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What You Must Know About Law Firm Marketing Automation and Analytics
There was a time when the only marketing law firms would do, if any, was send emails to potential clients with little follow-up, or publish a blog post every now and then.
Today, legal offices use analytics and marketing automation to grow their clientele. Your law firm can reach out to your dream clients with personalized messages right when they need your services most.
Law firm marketing automation software puts you in front of your audience and keeps you there. You can use it to educate, cultivate and lead clients and prospects. You can increase your engagement with your clients and get greater returns. All the while, you spend less time and money on acquiring and keeping each client.
Analytics and Insights
It is now possible to track every interaction prospects and clients have with your website. You can analyze that data and use it to present your audience with the information in which they are most interested. But before you can effectively market to those who visit your website, you need to know:
where they are coming from on the internet
where they are going on the internet
where they are geographically
which page(s) on your website they landed on
how long they spent on your website
what they clicked on
what other actions they took on your website
whether they followed up and contacted you
if they did not follow up, where they fell off
Analytics can help you determine key performance indicators, such as return on investment, cost per lead and conversion rate. Not only can you track what people do on your website, but you can also use tracking codes to tag and track advertising campaigns, social media campaigns and public relations outreach on other websites and platforms.
Once you have data on what is getting people’s attention and influencing them to contact you, you can use it to make decisions, such as whether to spend more on advertising, what messages to send and where you need to beef up your content.
For many, the free version of Google Analytics is enough. However, there are many analytic tools beyond Google Analytics. Some examples include Crazyegg, Clicky, Woopra, Clickmeter and SimilarWeb.
These and other packages offer different services and software for your law firm. Some of these services include:
web traffic analysis
analyzing marketing links
benchmarking your website against competitors
data analysis
marketing automation
Marketing Automation Software Saves Time and Increases Effectiveness
Using marketing automation simultaneously increases your engagement with your clients and enables you to spend less time and money on acquiring and keeping each client. The ways you can use marketing automation are almost limitless, but let’s discuss four main ones:
Email: You send emails out to your list. Depending if they open or do not open the email, they get a different follow-up email. Perhaps you send a newsletter discussing changes in laws in three different legal areas. If the user clicks one of them, you can send more material on that topic rather than the other two. Strings of email may be written in advance, and which ones the user receives is dependent on their own actions and interests.
Social Media: At its basic level, you can use marketing automation to schedule social media posts. It’s much less time-consuming to set up dozens or even hundreds of posts at once than one at a time. Some tools can even aid in finding content. Hootsuite and Buffer are popular social media tools you may want to consider if you are not already using a tool.
Interactive Bots: You don’t always need a human to respond to every email or every information request. There are ways to set up answers to the most common questions people ask so that they can get their answers without needing to speak to a person. A popular one for business platforms, including law firms, is
Virtual Spirits.
Retargeting: Retargeting is also known as remarketing. It’s a cookie-based technology that uses Javascript to enable you to follow your audience around the Internet and show them ads that are of interest to them. Say, for example, that someone lands on your webpage about patents. The code on your site drops a cookie, so as your visitor goes to other sites or Facebook, they are shown ads about your patent services.
Related article: Find out why social media is a must for your law firm.
These are just a few examples and, of course, all of these can work together. So, if someone clicks one of your ads, you can respond with information about the topic and ask them to sign up for a newsletter about it. You then have their contact information and can direct personalized emails to them around their interests, hopefully leading to a consultation at your firm.
There are many marketing automation packages that are suitable for law firms. These include Hubspot, Autopilot, Katabat, Infusionsoft, Marketo and Pardot.
Conclusion
To succeed in today’s competitive legal climate, you need to understand your clients and automate the best ways to reach them.
According to a Google Legal Services Study and a Google Consumer Survey:
74% of clients that visit a firm’s website are likely to take action
96% of people seeking legal advice use a search engine
The legal profession is becoming increasingly sophisticated in the uses of marketing technology. You need to be in front of your digital-centric audience with the information they want and when they need it most.