How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Content

Now that the new year is here, and you have determined how big your marketing budget for 2021 will be, it is time to decide how to allocate your marketing budget. Which marketing activities can you do by yourself, which ones should be part of the job descriptions of your current employees, and which content should you have professionally made? In order to make a wise decision about this, you should measure the effectiveness of your law firm’s current marketing strategy.

There are well recognized key performance indicators (KPIs)for measuring the effectiveness of various formats of marketing content, and only some of these are applicable to law firms. If your marketing budget allows it, you can even have a law firm marketing expert assess your current legal marketing content and advise you about your new strategy.

Key Performance Indicators for Your Law Firm’s Blog

As ever fancier apps and social media platforms appear on the scene, blogs remain one of the most underrated marketing tools; they are especially important for law firms. A well-written blog can effectively present your brand identity, improve your SEO rankings, and bring in new clients. How can you tell how well your blog is doing these things, though? According to Mike Murray of Content Marketing Institute, these are some KPIS that show how well your law firm’s blog is achieving its goals:

· Number of visitors – The more people click on your blog, the better.

· Number of repeat visitors to your blog – If people reread your posts or return often to your site to look for new posts, you know you are doing something right.

· Time on page – If a visitor spends a certain amount of time on your site (about two minutes for a 500-word blog post), it is an indication that they have read the entire post, which indicates that the post is interesting and understandable.

· Geographic trends – It is not bad if people outside your geographic area read your blog; it means that you are a nationwide authority on your subject. What you really want, though, is for people in your city or county to visit your site and read your blog, because they are the ones who can become clients.

Key Performance Indicators for Email Marketing

Long form text is a more important factor in clients’ decisions to engage a law firm than in customers’ decision to make a purchasing decision in almost any other industry. Therefore, it is not surprising that blogs and email marketing are among the most important marketing strategies for law firms. KPIs for email marketing include the open rate, click through rate, and number of subscribers.

Law Blog Writers Helps You Create and Implement Your Content Marketing Strategy

If your current legal blog content is not performing well according to KPIs, you can count on Law Blog Writers to produce custom-written legal blog content that will attract visitors to your site and make them want to keep reading.

Law Firm Email Newsletters Are an Effective Marketing Strategy, Not Annoying Spam

Your first response to the suggestion to incorporate email marketing into your law firm marketing strategy might be one of dismissiveness. After all, promotional emails are so numerous these days that some major email platforms automatically filter them out. If you don’t want to be reminded of the tempting foods that are two for one at your favorite restaurant or of that high-end clothing store where you once bought work clothes that you can no longer fit into, all you have to do is not click on the promotions tab of your email inbox. Do you really want to put effort into creating emails that people are going to ignore?

If this is your reaction, then take comfort in the fact that email marketing for law firms is very different from the gimmicky, spammy emails you get from businesses that are trying to get you to make a purchase today. In fact, you shouldn’t think of it as email marketing; instead, think of it as an email newsletter. Even better, if your law firm’s website already includes professionally written legal blog content, then you are more than halfway to delivering an effective email newsletter to current and future clients.

Anatomy of a Law Firm Email Newsletter

The good news about email marketing newsletters is how much they keep your target audience thinking about you, and the better news is how little effort it requires to send them. The recipients of your newsletter are people with whom you are already in contact by email, so the newsletter goes to their primary email inbox instead of getting diverted to the promotions folder. The following people are automatically part of your email list:

· Current and previous clients

· People who have filled out contact forms on your website

· Colleagues with whom you have previously exchanged emails

Your email newsletter isn’t going to convince these people that they need a lawyer, but that isn’t its purpose. It is to get them to engage with your site, share your content, and simply stay in contact. Once per month is the ideal timetable for sending your newsletter.

Creating and sending an email newsletter does not require a large chunk of your marketing budget. Once you subscribe to an email newsletter platform, the newsletter itself will not cost you anything. You can assign responsibility for it to your administrative staff or to your interns, if you have them. Using a template that comes with the email marketing platform is easy and does not add any cost. Best of all, you don’t even need to create content specifically from your newsletter. You can just share existing blog posts or videos that your law firm has made. The result is that people will view your newsletter as some much-needed “non-stressful stuff to read” when they open their email in the morning.

Blog Posts So Good You Will Want to Share Them in Your Email Newsletter

The legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will create eminently shareable blog content for you to post on your law firm’s website and distribute in your email newsletter.

Patience Is a Virtue When Measuring the ROI of Your Law Firm Marketing Strategy

If you approach law firm marketing with the idea that you are going to get rich quick, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Choosing a marketing strategy is not just about jumping on the bandwagon to follow the latest trend. Your goal is not to achieve 15 minutes of fame; this approach simply does not work in the legal profession. Your practice area, no matter how much media coverage it gets because of its relationship to current events, you are not going to go from zero to superstar overnight.

Even if the First Lady of the United States files for divorce, your family law firm’s YouTube videos are not going to break the record set by “Gangnam Style” in 2012, and even if they did, how many of those viewers who clicked on your irresistibly entertaining video would become new clients? In law firm marketing you should focus on strategies that will continue to pay off over a long period of time. Professionally written blog content for your law firm’s website is one of the most valuable investments you can make in your marketing strategy.

When the Investment Curve and the Return Curve Intersect

According to Tom Nixon of Harrington Communications, you should base your marketing decisions on how you expect the return on investment to be a year or more in the future. Any marketing effort worth its salt has startup costs, even if it only costs time. By this he means that the lawyers will need to spend some time planning and implementing the marketing endeavor, and that time could otherwise have been spent as billable hours.

Even the snazziest video, most shareable ad campaign, or sweetest holiday cards will not result in prospective clients clamoring outside your law office the next day. Especially with evergreen content that stays relevant, once you post an informative blog post, for example, it continues to do its job for years to come and to generate leads, and you will not have to spend a penny on it beyond the flat fee you paid the content writer to write it. In other words, the return curve continues to trend up, even as the investment curve drops off.

How Much Importance Should You Give to Analytics?

Analytics regarding the SEO performance of your content are not, by themselves, a foolproof predictor of return on investment. They can, however, give you a feel-good boost about how many people are seeing your content and are likely to see it in the future. Ranking highly on SEO is not the end goal, but it is certainly a reason to be proud and encouraged that you are doing something right with marketing.

Top Notch Legal Blog Content Will Pay Dividends for Years to Come

Regularly updating the blog on your law firm’s website will benefit your business in many ways. Choosing the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to compose blog content for your site will help you bring in new clients for years to come.