There are countless questions you’ll need to ask claimants to vet a claim and determine if the case is pursuable. Social Security disability attorneys will always want to know what disability a claimant has, while personal injury attorneys will be more concerned with an applicant’s case type. But there’s one question that you should be asking any claimant who contacts you, regardless of your area of law:

Why is this question important?

If you don’t ask claimants how they heard of your firm, you may have no idea where the majority of your clients come from. This is especially problematic for firms that have invested in numerous legal marketing efforts.

For example, let’s say that your firm is spending $10,000 per month on billboards and TV ads apiece. Neither billboards nor TV have an easy way to attribute conversions, so it’s up to your firm to do the detective work. If you sign 20 new clients in a month, but 19 of the 20 clients heard about your firm from a TV ad, you may not know your billboards are completely ineffective unless you immediately ask claimants how they heard about you.

How Your Firm can Pinpoint Ineffective Campaigns

Once you’ve gotten a good idea of how many clients you’ve signed per marketing channel, you may be tempted to simply focus on whichever efforts are yielding the highest number of signed cases. While this seems like the most logical option, it may not be the most profitable. You will instead need to calculate your firm’s cost per case to know which efforts are profitable.

Your cost per case is how much your firm has spent to sign one new client. For example, let’s say a Social Security disability spends $700 on pay-per-click (PPC) ads, and signs 4 clients. That same month, the firm spends $5,400 on outdoor bus stop ads and signs 22 clients. While the outdoor ads yielded far more clients, the average amount of marketing dollars spent per case is far higher. In this example, the cost of a new client through PPC ads was $175, while the cost of a client via outdoor ads was significantly higher at $245. Although the PPC campaigns did not result in as many clients, each client cost the firm significantly less to retain.

This doesn’t mean that you should only invest in one marketing channel as well! More sources ensure that you will have a steady flow of cases. So long as an effort is “profitable,” (typically a cost per case of 15% of your expected settlement will be fine), it’s a valid investment.

Supplementing Your Successful Marketing Efforts

While you’re evaluating and adjusting your firm’s own marketing efforts, you can also supplement paid and organic clients with lead generation. eGenerationMarketing offers Social Security, personal injury, and workers’ compensation, leads across the country, all at a profitable cost per case. If you would like to talk about our legal lead availability in your state, give us a call today at 617.800.0089.