Tracking Lead Intake and Conversions From Your Law Firm Marketing
By Alex on July 22, 2021 in Internet Marketing
The Importance of Tracking
Back in the early 1900s, the U.S. retail magnate John Wanamaker once famously said, “Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
Today, tracking marketing is easy and trouble-free. Numerous applications can be applied – based on the marketing you are using – to track most avenues of marketing properly. If, for example, you want to track the overall traffic to your website, Google Analytics can do that. If you want to track SEO rankings, free applications like Google Search Console will work (or countless paid applications like Agency Analytics that are available). If you want to track calls, CallRail is a wonderful resource. And for a law firm, if you specifically want to track your lead intakes, there are resources like Lawmatics, Clio, LawRuler and others.
Ultimately, this means there are effectively no excuses for not being able to determine where the acquisition of your law firm’s leads and conversions are coming from. The applications mentioned above take out all ambiguity and help provide an answer to this simple question: Is your marketing working?
For a firm, this is critically important. It is a direct reference to the adage of “working smarter, not harder” – hyper-focusing on what’s working best and doing more of that.
When your firm obtains maximum exposure with any form of internet marketing – which can include (but is not limited to) SEO, Google Adwords, Local Service Ads, Social Media, Video marketing; etc.- the end goal is not just this exposure for the firm, but obtaining quality clients and ultimately getting a return on your marketing investment.
Ways to Track
There are extremely detailed ways based on the application your firm uses to track specific returns from marketing: conversion goal tracking in Google Analytics; UTM parameters in paid, organic search or publications (like newsletters); etc.
That said, the most basic way of tracking digital marketing comes down to three factors: a phone call, a contact form submission, or a chat submission – if your website has one (and if you care about conversions, it should).
Categorizing these conversions within a law firm also most commonly fall into these standard classifications:
- Existing Client
- Lost Potential
- Pending/Consult Scheduled
- Potential New Client
- Referred
- Rejected by Firm
- Signed Up
Regardless of how these are all tracked, the most basic way to potentially funnel these together is by investing in a good Customer Relationship Management application. Top legal industry applications include Lawmatics, Clio, Law Ruler as well as many others. These applications aim to aggregate all this information together to easily present what is functioning the best.
What Qualifies as a Good Return
What qualifies as a good return is the biggest conundrum of marketing and what a firm deems as a qualified case. A law firm may have many stringent filters that would otherwise take an eligible case and deem it unqualified. No catastrophic injury? There’s no case. No major investment loss? There’s no case. Insurance companies handled the resolution? There’s no case. However, does that mean your marketing isn’t working? Very arguably, no. However, when the spend for marketing is extremely steep – especially in very competitive practice areas and markets – should these factors matter when deeming if the leads generated by your marketing are producing cases?
Ultimately, we can’t stress the importance of tracking this information and informing your marketing team of who and what is best qualified. Together, we can easily prove John Wannamaker wrong and show where we should be working smarter.
