Law Firm Internet Marketing PPC – Profiting From Expertise
As a law firm or independent lawyer, determining where to spend you online marketing budget can be a daunting task. You have so many options, and are competing in a very competitive field. Each click could possibly be a new client eventually worth thousands or hundreds of thousands to the firm. With that kind of value on the line you can bet that firms are willing to pay whatever they have to, to be seen. Is there anything you can do to get the edge?
Yes! You can be better than the competition. The sad truth about law firms and most business when it comes to marketing online is that they try to do it for themselves. Someone in the office says “We should be marketing online, lets try adsense.” Everyone says its a great idea and they give it a shot. The problem is, it isn’t that easy. Here is why.
Would you ever even consider telling a client to represent themselves in a court of law? Of course not. Forget about the fact the your law firm would not get paid and focus simply on the fact that they do not know what they are doing. When they go up against an experienced prosecutor, they do not stand a chance. Even a Neurosurgeon, as smart as they are, does not have the necessary skills or experience to compete in the at realm.
By now I am sure you have figured out the important point that I am getting at. You need to have someone on your team that specializes in Pay Per Click advertising running you campaign. The reason is that it works. Specialist devote years perfecting strategies to get the maximum return and effectiveness out of a Pay Per Click campaign. While you were in law school, they were in PPC school, or the school of hard knocks learn by trial. The industry standard for a service such as PPC management is about 15% of your total ad budget, and a set hourly fee to create, manage, and tweak the campaign. It is not always structured like this, but this gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect when looking for Law PPC help.
A good PPC expert can more than make up for the 15% budget fee. This is because they know what keywords to target, and which ones not to. They also know how to get higher in the rankings without paying more. They also know how to attract only those customers that you want to click on the ads.
This results in several effects. The most important effect is that you will decrease your cost per conversion. Cost per conversion is the amount of money it costs you to get whatever you determine is the metric to use. If it is a contact form you are after, than that is the conversion. If it is the sale of a traffic ticket defense package, then that is your conversion. It can be lowered in two ways, less cost per click, or better targeted click. Imagine if you will that you had a marketing budget of $4000 for the month. If you could get 50 leads out of that your cost per lead is $40. If if you could get 100 leads with the same marketing budget, your cost per lead drops to $20.
That means that you can pay more for successful clicks, and possible even increase your advertising budget because it is so successful. Below are several of the most important factors that effect PPC campaigns. If you are outsourcing to a firm or specialist, they should know these facts inside and out.
Optimized landing pages are key when it comes to ppc. Instead of sending a client to your main website, send them to a page designed specifically to target them. If your are targeting motorcycle injury clients, have a page of information related to that topic, and ask for their information there. You will get a higher relevancy rank. More on that in a minute
Testing is crucial to the long term success of a PPC campaign. Almost no campaign is successful right off the back. You have to test parameters against one another to see what is effective and what isn’t. It is different every time. In general a PPC campaign should become more and more successful as time goes by.
Analytics are one of, if not the most important factors in PPC marketing. You need to be able to see where you sign ups are coming from. Without analytics, 1000 people could click on an ad from a keyword you were bidding on and you would not know whether anyone signed up or not. Analytics is what let you know which keywords to bid more on, and which to stop bidding on all together.
Keyword Research: You want to find out what your target market is searching for, and how much competition there is. You also want to know the strength of the keywords commercial intent. This means is the person using that word in the discovery phase of the decision cycle, the comparison phase, or the action phase. Start by marketing to the action phased words first. That way you can save on clicks from 15 year old mesothelioma research reports.
