Paid media is no longer just for advertising professionals. From sponsored content and social media advertising to pay-per-click and display ads, there’s no shortage of opportunities for your law firm to promote content and drive exposure through digital paid media. The most successful paid media plan is one that reinforces your efforts in owned, earned and shared media as part of a comprehensive strategy that generates new business leads for your firm. However, with dollars and cents on the line, ensuring that your firm is getting the most bang for its buck is essential. Here are some tips on measuring different types of digital paid media.
How to Measure an Email Marketing Campaign
Have you ever wondered why you get so many emails from retailers, restaurants and other businesses? The simple answer is because they work. While it’s easy to complain about a cluttered inbox, the fact of the matter is email marketing that is valuable, informative and interesting to your target audience is a necessary inclusion for any successful paid media plan.
While measuring email marketing, it can be easy to get fixated on the subscriber count but a large number of subscribers is meaningless if they aren’t reading and engaging with your firm’s content. Open and click through rates are much more important for measuring an email marketing campaign. According to Mailchimp, the average open rate for legal marketing campaigns is 22 percent, while the average click through rate is 2.81 percent. Improving open rate could be as simple as tweaking the subject line to something more catchy and relevant, while click through rate is dependent on the interest in your firm’s content. Since law firms provide a wide range of services, consider segmenting your list based on audience interest and need rather than sending all subscribers the same content.
How to Measure Pay-Per-Click Advertising
As the home of all of your valuable content and contact information, your website is a great centralized hub for your firm and an ideal location to drive prospective clients. Pay-per-click advertising is one of the easiest and most effective types of paid media for driving traffic. Your firm promotes a link and pays a fee each time someone clicks on it. Incorporating keywords relevant to your firm’s services can put your ad directly in front of those who are already searching for it.
The price of pay-per-click advertising varies depending on the value of your selected keywords, so return on investment is one of the most important measures to track. While many ads can be had for as little as a few dollars through Google Ads, more competitive keywords can exceed $50 or more per click. However, the consistent use of relevant keywords in ads and content marketing practices will also improve your firm’s Google Quality Score, providing more ad clicks at lower costs. Hubspot Agency Digital 22 offers a simple formula for calculating pay-per-click advertising ROI: (Revenue – Cost)/Cost x 100 = ROI %.
How to Measure Social Media Marketing
Available through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and other notable platforms, social media advertising, or paid social, is your firm’s ticket to reaching a targeted audience with a genuine need or desire for your services. After client research provides a better understanding of who your firm is trying to reach, social media ads can be delivered to an audience based on location, spending habits or personal interests. Depending on where a lead is in the buyer’s journey, paid social campaigns can be used for prospecting, retargeting or converting potential clients.
While having your message seen organically in the buzzing highway of social media can be a challenge, determining the audience for your paid social media marketing is entirely up to you. With posts being seen by a targeted audience, increased likes, comments and shares is a reasonable goal to measure but for the purpose of improving leads and conversions, tracking the results of your call-to-action is more important. Whether it’s a link to click, phone number to call or something else, are people taking that next step after seeing your ad? If not, your firm is either targeting the wrong audience or sharing content that isn’t relevant.
Developing key pieces of content such as a webinar, ebook or case study that will elevate your thought leadership is the goal of our SAME 4-step strategic process.
Learn moreImproving Leads and Conversions Starts With Goals
If improving leads and conversions is what your firm is after with paid media, it all starts with setting goals. Not only do these goals tell you exactly what you’re trying to accomplish, they also provide a benchmark for measuring paid media. As your firm increases its number of leads through e-marketing, social media ads and other paid tactics, your goals will likely shift to close the deal and secure a new client. Maybe you start a new segmented email campaign or retargeting social media campaign to provide unique content specifically to your most qualified leads.
Whether it’s a brand new visitor in the early stages of the process or a qualified lead who is ready to do business with your firm, it’s your job to be the guide for those traveling along the sales journey. Since different types of paid media will find users at different stages of the journey, tracking their progress will reveal the success of your efforts or any changes that need to be made. Of course, not every new lead is solely because of an optimized landing page, social media ad or email, but it’s still important to measure those that were driven by paid media to determine your ROI.
It’s no secret that today’s media influx has made it difficult to get your firm’s message heard organically. However, it has also provided a flow of paid media techniques to promote it. With your target audience constantly being bombarded with content from other businesses, paid media is your firm’s ticket to generate leads and drive conversions. Developing an integrated strategy of paid media and content marketing that increases leads and cases is the goal of our SAME 4-step strategic process. If you’d like to learn more about how measuring paid media can create results for your firm, let’s chat.
