How is Legal Marketing Lead Generation Changing?

For legitimate legal-marketing companies, building high-value prospects is a top priority. Some techniques are more inventive and less invasive than others. When you’re planning a digital campaign for your law firm, which strategies should you consider, and why?

The same rules apply to all law firms; legal marketing campaigns have the potential to have an extremely high ROI or fail miserably. Success and failure boil down to who you’re selling to and why your service fits their need.

Why Legal Marketing campaigns fail

Many marketing pros pursue the apparent high monthly retainer fees that law firms are associated with and feel like they can justify a high budget to buy traffic. Depending on the type of legal services offered, more traffic might not be a priority.

If you’re looking for low in the funnel traffic, like traffic accidents or anything related to probate or estate planning, Google search ads alone should give you a strong ROI. When individuals search for these phrases, they have often already decided to buy, but haven’t decided who from.

With these types of services, one could argue that the more traffic to your law firm’s website should ultimately result in more clients, as long as the website converts effectively. The only downside is, there is a hefty fee to compete for this traffic in paid search.

On the flip side, if you want to get retainer clients who are longer-term or want B2B connections, PPC campaigns may hurt you more than they help you. The B2B customer journey takes weeks, months, and even years before a conversion happens.

For longer customer journeys, inbound marketing strategies cannot only identify but measure interest within your audience. However, the amount of work and production required to achieve a meaningful result is heavily weighted.

You’ll need a lot of content, specific to your services, to address and reassure the audience during their decision making journey. Also, be prepared to integrate Marketing Automation SaaS like Hubspot, Vbout, and Sharpspring if you want to make the most out of your campaigns.’

Marketing automation platforms, provide access to landing page builders, email marketing, contact filtering, browser push, and a ton more. An excellent platform for new marketing teams is Vbout.

This platform ties in a lot of CRM, analytics, direct marketing, and social media management together without being daunting to its users. The prices are also, much more affordable than the marketing automation heavy-weights and for a small to a medium-sized law office, will cover the mid to high-level needs of the business development team as well as the managing directors

How much does legal marketing cost?

How much is a new car? It’s relative to how big and how fast you want to move. There are a lot of ways to generate leads for a corporate law office. We start by building personas that fit your services.

After you understand who, you can begin figuring out the “why.” As in, why your firm is the answer they have (or haven’t) been researching.

The cost of legal marketing can vary by campaign platform and by the service you offer. Using paid campaigns, social media, content, and direct marketing can help reach broad audiences.

The more specific your service is, the higher the conversion rate, and the higher the cost. It will be worth investing in higher-level marketing activities, like Linked Selling and marketing automation, the more niche your service is. These strategies may seem to be higher cost, but the pricing of all digital marketing is relative.

As an example, if it takes 50 visitors to your site to get a general legal client and you pay $6 per click, the cost per client is $300. If you want ten clients a month, your budget should be over $3000.

If you take that model and want to sell a particular service like “BVI Yacht Registration,” you might find out that search traffic volume on Google, isn’t high enough for that type of search. You could easily spend double the amount per click ($12) and have to get 100 visitors to the site before one becomes a client.

That would cost $1200 per client, which may seem like a lot but even then, considering the client’s lifetime is sometimes ten years or more, the ROI would still be 10:1, not to mention the fact that they will more than likely need other corporate legal services as well. With Linked Selling and automation, it costs roughly the same monthly fee.

The difference is you get more connections and opportunities to nurture clients because the traffic isn’t coming from clicks but from direct communication with the pool of prospects that fit your target personas. A more labor-intensive strategy like Linked Selling will reduce your reliance on pay-per-click advertising and build an audience for you to share content with organically.

Meeting Setting for Corporate Legal Services

Corporate and financial legal services and trusts keywords are high-competition and are difficult to rank organically; they are also expensive to buy from Google and Bing. Over the years, we’ve learned that getting traffic is not the most significant challenge.

We built our service specific to prospect, communicate online with the ultimate goal of setting meetings with legal and financial services prospects. Our Linked Selling strategy isn’t part of a fancy algorithm or SaaS platform.

We simply use data and good ole’ fashioned prospecting to find a desirable audience online, then we connect, person to person. As the campaign matures, so does our contact list.

As we have more conversations, our messaging campaigns perform better. Eventually, we can set meetings and provide the sales team with the entire activity stream and a sales brief before they ever get on a call.

The service costs roughly the same monthly fee as a sophisticated PPC campaign. The difference is you get more connections and opportunities to nurture clients because the traffic isn’t coming from clicks but from direct communication with the pool of prospects that fit your target personas.

Also, these connections remain yours even after the campaign ends. What’s more, we provide a free Vbout Account as a CRM while the campaign is running and manually enrich new prospect profiles with the entire communication chain back to our initial invite to connect.

One difference with our Linked Selling strategy is that the price remains mostly fixed, and is entirely adaptive for the firm’s needs. We offer add-ons for automation, email marketing, browser push, and for an extra fee, we also train and recruit sales support specifically for your campaign.

Perhaps the most significant benefit my clients have seen is how Linked Selling is like a hedge against PPC, but they can also complement each other through retargeting. All the while, Linked Selling reduces reliance on pay-per-click advertising and builds a live audience for you to share content with whether you’re running a paid marketing campaign or not.

In the end, do you want traffic or meetings?

There are two key differences between our Linked Selling strategy and a typical PPC campaign. First, the fees for Linked Selling are fixed and predetermined but are completely adaptive to the firm’s needs.

With PPC, you’re average cost per click and budget one month, could have completely different results the next. That’s not saying that the results will be worse, just less predictable.

The second difference is the purpose of Linked Selling is simple, we want to set meetings on behalf of our clients. Yes, there is some back and forth communication and a social media makeover but mainly, we’re getting prospects through the funnel from the initial introduction to meeting invitation, rather than have a goal to get them to fill out a web form.

With PPC, the goal often ends when they visit the website and if they fill out a form. If they don’t convert right then, you can retarget them with display ads and social media but still, the goal is to get them to fill out a form.

Perhaps the greatest benefit my clients have seen is how Linked Selling is like a hedge against PPC but they can also complement each other through retargeting. All the while, Linked Selling reduces reliance on pay-per-click advertising and builds an organic audience for you to share content with whether you’re running a paid marketing campaign or not.

Is your business development team, hungry for more meetings?

Reach out and we will review your current plans and see if there is a way for us to get involved. If you’re interested in hearing more about our ala carte services request a review and proposal for Linked Selling. We also can talk more about how we integrate marketing automation, email marketing, browser push, and for an extra fee we also train and recruit sales support specifically for your campaign.