Why Your Firm’s In-House Marketing Sucks
I recently came across this article on Why Lead Generation Companies Suck. While I agree that the legal industry has its share of lead gen charlatans looking for easy prey, it’s not the case with every company out there — and it’s certainly not the case with Lawfty. We were founded by a lawyer and MIT engineer precisely because of the same frustrations that the author, Anthony Johnson, expresses.
We’re a law firm that built a tech company in San Francisco, and we’ve been drawing on the creativity and analytic prowess of our team to build something huge, innovative, and revolutionary in the field of legal marketing — and we’re done with being lumped together with vendors that dump a flood of low quality leads on their customers each month and expect them to do the filtering. Here’s why Johnson is wrong about encouraging PI lawyers to do their own in-house marketing — and why Lawfty shouldn’t be lumped together with legal lead generation companies.
How It Works: Algorithms
Lawfty is to lawyer advertising what programmatic stock trading is to the stock market. Our algorithms constantly analyze historical ad performance data and optimize our bids dynamically in accordance with what it predicts to be the best time of day depending on previous patterns of searches. It’s like having an mathematician constantly monitoring our ad performance 24/7 and tweaking bids at the same time. There’s no way a human — whether a lawyer also managing a full docket of cases or a full-time marketing manager — could ever compete.
How It Works: Constant Experimentation
Any SEM marketing manager worth what she’s paid will tell you that A/B experimentation is the key to refining your messaging and improving click through rates. By running only one ad copy against another and then analyzing the difference in performance, A/B testing improves CTR and cost per click metrics over time. To learn why A/B testing is indispensable for AdWords, read more here.
How It Works: User Feedback
Most attorneys who manage their own marketing in-house will never get around to doing comprehensive user feedback surveys because most of their of your attention and time is already taken up by their clients’ pending cases. On the other hand, any UX or UI designer will tell you that redesigning a website without getting user feedback first is like painting in the dark.
At Lawfty, we periodically survey people who submitted an inquiry through our system. We don’t ask them anything about their case. Instead, we ask them what information mattered the most to them when they were concerned and searching for an attorney to help them (hint: they don’t care where you went to law school or how many years you’ve been in practice). We then use this information at every step of our content funnel — from website redesign to landing pages — to craft language that appeals to them and encourages them to contact us about their case.
How It Works: Data Really IS King
Lawfty employs a first-class team of data scientists to constantly analyze patterns of behavior both before a potential client clicks on one of our ads and after. Without giving away too much of our secret sauce, we’ve figured out which channels are the most likely to produce the most relevant leads — meaning that we can take our information beyond just CTR and cost per click to truly understand where (and when) our ad spend is most effective.
How It Works: Transparency And Skin In The Game
Anthony Johnson makes an interesting point, that vendors have no interest in giving their clients quality leads because they’re only paid per lead, not per signed case. He’s right. But this doesn’t mean that all personal injury firms are better off managing their own marketing — it just means that personal injury law firms should only partner with someone whose fee structure incentivizes passing on quality, vetted potential clients.
That’s why Lawfty matches our partners’ ad spend dollar for dollar, aligning 100% of our interests with those of every partner firm. We believe that deeply aligning our interests with those of our partners is the best way to build sustainable, long-term business relationships.
What Should You Do?
Please, for goodness’ sake, DO NOT start doing in-house marketing for your firm as Anthony Johnson suggests. Contrary to what he states, the basic level of AdWords support is not enough to successfully run an adwords campaign — it’s only just good enough to switch from throwing money at a vendor to throwing money directly into the black hole of AdWords. “If you are not spending enough, add another phrase. If you are spending too much, pause a few” doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what it takes to actually achieve positive ROI on your adwords campaigns (speaking of which, Anthony — I’d be happy to tell you more about what we can do. We’re definitely doing better than $46/click).
That’s why large nationwide firms actually hire marketing specialists and invest heavily in their training and data analytics. Setting up and running your own AdWords campaign is no joke.
But building out an entire marketing department isn’t realistic for many of the medium or smaller sized firms that desperately need a steady inflow of signed cases every month to keep the lights on. If you’re a small to medium sized firm, then you absolutely should be considering working with the right kind of partner for case leads. If you’re intrigued, find out more about applying to a Lawfty Partner today.
