There continues to be a lot of discussion about changes facing the legal industry, many of which are long overdue, but perhaps not welcome. Not only are clients putting pressure on lawyers to find suitable alternatives to the billable hour, but they are also seeking changes in how services are managed, delivered and benchmarked, including pushing for implementation of performance metrics.
But it is also time for change in the way legal services are marketed. Legal marketing – like so much within the legal industry – has been the victim of law firms’ unwillingness to change, hesitancy to be at the forefront of employing new or different marketing tactics, tendency to be late adopters of technology, and budgets that continue to lag behind marketing expenditures in other industries, including other professional services.
Legal marketers have done an outstanding job, particularly when one considers the restraints under and cultures in which they operate. But they may further handicap themselves by not using marketing processes deemed standard operating procedures in nearly every other industry, whether B2B or B2C.
Nowhere is this more true than in law firm advertising.
What drives most law firm ads?
The fact of the matter is that legal advertising often is driven by ego and internal politics. When these are your motivating factors, ads are created – or at least rewritten and approved – in an internal vacuum, one in which strategy is overshadowed by attempts to pacify a certain practice group or a particular office, regardless of the actual business potential of the practice group’s services or the office’s location.
Given the bite that advertising takes out of any law firm’s marketing budget, we all should be concerned about finding ways to measure its ROI. Yet, year after year, firms continue to spend money on advertising with very little, if any, information about its effectiveness beyond the anecdotal. Perhaps a client sees an ad in print or online, or hears about the firm’s sponsorship of NPR and comments to his or her attorney. Or maybe the lawyers across the street will see that full-page graphic in the latest issue of the National Law Journal.
But marketers aren’t – or at least shouldn’t be – interested in merely the anecdotal. We want to know whether the campaign moved the needle. Did it reach the right people? Did it cause them to take the desired action?
Advertising is expensive, and evaluation of the ROI is far from an exact science. Even for organizations recognized as global leaders in the discipline, ROI is often elusive.
This is particularly true in marketing legal services. (When was the last time you saw a discount code offered for mentioning a lawyer advertisement?) What’s more, lawyers do not want to attribute the acquisition of a new client or the expansion of an existing client to anything other than their own rainmaking prowess.
How to measure legal ad ROI
With our industry awakening to the new reality of doing business, perhaps now is the time for law firm marketers to push the envelope by adopting and adapting more of the best practices long used by marketers in other industries.
Here are four suggestions for achieving an initial level of ROI measurement for the more elusive ROI animal: print advertising.
1. Examine revenue
If your law firm print advertisement highlights one practice or office, compare the revenue of the practice or office before and after the campaign. While fluctuations in revenue cannot be attributed solely to the ad, seeing no increase over a prolonged period of time may provide the impetus to refocus.
2. Designate a unique “advertisement only” phone number
Set up a specific phone number, and list it in the firm’s print advertisements. When dialed, the number should ring through to the same receptionist as the standard number for the firm or office so the caller does not experience a difference in connecting with the firm. For each call received on the designated line, have the receptionist go to the firm’s website and complete the “Contact Us” form for that caller. By tracking the volume of calls to the number, you can measure the first level of response to the ad. Consider also using a call analytics system (such as If By Phone) to further track which print ads drive telephone leads.
3. Use the “Contact Us” form on your website
If viewers of the advertisement are moved to visit the firm’s website rather than call, provide a way for them to indicate how they learned of the firm. If your advertisements are limited to a few publications, consider listing these as a tick box or drop-down menu associated with the “How did you hear about us?” question. By adding this referral source field, the receptionist can also use the web form to capture leads through the designated phone number. This approach ensures that these leads automatically find their way into the firm’s customer relationship management system and are tracked in Google Analytics.
4. Harness the power of the QR code
QR codes (those grid images of black square dots on a white background) have come a long way and provide another way to track response to a print campaign, providing a connection from print to digital. QR codes offer GPS tracking, email notifications, custom designs and detailed analytics. Drill even further into the specifics of lead generation by using a different QR code for each of the various publications in which a print ad appears.
How are you measuring your firm’s legal marketing ROI? It is worth the time and effort to evaluate this question.
Joi Scardo is a Senior Marketing Strategist at Jaffe, a full-service PR and marketing agency for the legal industry. “What is the Real ROI of Law Firm Advertising” appeared as a post in the Jaffe blog at jaffepr.com in February 2015.
Joi can be reached at 1.850.830.2356 or by email to jscardo@jaffepr.com.