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?
The simple answer is to be better than your competition. Of course gaining those skills can take a PPC marketer years and a lot of money to be able to compete. Most legal firms decide to do there PPC internally. Often times someone suggested they need to start marketing online and mentioned google and everyone came to the consensus of adsense. The trouble is it doesn’t work out to be so easy, and you are wasting your firms marketing budget. This might be a solution.
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.
If by now you have not figured out what I am trying to tell you, here it is. Let a specialist manage your online marketing! The reason why is that it works. Some people devote years to becoming masters at PPC. That is all they do. This makes them much better at it than you. The industry standard is to charge 15% of your budget, and a hourly rate for set up and management. This isnt how it is always done, but it gives you a starting point.
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 relevency rating, which means it costs less to appear at the top.
Testing is crucial to the long term success of a PPC campaign. Almost no campaign is successful right off the back. You have to test parameters against one another to see what is effective and what isn’t. It is different every time. In general a PPC campaign should become more and more successful as time goes by.
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 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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