Gyi Tsakalakis of AttorneySync and Litify VP of Growth Jon Robinson discuss how to accurately measure your law firm's marketing ROI. They offer tips for tracking every piece of marketing collateral to determine what is truly driving new business for your law firm.

Watch the conversation or read the highlights below.

How to measure the impact of your brand build

Tsakalakis says that while brand-building is important, “None of this has any meaning unless you can tie it to a business metric. I think we get lost in all the noise of marketing shininess.” He cites search traffic as an example of an element of marketing that is perhaps overvalued, because "traffic only has value if it turns into something," ideally a conversion. There’s no point in generating traffic if none of the people who visit your site end up contacting you.

I think we get lost in all the noise of marketing shininess.

Ultimately, attribution is about grounding potentially hazy qualities like brand-awareness with numbers, and connecting it all back to your business through data. “Even folks that are doing brand-building, there are all sorts of ways that you can measure the impact of your brand build,” Tsakalakis says. “Whether it’s through market research or search console data, how many times people are searching for your name or firm name, it’s really about tying some kind of accountability back to your marketing, from a business standpoint.”

Tsakalakis thinks that 80% of lawyers should be focusing on qualified potential client inquiries and retainers. “As you move further and further away from qualified prospects, you start to get into indirect metrics,” which are less useful.

The power of a good CRM

Tsakalakis says there are two reasons to write a blog. One is to build your brand and grow your audience. The other is the “unbranded bucket,” which could take the form of a legislative update, analysis of a high-profile case or litigation phase, or answering a frequently asked question. “When those blog posts get scooped up by Google, they get indexed and start showing up in search results, and you can track that people came to those posts.”

Once they’re on the site, you can then track conversions. “Now you’ve got tight attribution between someone doing a search, coming to that specific blog post, and making a phone call or filling out a form. Put that into your CRM platform and now you’ve connected your blogging activities all the way down to qualified prospects and ideally retainers.”

We can report on phone calls, form fills, events in Google Analytics, goal conversions in Google Analytics, but if you want to take it that last mile, you have to be able to connect that data to a CRM tool or practice management tool.

That means it’s crucial to have a good CRM system. You need to be able to connect your Google Analytics data with your client management system to fill in all the gaps of the customer journey, or “close the loop” as Tsakalakis says.

“You need a tool that does that, because that’s the missing piece that we see so often. We can report on phone calls, form fills, events in Google Analytics, goal conversions in Google Analytics, but if you want to take it that last mile, you have to be able to connect that data to a CRM tool or practice management tool,” such as Litify.

Once you have that, “Then you can make amazing reports that give you tremendous insights into your marketing mix.”

“There is so much gold in your legal marketing data”

Tsakalakis recommends that law firms use Google Search Console, “a free tool that will give you impression data, click data, and position data with the specific queries. It used to be that Google Analytics would show you the keywords that people landed on your site using. They took that away, but they still give it to you in Search Console.” It’s a way to track the impact of your brand activities and the impressions for searches for your name or firm name over time.

“Tracking that growth in Search Console is a really good way to understand if you’re growing the number of people who are actually interested in your brand,” Tsakalakis says. “You can do the same thing if you’re running paid ads. If you bid on queries, bid on keywords that include your brand name, you can track that growth over time too. So, that’s just a very simplistic way to do it.”

While building accountability into your marketing and advertising activities is key to growth, Tsakalakis also says, “It’s important not to become so myopic about attribution that you just abandon brand-building. I think that’s a big mistake that a lot of folks make. It’s really just thinking about this more holistically. What are the impacts of these integrated strategies working in harmony that are driving more people to your firm? And ultimately getting back to connecting that to retainers and fees.”

He notes that technology and the internet have made this approach much more feasible, and that the firms who capitalize on that capability have a serious edge. “There is so much gold in your marketing data and CRM data, whether it’s nurturing existing relationships or staying in touch with former clients or building custom audiences on Facebook. The firms who are taking advantage and implementing these systems and measuring this data, they have a huge competitive advantage.”

“If you plan to be around for the next ten, twenty years, it's really time to take the next [step in the] evolution of attribution for your marketing time and money.”

See what the next stage of attribution and growth might look like for your firm by requesting a Litify demo.