Social Media Marketing for Attorneys: Guidelines for Measuring ROI
.jpg)
However you choose to measure social media, it is imperative that you have a success metric in mind before you begin. Without some sort of benchmark, determining your ROI is impossible.
Digital intelligence firm eMarketer.com came out with a free report called Seven Guidelines for Achieving ROI from Social Media that does a nice job of explaining exactly what marketers need to do to achieve success with their social media marketing programs. I’ll do my best to summarize:
1. Establish clear marketing goals for your company (generate more opt ins, more leads, etc).
2. Identify the basic measurements and metrics you want to measure.
3. Remember, social media is a commitment to connect with leads, clients and referral sources, it’s not a campaign. To win at social media, you need to have a long-term outlook.
4. If hard ROI metrics are difficult to track directly, consider a range of softer metrics that can be linked back to desired business outcomes.
5. Determine how much a client who opts in to your database is worth to you if a sale is made. Estimate how many sales you need to make in a year to justify the investment.
6. In your ROI calculations, don’t overlook the value of cost savings that result from engaging in online conversations with prospects, leads, clients, and potential referral sources.
7. Examine your choices for managing your blog and social media marketing efforts. You have three choices:
Do It Yourself. While this may seem the cheapest option at first (“It’s only my time”), consider this—How much do you charge per hour (if you don’t charge hourly ask yourself how much value do you place on an hour of your time)? For example, if you bill out at $250 per hour and it only takes you 1 hour to research, write, edit and post a blog (that’s a good estimate), but you do this 5 times every week to maximize lead generation, that’s $1,250 per week, $5,000 per month, or $65,000 per year. That’s not counting the “opportunity cost”—not only will you “spend” $65,000 of your time each year, but you will also lose another $65,000 in actual billing where you could have billed a client! So the true cost of “doing it yourself” may be upwards of $130,000! Suddenly, that doesn’t seem so cheap.
Use a Staff Member. This usually takes the form of either instructing an Associate to do it (what’s their motivation to write great blog posts 5 times every week?) or assigning another non-attorney staff person to write it—at which time it becomes just one more thing on their long list of to-dos. Not to mention the fact that you will need to make sure any staff member understands keyword density ratios, how to insert the correct keywords, and using the correct header and title tags—that's all that SEO stuff, which is the real reason why you are blogging anyway.
Outsource. A growing number of attorneys are outsourcing their blogging efforts and social media campaigns to organizations like ours (full disclosure: yes, we have a program for attorneys to manage their blog and social media). When you outsource, you can focus on end results, not the process and hopefully you will be working with professionals who do this for a living. It’s not just another item on their to-do list, it is the very service you are paying them to provide for your firm.
When you interview an outsourced legal marketing company, be sure they meet these 5 criteria:
- they can point to other attorneys they work with;
- they have a written blueprint for how they intend to generate leads for your law firm;
- they clearly integrate blogs and social media and see one as an extension of the other;
- they charge a flat fee that’s reasonable based on results;
- they have clearly identified strategies to track and measure actual results from your blog and social media. Having a written guarantee of results is even better.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Practice Made Perfect for Lawyers CD Set
The Practice Made Perfect CD set and manual applies Stephen Fairley’s unique High Impact Marketing System to the practice-building challenges faced by solo practitioners and partners at small law firms.
It includes dozens of specific marketing and sales recommendations that can be easily and quickly applied to your firm, including:
- The only 7 sure-fire ways to get clients in your door NOW
- Why advertising doesn’t work for most small law firms
- The 7 reasons why people don’t buy from you
- How to market and sell with USP’s (Unique Selling Proposition)
- Using audio logos to attract immediate attention for your business
- Using low-cost, high impact marketing strategies
- Strategies for achieving maximum results from all of your marketing efforts
- How to discover your Ideal Target Market
- 3 critical factors to remember when looking for new clients
- The NEW sales cycle for professional services
- How to retain your best clients
Click here to order your Practice Made Perfect for Lawyers CD set and manual now.
http://www.therainmakerblog.com/admin/trackback/240197
