Among the many moving pieces of any legal practice, marketing is perhaps one of the biggest question marks given the wealth of options available to lawyers today.
However, it’s easy to blow out your practice’s marketing budget if you don’t take special care and understand exactly what your firm needs.
For example, some practices attempt brute-force spending on social ads and PPC, seeing absolutely no traction. Meanwhile, others rely solely on blogging and wonder why their practice isn’t attracting hordes of inbound clients.
Keeping your practice’s marketing budget in check requires a for-pronged approach. With the following tips in mind, you can move forward with your marketing with a sense of confidence and understand what your practice realistically needs to succeed in today’s competitive online marketing landscape.
Use Software to Save Time
As the old saying goes, time is money.
This rings true for just about any aspect of running your practice, from marketing to client communication and beyond.
It’s crucial that lawyers today find as many shortcuts as they can to cut down on menial and time-consuming tasks. Investing in law practice management software can help eliminate bottlenecks and give you time to focus on other aspects of your practice such as marketing. Such software represents a long-term investment that promotes productivity, ensuring that your practice is firing on all cylinders.
Figure Out Where Your Practice is Lacking
Effective marketing requires us to set specific goals. If you don’t have specific, actionable goals in mind, you’re essentially flying blind.
As a result, you should start by understanding what your practice is lacking in terms of Internet marketing. For example, you might want to assess…
- What keywords your firm is ranking for and what sort of keywords you hope to target
- Whether or not the traffic visiting your site is actually reaching out to you and responding to your calls-to-action
- How your social following is engaging your business and if those followers have potential to become clients
By starting with your weak points, you can tackle challenges one-at-a-time versus trying to attack too many marketing channels at once.
Let Others Do the Heavy Lifting
You can’t expect to do all of the heavy lifting yourself when it comes to blogging and social media. Consider how interns, virtual assistants and freelancers can fill such marketing roles versus full-time employees. Given that many marketing activities are done on an as-needed basis, a remote marketing team is a brilliant idea for any practice looking to grow their web presence.
Do Your Homework Before You Spend Big
Bear in mind that channels such as email marketing and PPC campaigns do require a certain degree of financial investment. Before you spend a dime, though, make sure you’re working with someone with a track record of success versus someone who’s promising you results but can’t back it up.
Do your homework before hiring a marketing manager and maintain realistic expectations accordingly. It often takes time to see a return on your investment, after all.
Marketing budgets can quickly balloon out of control if you don’t set boundaries from the word “go.” When in doubt, be mindful of your spending and likewise rethink your practice’s goals before any given campaign.
