I bet if I walked up to ten lawyers on the street, and asked them what their legal marketing numbers were, 9 out of ten would have no idea what I was talking about, and the last one could tell me what their revenues were last month. But that is about the scope of knowledge most lawyers have about their numbers. If you are looking to take your law firm from just another “practice” to a real, legitimate, legal business/enterprise, you must get a grip on your numbers. This is another legal marketing mistake that I see lots of lawyers make – not knowing or tracking their numbers.
What are your legal marketing numbers?
All successful businesspeople know what the numbers are for their business. A law firm is no different. You must have a handle on the key metrics for your practice to know whether your practice is growing or shrinking. If there is a problem, having your numbers will help you identify that problem, and then figure out how to fix it.
Here’s what I mean. Let’s say that historically, 50-75% of prospects that call your firm will schedule a consult. But right now, your numbers are showing you that only 30-40% of prospects are scheduling a consult. There is obviously a problem there. Is the problem with the person that is answering the phone? Is the problem with the types of callers that are calling your firm? You need to know this so that you can take the necessary actions to get your conversions back up to historical norms.
This is just one example. There are so many things you can track – here are just a few:
- Number of prospective callers
- Number of consults scheduled
- Number of consults that show up
- Number of consults that become clients
- Average retainer/trust advance paid
- Daily/weekly/monthly revenue (compared to goals for the year)
- Number of opt-ins to your website
- Amount spent on advertising (that you can track)
- ROI of those advertising dollars
These are just a few of the things you can track. The truth is, you can track almost anything.
Why is this so important for legal marketing?
Most lawyers view marketing as an expense that they will throw money at and hope that something sticks. If they need the phone to ring more, then they spend more on SEO – not really understanding why or how that gets more people to call their office.
There are so many things that you can do to market your law practice, but you must focus your time and money on marketing that is “trackable”. If you spend a dollar on adwords, and it returns you 50 cents, then you need to re-evaluate your adwords campaign. If, for some strange reason, you decide to throw up a billboard – you had better have a unique phone number assigned to that billboard so that you know how many callers are directly related to that billboard.
How to keep track of your numbers
If I were to go back and start over again, I would start simple. You don’t need a spreadsheet with 20 different metrics on it just yet. I would keep a tick-sheet next to the phone. Anytime someone calls and identifies themselves as a prospective client, you put a tick on the sheet. If they schedule an appointment, you put down another tick. At the end of the week, you count up how many consults you had that week, how much revenue you generated, and add up the marks on your tick-sheet. Then you can consolidate all of these numbers into one master spreadsheet.
As you get more advanced at this, you can start to delegate some of this work to a virtual assistant that can aggregate the numbers and put together some pretty graphs for you to see at a glance what is happening in your practice. Ideally, you would want to look at these numbers at least once a week, typically on Friday afternoon. That way when you huddle up for your Monday morning meeting with staff (if you do those – I recommend it), then you can go over the numbers from the previous week and make adjustments as necessary.
Do you currently keep track of your legal marketing numbers in your law practice? Have a comment about this post? Please feel free to leave some feedback below!
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