There are many ways to market a law firm, and the best approach combines more than one. Whatever channels you use, it is imperative that you track the leads coming in through each.
Lead tracking is the science of determining how your potential clients find you — and how many people each advertising method is sending your way.
Furthermore, attribution is then assigning credit to marketing touchpoints that a customer was exposed to prior to their purchase or conversion.
Need help understanding other marketing definitions? Download our digital marketing glossary here.
By comparing leads from television to, say, leads from your website, you can begin to get a sense of what’s working and what’s not. But caution! Things aren’t always what they seem.
The tricky thing about lead tracking and attribution for law firms is that your clients don’t always travel a straight path to your front door. Personal injury clients, for instance, are likely to hop around from one source to the next before landing in a case file on your desk. We call that path The Client Journey, and it’s typically a circuitous one.
But with all that hopping around, how are you supposed to measure your success in advertising? Where are your calls and cases really coming from?
Extreme Vetting: The Attorney-Prospective Client Relationship
We encourage all of our clients to assign a unique track line to every advertising asset. When an injured person views your TV ad, for instance, they should see a different phone number than the one they find on your website.
That way, whenever a particular phone line rings, you know exactly how the person got that number — in theory.
There’s just one problem with that theory, though: the modern customer journey is not linear. Everything leads to the internet.
Customers tend to vet service providers extensively before making first contact — especially when it comes to legal service providers (and personal injury lawyers in particular).
Your prospective clients simply have so many options available to them that it wouldn’t make sense to contact you without doing their due diligence first. After all, they can access tremendous amounts of information about local attorneys in a mere moment on Google, and they’re well aware of that power.
Accordingly, even if a client first learns about you from a highway billboard or a local broadcast commercial, they’ll likely visit your website as a next step. Then, when they finally contact you, they’ll either use the online form or the phone number on your website.
We often hear from law firms who are dismayed that their TV track lines are showing relatively few contacts. But the truth is that many of your online track lines actually belong to television or other advertising assets, because that’s where they first discovered you.
The Big Picture Is Made Up of More Than One Kind of Screen
Since many of your leads are coming to you as a result of multiple advertising assets, it’s critical that they all complement each other, working together as a cohesive whole — a complete user experience.
Everything needs to be stable, ready, and working well for the ease of the users (who in this case are usually accident victims or the family members of accident victims).
For example, if a car accident victim – or one of their relatives – sees your commercial on TV while in the hospital room and then visits your website on their mobile phone while still in the hospital bed; your site must be mobile-responsive, fast-loading, and informative.
They’re coming to you for help, so your website should be ready to educate, inform, and lead them to the next step on their journey: making contact.
Law Firm Synergy and The Client Journey
Think of your prospective clients as digitally empowered people. Thirty years ago, they would have picked up a landline phone with a long, curly cord and dialed a 1-800 number they found in one of two places: the phone book or on the commercial they caught (in real time).
Today, there’s no counting all the ways they might have found you, nor all the information they might have gathered about you along the way.
Take a look at this video which aptly demonstrates just how unpredictable and nonlinear the modern Client Journey can be.
https://digourideas.wistia.com/medias/ngl9u2n94x?embedType=async&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=640
In a world where accidents can happen at any moment, and the victims might look literally anywhere for an attorney to help them, your law firm’s challenge is to be anywhere and everywhere.
So just as a multimedia company like Disney or Universal might look to promote itself across film and television and theme parks and the internet all at once, you should adopt a similarly synergetic view of your legal marketing initiatives.
Be sure that wherever a client’s journey starts, you’re part of the path.
Talk to Network Affiliates About Lead Tracking and Call Tracking for Law Firms
Raw data is less important than how you read that data and what you decide to do with it. Don’t make faulty assumptions about your legal marketing assets because you’re misconstruing your call tracking or lead tracking metrics.
Reach out to our team at Network Affiliates and learn how your law firm can take full advantage of the modern Client Journey.
Call us at 877.709.0633 or simply use our easy online contact form today.