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Are you your law firm’s own worst enemy?
At Gorilla Webtactics, our legal marketing agency surveyed 70% of law firms in Minnesota to better understand the most common things holding legal practices back from growth. What we found may surprise you.
Many law firms make the same marketing mistakes, and by addressing these 5 key areas of your marketing plan, your firm could enjoy unparalleled growth this year.
Working With the Cheapest Legal Marketing Agency
Plautus wrote “You must spend money to make money” before he died in 184 BC, so the idea of investing to create a positive return isn’t new.
But what we found while interviewing 70% of legal practices in Minnesota, is that many believed that going with the cheapest legal marketing agency was a good idea or saved their firm money.
Opportunity Cost is defined as the cost of choosing one alternative over another, and missing the benefit offered by the forgone opportunity. Cheap legal marketing agencies cost less in actual dollars, but represent a large expense when you consider the missed opportunities offered by an experienced, performance-driven legal marketing partner.
• One of the biggest mistakes lawyers are making is shopping for the cheapest legal marketing agency they can find and neglecting to consider better services, which can offer more value to your firm and a considerably higher ROI (Return on Investment).
Spending Money to Appear Right Alongside Competitors in Paid Directories
Legal marketing agencies who lack experience and creativity will often begin their engagement by recommending that your firm pay for a directory listing, where your firm will be listed on a low-traffic page alongside all of your competitors.
This can be a big mistake, and will inevitably offer a poor ROI to your firm relative to other ways to spend those marketing dollars. Sadly, we found that the majority of law firms we surveyed are making this mistake, and wasting their marketing budget on paid directory listings instead of data-driven Google advertising campaigns which are proven to drive more effective results.
• Spending money to be in a paid directory listing right alongside all of your their competitors is one of the biggest (and most common) mistakes law firms are making with legal marketing this year.
Working with an Agency That Represents Your Competition
If your legal marketing agency represents competing law firms in your area, don’t work with them.
While it’s easy to be lured by a pitch which speaks to the agency’s experience working in your local market, if you do you’ll often be paying for a carbon-copy marketing strategy which nets you worse results. What’s more, you’ll know that any new strategies the agency tries on your behalf which are effective will be instantly activated for your competitor as well, delivering only half of the available leads to you, while the marketing firm gets paid twice for the same work.
Sadly, during our survey of legal firms in Minnesota, we found that not only were many law practices represented by the same marketing agency, but that they were paying for PPC (pay-per-click) campaign management. PPC campaigns represent a great advertising opportunity, but an agency which manages competing campaigns will inevitably drive up costs and deliver poor results.
A lawyer in your firm wouldn’t litigate a case as both prosecution and defence counsel, so why would you ever think it was acceptable to trust a legal marketing agency to represent both you and your competition?
• Working with an agency that works for competing law firms in the same market area (especially when they run pay-per-click advertising campaigns) is one of the biggest legal marketing mistakes you can make.
Settling for a Website That Isn’t Strategically Designed to Convert
One of the biggest mistakes law firms are making this year is that they were willing to settle for a sub-par website design. A well-designed legal website is clean, clear, and strategically designed to convert visitors into warm leads, and eventually into valuable clients.
In today’s digital marketplace, your website is your most valuable salesman. It’s your primary tool to establish your firm’s brand identity, client experience, and company values. Hiring a legal marketing agency to update your web presence and create a modern, fast-loading, mobile-responsive website is one of the best investments you can make this year.
We were surprised how many law practices chose to settle for a website they felt was “good enough,” rather than hiring experts to help their #1 marketing tool perform at its potential.
• Settling for a website that’s not strategically designed to convert is one of the biggest mistakes lawyers are making with legal marketing this year.
Not Taking the Time to Set Up and Understand Analytics
Leveraging analytics can be a key to driving your law firm’s growth, and a properly executed web analytics strategy can open up efficient marketing channels like low-cost social media marketing, targeted law firm remarketing campaigns, and much more.
Surprisingly, we found that most lawyers are not taking the time to set up and understand the types of analytics that can help them make data-driven decisions about their marketing efforts.
What does this mean? To put it simply, it means that most lawyers are wasting money and spending their marketing budget inefficiently.
You don’t have to guess about the effectiveness of marketing campaigns in this day and age.
Experienced legal marketing agencies like ours can help you set up tracking, leverage analytics to measure results, and deliver custom reports which tell you exactly how far your marketing dollars are going, and where they are most effective and efficient.
• Not taking the time to set-up and understand the types of analytics that need to be in place and monitored to help make data-driven decisions, acquire better leads, deliver more business and a higher ROI is one of the biggest legal marketing mistakes lawyers are making this year.
Ensure Your Firm is Positioned for Growth This Year
Lou Holtz said, “In this world you’re either growing or you’re dying, so get in motion and grow.”
It’s decision time. Is your firm going to focus on growth this year or settle for the status quo?
If you’d like to learn more about our satisfaction guarantee or discover the marketing mistakes your firm is making (and how to fix them), request your FREE digital marketing assessment from Gorilla Webtactics today.
