Marketing has a great influence on law firms’ growth, it’s no wonder that marketing your law firm holds weightage in your growth strategy. Marketing is something that is often overlooked and considered an expense and time taking effort. In such situations, big law firms come to an advantage as they can budget quite a big amount for their marketing. Small law firms have countless financial obligations and are unable to grasp the advantage of marketing due to budget constraints. For effective marketing you need to have effective strategies that work for you, it doesn’t always mean that marketing your law firm will be expensive, you just need to hit your arrow on the right point.
Develop an effective marketing budget for the lucrative growth of your law firm. If you don’t have experience don’t worry we have got you covered. In this blog, we are going to discuss how to effectively strategize your marketing budget. In this blog, we have especially focused on small law firms.
Here is how you can develop an average marketing budget for your small law firm.
1. Estimating The Potential ROI- At the beginning for small law firms cost associated with marketing can be scary initially, but it is the results that are going to pay off the efforts, time, and money you have put in. Think of it as you paid for the property as an investment that is going to pay you to rent forever. Marketing in the legal sector is no different, you have to invest time and money to successfully reap the benefits of marketing. You have to carefully analyze what return on investment you are expecting from your marketing budget.
2. Retention v/s Acquisition – To allocate budget to all the important parts of your marketing strategy it’s vital to know each part and its potential ROI. It’s up to you whether you want to spend more money on retention or acquisition. Retention marketing is reminding your former clients that you are up for more business in the future. This is important as they might need you in the future or might refer you to someone. This is why you need to allocate a small portion of your budget to gain former clients. Acquisition on the other hand means, bringing in completely new clients, it’s a saying that acquisition needs more money than retention. The budget for acquiring new clients will hold more of the money, and you need to carefully allocate SEO for law firms, PPC, content marketing, law firm blogging, legal directories, social media ads, and other digital tools that will bring new leads.
3. How Much To Spend On Digital Marketing-This one is going to take time, it’s not easy to determine how you should use digital marketing for your business and similarly how to allocate your budget to it, but it’s not impossible though. How much to spend on digital marketing for lawyers depends on 4 factors: awareness, interest, decision, and action. Awareness means that you need to create brand awareness among your leads. You won’t know about your existence without it, this means you need to allocate a budget to things that can create brand awareness such as properly optimizing SEO, Social media pages, and Profiles on the most visited legal directories. Interest means, that now that you have created awareness about your brand, leads will need to land upon something that will give information about their newly profound interest, such as landing pages and pop-ups. Consider hiring a freelancer to write engaging content for your leads. The decision means that you need to convince your client why you are the best choice for your client, showing them testimonials, past victories, and Ads is a way to help make your client a decision. Action means that now your client has made a decision he will try to reach you to have a conversation with you. In such a situation you need to have the right tool which will bring your client in contact with you. Such as chatbots. In this funnel, you need to identify which part needs the most attention and allocate the budget accordingly.
4. Prepare Your Marketing Tools- Budgeting for only digital marketing will not help, as you need to allocate funds for tools and other things also such as websites, business cards if there is any software you will be using for your practice like legal accounting or law firm case management software. Website developments take a substantial amount of money, you need to carefully plan, search for the cheapest domains, and hire a freelancer to do it. Design your business cards and find cheap printing options online. Many online solutions deliver you printed business cards that too at a much lower cost than you bore by getting it done physically. Similarly the same goes for software. Initially set a flexible budget for software and try to use free trials of various software and find the affordable one that suits your needs the best.
5. Cost Of Lead Generation – It will be beneficial to take a lead as a dollar in your budget, this way you can easily track your marketing efforts. It will also help you to identify which marketing strategy is working for you and give you a positive ROI. Using potential leads for measurement of your efforts is the best way to calculate how much business you pulled in. To determine the cost of lead generation you simply divide by all money and marketing efforts (time) you have put in and divide it by the number of leads you have gained.
6. Use Cost-Effective Strategies – It’s crucial to hold on to effective marketing strategies that are cost-effective and do not make a hole in the firm’s pocket. Social media marketing- Social media is a vital part of law firm marketing, and it doesn’t cost much, everything is done online and there is no need to spend money on physical stuff like business pamphlets. Social media for law firms allows you to advertise your business in cost-effective ways. For example, take Facebook advertising, you start ads just for 10 dollars a day. You no longer need thousands of dollars to advertise, yet it’s not easy to find cheap methods on social media for marketing but with correct research and analysis, you can find the right resources. Outsourcing- It’s hard to digest the fact that you cannot do everything, it may be difficult to trust others for your work but it can free up countless hours in which you can put in important and more valuable work. Outsourcing looks different for every firm, finding affordable outsourcing options and organizations can do wonders for your law firm’s budget as it will cost less and parallelly free your time. Leverage on tech tools- In the last few years due to pandemics, hundreds of new tools have been introduced to the legal industry to make working more smoothly. Leveraging on tech tools can help you to reduce the overhead costs, and cost of hiring employees whose work can easily be done by such tech tools. For example, hiring support staff to do administrative work can easily be automated through legal software for a small law firm.
Summing up-
Marketing can do wonders for your law firm without you going broke and maintaining all your other financial obligations. Nobody wants to spend their time juggling numbers, but it is something that pays off the effort put in. Your giving in and taking out should closely equalize, you wouldn’t want to spend dollars on something which is not giving in equal. In this blog, we shared how to develop an effective budget for your small law firm and we hope this blog has helped you in some way. The more time and effort you put into the marketing part the more it will bring in leads and will help your law firm to grow.