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.
Why is that worth 15%? A good firm or specialist will know what keywords to target, and which ones waste your money. They now all the tricks to get you more relevancy so your ads cost less, and they know how to right ads that attract the right people, and get the wrong people to ignore them.
This results in several effects. The most important effect is that you will decrease your cost per conversion. Cost per conversion is the amount of money it costs you to get whatever you determine is the metric to use. If it is a contact form you are after, than that is the conversion. If it is the sale of a traffic ticket defense package, then that is your conversion. It can be lowered in two ways, less cost per click, or better targeted click. Imagine if you will that you had a marketing budget of $4000 for the month. If you could get 50 leads out of that your cost per lead is $40. If if you could get 100 leads with the same marketing budget, your cost per lead drops to $20.
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.
Testing testing testing. Very few PPC campaigns are profitable on the first day. You have to test and see what works. You should be making multiple versions of your ads, and multiple groups of ads. The more specific and niche you can get with your ads the better. See which ones perform and which ones do not. Keep the best performers and then test them against more ads.
Analytics makes or breaks the campaign. You cant test properly without a solid analytics program. Without great analytics you cannot tell which words are converting to the desired result, and which ones are eating you budget.
Keyword research is essential to let you know several things. What your target market is searching for, how much it will cost, and what the commercial intent is of each keyword. You want to go after the people that are in action mode, not research mode. It will save you from expensive clicks from a 15 year old student researching class action lawsuit.
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