Marketing is essential to your business. You can have the best legal team in the entire world, but if no one knows your name or phone number, you will not receive any business. Marketing is also one of those business areas that can cost as much as you let it. There are thousands of marketing agencies, technologies, and services all promising to deliver business right to you. Many legal teams struggle with allocating their marketing budget effectively so that their return on investment is absolutely maximized.
Luckily, there is an easy rule of thumb to follow. The 85/15 rule.
The 85/15 rule states that 85% of your marketing efforts and budget should be spent on owned aspects and properties. Your website, lead generation strategy, brand, and content marketing all fall under this umbrella. It is vitally important to take ownership of your own marketing and your own message. You can certainly hire a representative or even an agency like Abogados NOW to help you in this arena, but anything with your brand on it should be considered owned.
15% of your efforts and budgets can be spent on things you do not own, like business development, third-party lead sources, and referrals. These are items that will help your marketing efforts, but they should never occupy the majority of your strategy.
Let’s consider a hypothetical situation. The Best Defense Law Firm is looking to do more business. They have $20K to spend on marketing. They decide to spend $17K of that budget on a lead list. That only leaves $3K left to polish their inbound lead process and develop content for their website that will draw those leads in. The leads they were after wind up languishing on a list, uninterested in their practice since the practice has minimal online presence and no brand authority.
Now let’s consider a hypothetical that handles marketing the right way. The Very Best Defense Law Firm has $20K to spend on marketing. They spend $10K developing a fully bilingual website and online presence by filling it with expert content to be a trusted legal voice in both English and Spanish-speaking communities.
They spend their remaining $10K advertising their name, online, to people who are actively looking for at attorney.
In the long term, not only will leads and referrals start pouring in, but thousands of new prospects will now start noticing your presence in the community. Advertising your name today will mean generating clients tomorrow, a week from now, or even years from now. Owning your marketing simply pays dividends.
