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Written by david wolf
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Managing your online marketing budget as a lawyer or law firm can be a challenge. There are countless decisions to be made, and you are competing for very valuable interest. One client could mean thousands or hundreds of thousands in revenue to the firm. That means that other firms are paying top dollar to be seen on the front page of the ad search results. Is there anything you can do?
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 isnt that easy. Here is why.
Would you recommend that a defendant represent himself in court? Why not? Because no matter how smart they are, law, and being effective in a court room is something that requires years of experience and specific knowledge to become good at. A physhics professor may be smarter than you, but he does not know how to object when a prosecutor makes an unsubstaintiated claim.
What your firm should be doing is getting an expert in the field of PPC to manage the campaign for you. The reason is the same reason a PPC expert should hire a lawyer for law advice. PPC marketers spend years honing their skills to stay competitive. Most likely you are competing against them right now if you are advertising online, and you are at a huge disadvantage. Normally a good PPC management firm would charge 15% of your marketing budget + an hourly rate to do the the testing, tweaking, and research. This is not set in stone and is merely an industry average of sorts. Often times other arrangements are made.
Why is that worth 15%? A good firm or specialist will know what keywords to target, and which ones waste your money. They now all the tricks to get you more relevancy so your ads cost less, and they know how to right ads that attract the right people, and get the wrong people to ignore them.
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 successfull 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.
Optimizing your landing pages for the keywords you are targeting is extremely important. If you are targeting clients for emergency room malpractice, you want to point them to a page on your site specifically about malpractice law and not your main page. The more specific and relevent you can get the page the better.
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.
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