Plan Your Lawyer Marketing Tactics for 2022
At the core of effective marketing techniques are online marketing tactics that are apt for your business goals. For a law firm to be more profitable, it is important to be able to market online in this evolving world of eCommerce. Always keep in mind that not all marketing tools can help increase your online presence and convert your target audience into actual clients.
Make use of the fastest growing marketing trends to add more lead sources, or invest more in currently performing lead sources to create more leads. Seek help from someone with the consulting and marketing skills for you to have a competitive advantage.
For marketing and business consultancy needs, get a team who can help your law firm. Call us at Richard James, Your Practice Mastered today.
Business Consultancy and US Law Firm Management
Good marketing campaigns will help you stand out by boosting your web presence, credibility, and online reputation. A great marketing campaign, however, will help you translate potential customers into actual paying clients. With an expert on US law firm management helping you, you can make the most out of your internet marketing strategy.
Effective marketing is the umbrella where advertising, sales, and customer service reside. The right marketing company can provide what your practice and business needs. However, behind the best marketing strategies are carefully determined numbers. Yes, numbers. US law firm management, after all, is all about crunching data and numeric values.
Seven Steps to Make a Marketing Plan
It is important to create a marketing strategy early on. Here’s my 7 step plan to do just that. (Important Note: This article assumes you already know how to generate leads and you are doing so currently. If you don’t know the basics, you’ll need to fix that before proceeding with these steps).
Start now
If you wait until January 2022 to create a 2022 plan, you’re going to be running to catch up all year long, and likely, you’ll be so frustrated you’ll quit and not create a fully executable plan. So, schedule a meeting in November or early December to create a plan for the following year.
Know your math
Marketing is 50% math, 30% systems, and only 20% new ideas. It’s all about arithmetic for me. Before you can create a plan, you must know some basic numbers.
What is your Cost Per Lead, what is your Cost Per Client, and what is your Value Per Client?
To determine the CPL, simply divide the total number of leads you received during a predetermined period (6 months or longer is best) into the total dollars invested into marketing for the same period into your total marketing spend for the same period. That’s your Cost Per Client/Customer/Patient.
Depending on your business, and how you are paid, determining the VPC can be a little trickier. Of course, it can be as simple as dividing the total number of new clients into the total gross revenues of the business. The point is, you must know what a client is worth to you on an annual basis. Without that number, you could be investing way too much to acquire a client or you could be missing out on an opportunity to invest more.
Know your conversions
Next, you must know how many leads it takes to convert a lead into a paying client. Every business has a path for a lead to become a client. Some sell online via a sales funnel and then upsell post initial sale, other brick-and-mortar businesses may set appointments, convince the prospect to show to the appointment, close the deal, get paid, and provide an excellent product or service to receive referrals.
What your path is doesn’t matter. However, the total number of leads it takes to generate clients is very important. In our business, we know that for every 10 leads, we’ll generate 1 client. Now, because we know what our Value Per Client is, we are comfortable with a 10% conversion. You may not be; the math has to work. The key is, we need to know what the math of our business is.
Set a goal
I know, it’s been said, over and over again. But if you do not have a goal in mind, the plan is irrelevant. We use a map to get from A to B. The goal represents the “B” in that conversation. So, you must decide, how much additional annual revenue do you desire to create in 2022? Our 2022 goal, assuming we close out the year where we believe we will, is a 30% growth on $2.5M which will take us to $3.25. Now that we know the goal, we can start to build a plan using the pieces we created in steps 1 through step 3.
Create the structure
I already know what our Value Per Client is, I know what our Cost Per Client acquisition is and I know how much it Costs Per Lead. So, all I have to do now is identify how many clients I will need to acquire to achieve my desired goal.
There are several factors to consider when creating this structure, most having to do with how you are paid. You had to consider these same factors when you determined your Value Per Client. We sell our services on a monthly reoccurring basis, so we’ll need to build out a spreadsheet that shows how much new revenue we’ll create each month as well as how much revenue was due based on previous sales.
Your business may sell on a single price point, which will make your math easier or you may accept payment plans or work on contingency fees which will create more complexities. The bottom line is, we need to first identify how many new clients we’ll need to generate in a year to reach our desired annual revenue goal.
Once we know that number, we can go back to our conversion math to determine how many leads we’ll require to generate those clients. And because we know the Cost Per Lead, we’ll be able to identify what our marketing budget for the year will need to be. Now you have your structure. Simply subtract the expected revenue from your existing clients, from your total 2022 goal.
Now you know the growth revenue number. To generate your desired growth revenue, you’ll need to obtain “X” number of new clients. To generate “X” number of new clients, you’ll need to generate “Y” number of new leads. To generate a “Y” number of new leads, you’ll need to invest a “Z” number of dollars. Simple arithmetic. See, I told you marketing was 50% math!
Work on your marketing budget
Now that we know our numbers, we will need to determine where we’ll invest those dollars. At this point in the article, we could go off the deep end. I could take us down a path that would lead to us getting lost. So, I will do my best to avoid that. And, I’m going to assume you know which lead sources (advertising sources) that you are using perform and which ones do not.
If you do not know that information, you will need to, but we will not have time to cover that here. Here’s the plan. Identify your best-performing lead sources and invest more money in them. Typically, they will provide more leads proportionate to your previous spending. Most business owners get bored and try to find the new bright and shiny. Don’t do that. First, start with what works and just do more of it.
Utilize your lead sources
Take these sources and plan them out on the calendar for the entire year. Whether it’s email blasts, direct mail, television, radio, pay-per-click, webinars, teleseminars, live seminars, or JV/affiliate partnerships, plan them a year in advance. And then break down each lead source by working backward from the launch dates set. This way if you need a landing page, or copy or graphics work done, you can leave yourself plenty of time to get it done.
Simple right? Hey, I did not say it would be easy. But my hope is, after discovering what needs to be done to create a plan, you’ll see how the information will benefit your business and allow you to create systems in many different areas.
In a future article, let’s discuss how to focus on the Life Cycle of your clients to see if we could get you closer to your goal without investing any more money in advertising.
Call us at Richard James, Your Practice Mastered
US law firm management is not easy, especially when marketing efforts are involved. You need an experienced professional who can guide you with the steps that you need to take.
If you want to have your best month ever, contact our legal management consultant Richard James or schedule a 1-on-1 consulting today.
