How to Tie Metrics to Your Law Firm’s KPIs
By: Zach Parker
Legal

More isn’t always better when it comes to measuring legal marketing metrics. If your law firm starts tracking and calculating every move you make, you’re likely to end up with enough statistics to fill up the back of a baseball card, leaving you overwhelmed and unable to determine what’s working and what isn’t. Rather than compiling all available data, it’s important to focus on those that are tied to your law firm’s key performance indicators, or KPIs. This allows you to focus on specific goals and objectives to evaluate your success at reaching them. Here are some tips on how to tie metrics to your law firm’s KPIs. 

Metrics for Building a Brand

Establishing a brand is a logical goal for any law firm, particularly in the early stages of your marketing efforts. And while your firm’s brand may be an abstract idea, its growth in the minds of your target audience can still be measured through the right KPI metrics. For the purpose of building your firm’s brand, the number of website visitors is the key performance indicator to focus on. After all, your website is the home of your firm’s blog posts, case studies, media coverage and any other valuable content that establishes your brand. 

Notable legal marketing metrics to track website traffic include inbound links, referral visits, media mentions and website visitors. Measuring these KPI metrics will help your firm determine where you are having success in establishing your brand as well as areas that might need more attention. For example, if you’re getting a lot of new website visitors from sharing blog posts, it’s pretty clear that your content marketing efforts are accomplishing your goal. Or, if your traffic from linkbacks is lacking, consider a new approach to media pitching that will increase your chances of earning coverage and a link to your website. 

Metrics for Generating Leads

Depending on size, location and practice area, there are a number of different law firm KPIs to measure the success of your marketing efforts. However, generating new leads might be the most universally monitored. The rise of content marketing in recent years has created a variety of outlets and opportunities for turning your key audiences into potential clients, which also brings with it plenty of KPI metrics for tracking growth and revealing any shortcomings. 

With its simplest definition being an individual or organization that is interested in your firm’s services, there are a number of different metrics involved in the lead generation process, but for measuring total leads, the source, cost per lead, lead quality score and lead-to-prospect ratio are pivotal. These legal marketing metrics allow your firm to pinpoint where your leads are coming from and where those leads are currently at in the sales journey. Cost per lead is also important because it reveals exactly how much your firm is spending to generate these leads and helps determine your overall return on investment. 

Metrics for Converting Leads

Now it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty. Generating a large number of leads is always a valuable practice, but converting them into clients is where all your hard work comes to a head to provide new revenue for your firm. When it comes to measuring clients as one of your law firm KPIs, conversion rate, cost of client acquisition and revenue won are some key legal marketing metrics to follow. 

One of the most prominent KPI metrics, conversion rate is an evaluation of how well your firm closes the deal with interested leads. Following these conversions through the sales journey allows you to see which of your marketing practices were effective in turning visitors into leads or leads into clients. It can also provide insight into where your efforts are coming up short if there’s a significant drop off from qualified prospects to new clients. 

Metrics for Increasing Client Loyalty

Chances are you probably remember a time as a child when you passed a McDonald’s while riding in the car with your parents. Despite your best efforts to convince your parents to stop and seize the moment to get a delicious Happy Meal, they probably rebuffed you with a reminder that you have food at home. The same principle applies for law firms. Much like the Happy Meal, new clients are an exciting target to pursue, but that pursuit shouldn’t come at the expense of the “food you have at home” in the form of current clients. 

Though often overlooked, client loyalty is a valuable objective that can be easily tracked with recurring revenue as one of your law firm KPIs. Client referrals and reviews, engagement and retention rate are just a few of the legal marketing metrics that will help determine whether or not your firm is successful in its efforts to increase client loyalty. Positive reviews or high engagement rate on emails or social media posts from clients means your firm is on the right track, while a low retention rate could be due to spending too much time on prospects and potential rather than established clients. 

Keep in mind that creating law firm KPIs and studying the legal marketing metrics that follow is not a one-time practice. As your firm’s needs and goals change over time, so too will your KPI metrics. Each time you embark on a new goal to reach, your firm will need to evaluate all the potential metrics to ensure you’re still tracking the best ones to measure success. If you’re interested in learning more about how to tie metrics to your law firm’s KPIs, let’s chat. Helping firms achieve measurable, exceptional results is what we do best. 

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