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by Aaron Kirk Douglas and Greg Fredette
Now is a great time to examine Return on Investment (ROI) for marketing. Law firm partners should examine and compare the ROI of newly employed "sales forces" versus traditional communications-based marketing. Sales-based marketing-just now being used by law firms-has been a mainstay of accounting firm marketing for decades. Sales-based marketing has more easily measurable results, since the law firm representative has direct contact with clients and closely tracks the business coming in the door from their efforts. Determining the results from communications-based marketing-currently more prevalent among law firms-requires more work. Both types of marketing are equally valuable in business development. This article offers suggestions on how to measure non-sales marketing results.
Here are five things your law firm can do to determine whether a "non-sales" communications-based marketing department is having measurable impact on business development. Keep in mind that these may sound easy, but they may represent significant additional work on top of what legal marketers are already trying to accomplish during their workweek. You may want to consider hiring a project assistant or independent contractor to come in and do this type of comprehensive analysis if your existing staff is busy with the actual "work" of business development.
1. Keep a log of all proposals sent out and track the results.
This sounds really easy, but because there are so many things being juggled by a typical marketing professional that remembering to make a log entry can sometimes fall off the "to do" list. Remembering to gather this information can pay off in a big way every 6-12 months and help refine proposal methodologies to improve performance.
Each time a secretary or lawyer requests so much as a single piece of marketing material (even a lawyer biography) to send to a potential client, the marketer should log
a) Who it is being sent to
b) What area(s) of law they are promoting
c) When they expect a response from the potential client (if any)
d) What industry or group the target client belongs to
e) Whether there are any other legal services your firm provides that can be pitched or included as "reminder services" along with that proposal.
Lawyers and secretaries generally aren't thinking about all this stuff. They are busy people and all they want is to make sure it gets out the door. The marketing professional needs to remind lawyers and staff of the opportunity to cross-sell (or at least present) additional legal services provided by the firm whenever information is sent out.
There are more than a few ways you can track responses to your marketing materials (known as "collateral"). A simple approach is to make a Microsoft Excel worksheet that includes at least the following information: (a) date; (b) responsible lawyer; (c) contact name and company the proposal was sent to; (d) company industry type; (e) what materials were sent (what bios & what legal services you were pitching); (f) results (more business: yes/no); (g) the dollar value billed if the firm was hired for new or additional business following and directly related to this proposal. While this method is low-cost and easy to implement in the short term, a more sophisticated approach will yield better results by saving time and capturing more information.
Many firms have discovered that automated proposal systems can simplify the task of creating proposals. A frequently overlooked benefit is that the proposal system can capture information used to track success and thus measure ROI. As people in the firm use these systems to create proposals, specific information is captured through the creation process, such as client name, lawyer, office location, contact info, etc. This information can be viewed by marketing staff at any time and sorted in numerous ways including date or industry. This method automatically provides the statistics necessary to analyze ROI. An automated system can also send e-mail reminders to attorneys requesting the results of specific proposals, freeing marketing staff from an extremely labor-intensive reminder process and allowing them to focus on business development activities.
Whatever method you use to collect this information, the results column is the most important. Accounting staff can provide detailed information on billing amounts and funds collected following specific proposals.
2. Keep track of web site visitors by month and report trends
If you have redesigned your Web site in the last year, be sure that you track the number of unique visitors to your site each month. "Unique visitors" is really the most important number because "total visitors" could be a single individual visiting 10,000 times. "Unique visitors" provides the actual number of different computer addresses. Keep track of visitor trends and whether they are increasing, decreasing or remaining stable.
It is possible to continually increase visitors to your site in the following ways:
a) Send out e-newsletters that are links to pages on your Web site.
b) Add a client Extranet to share case files and account information. [Banks and accounting firms have done this for years. Law firms have been very slow to catch up. Business consumers use this as an example of lawyer resistance to technology that improves efficiency and reduces costs to the client.]
c) Allow online registration for your seminars and events.
d) Entice people to visit your Web site "for more information" when you do hardcopy mailings, and in advertising.
e) Conduct client surveys that link back to your Web site.
Many firms use commercially available out-of-the-box software to collect Web site stats. To improve your understanding of your Web site traffic it is helpful to develop custom statistics programs as well. Custom statistics analysis programs provide more targeted results. For example, lawyers and legal professionals can receive personalized automated reports containing only the information that is important to them, rather than having to wade through unnecessary information.
Custom statistics programs also provide reports about other Web activity, such as traffic generated from a specific electronic newsletter, or the number of times a client logged into an Extranet or viewed an electronic proposal. These kinds of statistics provide very direct ROI metrics.
3. Change your new client intake form to better track referral sources
Everyone has or should have a client intake form. Most marketers I've talked to know that theirs is in bad shape but don't know how-or don't want to take the time necessary-to fix them. Here are some of the checkboxes that you want to be sure to include on your form under "Source of Referral."
a) A person: (name) _______________________
b) Speaking Engagement
c) Seminar
d) Networking Event/Sponsorship
e) Community Involvement
f) Web site/Internet Browsing
g) Martindale Hubbell
h) Firm Client: (name) ___________________
i) Client transferred from prior firm [for lateral hires]
Try not to include vague things like "Firm Reputation" because that doesn't mean anything or your attempt to measure ROI. Your new clients come from someplace measurable and tangible. You need to find out what that source is.
For real efficiency and ease, you can develop an automated electronic intake form on your Intranet. People in your firm can fill out these electronic forms by typing in new client information that is then saved into a database. Your intake form might provide several departments or individuals in the firm with new client or client matter information. It might also automatically save the information into another database system such as an electronic newsletter that is e-mailed to lawyers and staff.
4. Utilize a service that calculates cash value of your in-house PR efforts
There are Web-based sites that can help you measure the actual cash value of your in-house Public relations. This is the same methodology employed by expensive public relations firms to prove their value to you. This technology can easily calculate the actual cash value of in-house public relations efforts. To utilize this service you must have either a paper or electronic clipping service already employed. A newspaper clipping service is usually very inexpensive. Electronic services do the same thing but cost more because they also include online news stories.
With these services, news clipping information is entered into an online database that calculates the cash value of the impressions your firm received as a result. These calculations use Neilson, Arbitron, and other well-known audience measurement services.
One provider of this service is called PRTrak, although there may be others. A PR-educated marketing staff can easily pay for itself in this one activity alone by minimizing outside PR and advertising expenditures.
5. Ideas for additional year-end statistics
In addition to the above items, there are other easy items to track that can be included in a ROI analysis. They include tracking the total number of inquiries generated from your Web site marketing staff and lawyers responded to during the year. The use of automated Web and Intranet technologies can simplify the gathering of this information.
There are always more things to analyze-but too much analysis leads to organizational paralysis. Pick some ROI measurements that work for you and stick with them.
Aaron Kirk Douglas, former marketing director at Miller Nash LLP, is a legal marketing consultant based in Portland, Oregon. He can be reached through his Web site at www.aaronkdouglas.com.
Greg Fredette is the managing developer of SaturnoDesign.com, a Web and software development company in Portland. Oregon. He can be reached at www.SaturnoDesign.com.
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