As a law firm or independent lawyer, determining where to spend you online marketing budget can be a daunting task. You have so many options, and are competing in a very competitive field. Each click could possibly be a new client eventually worth thousands or hundreds of thousands to the firm. With that kind of value on the line you can bet that firms are willing to pay whatever they have to, to be seen. Is there anything you can do to get the edge?
Yes! You can be better than the competition. The sad truth about law firms and most business when it comes to marketing online is that they try to do it for themselves. Someone in the office says “We should be marketing online, lets try adsense.” Everyone says its a great idea and they give it a shot. The problem is, it isn’t that easy. Here is why.
In your right mind would ever recommend a client represent themselves in court with little or no court experience? Why not? You would not do that because you know that regardless of how smart that person is, they have no court experience or expertise. This is something that requires years of experience to master. A rocket scientist may be smarter than you but they do not know that asking to dismiss a piece of evidence because the paper work wasn’t filed properly was even an option.
What your firm should be doing is getting an expert in the field of PPC to manage the campaign for you. The reason is the same reason a PPC expert should hire a lawyer for law advice. PPC marketers spend years honing their skills to stay competitive. Most likely you are competing against them right now if you are advertising online, and you are at a huge disadvantage. Normally a good PPC management firm would charge 15% of your marketing budget + an hourly rate to do the the testing, tweaking, and research. This is not set in stone and is merely an industry average of sorts. Often times other arrangements are made.
Is it worth 15% You bet. If you get a good firm, the increased effectiveness in your campaign could easily double, if not triple. They know how to make your campaign larger, more targeted, and more effective on the same budget. They can even get the people that see your ads who are not potential clients to not click them and cost you money.
This translates in to higher conversions per clicks, and only paying for the clicks that are getting conversions. Sounds like a good thing right. Because it is. A very good thing. Imagine what would happen if you were spending $5000 a month in PPC advertising online, and you could increase your conversion from getting leads from 10 clients a month, to getting leads from 20 clients per month. That is huge.
That would mean that you could charge more per click, because you are converting at a higher rate. Here are several important factors that effect PPC campaigns and how effective they are. You can ask prospective marketing firms about these, they should have answer to all or almost all of them.
Creating optimized landing pages is crucial. You want the page that the person lands on to be as relevant as possible to the search term. It makes sense to them, but Google also rewards you with a higher relevancy rating, which means it costs less to appear at the top.
Success is all about the testing. Few campaigns are profitable right out of the gate. The key is test every variable. Test dozens of ad variations, test small groups of keywords individually. Keep the best performer through out the others, and test the best performer against a new set of ads.
Analytics are one of, if not the most important factors in PPC marketing. You need to be able to see where you sign ups are coming from. Without analytics, 1000 people could click on an ad from a keyword you were bidding on and you would not know whether anyone signed up or not. Analytics is what let you know which keywords to bid more on, and which to stop bidding on all together.
Keyword research is how you determine which keywords to target in the first place. If you do proper keyword research before you even begin an internet marketing campaign, your success rate compared to not doing the research will be astronomical. It is the foundation of all internet marketing.
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