A Guide to Creating Your Law Firm Marketing Budget

If you're a lawyer, I think you'll agree when I say:

Setting the law firm marketing budget can feel like you are just throwing darts.

Marketing is an essential part of any business, especially in an industry as competitive as law. Despite the importance of marketing, some firms don't set aside enough money in their marketing budget to make a real impact. While you may benefit from word-of-mouth advertising and recommendations, if you truly want to expand your law practice, you need to start spending money on marketing!

One of the most important parts of developing a marketing strategy is deciding on a budget. In fact, you should set your budget before you begin exploring different marketing strategies.

Here is a straightforward guide for creating a marketing budget for your law firm.

What Impacts A Law Firm Marketing Budget?

There are a lot of things that will affect your marketing budget. Some (most it seems) are unforseen.

In addition to the goals that you set, you will need to consider the current success of your business, the size of your market area, your revenue goals, and many other things.

Here is an overview of these primary factors:

The Current Success of Your Business

Consider the current success of your business. The more established your law practice is, you may not need to spend as much to continue growing your presence.

In an ideal world, marketing provides a snowball effect. The more traffic your website receives, the easier it is to continue building backlinks and increasing traffic to your site. The more followers you have on social media, the easier it is to gain more followers.

Why? Because you have more exposure. You're seen by more people, thereby giving you a better chance of a potential client seeing you.

Now this is the 'best case' scenario.

Sometimes the bigger players need to spend even more because their top competitors seem to have unlimited budgets.

The Size of Your Market

A large portion of your potential clients will be located in the same geographical region as your law practice. You need to factor the size of your market into your marketing budget. If you set up your law practice in a town of 40,000 residents, you will not need to spend as much as a law practice in a major city with over a million residents.

Determining the size of your market can require research and planning. You need to look at the number of criminal proceedings in the region where you practice law, along with the number of civil cases each year. However, this will only give you an indication of a portion of the market. Consider hiring a consulting firm if you need to further research your market area.

The Level of Competition That You Face

Then, look at the marketing efforts of your competition. Do they actively release posts on social media? Do they have an email newsletter? Do they post blogs to their website? Consider the forms of marketing that they rely on to ensure you are using the proper marketing channels. You may find that they overlooked a particular source of reaching clients.

You may want to even set up Google Alerts so you can see when and were and how often your competitors are mentioned.

I wrote a post about Google Alerts that you can read here.

Determine Your Marketing Goals

You also need to decide what you want to get out of your marketing campaign. What are the marketing goals for your law firm? Do you want to increase traffic to your website? Are you trying to increase social media awareness? Perhaps your main goal is to simply improve your online presence.

There are a myriad of way to attack your goals, but determining your goals early will give you benchmarks to rate the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

In order to set achievable goals, you need to evaluate your current position.

For example, if you are not currently appearing in search engine results for your target keywords, you shouldn't expect to reach the first position during your first year (though it certainly is possible).

However, if you are currently appearing on the second page of search engine results, you could realistically set a goal of reaching the first page by the end of the year, and possibly even the #1 spot would be within reach (depending on your market).

Remember to prioritize your goals.

Set one or two primary goals and several supporting the goals.

The primary goals should have a direct impact on your bottom line.

Putting It All Together

After looking at these different factors, you can begin coming up with a budget that meets your needs. A law firm that is already well-established may only need to spend between 5-10% of their earnings on marketing, while, a younger law practice might need to spend as much as 15-25% of their earnings to notice a major impact.

Based on the current success of your business, the size of your available market, the amount of competition in the area, and your marketing goals, you can create a budget that helps your law practice grow.

There are two more steps that can help you put all of this information together to determine your marketing budget – looking at your financial information and deciding how to spend your marketing budget.

Looking at Your Financial Information

First, you need to organize your financial data and understand how much your law firm is bringing in each month.

Remember, you are setting a groundwork.

You are building a foundation, and you need to have a strong foundation.

The more you can invest now, (assuming you hire the right company), the more you will reap the benefits later.

Make sure that you properly analyze your financial data. The figures that you are working with should come after you have subtracted operating expenses like salaries, your lease, and other expenditures.

Deciding How to Spend Your Marketing Budget

Not only do you need to determine how much money to put into your marketing campaign, you need to use your budget wisely. Develop a solid marketing plan that makes the best use of the money you have set aside.

You need to decide which marketing channels to use to promote your law practice. This could include social media marketing, video marketing, SEO spending, an awesome-user friendly website, mobile application development, email marketing, PPC advertising, and other online marketing solutions.

Create a list of all the different types of marketing that you want to utilize as a part of your overall marketing strategy, and be exploring the different costs related each marketing channel. From there, start allocating your budget based on your previously set goals.

Here are some of the most effective forms of SEO marketing for attorneys you can use to build brand awareness and generate new clients:

Social media marketing is a great way to promote your law firm. You can share beneficial information or link to blog posts from your website. This can help your website build backlinks, which can have an impact on your search engine rankings.

The law firm pictured below includes links to all social media sites on the website homepage, and has an active following on Facebook and Twitter.

You can use video marketing to create customer testimonials, business introductions, and informative content.

You can provide an overview of your legal services or offer answers to commonly asked legal questions.

Post these videos YouTube, which is the second most visited site on the internet, and then share the videos on social media or embed them on your website.

PPC advertising and search engine optimization should also be included in your marketing budget. Some people feel that PPC advertising is no longer effective.

While there is some truth to this, the cost can be minimal. If you choose to include PPC ads in your budget, find a PPC network that includes targeted ad networks. This can increase click-through rates for your ads, making them more effective.

Evaluate the Performance of Your Marketing Strategies

After you have begun deploying your marketing strategy, you need to evaluate its performance. Remember that you need to be flexible with your marketing efforts and that some strategies require time before you begin noticing a good return on your initial investment.

If you feel that you are not getting enough of a benefit from a particular marketing channel, you may want to limit your budget in that area and reallocate the money towards other parts of your marketing campaign.

For example, after several months, if you do not feel that you are benefiting from PPC advertising, you might want to place your PPC budget into one of your other marketing efforts.

Or, if you have the budget, keep at it, but bring in an experienced professional to give a second opinion and give you some ideas where you could improve your performance.

Remain flexible in your approach to marketing and make adjustments. But, avoid making adjustments too often. Give your marketing efforts time before you revise them.

Generally, you should give any strategy at least 3 months to properly gauge its effectiveness. (Sometimes more, as in the case with content marketing and SEO.)

BONUS: 10 PPC Mistakes to Avoid When Getting Started With Google Ads. Learn the 10 most commons mistakes (and avoid them!) we see from businesses that are using Google Ads.

 

Final Thoughts on Creating a Marketing Budget for Your Law Firm

Setting a budget is an important part of creating an effective marketing campaign. Without a budget, you may end up spending too much or not spending enough.

It's easy to assume that creating a website and spending a little bit of money on social media marketing will be enough to increase the online presence of your law practice. Unfortunately, to remain competitive and reach as many potential clients as possible, you really need to develop a diversified marketing strategy. This all starts with the marketing budget that you set.

You can spend anywhere from a few hundred dollars per month on advertising or several thousand dollars. This will all depend on the factors listed above, including your market size, competition, current success, and your goals.

Conclusion

Always consider your marketing budget before developing your complete marketing plan.

What do you think? How are you developing your marketing budget?

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