Increasing Marketing ROI by Using Legal Data for Business Development – Josh Blandi Writes in Law Practice Today

In the increasingly competitive world of legal marketing, ROI is what makes or breaks law firm business development. To boost ROI, firms of all sizes, whether they’re AmLaw firms with a BigLaw sized marketing budget or a small firm bootstrapping their way forward, can use legal data to uncover and win new business opportunities and supplement their traditional digital marketing efforts. 

We’re happy to share insights on leveraging legal data for law firm marketing from the latest article published by UniCourt CEO, Josh Blandi, in Law Practice Today, a digital publication of the American Bar Association (ABA) Law Practice Division. Josh’s article, Increasing Marketing ROI by Using Legal Data for Business Development, draws a direct comparison between traditional digital marketing from social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts with what can alternatively be accomplished using intelligence gained from litigation data. 

To drive home just how cost effective litigation data is for law firms as a business development tool, Josh shares how access to legal data costs only a fraction of what’s spent on normal marketing budgets, yet provides the insights to easily locate and target real opportunities with long-standing clients and high-value leads.

Here below is an excerpt from our article in Law Practice Today:

The costs associated with accessing legal data have dramatically decreased in the last decade to the point where law firms, regardless of their size, can use legal data to find and win business with a greater return on investment (ROI) than traditional digital marketing campaigns on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google. 

Today, litigation data is more widely available thanks to the ever-growing legal tech ecosystem and increased competition in the legal data as a service market. Rather than casting a wide net with costly social media advertising campaigns only to amass a few new leads, and even fewer true conversions, utilizing litigation data allows law firms to hone in on their target audience while gaining more business from their existing customers.

Challenges with Traditional Digital Marketing for Law Firms

While social media advertisement campaigns on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google are some of the most common places to spend your marketing budget, there exists a more cost-effective way to allocate marketing dollars. Legal data has become more accessible and law firms should be capitalizing on the powerful insights it can infuse into their marketing strategies.

A 2018 joint study between Bloomberg Law and the Legal Marketing Association found that the average law firm spends 6.7 percent of its gross revenue on marketing. While this may not seem like much at first glance, for every $100,000 earned, $6,700 would be spent on marketing. When considering the little room for error in marketing budgets for small law firms, 6.7 percent is a significant number. 

LinkedIn advertisements typically cost between five to six dollars per click with a conversion rate of around 6.1 percent. In total, this works out to about ninety dollars per conversion, which is where your business actually comes from. So with a modest budget of $1,000 for a month of LinkedIn advertisements, statistics suggest that you will receive about eleven conversions from your marketing campaigns in any given month. These ballpark figures are meant to illustrate just how much money, time, and effort is required to maintain basic social media advertisements and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. 

Now that Google is not only a noun, but also a verb, synonymous with ‘search’ for most people, it comes as no surprise that fighting for space at the top of the queue is becoming more and more difficult. With millions of websites employing the highest-ranking SEO terms and keywords to work their way up the list and drive traffic, it can take months or even years, in addition to large investments of resources and money, for a firm to build up enough web-credibility to appear on the first page of results from a Google search. 

This traditional means of marketing is growing impractical for smaller firms without the sizable legal marketing budgets of BigLaw firms, as despite all the hard work to optimize your keywords and website tags, you may still fall short of beating out veterans in the organic web-development department. But not all hope is lost: legal data presents a solution.

You can read the full article here on Law Practice Today.

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for legal tech updates!

• Share on