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Marketing Attribution for Law Firms
Most law firms today have a marketing budget to expand their client base. However, most will not see their anticipated results if their marketing strategy is not built on detailed and accurate data. According to a study by CallRail, most law firms believe social media is the best marketing channel despite it being the least performing one. If these law firms continue to invest in underperforming channels, they may never reach their growth goals. This is where attribution comes in.
Marketing attribution helps you determine where your leads and clients are coming from and which marketing channels are giving you the best return on your investment (ROI). When used correctly, attribution allows you to make informed decisions on where to invest your marketing budget and create sustainable growth for your law firm.
Marketing channels can include Google ads, different social media platforms, email, and search engine-optimized (SEO) content.
Using attribution as part of your marketing strategy is the key to scaling your legal profession. Read on to know why.
What Is Marketing Attribution?
Before jumping into why attribution is necessary, let’s first understand what it is. Marketing attribution is a strategy used to determine which marketing tactics and channels are responsible for most conversions by assigning conversion credit to client touchpoints. By touchpoint, we mean any interaction a potential client makes with your law firm, such as visiting your website, clicking on an ad, or contacting you.
This attribution of credit helps you assess the success of your marketing efforts and use the reported data to focus on what is profitable. The data you gather will also help you optimize customer touchpoints to turn more leads into clients.
Attribution requires tracking, collecting, and analyzing data about the customer journey. To do that, you will need tracking software and tools like Google Analytics and WhatConverts. The collected data will then be consolidated into your CRM for efficient management of all your social, chatbot, email, and call leads.
With attribution, you can assess the effectiveness of your law firm’s marketing efforts and then allocate your marketing budget accordingly.
How Can Marketing Attribution Benefit Your Law Firm?
If you aren’t sold yet on the importance of attribution for your marketing, here are four ways it can help you scale your legal practice:
Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Strategy
Attribution helps you determine which marketing channels or campaigns are effective in bringing cases. This goes beyond counting the number of leads or prospects each channel generates. It allows you to determine their quality and focus your efforts and marketing dollars on where your best clients are coming from.
Making Data-Driven Decisions
Attribution data allows you to make informed decisions and guides your business development efforts. It provides valuable insights into client behaviors, preferences, and engagement patterns through tracking tools and software. By having a robust attribution setup, you eliminate all guesswork from your marketing and know exactly what’s working and what’s not.
Eliminating Overspending on Poor-Performing Marketing Channels and Campaigns
You can identify the marketing channels with the highest ROI and also where you are losing money. From here, you will have the option to cut off the poor-performing channels or look through your attribution reports and find out where you can improve. Either way, you will not be overspending on what’s not bringing in value.
Growing Your Law Firm
Unlike referrals, for example, there’s really no limit to how many clients and revenue your law firm can gain every month with marketing attribution. Your law firm’s growth becomes as scalable as your marketing efforts, and the more you invest in what has been proven to work, the more ROI you will see.
How to Measure Marketing Attribution?
Once you are ready to take advantage of attribution, you must decide how you are going to measure it. There are two ways to do that: the one-touch attribution model and the multi-touch attribution model.
Here’s what you need to know.
One-Touch Attribution
One-touch attribution is a simple model that attributes conversions to the clients’ very first interaction with your brand or the last one.
In a first-touch attribution model, the client’s first interaction with your website or content takes all credit for the conversion, regardless of whether the conversion happened on the same day or weeks after. Conversely, a last-touch attribution model attributes credit to the last touchpoint just before conversion.
The one-touch models only offer a snapshot of the customer journey and don’t offer much insight.
Multi-Touch Attribution
Multi-touch attribution considers many touchpoints throughout the customer journey and attributes a percentage of conversion credit to each touchpoint. Here are some models that fall under multi-touch attribution:
- Linear attribution: This is a model that assigns equal credit to all touchpoints. This type of attribution allows you to understand each channel’s overall contribution.
- Time-decay attribution: This model gives more credit to the most recent touchpoints before conversion. It may be beneficial if your legal services have a longer sales cycle.
- The U-shaped attribution model: This model gives significant credit to the first and last touchpoints and then distributes the remaining credit among other touchpoints.
- The W-Shaped attribution model: This type attributes 90% of conversion credit to the first touchpoint, the interaction that creates contact, and the last touchpoint. The remaining credit is then attributed equally to the in-between touchpoints.
- The Custom attribution model: This type of attribution is arguably the most complicated of them all. It offers a personalized approach tailored to your firm’s unique characteristics and operations. However, it requires in-depth data and understanding of your clients and their journey to conversion.
These models will help you understand the effectiveness of different touchpoints as well as overall channels in generating new business. However, there’s no “one size fits all” when it comes to measuring your marketing attribution. You’ll have to choose the model that’s most suitable for your law firm, depending on:
- Your marketing goals
- Target clients
- The client’s conversion journey
The right attribution model will help you understand where your marketing dollars are better spent. You can then refine how you allocate resources to sustainably scale your firm.
Ready to Scale Your Law Firm with Attribution?
Attribution is essential for scaling law firms because it gives in-depth insights into the quality and efficiency of your marketing efforts. Constellation Marketing can offer your law firm an attribution setup that generates comprehensive and transparent data to maximize your business. We are helping 50+ law firms across the U.S. triple their revenue through data-driven Google advertising and SEO.
Schedule a free consultation now and start taking advantage of attribution to thrive in the legal industry.
