreadsheet to make marketing changes. They explain in detail the numbers you should be looking at and how to make sense of them:
Part 1 of the video discusses:
- How to set up this spreadsheet in 30 minutes and what information you’ll need to get started.
- What data you should be keeping track of.
- Simple calculations will be most helpful and why.
- How you can accurately predict how much repeat business your clients will do this year.
Part 2 of the video discusses:
- How to increase revenues by focusing on your firm’s most profitable cases.
- How to boost profits by focusing energy on the most productive referral sources.
- How to pick the 2 to 3 marketing campaigns that will generate the most revenue for the time you spend.
3. Evaluate and improve your conversion rate
Your conversion rate is the percentage of leads that become paying clients. Attorneys often miscalculate their own conversion rate, which results in a skewed understanding of their own marketing performance. This is often caused by a misunderstanding of the definition of a lead.
A lead is not just the prospective client who shows up to your office for a meeting. You should define your leads as anyone who has interacted with your firm, both online and in person, who you haven’t done business with in the past.
A lead is not just the prospective client who shows up to your office for a meeting. Click To TweetThe fastest and least expensive way to increase revenues is to simply improve the conversion rate for your existing lead flow because it doesn’t require adding lead traffic to increase revenue. You’re just doing more with what you’ve already got.
To convert leads into clients, your firm must “nurture” the lead through all the stages of the sales funnel. By making the sales process more efficient, and converting a greater number of the leads that your firm is already getting, you can increase revenues without spending money on an additional marketing campaign.
The first step is to create a system for keeping track of every lead that comes into the firm. You do not need a fancy CRM app like Salesforce or Infusionsoft to do this. Here is a form of a spreadsheet you can use to do this.
The second step is to look at every interaction that the lead has with your firm (including your staff), and putting standardized procedures in place so leads are followed up with consistently.
Attorneys who understand that it can take as many as eight contacts to turn a prospective client into a paying one routinely close the most business.
