Be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2 of our “After the Click” series to learn how to get more clients from your digital marketing.
After a legal practice has optimized its intake and routing processes to handle potential clients, it’s important to then determine how clients are learning about the firm.
These days, law firms typically have multiple channels for client acquisition, including Pay Per Click advertising, search engine optimization, direct website visits, referral sources, social media, and many more. While getting an Internet user to click through to your website is a key goal, it is equally important to know the path that visitor took to get there and their behavior flow after they landed on your site.
Understanding your sources for potential clients is a vital component to calculating your overall return on investment. This information can enable your firm to identify channels that aren’t working and to prioritize those that are more effective.
The following four tips will help your law firm effectively and accurately analyze its sources for potential clients, which will enable you to make better decisions on how to spend your marketing budget.
If your firm invests in a multichannel strategy for marketing to prospective clients, you need to make sure you’re accurately tracking data from each of those sources. Using tools like Google Analytics is a major part of understanding your website traffic, and conversion tracking will help you further understand which pages and content are best optimized for conversions.
Google Analytics allows you to not only track general sources, such as paid, referral, direct, email, and social media, but also to pinpoint the exact path your website visitors took to your site. By using this Campaign URL Builder, you can create customized links that tell Analytics specific sources for traffic. For instance, you can see that a user landed on www.example.com from a specific newsletter in your email campaign from MailChimp.
Ask Clients During Intake
Occasionally, even the most advanced analytics tool is unable to determine where a specific client came from in the digital sphere. Likewise, if your firm advertises using television or radio commercials, billboards, or similar media, you won’t be able to track each person your ad reached.
The truth is, you likely won’t have a 100 percent success rate with any tracking tool. That is why it’s crucial for your practice to ask clients how they heard about your firm. We recommend implementing this step as part of your intake process. The longer you wait, the less reliable your client’s memory will be.
Your intake team should have clients be as specific as possible. If the client heard one of your television ads, which channel was it on and at what time of day? If they were referred by a relative or friend, what was their name? If they saw your billboard, which location was it? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you determine where your marketing budget is being best spent.
One of the greatest benefits of data tracking is that it becomes more valuable the longer you do it. Over time, you start to see trends that can help you project client acquisition and plan for future marketing strategies. Therefore, you should never consider any data you have as disposable; each piece plays a role in building a larger picture.
Because tracking data is such an important asset to your firm, it is best to continually organize and summarize the information through weekly or monthly reports. You can either track it manually or use practice management software, a database, or a spreadsheet to automate the process.
The more you learn about where current and past clients came from, the more you’ll be able to increase efficiency and cost-effectiveness in acquiring future clients. However, your data is only reliable if it’s consistent.
If you prioritize data tracking for a few weeks but then stop doing it for a couple months, the information you compiled will be practically useless. As most firms can attest, some months are better than others when it comes to signing clients, which is why small sample sizes are ultimately worthless.
Tracking client sources can require a lot of effort, but the information you collect will compound in value the longer you stick with it. Moreover, like most processes, it becomes easier to do over time.
At Client Chat Live, we offer live chat operators 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. To find out more about how we can help you get more clients, contact our team at (808) 725-3633 or send us an email.
Be sure to check back here for future installments in our “After the Click” series.
After the Click, Pt. 1: Optimizing the Intake Process for Law Firms
After the Click, Pt. 2: Determining Who at Your Firm Should Be Talking to Potential Clients
