Legal professionals, including lawyers and agencies, are not typically trained in marketing, yet rely on marketing to get the word out about their services. Since people typically do not care much about what law firms are doing until they have a need to use their services, it is important that you market to and for the people that you can help.
There are some common marketing mistakes that law firms make — make sure that your agency isn’t doing one of them. Read on for these common mistakes, and how to avoid law firm marketing mistakes at your practice.
Mistake 1: Hiring a Marketing Agency Without Doing Your Due Diligence
While hiring a marketing agency is not a bad idea in itself, hiring the first agency you come across is not the way to go. Make sure to do your research about agencies and gain an understanding on their ideal clientele and experience in past projects.
It’s not a requirement that the agency you choose has a lengthy portfolio or has worked with a company exactly like yours before, but it is important that they have an understanding of your agency. Furthermore, it is imperative that they truly understand your business and your brand, as well as its voice. If you have a marketing agency putting out ads and content that you wouldn’t approve of because they don’t understand how your firm really works, then they will not be giving potential customers the impression and reputation that you want to be known for.
Find a few agencies that you think are good options, and send a request for proposal (RFP) to the ones that you’d like to potentially work with. Make sure that your RFP is detailed and has all the questions included that you want to know about the marketing agency you are going to choose. You can also ask each to do a presentation and project for you to see which works best in a real-time scenario.
Mistake 2: Not Understanding Marketing Whatsoever
Though you don’t need to become a marketing expert, it is important to understand if you are getting a good return on investment (ROI) for the marketing agency that you work with. How can you be sure if you don’t understand anything that your agency is doing for you?
Understanding at least a bit about the marketing basics is important. If you don’t know, make sure that you can ask your agency and they can thoroughly explain it to you, at least in layman’s terms.
It is important to also do some of your own research to understand what an actual good ROI and ROAS (return on ad spend) is in your industry. Put simply: don’t just take someone else’s word for it. While you should be able to trust an expert (like your marketing agency), make sure they are reputable and trustworthy by being able to share outside sources to back up their claims. A quick Google search can also help you find some sources that you trust to back up or explain whatever jargon you want to learn more about.
Mistake 3: Not Having Full Access to Your Marketing Accounts
Yes, you will have to give passwords and access to your marketing agency to control things such as your pay-per-click (PPC) ads, social media campaigns, keyword ads, and more — but you do not want your agency making these accounts for you without allowing you to access them as well. After all, these accounts will be created for your firm. It should be in your name and with you being able to log in and check on the status.
If you don’t understand what’s happening in the back-end of these accounts, we don’t recommend that you go in and try to do too much. However, it is important that you can have access in case you end up getting someone in-house with experience who can also help out, and so that you can see all the reports.
Mistake 4: Not Having a Proper Way to Track Success
You should have a good baseline of your data before your agency takes over to do marketing for you, as well as regularly updated reports to see how they are helping and improving your marketing strategy.
You can track what’s going on with a few specific tools.
- Call Tracking: Putting tracking numbers on your print and digital ads will help you understand how many people are phoning your business from the ads and marketing content that they come across for your firm.
- Google Analytics: Every business should have a Google account. This is important for your search engine optimization (SEO), as well as for making PPC ads, tracking website visitors and campaigns, and more. Creating and maintaining a Google Analytics account is free, and vital for the health of your marketing.
- Social Analytics: Without paying for extra, you can use the free analytics that your social profiles, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more supply you with by having a business account with each.
The bottom line is, it is important to regularly see your marketing statistics, and to report on the same data points on a consistent basis so that the reports make sense and build on one another. You don’t want excessive data thrown at you, but you want enough to see that progress is being made.
Don’t Let These Marketing Mistakes Happen to You
Follow the tips outlined above and discover how to avoid law firm marketing mistakes. Your firm should be successful when it comes time to setting up marketing campaigns!
