Managing your online marketing budget as a lawyer or law firm can be a challenge. There are countless decisions to be made, and you are competing for very valuable interest. One client could mean thousands or hundreds of thousands in revenue to the firm. That means that other firms are paying top dollar to be seen on the front page of the ad search results. Is there anything you can do?
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.
Would you recommend that a defendant represent himself in court? Why not? Because no matter how smart they are, law, and being effective in a court room is something that requires years of experience and specific knowledge to become good at. A physhics professor may be smarter than you, but he does not know how to object when a prosecutor makes an unsubstantiated claim.
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 isn't how it is always done, but it gives you a starting point.
Is it worth 15% You bet. If you get a good firm, the increased effectiveness in your campaign could easily double, if not triple. They know how to make your campaign larger, more targeted, and more effective on the same budget. They can even get the people that see your ads who are not potential clients to not click them and cost you money.
This means several things. First, you will improve the mother of all PPC metrics, cost per conversion. The means that your ratio of clicks to conversions will most likely improve, or your cost per click will lower meaning you will have a lower cost per conversion. Usually it is both. This is very good thing. Imagine you have a budget of $10000 per month, and you are currently getting 3000 clicks to your page. That means your are paying $3.33 per click. From that you are getting 100 leads. that is $100 per lead, or 3.3% conversion. If you could make that 6.6% you will have double the leads and your cost per lead is now $50.
The implications of this is that your can pay more for your clicks if you have to. Up to double what you would have paid before and still have the same or better results. You may even be able to increase the advertising budget because of its effectiveness. We have comprised a list of several of the most important factors that effect PPC campaigns.
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 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: You want to find out what your target market is searching for, and how much competition there is. You also want to know the strength of the keywords commercial intent. This means is the person using that word in the discovery phase of the decision cycle, the comparison phase, or the action phase. Start by marketing to the action phased words first. That way you can save on clicks from 15 year old mesothelioma research reports.
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.
Would you recommend that a defendant represent himself in court? Why not? Because no matter how smart they are, law, and being effective in a court room is something that requires years of experience and specific knowledge to become good at. A physhics professor may be smarter than you, but he does not know how to object when a prosecutor makes an unsubstantiated claim.
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 isn't how it is always done, but it gives you a starting point.
Is it worth 15% You bet. If you get a good firm, the increased effectiveness in your campaign could easily double, if not triple. They know how to make your campaign larger, more targeted, and more effective on the same budget. They can even get the people that see your ads who are not potential clients to not click them and cost you money.
This means several things. First, you will improve the mother of all PPC metrics, cost per conversion. The means that your ratio of clicks to conversions will most likely improve, or your cost per click will lower meaning you will have a lower cost per conversion. Usually it is both. This is very good thing. Imagine you have a budget of $10000 per month, and you are currently getting 3000 clicks to your page. That means your are paying $3.33 per click. From that you are getting 100 leads. that is $100 per lead, or 3.3% conversion. If you could make that 6.6% you will have double the leads and your cost per lead is now $50.
The implications of this is that your can pay more for your clicks if you have to. Up to double what you would have paid before and still have the same or better results. You may even be able to increase the advertising budget because of its effectiveness. We have comprised a list of several of the most important factors that effect PPC campaigns.
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 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: You want to find out what your target market is searching for, and how much competition there is. You also want to know the strength of the keywords commercial intent. This means is the person using that word in the discovery phase of the decision cycle, the comparison phase, or the action phase. Start by marketing to the action phased words first. That way you can save on clicks from 15 year old mesothelioma research reports.
