Skyrocket Your Law Firm Growth: A Strategic Guide to Marketing Audits and Client Acquisitions with Jennifer Goddard

Are you ready to skyrocket your law firm's growth with data-informed strategy? This episode is a game-changer for you. Join us today with Jennifer Goddard, the powerhouse CEO and co-founder of Integrity Marketing Solutions, as she uncovers the nuts and bolts of a strategic fourth-quarter marketing audit. Jennifer guides us through tracking financials in top accounting software and shows us how to understand and leverage client acquisition costs in planning for a break-out 2024.

Ever wondered how to streamline your new client acquisition while enhancing lead flow? Jennifer shares valuable insights on this and delves into the often-overlooked importance of attributing acquisition costs accurately. The labyrinth of client acquisition costs and attribution is made simple in this conversation. Alongside, Jennifer explains various attribution models - from the default Google Analytics model to first interaction attribution and time decay - and how they can alter the way we credit a sale to an online interaction.

But that's not all. In the concluding segment, Jennifer shares her expertise on measuring and optimizing website engagement. She uncovers the secret to understanding how your audience interacts with your website and how you can tweak it for better performance. Distinguishing between conversions and new clients, she further enlightens us on using attribution models to track online sales and actions. This episode is a treasure trove of insights for those looking to make astute decisions and sidestep common pitfalls in their law firm's marketing strategy. So tune in, absorb, and get ready to revolutionize your firm's financial health.

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Transcript

Sponsor: 0:00

Before we dive into today's episode, a special shout out to our sponsor, QuidProQuo. Are you a law firm looking to scale or sell your practice? Qpq's expert team can help you unlock your firm's full potential. Stay tuned for valuable insights brought to you by QPQ.

Jennifer Goddard: 0:16

Okay, good morning everyone. I'm Jennifer Goddard. For those of you that I have not met, I am the CEO and co-founder of integrity marketing solutions. I'm going to be your guide today as we walk through the process of doing a fourth quarter marketing audit for 2023 and taking that information and putting it into our 2024 strategic plan so that we're making better decisions based on accurate information. When we talk about trying to grow a law firm, having this kind of knowledge about your marketing and your sales and your revenue is really the ticket. This is knowledge is power. Marketing is the engine that drives your law firm's revenue machine. It's marketing that builds your brand to attract your ideal clients and it sets you up for success or struggle as you grow your law firm. Getting it right is the key to getting growth, profitability and ease in your business life. When we do a marketing audit, it's important that it's not done in a vacuum. We can look at a lot of performance statistics by going into the backend of the website and going into the backend of our advertising platform, which we will do. Success in your law firm is not just about what's the click-through rate or what's the cost per click or how many calls did you get booked. We have to look at the marketing inside the big picture of the financial health of your law firm.

Jennifer Goddard: 2:07

Today, I'm going to show you how to conduct this marketing audit in such a way that it really gives you value and that you can use the information from this audit to guide your strategic planning for next year, but also you may start making some course corrections this year while we're in this fourth quarter. With this information, you're going to have a better chance of making great decisions and really reaching your goals. We're going to be looking throughout the webinar today on three aspects. First, we're going to look at financial tracking and what financial tracking you have in place and what is the minimum viable product or what's the minimum amount that you need to have. You can go much deeper. There are graduate-level courses on business management. I have an MBA. I don't expect you to get an MBA out of this class. What I want you to do is understand the very minimum things that you need to be looking at so that you know your KPIs and that you can easily access that information so that you can make better decisions going forward. Then we're going to look at your client acquisition costs and how to determine those and how you might be making some mistakes if you do it too simplistically. By going a little bit deeper into these numbers, you can get pretty accurate as to what your client acquisition costs are and then be able to make decisions to lower those costs and to improve your performance as you move forward this year and into next year. Then we're going to take that information. I'm going to show you how to look at that information and make decisions. Use it to make decisions for next year and for your strategic planning. Collecting a lot of data can be tedious and if it is not used properly or if it's inaccurate, then it's a useless waste of your time. What I want to do is give you the tools today to get the minimum amount of information that you need so that you don't get overwhelmed, make sure that that information is as accurate as we can make it and that it is useful to you, and show you how you can use that information to guide your strategic planning in the coming year.

Jennifer Goddard: 4:43

Let's just talk a little bit about who we are and why you might want to listen to what we have to say today. We are integrity marketing solutions and we've been in business since 1995. From the very beginning, we have focused exclusively on estate planning and elder law attorneys. That's our wheelhouse, that's what we know the most about and I really believe that that's our expertise. We provide online marketing solutions. We started out as a print and mail company and through the years we have evolved and we really are exclusively focused today on digital marketing solutions, strategy training, coaching and support. We're a very comprehensive digital marketing agency as well as a strategic planning and coaching agency. Our mission is to help estate planning and elder law attorneys grow great law firms that are profitable, that are enjoyable and that have a big impact on their communities, on your family and even on your future generations. The way that we do this is with comprehensive digital marketing solutions. We've built a team of top experts in the field who do the execution, who support our clients with strategic planning, with sales training and with coaching, as well as technical support. When we get into this concept of the marketing audit and the strategic plan. I just pulled that little quotation.

Jennifer Goddard: 6:18

Before anything else, preparation is the key to success. We want to be sure that we have the information that we need to make good decisions. I'm going to show you why that's so important because it's so easy to make a bad decision that can cost you a lot of money if the information you're looking at is not accurate or is not the proper information. The first thing I want to talk about is I want to be sure that you guys have a really strong understanding of your firm's financial performance. Top performers among practicing partners and that's usually like a solo or small firm, which most of our clients are. In solo or small firms, they're a practicing partner. They're not just the managing partner, but in the top performing firms, that practicing partner is an astute executive. He or she is focused on revenue, revenue, revenue, the revenue growth and the revenue quality.

Jennifer Goddard: 7:23

When we look at your financial tracking, I want to be sure about a few things going forward. If these things are not in place for you now, you're going to want to make that one of your first moves for 2024 to make sure that you have these things in place. You should be tracking your financials in some major accounting software like QuickBooks or Xero. Those are the two platforms that will make it easier for you to communicate with your CPA, with your bookkeeper and, if you ever need to change bookkeepers or change CPAs, if all of your financial accounting is in a major platform like QuickBooks or Xero, then it's going to be much easier for you to make a change. These things sometimes happen as we become more sophisticated in running our businesses. Sometimes we find that we need a more sophisticated bookkeeper or bookkeeping service. We need somebody who understands a little bit more about our business, so we might want to change our professional. You want to be sure that you're working with a professional accounting team a bookkeeper and a CPA and work with them to set your accounts up in QuickBooks or Xero properly. The thing I like about QuickBooks is it will integrate very easily with any of your law billing platforms. If you're using LawPay, lawmatics, cliopayments or Practice Panther, you can integrate that with QuickBooks.

Jennifer Goddard: 8:56

At a minimum, you're going to want to review revenue reports monthly and trend reports twice a year. The reports I want you to be sure that you are looking at on a monthly basis are your gross revenue and your net profit. The gross revenue is all the money that you're bringing in, and your net profit is going to be at the bottom of the report, after all of your expenses are taken out. You should have a handle on that at least every month to see where you are in terms of profitability and revenue Now a couple of times a year. I want you to look at another report, which is called the EBOC their Earnings Before Owner Compensation. You pull out from that what you pay yourself and add it back in to your net profit. What's your profitability if you pulled out your own compensation? Why that's important is you need to be keeping track of how your personal compensation is growing or not growing as your practice grows. So as your revenue increases, is your personal compensation keeping up? Are you paying yourself enough? Are you paying yourself too much? If revenue is going down, your personal compensation probably needs to follow it. So I just want you to be looking at that on a regular basis, about twice a year at least, and then once a year I want you to look at what your three year trend is. Is the revenue growing? Is the profitability growing? Is your personal compensation growing? Are you keeping pace with inflation? Are you hitting your financial goals? So that's at a minimum, having a professional accounting team and being able to see these reports on a regular basis and understand them, and if you have questions about them, have someone you can ask. What does this really mean? How do I change this? How do I improve that? Okay, Then there's one more thing that I would like for you to be able to put into place.

Jennifer Goddard: 11:16

I would like for you to be able to track your revenue by your lead source. At IMS, we help our clients set up revenue tracking by lead source either in Laumatics or Ingo High Level, so we set up a dashboard so that they can track when revenue comes in, what was the lead source for that revenue. You can also do this in QuickBooks. You can talk to your accountant or your bookkeeper about this If you use the customer type and you assign the lead source as a type. So this customer type is a Google pay per click type. This is a Facebook ads type.

Jennifer Goddard: 11:59

One advantage of using that customer type in your revenue tracking in QuickBooks is that that reporting can be set up to run automatically. If you want to use QuickBooks to do that, you would talk to your CPA or your bookkeeper to set that up for you. Whichever way you choose to track revenue, be sure that your system is as accurate and as automatic as possible. Errors in this data entry can lead to making mistakes, because you make a decision based on bad data. You're a good decision maker, but if you don't have the right data, you can easily make a bad decision because the data is telling you something that is not accurate.

Jennifer Goddard: 12:45

So, like I said for our clients, we set up their revenue tracking for them in their CRM, whether it's Laumatics or Go High Level, but you also can definitely do this inside of QuickBooks and if you need help to do that, talk to your bookkeeper or your accountant. But what you want to have is a very quick and easy way to get an overall view. I just kind of this graphic here is just like Facebook ad one, facebook ad two my local service ads seminars and then pay per click. So if I can look at this easily to see not only what's my revenue by lead source now, but then what I have here is like a three year trend. Okay, so you want to be able to see your lead source that's driving your revenue? Okay, that's these are. Again, these are like minimums. Okay, you can always go into more depth and more detail, but if you're just trying to get some systems in place for tracking, this is a minimum.

Jennifer Goddard: 13:46

So habits of top performers having financial tracking in place, working with a professional team to help you with that. A focus on revenue by tracking revenue by case type and by lead source, and then really being proactive in your financial management having 24 seven access to your reporting, not having to wait until your bookkeeper sends you a report, but be able to log into your QuickBooks account and pull up those reports and look at them. Have your bookkeeper teach you how to do that so that you can look at those reports at any time. I'll give you a tip about that as well. One thing that you can kind of keep tabs on your bookkeeper if you have access to your reports 24 seven, you can always go in and make and see if things are kept up to date. So you know, bookkeepers are like any other professional they can be great, they can be terrible, and if you don't stay on top of it, you won't know which one you have until your CPA says, hmm, your books aren't up to date. So you want to be able to go in there, look at your books, look at these reports 24 seven, at any time and make sure that everything is being kept up to date and then review with your accounting team at regular intervals.

Jennifer Goddard: 15:10

So evaluating marketing performance may seem like well, why are we talking about financial tracking when we're talking to evaluate marketing performance? Well, it's more than just clicks and leads. You have to have an understanding of your financials and this relentless focus on growth and revenue quality before you can make decisions about marketing performance, because they are inextricably intertwined. And how the financials are performing, which are being driven by the marketing, will tell you. It's like financial is your lagging indicator. Your marketing performance is your leading indicator. So good marketing performance will drive good financials if we're focused on the right things. So we have to have this financial tracking in place before we can really decide which marketing is working for us and which needs to be worked on.

Jennifer Goddard: 16:10

So, moving on then to the second part of this marketing audit, we're going to focus on client acquisition costs, and we're going to try to do this in a very scientific and accurate way so we can make good decisions. Now, marketing is both art and science. In this section of this webinar, this class, we're going to be focusing more on the science, so we're going to look at the things on the left side of this slide. We're going to examine what I would call these hard costs. These are direct revenue generating expenses, so any activity that you engage in, that you allocate budget toward where you expect to get a referral, a business card, a lead or a new client. Those are activities we want to examine when we look at client acquisition costs. Some examples would be your workshop marketing. So we want to look at all the costs that go into your workshop marketing, including your time and your staff time, trade shows or conferences that you attend with the intent of getting referrals or leads, a referral network membership if you belong to BNI. You're going to want to look at that cost and how is it driving revenue if it's driving revenue.

Jennifer Goddard: 17:37

And then we're going to take a close look today at paid advertising, whether that's your direct mail, your newspapers, banner ads on the internet, facebook advertising, google advertising, anything where you are spending money on paid advertising. These are the hard costs that really are direct revenue generating expenses that we can measure to determine our client acquisition costs. Now we're going to take a look at these soft costs later on in the class, but we're going to look at them differently because these are leading indicators. We're going to look at how well they perform, but we're not going to tie them directly to an individual client acquisition, so we're just going to put those on the table for the moment, and these will include soft costs, and one of the reasons is very difficult to factor them into this client acquisition cost equation. So we're going to look at them under a different microscope. And so these other costs they're going to look at later would be your website hosting and maintenance, any content marketing that you're doing, blogging, social media, your search engine optimization or SEO.

Jennifer Goddard: 18:56

If you're sending newsletters, email newsletters, your marketing staff and your strategy planning, those expenses are not really tied directly to a single client acquisition. Your personal networking that you do. So. If you're going to play golf, if you're taking someone, if you're attending a luncheon, things like that you're just getting your name out there. I like to think of those more as branding or like a PR type things. Or the cost of doing business, cost of being in business.

Jennifer Goddard: 19:28

Now we still want to look at those things, but when we look at determining our CAC, our client acquisition costs, we want it to be a little bit more scientific. So we're going to look at the hard costs first, then we're going to look at the performance of these other things. So the first thing we have to do is kind of understand how this marketing basket works. A lot of times, when attorneys decide to try to figure out what my client acquisition cost is, they take everything that might remotely be related to marketing and they add all that marketing expense up and divide it then by their new clients and this is now what they think is their client acquisition cost. And yes, that will give you a number, but it's not a very helpful number. This number doesn't give you information that can guide decisions about where you should cut back, where you should reinvest or how you could optimize your revenue. If we're going to really do strategic planning, we've got to get a lot more granular than this.

Jennifer Goddard: 20:39

So our goals on doing this audit are to enhance both your revenue and your profitability. So we want to lower the client acquisition cost while we maximize the lead flow. Well, one way we could definitely lower client acquisition costs would be to just stop doing everything Right. Just don't do any marketing, don't have any leads. So then your lead cost is zero, but also your leads are zero. So we don't want to go that route. We want to maximize your revenue and maximize your profitability by putting our investment in the things that's driving the best leads for you. Okay.

Jennifer Goddard: 21:26

So we have to really look at that cost to get a new lead and what your conversion rate is and what your fees are. So we're going to be looking at lead cost, conversion rate and fees. It's really pretty simple, but it's not as simple as just throwing everything into a basket. Right, we have to use things that we can quantify. So our goal is to lower this cost per lead, raise the conversion rate and also raise the fee, the average fee. So if we lower our cost per lead and we improve our sales process and boost our conversion rates, then we really are making a strong impact on our profitability and our revenue growth. But to do that, we're going to have to do a little bit of work to get that to where we have a real number that can make sense for us and help us make a better decision.

Jennifer Goddard: 22:24

It's a little bit tough to do because client journeys even though this looks like a really perfect circle, they're very convoluted when how a prospect becomes a client especially when we look at digital marketing it can be a very long path and there can be lots of different things that impact it along the way. And I'm just taking one example Someone goes online and they search for an elder law attorney. Then they come to your website because your SEO is working Right and they looked at your website but they don't book a call. But the fact that they clicked and came to your website would be what we would call a first interaction attribution. So in some models, if that person eventually became a client, we would attribute that to our website and our SEO. Okay, but then they didn't actually book a call. They go back online and looking for something else and we have a remarketing ad that shows up in their Google search and because that happens, because they visited your website, then they click on that remarketing ad and they still don't book. So that remarketing ad gets zero attribution, even though it contributes to the customer journey.

Jennifer Goddard: 23:53

Then again, because they've made these two actions, the next time they're online they see one of your YouTube videos and that shows up. They watch it. Still they don't book a call. Youtube doesn't get that attribution, even though it makes a contribution. You get the idea. People click on your Facebook ad. Maybe they watch a reel on Instagram.

Jennifer Goddard: 24:16

Finally, they book a call through your website and when your people ask them on the phone, how did you hear about us? They say I don't remember and they don't. Or they may say well, a friend of mine mentioned you, or I talked to my financial advisor. So if we're not careful, we end up not attributing our new clients to the proper platform that actually generated it. And, as you can see, that's going to be really hard to do. Right that there are lots of different attribution models, and so we have to realize that, while all of these things may be contributing to us finally getting that customer, that client, we have a little bit of difficulty making an accurate attribution. So just to kind of understand what is attribution, to paraphrase an old saying, if a click takes place today but nobody converts until three weeks later, does anyone know what drove that sale? So it is difficult, but we have to make some choices.

Jennifer Goddard: 25:34

I'm going to show you some different attribution models, but the thing to remember is the default model in Google Analytics is to give the credit for the conversion to the last interaction. So the interaction that was closest to the conversion is the one that gets the credit in Google Analytics, and you know what? For most purposes, that's a reasonable attribution model to use. I'm going to show you some of the other models, but the last interaction is probably as good as anything else, because it's very, very difficult to track every single one of those touch points. But if you know, if you understand and accept that all of these touch points impact that last interaction, then you can kind of look at some of this information with a bit of a grain of salt and a better understanding. So remember I told you that marketing is both art and science. That's going to be the art of it. The art is understanding that everything contributes to that last interaction. So we don't have to go through every single one of these attribution models, but I wanted to show this to you so that you can see that there are lots of very different ways to attribute a sale to an action online.

Jennifer Goddard: 27:03

The first interaction attribution is a very valid model. However, it usually involves some kind of time decay because it may have been a year ago that they first saw you, that they first clicked on your website, and most attribution models will not hold that information that long. A lot of this information can be found in your CRM, if it's set up properly. When you do get a client, if you look at their record, you may be able to see interactions with that prospect back for a year and then your last interaction attribution is fine, but it's an informed decision to realize that all these other things that we were doing kept them in the loop when we sent that email newsletter, when they listened to our podcast, when they came and watched another one of our webinars or they attended a workshop then they finally did this last interaction. So it's just something to kind of be aware of, because we're going to go with this last interaction attribution, but we're going to understand that there are a lot of things that may have led up to that last interaction. So the next step is so that we now understand that it may have come. This lead may have been nurtured by a lot of different interactions. We're still going to look at our cost per lead.

Jennifer Goddard: 28:36

Very simple formula add up your costs for the campaign, divide by the number of leads. That's your cost per lead. You also can find this in the data reporting. Your agency should be providing it to you and if they're not, you can find it in the backend or the user dashboard of any of your advertising platforms, whether it's Google ads or Facebook ads. But it's pretty simple how much should we pay for the campaign? How many leads did it deliver? Divide that, you end up with your cost per lead and we're going to look at your closing rate or your conversion rate from those leads. Also pretty simple add up the number of new leads. Divide by the number of new clients. Now you know how many leads from all sources you need to get a new client. You will do well to track your new clients by lead source and dig a little deeper and add up the number of leads from each source, divide by the number of clients from each source, and now you know how many leads you need from each source to get a new client. Let's take a look at how this can play out and how you can.

Jennifer Goddard: 29:44

Making a mistake here could lead you to make a mistake in your strategy planning. So fairly simple calculation here. So Google local service ads we need six new leads to get a new client. Our cost per lead is about $50. So our client acquisition costs for this source would be $300. These are just sample numbers, guys. This isn't from anybody's account On Facebook. We've calculated our closing ratio. We know we need 10 leads off of Facebook to get a new client. Every lead costs us about 20 bucks. So our client acquisition costs for clients that come through Facebook is $200. When we do a workshop, we know we need to have three people attending our workshop before we get one client, so it takes three leads. One client costs us about $300 per lead in a live workshop, so our client acquisition costs for this source is $900. So we could average those out and say, takes us about 6.3 leads to get a new client. We're paying about $123 per lead, so our client acquisition cost is about $777. This is about as far as most people will go.

Jennifer Goddard: 31:15

If these are the numbers that you're looking at, I'm going to show you how, if you were to dig a little deeper, you might make a big mistake if you used these numbers. If you've looked at these numbers, you might say my gosh, my client acquisition costs are through the roof and they're the highest for my workshops and my Google local service ads. So I should stop doing those things and put everything into Facebook because that has the lowest client acquisition cost. Let me show you how that could play out in a way. That would be a big mistake. So now we're going to go a little bit deeper and we're going to take some data that I've made this up. This isn't from anybody's account, but you know what? It's pretty general. These are some numbers that we frequently see.

Jennifer Goddard: 32:08

So we're running local service ads for probate. We have 65 leads from those local service ads and from those leads we got 11 clients. So our closing rate was 17 percent. So we know we need six leads from local service ads to get one client. Our cost per lead is $50, which is pretty normal. So that brings our client acquisition costs from those local service ads at $295.45. But because those are probates that actually generated quite a bit of revenue Maybe there were a few little guardianships in there so the average fee is $4,000. Your net revenue is $3,795. So even though that client acquisition cost seems a little high and the closing rate seems a little low, by breaking it down and knowing how much revenue that drove, we see that actually that's one of the most profitable things we're doing. We certainly are not going to cut it unless we have other extenuating circumstances. We say we don't want to do probates or we're not set up to do probates, so we have to have other considerations. But it's actually a very profitable campaign.

Jennifer Goddard: 33:34

Now let's look at Facebook ads. So running Facebook ads for estate planning for pre-death planning 438 leads, 44 clients, a 10 percent close rate. So you might say to yourself, wow, we're only closing 10 percent of those people. We should stop those Facebook ads. You see what I'm saying. Our cost per lead is $20. Our cost for our client acquisition costs comes out to be about $200. But look how much revenue we're generating over $100,000 worth of revenue from those Facebook ads, average fee being about $2,500, also very profitable. So it's bringing in more money than the probate ads, but the probate's very much more profitable. But still, we're still profitable at $2,300 net revenue. Now there are a lot of things we can do to start changing these numbers, but we can't change them until we know what they are.

Jennifer Goddard: 34:35

Now the workshops, which look like they were really bad that previous slide. We're doing workshops for estate planning. Our close rate now from the workshops is very high 33 percent. That's pretty normal. I mean. Actually some workshops close at a much higher rate than that. So even though our client acquisition cost is high, our closing rate is high and it's driving $112,000 worth of revenue. Our net revenue is the lowest of the three but still acceptable and there may be things we can do to improve that now that we know it. So when we get down into this level of granularity, we're able to really make some strategic decisions.

Jennifer Goddard: 35:28

So I put together a spreadsheet like this for you guys. It's going to be in the bonus materials. There'll be a QR code you can scan at the end of the seminar, but also we're going to send it out to you in an email afterward. If you come into this spreadsheet, the numbers you need to have are the ones that are highlighted in gold, so you need to know how many leads, how many clients, what your cost per lead is and your total revenue from each lead source. Then the spreadsheet will do the rest of the calculations for you. So where do you get this information? The number of leads and the cost per lead should be given to you by your agency or you can get it from the user dashboard of any one of these advertising platforms. The number of clients that you got from each of these lead sources is something that you're going to have to track. If you're one of our clients, we should be able to track that in your CRM. We should have got that set up and we should be, but you have to put the information in that this person became a client and what you charge them. So the number of clients and the revenue should be coming from your tracking, either in QuickBooks or in your CRM. So when you have that information, you plug this into the spreadsheet that I'm going to give you. It'll make all these other calculations for you.

Jennifer Goddard: 36:54

Now, with this information, understanding the art of this remember you take into account that there may be other things that impact this, other interactions, but this is the hard data that you have. This is the science part of it. It's nuanced by the art of it. With this information, you can start to make some pretty accurate decisions and some better decisions that are driven not by a feeling but by real data, and you can start to change some of these numbers. So, just looking at this as an exercise with your team, you can take this slide. I'll give you the slides in the follow-up as well. You can take the slide, put it up on a screen and ask your team if these were our numbers, what would you do? And it's nice to use sample numbers because then nobody gets defensive about the numbers. Well, that's not exactly accurate. Okay, fine, what we're talking about is an exercise of looking at these numbers and then, how do these numbers drive your decisions?

Jennifer Goddard: 38:09

As a marketing person, if I'm looking at these numbers, I'm going to say I wouldn't change my marketing. I wouldn't change anything. I would increase the budget to keep up with inflation, but I would look at ways that I could improve my average fee, that I could raise my average fee so that I could get more revenue per client. But there are certainly other considerations that may be going on in your law firm. Do you want more probate cases? Are you capable of doing them? Are you capable of doing more of them profitably? Do you want to do more workshops? Or were you kind of hoping that these numbers would justify your decision to stop doing workshops, in which case you were going to reallocate that money, probably into Facebook, where you're actually more profitable for every estate planning client.

Jennifer Goddard: 39:01

Is that enough net revenue? Do you need to raise your fees? How are these ads? Could we go back and make these ads more effective? Could we do some testing? Could we test different audiences, different creative? Could we make the ads work better for us? Are there advertising channels that we're not using that might work really well for us? Should we look at doing some different types of advertising. You know we've only got three things up there right now and overall they're driving about $275,000 worth of revenue. Do we need to add budget? Scale some of these up? So these are the things that I think you can take this very slide back to your team and say, if these were our numbers, what would you do? That's a good exercise and then plug in your own numbers so that you can start to see how these numbers can drive your strategy and drive it in a much more accurate way, so that you don't make mistakes, cutting out something that is actually quite profitable when you really get down into the numbers and look accurately at them.

Jennifer Goddard: 40:15

Okay, so now the next thing. Remember I told you we're going to take some of those soft costs and put them on the table and then we become back to them and look them again under a different microscope. So these are some of the things that you're doing in your marketing that you need to be doing. They raise your visibility, they establish your brand, they help you claim your position in the market, but they're more difficult to gauge directly against client acquisition costs. So instead we look at how well are these things performing? So we go way back to leading indicators of success.

Jennifer Goddard: 40:58

So when we look at someone's website, these are the things that we look at to see if it's a well-performing, if it's a high-performing website. We want to see how many sessions are completed on this website. We used to call that like how much traffic are you getting? So how many times are people visited the website in any given period of time? We want to see users, and I kind of like to see the number of users be about three quarters or half of the number of sessions. So then I see that users are coming back to the website, so sessions are. How many times is the website accessed? Users are people who are accessing it.

Jennifer Goddard: 41:43

Then I want to look at engagement how much time are people spending on the site or are they bouncing right off? Are they spending a minute on the site, two minutes on the site? I want to see how much time they're spending, because that will give me an indicator of how valuable that website content is to that user. And that is an indicator right back to Google and impacts my SEO or my search engine optimization, because Google says well, people are finding that information valuable. I'm going to present it more often. I'm going to present it higher in the results.

Jennifer Goddard: 42:15

Then I'm going to look at the number, at the traffic by source. I want to see which sources are driving traffic to my website. Am I getting traffic from emails? Am I getting traffic from social media? Am I getting traffic from my ads? Or am I getting organic traffic from people doing searches? And I kind of want to see that be pretty well balanced. I don't want all of my traffic coming from paid sources because that means I'm paying a lot over time. I want to improve my organic or free traffic traffic that's coming from my email, traffic that's coming from social media.

Jennifer Goddard: 42:55

And then conversions how many people are submitting a form, making a phone call? How well is that website performing in terms of delivering conversions? Now, conversions not the same in this context as a new client. The conversion is something that people, an action that people take on the website. They complete a form, do they make a phone call, do they subscribe, etc. They download. Those are conversions. So it's a little confusing, but it's not the same as a new client. It's an action that people are taking on the website. Then I want to look at my SEO. How is my search engine optimization on Google. How well am I? What's my visibility? How well is my SEO effort performing? So I want to look at the keywords that are important to my practice and how well am I ranking in my local market when people search on those keywords? Where do I show up in the local map pack? My map pack position? Am I in the top three or am I in the top five or am I not showing up at all? Those two things are very important for because when people do a search, they're usually very low in the funnel. They're ready to make a decision and you want to be on that first page for those important terms for your firm. And then, how many reviews do I have? We know that the more five-star reviews you have, the better your click-through rate, the better your conversion rate. It's very important to your SEO that you get those five-star reviews. Then we're probably making a significant effort on social media to increase our visibility. So how are we doing that on that side? Are we just throwing out blog posts to social media or are we tracking how effective our efforts are in social media? How do we track that? We want to look at how many followers we have. You want to look as the CEO of your law firm, you want to look at how many posts were actually made. You want to be sure that if you're paying somebody to manage your social media, that they're actually putting those posts out, that they're not just doing like one a month. So how many posts were made? How much engagement did those posts get to people like share, comment, what's the reach? How many people, how many impressions are there? How many people are seeing these posts? And then how many times are people clicking on any of your posts and going on to your website? So that's how you're going to measure the performance of your social media efforts, remembering, way back on that slide about the customer journey, that, even though we can't attribute directly that client acquisition to any one of these things that are on this slide, they all contribute, they're all part of that customer journey and so we want to make sure that they're all performing well. Like I said, if you're paying someone to do to manage your social media, you want to be tracking how effectively they are managing it. And then, finally, I think you're all probably doing email. I know all of our clients are doing email marketing. We want to look at things like what's the deliverability. How much of your email is landing in spam? How much of it is being bounced back? How much is being delivered to the inbox Of those? What's the open rate? How many people are actually opening the email and reading it? And then, generally speaking, you're going to have some links in that email that you want people to click on. What is the click through rate? Another thing to look at is what's the size of your email list. Is it growing? I have seen many times when clients would come to us and they have 300 people on their email list and six months later they still have 300 people on their email list. I know that they have been seeing clients in the office, they have been doing things to interact with people, but they haven't been adding them to their email list. So you want to see is there some growth in this email list? And then, how frequently are you emailing? If you're only emailing once a month, it's probably not frequently enough. You want to be emailing your list on a regular basis and you want to be sure that you're providing value in those emails. Again, it's sometimes going to be very difficult to attribute a specific client to a specific email, but you can gauge how well your email marketing is performing by looking at these kinds of numbers, and you will find those numbers in your CRM or your email software. Now the next thing you may have some staff that's doing marketing for you, whether you have an in-house marketing assistant, a virtual assistant or you're working with an agency. It's also important, at least once a year, to audit and evaluate their performance as well. So how do you do that? Well, I've looked at four primary areas. That where I want to see a good performance from anyone that's working in marketing. And the first area is technical. Does the person or the agency, do the people, have the technical expertise to support you on these important leading digital platforms? Because you don't want to have to learn every single platform and you don't want to ignore important platforms. So does your marketing agency staff person have the technical expertise to manage this for you? Oftentimes, what I see in law firms is we have a person who's been working the front desk for years and then they don't have technical expertise, but they're liked. Everybody likes them, clients love them, you like them. There may not be the right person to have managing your marketing because they can't expand you, because they don't have the technical. They simply don't have the technical expertise to do it. In that case you may not hire that person. They're very valuable, but you may get a virtual assistant. You may work with an agency to shore that gap. Do they have the creativity so that your marketing doesn't look like everybody else's? It really shows your firm with distinction, distinctly from others. Are they consistent in both the quality and the frequency of the marketing messages? Do they have a schedule that they follow and do they follow that schedule? Like, do they have an editorial calendar? Do they have a schedule of social media posts? Are they consistently following that and does your marketing look distinctive to you and is it consistent? And then in communication, I want to know that they're communicating with me as the CEO of my law firm, but I also want to know that they understand my practice well enough that they can communicate to the public as well. So there's two sides to this communication. For the marketing role to communicate with you and let you know what's going on with your marketing. And can they communicate with the public? Can they write messages, can they craft posts? Can they explain what you do? Do they understand the needs of people, of your prospects who will become clients or are they kind of clueless and always looking to you to create the content? So those are the four pillars that I look at in evaluating my marketing staff, whether it's my agency or my in-house person, et cetera Technical expertise, creativity, consistency and communication. So when we look, take all this information that we've now gathered, how do we apply this to our strategic planning? So our goal is to get more clients from our marketing budget. If we lower the cost per lead, we'll get more leads for the same budget. When we turn more leads into new clients, we'll get more revenue. Now, when we boost the conversion rate and raise the fee, we're lowering the cost per lead. We are on a winning path and we can really make this grow the revenue and grow the profitability at the same time. So when we look at the strategic plan, we may be looking at ways to lower the cost per lead by improving ad performance. So we may allocate some budget to do some testing, to test some new audiences, the new offers, new creative. We may reallocate some of our budget to things that are delivering a lower cost per lead. They're delivering ads at a lower cost. We may say you know what we could really lower our advertising costs by doing more organic or free marketing. What we've seen across the board is when our clients are more active on social media and on email and on doing the things that are free the organic, the SEO videos, etc. Their ad costs go down. And it's back to that first slide I showed you at the customer journey. The more free touchpoints that we have with our prospects, the less it's going to cost us to get that paid ad to work. So we can generate free leads. But we also can use that organic to lower our advertising costs. Then we want to look at at the same time how can we boost conversions from the leads we're getting? We want to look at can we follow up with our leads faster? Can we put in an automation that sends a text message? Can we assign somebody to make a phone call? Are there ways that we can follow up with our leads faster? Because we know the faster we follow up with the lead, the better our chances are of getting them to book a call and come in and become a client. Can we implement some lead nurturing campaigns? Sometimes, when we run Facebook ads you remember I showed you sometimes it takes 10 leads to get a client. Well, those other nine leads are generally very valid, and so they build up a big email list. Could we launch some lead nurturing campaigns through email to convert some of those lost leads into new clients? Should we be looking at retargeting, remember I talked about? Sometimes we won't launch a remarketing campaign and someone visits their website. Now, when they go back to Google and they're looking for something else, your ad shows up again. Do we have enough traffic now that it would make sense for us to do retargeting, which is typically very low cost per lead, typically very affordable way of advertising online? Should we be doing some things that would increase our authority and people's trust in us so that when they come to that first call, they're pre sold Like your referrals, right? Can we do that by increasing our online visibility? Are there things we could do to improve our sales process, the way that we answer the phone, the way that we handle those initial phone calls? Can we command premium fees? Can we get better in our sales process? That's one of the unique things that we do at IMS, so we have a sales coaching and training program for you and for your staff so that we can help you handle these phone calls better, handle these consultations better and get higher fees and higher closing rates. So if we combine these two strategies when we do our strategy planning for 2024, we can make some really major changes and avoid making major mistakes. So if you want to get great results, the first thing is to know what success looks like for you, for your firm and for your family. So those can be revenue numbers that you need to set as goals. So I want to be able to send my kids to private school. I don't want my kids to have to take on student loan when they go to college. I would like to have a vacation home. Those are big goals and some people have those goals. Some of you are thinking about those goals right now. How are you going to get to those numbers? That's how you're going to be defining success for your revenue. Others are saying well, what I really want is I want to stop doing workshops. I don't want to be gone all the time. I want to stop doing probates. I don't enjoy doing those. So that would be considerations that can impact your strategic planning. Okay, starts with knowing your numbers. Make sure you understand your firm's financial health and that you have tracking set up either in your accounting software or your CRM, or from your agency. Then set your goals based on your current financial health, your marketing performance and the lifestyle that you want for yourself and for your family, and then allocate the resources to achieve those goals. Then take all of this information your goals, your numbers, your performance and plan your strategy for next year. Now you're armed with accurate numbers, realistic goals and you're really ready to make a strategy. That's not just a knee-jerk response or a feeling. You have solid information to make database decisions. So, guys, here's what we've got I've put together for you, and you can take your phone out right now and scan that code, take it to a Google Drive that has these worksheets in it, or you can wait until tomorrow. We're going to send out a follow-up email and we'll have that link in that email. So I've got this client acquisition cost worksheet that will help you put together that table of numbers for yourself, using your numbers. Then we've got the marketing audit worksheet that walks you through auditing your 2023 performance. When you have those two things completed, then you pull out your 2024 strategy planning worksheet. You're going to use the numbers and the information from these two the spreadsheet and the audit worksheet to impact your strategic planning for next year. Okay, guys, marketing audit worksheet, strategy worksheet and client acquisition cost worksheet. If you're going to get it done, it's going to take focus, clarity and probably some sacrifice. You're probably going to have to make some sacrifices to achieve your goals. If you need help with any of this, from auditing to strategy planning to execution I would invite you to reach out to my team. You can use your phone now to scan this QR code or you can write down this URL. We offer a free discovery call. You would go to wwwimsrockscom. Forward slash apply. Go to that page. Book a call with my team. It's about a 15 minute call. We can talk about what your goals are, where you are now and what's the gap between where you are now and where you want to be. Then we can talk about whether or not we might be able to help you and what would be the steps to get from where you are now to where you want to be. It's a free call. We're happy to talk to you. We're happy to help you. In the meantime, start getting your numbers together. Start getting your financial tracking in place. Make sure you can track your financials, make sure you can track your income by lead source and that you know exactly what your client acquisition cost is for each area that you're marketing. Now you're able to start making some really great decisions and grow your practice in the new year. Thank you all. We're out of time. Watch for that email tomorrow with all of your bonus materials and book your call now. Don't wait, don't think we'll all get to it later. Go ahead and book the call now. Talk to Michael or James. We'll get you clarity and we'll figure out whether or not we could help you achieve your goals in what's left of this year and into next year.

Sponsor: 1:00:14

That's a wrap for today's episode and a big thank you to our sponsor, QuidProQuo. Qpq is your partner in law firm success, offering expert guidance on scaling, selling and optimizing your practice. With a team of experienced professionals, they bring real world insights to the table. Are you ready to take your law practice to new heights? Visit their website at wwwquidproquolawcom to learn more and start your journey toward a thriving and sellable law firm.