Effective law firm advertising that doesn’t break the bank is possible! A data-driven approach to your law firm’s advertising budget can cut wasted money in half. Learn how it’s done here.
Define Your Advertising Goals
No business can afford to waste money on poorly-planned advertising—especially right now. But it can be intimidating to start building a data-driven plan upon which to base your advertising.
What does effective law firm advertising look like to you? If you’re not sure where to start, the first thing to do is identify your firm’s marketing goals.
Don’t be vague here (of course you want to get more clients and make more money; that’s any law firm’s goal). Instead, have concrete answers for specific questions. For example:
- What kinds of cases are you looking for?
- What is the minimum number of cases you want to gain from your advertising efforts?
- What is the maximum number of clients you can realistically add to your caseload?
- Where should your leads be located?
- Is there a certain type of client you want? Describe them.
- What ROI (return on investment) are you aiming for?
Next, it’s important to identify your resources. This includes your budget, but it also encompasses the time and energy it will take to run your law firm’s advertising. (That’s where an advertising agency with law firm experience comes in handy: we handle all of that so you can focus on serving your clients.)
Measuring Television Advertising
The key factor in measuring the effectiveness of a television commercial is in how many conversions, or prospect leads, it produces. In other words, it doesn’t matter how many people saw it or liked it: if your commercial doesn’t produce promising leads at an efficient cost, it’s just about worthless to you.
The secret is reaching certain levels of reach and saturation with your television media. If you think only buying the occasional commercial is a way to save money on advertising, think again. It’s already hard enough to break through the noise of all the other commercials that are vying for your prospects’ attention, so underachieving in TV just results in your law firm wasting money on a pointless ad.
In television advertising, you must reach high levels of reach and frequency for your firm to be remembered. Otherwise, your name won’t pop up in the mind of a prospect when it’s most important: when they need a lawyer to help them with their DUI, bankruptcy, injury, or divorce.
Because you’re offering a service, your law firm’s advertisements must consistently reach an audience that needs to hear what you have to say. The only way to find out exactly where that audience is, when to reach them, and what they respond to is through measuring your advertising.
At Kirkpatrick Creative, our media purchasing is based on statistics. We test ads across time slots, demographics, and networks to find the exact combination that works for your law firm’s specific advertising goals. To do that, we perform rigorous testing on the performance of every ad we run.
Information is Power
When we start analyzing trends, we discover—from our own data—which advertising produces the most prospect response, at which times of day, and from where. That’s how we find out where your law firm is wasting its advertising dollars.
Want to try it for yourself? Start keeping track of the demographics of your calls. What type of person seems to call when? How did they hear about you? This is the first step of building a database that you can reference when you need to make advertising decisions. Keep in mind that this isn’t a one-time activity—your database must be constantly updated for it to be as accurate as possible.
If you want to know which TV spots get which customers to call you, use separate phone numbers for different commercials. This will tell you in an instant which spots are speaking more to your ideal prospects. But don’t stop there—take note of how many calls you receive on each number, and on which days of the week they call. Then, use your data to negotiate with TV stations and get better prices on your spots. After all, your data isn’t very useful if you don’t apply it!
You can also run analytics for different practice areas in your firm. For example, what are the best programming and time slots for personal injury, bankruptcy, social security/disability, and truck wreck leads? Chances are that they’re all different. Through analytics, you’ll have the information to deploy creative messaging with the right positioning that will speak to potential clients in each of these practice areas.
New Opportunities
Now that you’re not wasting your law firm’s advertising budget on expensive, non-productive media, what can you do with the money you’re saving? Here are a few ideas.
First, you can buy longer spots to dominate the top-performing commercial breaks on your favorite (i.e., the best-producing) television programming. This improves your law firm’s chances of being onscreen long enough to be remembered by viewers. Now, your name and number won’t just be a flash on the screen that could be easily missed by someone running to the bathroom or microwaving their lunch.
Buying longer spots also allows you to expand on your brand positioning without sacrificing the most important part of your commercial: the call to action. Thirty-second spots are notorious for being rushed. Consider a sixty-second spot instead to really inform viewers what you’re all about and why they should choose you.
Finally, you can now buy and test ideas that you never had the budget for before. For example, you can experiment with different days of the week or programs you think could be valuable. Even if the results aren’t great in terms of leads, they’re great for information! You’re still getting value of your investment in the form of intel for future advertising strategies.
The Bottom Line
To sum up, these are the two main tenets of how measurement makes for effective law firm advertising:
- To improve the efficiency of your media buy, increase frequency only in places that you know generate leads. When you start building a database of where your leads are coming from, you never have to guess at this again.
- To find out what messaging resonates the most with your target audience, measure the results of each and every ad you produce. This will increase the likelihood of leads converting into clients.
Having access to data means the highest possible advertising efficiency: the most client prospect response at the lowest cost. For optimum success, law firms should create a measurement process for their advertising, analyze what they find, and make budgetary decisions based on that data…or hire an agency to do it for them.
Efficient, Effective Advertising for Law Firms
At Kirkpatrick Creative, we work every angle and test everything we do to harvest even the smallest incremental boosts for the maximum efficiency of our law firm clients’ advertising budgets. We refine, test, and repeat until we get the most productivity out of every advertising dollar spent. It’s what we call advertising engineered to work.
Ready to get started making the most of your law firm’s advertising budget? Contact Kirkpatrick Creative today for a FREE marketing assessment!