How To Build A Stable, Profitable, Legal Practice in 2023...

Choices...There’s the traditional slow, hard, way...and the far better way.

Every practitioner who wants to be their own boss has the choice of strategy for their legal practice development and management.

With the traditional slow, hard, way many practitioners fail, and often return to employment. 

Others battle on right through to retirement, creating little if anything valuable to sell, and earning not much more than the salary of a good employed lawyer for all the stress and financial risk. 

That’s ok if you’re happy with it, but not so good if you think, “Surely there’s a better way”?

The far better way involves consistently allocating a percentage of your time and financial resources to sensible, practical, business development.

It needs to be recorded carefully and fully monitorable for your return on investment so you can make tweaks to improve it when poor ROI is identified.

The business development techniques that are relevant to your unique practice will depend on a few factors around what legal services you are providing.

Robservation...some techniques that will work if done properly, and persistently, are more easily done in 2023 than ever before.

Just a few examples that may be relevant from the many dozens of techniques...

·      Networking using Linkedin...

·      Webinars and seminars...

·      Relevant, well-written, website content that carefully incorporates important keywords to “snare” the interest of leading search engines such as Google...driving traffic to your site...

·      Once your website landing pages content is good, consider whether Google Ads will also work for you...

An oft-asked question is along the lines of, “Does Google Ads really work and provide a good return on investment of time and money”?

My answer...Most certainly, if done properly!

Let’s have a look at a few aspects of what “doing it properly” requires...

·      Invest the necessary time yourself to really understand how it works, and stay up to date on developments...

·      Get your keyword selection right...

·      Set budget carefully, and ensure bidding is set up well and monitored closely so your ads are selected by Google for exposure to the right searches enough of the time.

·      Design your ads people will see on their search results page carefully, with real appeal, and align them accurately with the content they will find on your landing page when they click on an ad...

·      Carefully monitor that enough of the people who click each of your ads and arrive at one of your landing pages are in fact the right people...if not, they will move on immediately and you will have paid for the click, but your “conversions” will be too low (emails, form submissions, phone calls...all trackable from each of your landing pages).

·      Have everyone handling enquiries arising from conversions trained to understand why they mustcapture all vital details of every enquiry...and ensure they always do.

·      Challenge what appear to be illogical suggestions from whoever is managing your campaigns. As an example, a suggestion that you look at reducing your budget in an area of your campaign when you are only getting your ads exposed in 20% of the possible searches looks at least worth exploring a bit! This would be especially the case if when your ads do get exposed to a searcher they rank highly in the list presented by Google Ads and get terrific click through rates.

·      Use quality tools such as UberSuggest to run all sorts of tests of your performance, including where you may be competing against yourself with duplicated content, either within the one website or across two or more.

·      K.I.S.S. (see below main mistakes I see)...

The Main Expensive Mistakes I Observe...

·      Setting up campaigns that are too broad and complex for your Google Ads manager to review thoroughly and continually tweak for better performance. Let’s face it, if your campaign is too complex for them, they will focus on small parts (and may feel you are not paying them enough each month to do more). Their reporting quality will usually drift down the scale and become next to useless.

There is plenty of material on the Internet describing how few Google Ads marketers (less than 35%) find time to “personalise” campaigns to keep costs down, and ROI strong. 

With a complex campaign it is pretty much impossible that you will be able to spot major defects yourself and follow up the manager to better explain things and arrange the necessary fixes.

·      Focussing too much on click volume without carefully assessing the ROI of each campaign. What I’ve seen happen is relatively large budgets getting soaked up with hardly any genuine enquiries from the clicks, and clicks costing far too much on average. Competitors with well-organised campaigns can drag your click cost up.

Even basic ROI analysis will require capturing data on actual conversions from the clicks, and the reasons for not opening a file (or an initial consultation) for the prospect, and calculating at least anticipated fees from each new file opened.

·      Principals and other practice managers assuming that you can only spend money on Google Ads if your ads are getting clicked on, and that if your budget is getting used up you must be on the right track. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Bottom Lines...

Google Ads are by no means a “set and forget” strategy...quite the opposite in fact!

Getting quality enquiry for your services at a reasonable cost is not similar to falling off a log.

Doing it properly does achieve quality enquiry for some legal services at a very pleasing ROI.

 Upcoming Webinar    ”Legal Firm Optimisation-Approaches to Fully Under-Pinning Practice Financial Health”. Wednesday 26 April 2023. 2.30pm NZST...12.30pm AEST

**New video published Monday 20 March 2023**

Lawyers’ Practical Post-Pandemic Marketing...HERE

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