“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” -W. Edwards Deming
Marketing is a tricky business for PI firms. You’re in a crowded market that’s rife with strong competition, and everybody’s trying to increase their share of the market. Finding ways to stand out is important, but how do you know if your marketing efforts are making a difference?
If you’re opening cases and paying all your bills, you might think your marketing spend is effective and under control and that there’s nothing to worry about. But what about opportunities you might be missing? Is your firm capturing all the market share it possibly could? Are your lawyers consistently getting the cases they excel at and that bring in the business that grows your firm?
A more important question is: How would you know?
I ask because I’m the business intelligence and implementation analyst at Jove and a former COO/CMO of a large, multistate personal injury law firm. Too often, I’ve seen lawyers base crucial business decisions on what they feel in the moment or anecdotal information, and this is especially true with marketing.
Gut feelings and personal perceptions can be helpful and shouldn’t be discounted in business, but they don’t give you the whole picture of how your marketing budget is working for you. Fortunately, marketing data can fill in the gaps and tell you what’s working, what isn’t, and where to best place your marketing investment to get the greatest ROI.
Here are some of the most common questions I receive from PI lawyers about ROI for marketing their firms and practices – and how data addresses them all:
How Do I Know If My Law Firm Marketing Strategy is Working?
The most important thing to realize before you start measuring marketing ROI is that you need to have clear objectives in the form of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Examples for personal injury firms include intakes, new case volume, case revenue, and firm profits. Any and all of these can give you an idea of the results your marketing generates for your firm.
Next, you need a tool to capture and collect data about each of your marketing channels and how much they contribute to your marketing strategy. Google Analytics is an example of such a tool and it’s free to use. It gives you data about how many people visit your website, where they are, and how many convert into potential business leads.
Analyzing your marketing data gives you insights you couldn’t find anywhere else, no matter how much experience you have practicing law or managing a firm. But what you do with that information is what really matters because applying insights from data analysis should drive your business strategy.
How Do I Use Marketing Analytics to Drive My Law Firm Marketing Plan?
Fancy marketing reports and charts can tell you what’s happening with your law firm’s marketing efforts, but the hard part is determining what they mean and what to do about it. For this, you need to look at the story behind the numbers and think critically with an objective mindset.
This is an area where Jove shines because we take large amounts of data, your historical data, and use our business intelligence platform to analyze it. To accomplish this, we use AI algorithms to analyze trends and predict future returns. Then, we present it in actionable ways.
As a result, you’ll notice trends and see the emergence of actionable data you can use to better inform business decisions for your marketing department. Achieving a top-down view of your marketing efforts will also reveal the relationships between them and how they may contribute to each other’s effectiveness in ways you hadn’t been able to perceive before.
For a case study example, imagine that a law firm cut its marketing budget due to the pandemic, but didn’t realize the effect this would have on their internet traffic. When they stopped running television ads, they were dismayed and perplexed to find that their website traffic plummeted (even though they were still running an online advertising campaign).
It turned out that the bulk of their clients were seeing their advertising on television and then going to their website to fill out an intake form rather than picking up the phone to call the number on the screen. Data without context made it look like TV advertising was a waste of money when it drove the firm’s web traffic and thus led to the most conversions.
That’s why it’s so important to dig deeper to discover what the numbers are trying to tell you.
How Do I Calculate My Law Firm’s Marketing ROI?
By analyzing your firm’s data, you should have a clear picture of the source of your marketing leads. Armed with this information, you can then drill down to calculate ROI by comparing your marketing expenses against individual metrics such as intakes, new case volume, revenue, etc.
The end result should be a number, either a ratio or a percentage to indicate the rate of return, for each marketing tactic as well as your overall marketing strategy. You can also look at it a different way and calculate ROI against how much you invest in marketing attorneys’ practices versus how much revenue they’re responsible for generating for the firm. With advanced software like Jove, you can get creative and measure your marketing ROI in the ways that matter the most to you and your firm.
How Can I Get Started on Calculating My Firm’s Marketing ROI?
The goal of calculating ROI should be to find quantifiable returns stemming directly from your firm’s marketing investments. The ideal is that you end up knowing how every dollar comes back to you and how much of a return you can expect for future and ongoing investments in your firm’s marketing. As a result, your marketing efforts will be optimized to be as profitable as possible. You’ll also have peace of mind knowing that none of your firm’s money is being wasted and that you’re making the best investment you can in your firm’s marketing success.
Want to see how Jove can help you track your PI firm’s marketing ROI and increase your bottom line? Schedule your demo today.
