Budgeting for your law firm marketing activities can feel like a bit of a balancing act.
Every marketing channel comes with its own pros, cons, and budget considerations. And you need to ensure that you’re getting the best ROI from everything you do.
Here’s a list of FAQs law firms have when determining their marketing spend, with answers to guide you as you design your law firm marketing budget and strategy.
How much should law firms spend on marketing?
There’s no magic number that you should spend in your marketing budget. But you can get a good estimate of how much to spend by considering a few factors about your firm:
What is your current revenue?
The key to setting a law firm marketing budget is to have a deep understanding of your revenue. Knowing your historical revenue figures, and having a good forecast for what it will be in the coming year, will help you determine how much you should spend on marketing.
According to CallRail's 2023 Law Firm Marketing Outlook report, firms spend on average 15% of their annual overhead budget on marketing.
Interested in how budgeting changes have changed for 2023? Check out the 2023 Law firm marketing outlook report to find out how your firm stacks up.
What are your marketing goals?
Having a clear, specific picture of what you want your marketing to achieve will not only help you choose the right channels to invest in, but also demonstrate how much you need to spend to get there in the timeline you have in mind.
Ambitious goals like a major increase in new client leads will require a larger marketing investment. If you aren’t as focused on growth or have less of a need for continuous new leads, you can stand to decrease spend for the time being.
Where is your revenue coming from?
The final thing to consider when setting your law firm marketing budget is the source of your current revenue. No matter what your goals are, you still need to fund your activities with current dollars. Maintaining enough investment in the marketing channels that are already working for you gives you the freedom to explore other marketing channels that can accomplish your goals.
What do law firms spend their marketing budget on?
Once you have a good idea of how much you are budgeting to spend on marketing, your next task is to determine which channels you want to use, and how much you want to invest in each one to achieve or surpass your goals.
There are two generally two overarching areas of marketing to consider when it comes to generating revenue. They are by no means mutually exclusive—you can invest in both, though you may prioritize one of these over the other, depending on your goals.
Acquisition Marketing (Lead Generation)
If your primary goal is to bring a continuous stream of new clients to your door, then you need to spend more of your law firm marketing budget on acquisition marketing, or lead generation. There are a wide variety of channels that can drive new client acquisition—everything from commercials and billboards to SEO & digital ads can increase the number of leads you receive each month.
That being said, client acquisition includes both lead generation and lead conversion. Therefore, you need to dedicate some of your budget to conversion methods. As you bring in new leads, you need to make sure your website is optimized to convert those visitors into clients and that your intake team is well-equipped to handle the influx of new leads.
You can do this by tracking visitor activity across your site, and redesigning your website and on-site copy to improve conversions overall. You can also equip your intake representatives with more insights about your customers, to help them nurture leads and turn them into clients.
Retention Marketing
Retention marketing strategies are focused on keeping existing clients on your books, or turning new clients into long-term retainers. For most firms, retaining existing clients costs far less than acquiring new ones.
If your firm is focused on practice areas where retainer clients are responsible for a good portion of your earnings, then you may want to invest more of your budget into advertising channels that focus on retention. These may be things like retargeted ads, content marketing to show expertise, and channels that increase brand trust and loyalty.
For more detail on which marketing activities and channels law firms are spending their budget on – download the How to budget for law firm marketing ebook.
How much of the budget should be spent on digital marketing?
Many law firms have seen success through traditional marketing channels. In our 2023 Law Firm Marketing Outlook report, we found that on average, law firms will spend:
- 11% of the budget on TV ads
- 11% of the budget on print/billboard advertising
- 10% of the budget on podcasts/radio spots
But that still leaves a significant amount of budget for digital marketing channels. And where you spend that budget depends most importantly on what you want to achieve, and where you are now in your marketing journey.
Here’s what to consider:
Website upgrades
Your website will be the first port of call for many of your leads, so you may want to invest some of your budget into building a new website or updating your existing site. You can focus on things like improving user experience and optimizing for conversions, increasing the odds that your new leads will retain you.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising through Google or social media is an excellent way to bring in a lot of web traffic quickly. That being said, this can be one of the more expensive channels to invest in, depending on what platforms you use, what keywords you’re bidding on, and the size of your intended audience. 20 of the 25 most expensive PPC terms on Google are legal-related. In this type of hyper-competitive environment, it’s essential to know which keywords produce leads and which do not and to use that information in setting your budgeted spend.
SEO & Content Marketing
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is another way to bring more traffic to your website by creating content that appears in the top 10 results for internet searches related to your business. Unlike paid advertising, SEO is a long-term strategy that brings long-term results. The quality of leads you get from SEO may be higher than those you get from paid channels, because SEO targets customers who are already actively looking for a solution.
To succeed at SEO, you also must invest in content marketing—creating blogs, whitepapers, ebooks, and other forms of written and visual content for your website. If optimized for search, these content pieces can increase the organic traffic coming to your site. Beyond that, content marketing can give your brand more visibility and credibility. The practice of law naturally produces a fair amount of valuable content that lends itself to easy use in this channel. Better still, investment in content can be more about time than money, lessening the impact on the overall budget.
How to track ROI and focus on what's generating leads
Remember that your initial plan for your law firm marketing budget isn’t set in stone; you should be routinely analyzing your strategy to find places where you can shift spend to improve your ROI.
To do this successfully, you need to track and analyze data related to the new leads you're bringing in. This is where CallRail can be a major asset for your law firm—with our software, you can easily see which of your channels are bringing you the best returns based on actual data, not anecdotes and guesses:
What’s driving law firm marketing in 2023? Download the infographic – 2023 marketing outlook for law firms – to find out.
Call Tracking
If your prospective clients primarily reach you through phone calls, it can be nearly impossible to know what channels individual callers used to reach you… unless you’re a CallRail user. Our Call Tracking software helps you attribute which sources of advertising were responsible for pulling in the most new leads and which led to very few.
Form Tracking
Similar to Call Tracking, CallRail’s Form Tracking allows you to understand which marketing channels are generating form submissions and which aren’t. You can easily attribute particular form submissions to the appropriate marketing activity—for example, you’ll be able to see if one of your paid ads has been responsible for pulling in new leads, and what actions those leads have taken (such as calling your number after submitting a form).
Conversation Intelligence
Analyzing which channels are the most successful is part of the equation—but you also need to understand what your prospects and clients need from your law firm. CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence lets you listen to callers at scale, enabling your firm to analyze client requests, improve the level of service you provide during client intake, and adjust products and services accordingly. CallRail’s AI-powered Conversation Intelligence can also categorize, tag, and prioritize conversations and keywords automatically based on the language your callers are using, allowing you to optimize PPC and SEO strategies while maximizing your team’s productivity. Learn more about the benefits of Conversation Intelligence.
Try CallRail free today
Budgeting for your law firm marketing requires patience, a detailed understanding of which channels are working and which ones are not, and the willingness to try new ways to reach your audience. With intelligent ROI tracking leading to the right channels, you can turn your hard work on the budget into new leads and revenue growth for your firm.
