What is “ROI” for Legal Marketing?

How do you define “return on investment” for legal marketing?

Recently, on an email list-serve I belong to, one poster opined that, “If you can’t calculate your return, it’s not marketing.” Is this really true? What is ROI? How do we calculate it? This seems to be one of the stickiest problems faced by  lawyers, particularly those for whom ‘marketing’ is a scary term, and usually associated with ‘selling’ or ‘advertising,’ which are considered four letter words to a lot of lawyers.

I think part of the problem may be in how we’re defining ‘return on investment.’ Traditionally, ROI is calculated strictly by the numbers – in other words, in the past year, I spent $xx on my blog (or another marketing tool), plus yy hours and I know that I got #z clients from it. .

One problem is that, at least in my opinion, there’s more to ROI than just the numbers. And sometimes it isn’t so easy to trace how a client came to you – they may tell you only one of the ways they heard about you. And they may not know how someone else heard about you – i.e. perhaps someone else is an avid reader of your blog and they tell the PC about you. Although it is important to evaluate what you’re doing and whether it’s effective, sometimes going strictly by the numbers leaves out some very important factors. As another member of the list pointed out, meeting a neat person or learning something new or doing something because you enjoy it are not necessarily quantifiable (particularly in the short run), but can be exceptionally valuable.

Perhaps your blog or writing articles are ways that you educate yourself and keep up with what’s happening in your practice area. Maybe clients don’t come to you through the web, but you send them there for additional information after you first meet them, and seeing what’s on your blog or your website helps them to make a decision. Perhaps your marketing helps you learn more about your clients and what they need. Maybe a seminar helps to convince existing clients to work with you on additional projects. The client may not even be aware of it. And maybe your marketing (whether in the form of a blog, a website, an article, or volunteering to do something for a committee, etc.) builds goodwill. How does one calculate that? How do you calculate whether something helps build your reputation or your credibility in the community or helps others get to know you better?

Another problem is that I think many people tend to be too impatient with marketing activities, thinking that they’re going to yield fruit right away. Many marketing activities are done to build credibility or to create relationships. A lot of times, those activities ultimately bring the best clients – but they take longer to develop. Just like personal relationships, business relationships aren’t ‘built’ overnight. You may have been blogging for a year and not gotten any clients directly from the blog, but that doesn’t mean that the blog isn’t working, or that it’s something you should stop doing. The same goes for writing articles, or giving seminars, which often yield fruit long after the article is written or the seminar is over. Often, it isn’t just one thing that convinces a client to hire you (or to call for a consultation, etc.)- it’s many things, over a period of time.

Certain marketing tools may be more suited for a particular area of practice (as someone pointed out with DUI and the Yellow Pages), or a particular area of the country, or a particular target market, which is why it’s difficult to rely on someone else’s statistics (which may not be accurate anyway), or to merely ‘copy’ what someone else is doing. Just because something works (or doesn’t work) for someone else, doesn’t mean the same will necessarily be true for you.

Finally, the way your message comes across and whether your marketing is targeted to a specific audience can also have an impact on your ROI. Sometimes it isn’t the tool that’s the problem, but the way you’ve used it.

I have to say that I disagree with the statement, “If you can’t calculate your return, it isn’t marketing.” It may be that you need to re-define your ‘return’ or think about that return in terms of something a bit less concrete than numbers – at least some of the time.

If you’re interested in some reasons why I think a lot of legal marketing fails, sign up for the free teleseminar I’m giving with PR Consultant Paramjit Mahli of Sun Communications Group on February 13 – Why Legal Marketing Fails.