If the person writing your paycheck was dyslexic, and is repeatedly transposing numbers, you would check the numbers every pay period, wouldn’t you?
Of course you would. Being paid $5200 is a lot different than $2500, isn’t it?
Of course it is!
Being acutely aware of your firm’s marketing key performance indicators is equally as important, if not more important. Your business’s numbers tell the story of your past but can also tell your business’s future, if you are reading them right and recording trends.
That’s why I recommend that every law firm owner take a look at a few things every year, from a global perspective. Being a firm owner with a keen sense of awareness of your business is as critical as being self-aware, personally.
Every single year, you want the answers to these to be fresh in your mind. What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? What are your opportunities? What are your threats? These key performance indicators will help you set yourself up for success as you move ahead.
Another key is to build your 12-month plan. Lay out your marketing plan based on holidays, birthdays, sporting events or whatever you are doing to use big annual events to drive business toward you. You want to build your map for this every single year. You don’t want a new year to go by without laying it out.
Before you do, review your list from last year. Did this work? Which strategies worked better than others? This is the work of the business. This never stops. As you grow, you may need a marketing director who will do this for you, but as the owner and leader, you’ll still need to inspect the work. For today, it’s likely you are wearing the marketing director hat. Each year, this must be done. You must carve out time to do this. If you are reading this and saying to yourself, Hey, I didn’t have a chance to do it the first time, I’m telling you, RIGHT NOW is the time to do it the first time.
So you have to do your annual plan for marketing and then sit down to have a look: Is your machine working? Remember when we talked about automating the whole marketing process? Are you getting the data you want to get? Is this the area that’s broken? Is this what’s wrong? Are you still using pen and paper? Should you be moving to something new such as Infusionsoft? Maybe you got your first things automated and are asking now, what else can we automate?
Are we sending emails with every single lead that arrives? Are we reminding people about appointments with text messages, emails, telephone and the five senses of communication? Are we getting good data back?
This leads me to the next point. Lead Sources.
Every month, your lead sources must be reviewed. If you are not using an automated system, you need to sit down with a pen and paper and have your staff give you those lead source figures. Knowing these will allow you to clearly identify what your cost per lead is and what your ROI is from every single lead source, every single month. It has to happen, and if it doesn’t, you are going to find yourself unaware of both what is working and what is not. You know what that means: you are spending money somewhere that is literally flying out the window.
Here is where the arithmetic is so important. I had a client who wanted to get out of a certain practice area. His office sent me the numbers in a pdf. They showed their cost per lead of $120. I thought that it was high for that practice area. They showed their cost per appointment was $380. And their cost per client was $2700. It just didn’t seem right to me.
Then I found out that these figures came from a staff member. The law firm owner didn’t collect this data, and the calculations were wrong, yet the firm was making decisions based on these numbers. I took it into Excel and reformatted, and I found out their cost was $9.85. Their cost for appt. was $22. Their cost per client, was $230. Massively different from the numbers they had. If you are getting such information from staff, don’t rely on your abacus to figure this out. Excel is FREE on Google and supplies the same data as Excel.
Remember these tips when it comes to marketing key performance indicators:
- Don’t have someone else compile the numbers.
- Inspect all of the time.
- Be sure you cross-check the numbers.
If you’re not careful, you will be making the wrong decisions. Dirty data costs you money in lost marketing dollars as well as through lost revenue from appointments you did not secure.
These are the KPIs of the marketing system. They tell the story of the health of your firm and of how you are doing in marketing, every single month, and every single year. Take a few minutes and submit to our Law Firm Analysis. It's free and can truly offer you some insight into how well your firm is performing.
Building a better law firm, one key performance indicator at a time.
