Building and growing a law firm comes with a great deal of responsibility. As attorneys, your ultimate goal is to ensure that clients receive the best representation and get the best result. In order to deliver the best client experience, firms have to consistently meet internal benchmarks and ensure that they are operating efficiently.

Working on your firm — versus just working in your firm — forces you to ask both simple and difficult questions. Nevertheless, the challenge many encounter as they begin the process of growing and improving their firm is that they don’t know the correct questions to ask. It is Litify’s goal to inspire you to think about which questions are the right ones to ask and challenge you to find the answers. Metrics are often the best tool to help you reach these answers. With this post, we will explore the power of marketing.

The First Line of Defense: CPA vs CPM

When marketing, it is important to stay focused on results. The key metric to track is your CPA (Cost per Acquisition).  While marketers will toss around other jargon such as CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) to justify their efforts, your CPA is the one key metric that will drive your success.

Don’t focus on how many people are seeing your online and offline campaigns, focus on how many of those eyes turn into leads and more importantly how many of those leads turn into cases.

Leads are Not Cases: Marketing Tracking Report by Channel

Whether you are running your own Google Adwords account, purchasing leads through a third party, or driving organic traffic to your website, the metric that your marketing manager will provide you with is the number of leads received and the cost per lead.

Don’t stop there.

Push your team further, and make certain that every lead that comes in is automatically attributed to a campaign. Extend your tracking and follow that marketing campaign to the finish line. Track the success of your campaign all the way through to a signed retainer. Reinvest in the channels driving quality cases at low CPR (Cost Per Retainer), and cut away the noise of campaigns that generate hundreds of dead leads.

Your firm’s success can be heavily influenced by the quality of your leads and in your ability to generate a consistent flow of clients. Knowing where your good cases are coming from is the first step in that mission.

Customer Highlight: Bruning Law Firm

“Most important to us is Cost Per Conversion of a Lead Source and the Average Attorney Fee per that Lead Source.  This allows us to compare how much it costs for us to bring in a lead from that source to what fee we can expect for a case from that lead source.   Then we can take our overhead (minus marketing costs) and divide it by how many cases we handled in a given year and find out what our margins are for our cases per lead sources.

Using these metrics we can really track the full lifecycle of a case and follow it back to its origin. These metrics will influence our marketing spend, our overhead, our headcount, and our entire business.”