We have all done it, spent money on advertising that didn’t work, lured in by the promise of thousands of potential clients just sitting waiting for you to send them your advertising message so they can buy your products or services.
The reality is entirely different. People no longer want to receive your advertising message, instead opting to researching the best companies themselves. According to new research conducted by Peppermint Technologies searching the web is the 2nd most popular method of choosing a solicitor amongst consumers, furthermore, 97% of consumers use online media when researching local products and services.
If you are a solicitor’s firm and are using online advertising to push your message to your audience, your marketing message is going unnoticed.Then you may find this solicitors marketing advice very helpful.
This means less people will click on your ads and they will ignore your messages which will push up the amount you pay for each lead. I’m sure you will have noticed that your cost for acquiring a lead has been steadily increasing over the years. Why? Because your prospects are switching off.
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How solicitors currently attract leads online
Most law firms will be using some form of online marketing, even if it is just a website. Many of the firms we speak to have difficulty determining what is working.
Firms struggle to see the ROI on things like SEO and PPC. They further struggle to see which channel is working; they know they should be on social media, talking and engaging with prospects and customers, but this activity needs to tie back to their marketing goals.
How much are these leads costing your firm?
Take a look at some of the prices on Google for solicitor related keyphrases and what the potential cost per click is.
You can see that the cost per click is on average £5.81, in our experience the prices are very conservative and in practice are usually a lot higher.
Here comes the maths bit: Let’s say you receive 100 clicks at the average cost which would cost you £581, minus the consulting fee if you are using an agency.
Now for argument sake say you convert 3% of all your visitors to your website from PPC into a lead.
This means you would pay £193 per lead.
I would say this is far too high, not only this, when you switch your PPC off that’s the end of your lead stream. No more leads entering the top of your sales funnel.
Don’t you want to be more in control of your leads?
I am sure a lot of you are also using offline methods: TV advertising, radio ads, advertising in local newspapers and cold calling. Old tired traditional marketing methods that are no longer working.
Could you tell me how many leads you got last month from these outbound channels, or better still clients? Again if you stopped the revenue stream to these channels the leads would dry up.
According to the Peppermint research only 1 in 14 consumers use advertising to select a solicitor. That is just over 7%!
How to reduce cost per leads by widening your sales funnel
Currently a lot of the solicitor’s websites I see have a very short funnel when it comes to generating leads. I will discuss with you how you can widen that funnel and generate not only more leads at reduced costs but leads that are ready to buy.
Since 95% of people are using online sources to research and considering the second most popular way to find a solicitor is by doing research online, this is where you need to attract your leads.
Also according to an article in The Journal Richard Susskind, a former keynote speaker at the law in Scotland conference, said “Clients want to pay less for your services.”
Susskind believes that IT is only one of three main drivers for change in the market at present. The liberalisation of legal service provision is another, but the dominant factor is what he labels “the more for less challenge” – clients wanting to pay far less for legal services while expecting more.
So how do you reduce the costs per lead?
By using inbound marketing of course. In a nut shell inbound marketing uses business blogging, social media and search engines to draw your prospect into your website where you will help to answer their questions and address their pain points.
See the impact on leads to companies who create content and blog on a regular basis below.
Download the full report “marketing benchmarks of 7,000 businesses”
Basically helping prospects with their research and by creating great offers like this one “how the finance industry is pioneering the new marketing” you will help identify them and begin to nurture them into clients.
So let’s say you had a business blog with 50 articles on it really helping to answer customers’ questions with a great download offer to help them further, you will not just regularly generate leads you will also become an authority in the eyes of your clients and the search engines.
The best bit of all though is unlike PPC, TV advertising and print, this blog content with continue to generate you leads at a much reduced cost for the foreseeable future.
Conclusion
As only 1 in 14 customers use advertising to select a solicitor, your expensive outbound marketing strategies are failing and will only continue to increase the cost of your leads. By creating great content that helps answer your prospects questions and nurtures them into customers with inbound marketing, you will see a steady drop in the cost you pay for each lead.
Now it’s your turn
In this ever changing world of digital marketing what challenges do you face in generating leads for your Solicitor’s firm? We would love to hear them in the comments below.