Unexpected Marketing Costs | eGenerationMarketing

Submitted by Deanna on Tue, 09/12/2017 - 16:32

Managing your own firm can be complicated enough, but running your legal marketing campaigns is an entirely new challenge for most attorneys. It’s nearly impossible to keep a firm running with rave reviews and word-of-mouth referrals alone. While you may have a strict monthly, quarterly, or yearly marketing budget, there are often costs that arise that are unexpected. Here are some of the hidden costs associated with legal marketing.

Hiring a New Employee

This may not be entirely unexpected, but if your legal digital marketing, public relations, or traditional campaigns take off, you’ll need to hire someone else to manage your marketing. A new employee will cost $30,000 at least in salary alone, but this isn’t factor that costs your firm. Paid time off, holidays, health insurance, and other benefits add up. An employee who earns just $30,000 could easily cost a firm $40,000 or more.

Billable Hours

Your time is valuable. If you’re spending hours usually dedicated to reviewing cases or processing paperwork on marketing, you’ll be losing money. Search engine optimization is the lengthy process of attracting unpaid traffic to your website. One simple way to optimize your site is by adding relevant content via a blog. If an attorney charging $300 per hour writes one blog post per week, in one year the blog could cost more than $20,000 in billable hours.

“Wasted” Dollars

Even marketing experts make mistakes on occasion. It’s very possible you’ll spend some of your marketing budget on a campaign that’s unsuccessful, or something will go awry with your marketing plan.

For example, an unattended PPC campaign has the chance of “going rogue” and servicing keywords unrelated to your area of law. Some unmonitored personal injury paid campaigns bid on mesothelioma keywords, which aren’t pursuable for attorneys not specializing in class-action lawsuits. Without careful monitoring or a dedicated PPC specialist, you could be throwing money away daily.

Equipment & Technology

Some expenses are straightforward, like spending $2,000 to use a billboard, or $250 per timeslot for your commercial. But what about the hidden fees that come with those types of campaigns? You’ll likely need to hire a graphic designer to make your billboard ad for you. The same can be said for producing and filming a TV commercial.

If you are focusing primarily on digital marketing, you’ll still have extra costs. Paying a blogger to write content for your website usually runs upwards of $20 per article. You can use Google Analytics to track your success, but other tools will charge a one-time or monthly fee. Marketing campaigns are useless without an idea as to whether or not they were successful.

Cut the Costs With Lead Generation

While it’s imperative that your firm works on optimizing its marketing campaigns at an affordable cost, it may be possible to supplement your current caseload without doing any marketing in house. Lead generation is one of the most affordable way to sign new clients, because you’re paying for a claimant’s contact information—Not the hope that he or she will reach out to you.