Attorney marketing challenges in New York often give law firms fits as they seek to grow their business while remaining compliant with the New York Bar Association.
We have all seen the expensive TV commercials with tiny “Attorney Advertising” disclaimers and ridiculous jingles.
Though the traditional television marketing techniques can work to a 2:1 ROI (gross, annualized) ratio, they are incredibly expensive, and time consuming to produce effectively.
Having been apart of successful TV campaigns, few think of the right channels, times, target audiences, and focus group studies it takes to work.
Does your firm have $100,000 a month for a bevy of News 12 Long Island spots?
Are they prepared to make a new commercial a quarter and utilize a focus group for each?
Those costs aside, did you know that TV spots, like mailers, require multiple viewings, weeks’ worth, before potential clients are expected to call in?
All of that said you can double your money, at least your gross versus cost, roughly.
But that is at a great cost of time, money, and only if it all works to perfection.
Billboard campaigns and mailers have become crapshoots at best, and ad sources, like Findlaw are known to attorneys, especially since they force lawyers to advertise to not have competitors show up on their own profiles, but the public knows little of Findlaw they see it at the very top of Google searches.
Where law firms and attorneys can truly gain steady growth, in new clients, is through online attorney advertising with SEO, web design, and CPC campaigns.
All of these have their attorney marketing challenges too.
The New York Bar has rules and guidelines in place for online marketing, but these are fairly straight-forward.
For example, the NY Bar requires your marketer or web designer to give you an entire backup copy of the site whenever there is a major redesign, in case of data loss.
“Attorney Advertising” also needs to be on every web page of your website.
Online marketing challenges for law firms:
It makes little sense to use Facebook Ads without posting anything on the firm’s business page there.
The same goes for any of the other social media platforms.
Each have their merits and depending on your area of law, you would be surprised which social networking sites work well, and for very little in ad spend compared to Google Ads.
A marketing agency experienced in marketing for attorneys and law firms will be able to grow your clientele online at a return on investment that is much greater than 2:1.
To do this, both organic and paid advertising methodologies come into play.
Organic advertising means using SEO, social media, and web design to get traffic that converts to clients without paying for ads.
The caveat here: time and effort.
Proper web design can take days, weeks, months, or even a year or so to show up in the top searches that will yield clients.
Having your SEO working to perfection also requires diligent updates to an attorney’s website and adding new relevant content often.
There are dozens of competitors in your area – just from Long Island to New York City – that will already be above you for some, if not all, of the most searched terms for your area of law.
The best phrases and keywords relating to your firm’s specialty with the highest traffic online yield the best potential clients.
But only those sites showing up on the first page of Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo receive enough clicks to yield consistent results.
And the amount of clicks increases exponentially the closer to the top of page one that you get.
The benefit to organic marketing is that you are not paying ads daily to be at the top.
Once you gain hundreds to thousands of views on your website monthly from the right audience demographics, you will start to get business in that should steadily increase with your online gains over time.
If you are doing the right type of SEO, keeping up with it, and not cutting corners, then it will be difficult to move you anywhere but up in the search rankings.
It is like having paid ads at the top of the page for free.
And paying for organic marketing is a lot cheaper than paid advertising campaigns.
Which is their biggest challenge: budget.
Personal injury law, for instance, can easily average $6-$12 a click in Google Ads to be in the top 3 spots in the Long Island and five boroughs of New York.
You will want at least 20 clicks a day to yield enough calls to get a qualified lead.
$120 by five days a week equals $600 per week, $2400 to Google monthly, and you still have to pay a marketer to run the campaign.
More likely you need to double that budget to conservatively (near the $12 Cost Per Click) have a chance at enough good client phone calls to gain new business.
Put $5000 a month on the table.
But a client once every other month, averaging their value to the firm at a third of $70000, or $23100 times six months equaling $138600 gives you better than a 2:1 ROI.
And that is an ultra conservative look.
An efficient marketing campaign will look to make a client a month to start in this example and some clients may be worth millions, which is why we averaged at a $70000 settlement value.
You can see the potential of a 3:1 ROI and much greater than that.
The budget, dedicating the $5000 a month for at least two months is the only drawback.
But these attorney marketing challenges yield great rewards.
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