There are numerous marketing channels attorneys can use to ways to find prospective clients. A firm may spend thousands of dollars per year on different marketing campaigns, all while neglecting to track how successful these marketing efforts are. By calculating your cost-per-case, your law firm can identify ineffective marketing channels and boost profitability.
Cost-per-case refers to how much you spend on one campaign to sign a client.
Cost of Marketing Campaign
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Cases Your Firm Signed
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Cases Your Firm Signed
Say you spend $500 on Social Security disability leads from a third-party company. If you end up signing three leads as clients, you have a cost-per-case of $167.
Why is cost-per-case important?
Cost-per-case is important because it allows your firm to evaluate your marketing sources and determine which channels are profitable and deserve further investment.
TV advertisements and cost-per-case
One of the most popular forms of advertisements for attorneys are TV ads because they receive many phone calls or walk-ins from interested viewers. In fact, a study conducted by MarketShare showed that TV commercials were four times as memorable as digital ads.
Before you hire a production company to film your first commercial, first consider the volume of clients you’d need to sign to make profit. A local ad will cost at least $200 per thirty-second slot. If you run just one ad per day for six months, you’ll be paying over $36,000 for local TV commercials.
If your ad is wildly successful and you sign four new clients per week, you’ll have signed 104 new clients after spending $36,000. This leaves you with a cost-per-case of $346.
This is a spectacular cost-per-case for a personal injury attorney earning more than $10,000 per settlement, but if you are a bankruptcy attorney and earn around $1,000 per case, you should probably seek other marketing avenues.
Third-party legal leads and cost-per-case
One marketing option for attorneys that typically yields advantageous cost-per-cases are legal case leads. When you purchase case leads from a lead generation company, you are guaranteeing yourself a potential client. Lead generation is essentially paying for contacts. While TV ads can be successful, there is absolutely no guarantee that anyone will call you firm after watching your commercial. The same could be said for billboards, pay-per-click ads, radio, or print ads.
For example, one of our clients converts 18% of their Social Security disability leads to clients, giving them a cost per case of less than $150. While these results are not typical, they’re certainly not atypical. Numerous clients have been wildly successful when purchasing legal leads.
Purchasing legal leads also eliminates some of the upfront costs that come with generating leads and finding clients. For example, if you want to create a commercial, you will need to hire a production company to create the commercial before you even pay a network to air it. This can be inexpensive if you’re making an ad for a small local channel, but can cost tens of thousands of dollars for a commercial broadcast on larger networks.
Buying legal leads also cuts down on the cost of hiring someone to work in-house on your campaigns. Pay-per-click, search engine optimization, and other digital advertisements are not only expensive to run, but you will need to hire at least one employee to manage your marketing efforts.
Final factors to keep in mind
There are three key components to remember when evaluating your cost-per-case:
1. Be proactive. Ask every caller or walk-in client how he or she found your firm. There is no point in running a TV commercial or putting up a new billboard without determining whether or not callers have seen it.
2. Keep your practice area in mind. Some areas of law yield much higher settlements than others. Depending on how much you expect from the average settlement, a cost-per-case of $1,000 could be excellent for mass tort or personal injury attorneys.
3. Don’t be afraid to ditch inefficient marketing channels. If you’ve crunched the numbers and found that you’re paying too much for any form of marketing, eliminate it.
If you’d like to learn more about what you could expect for a cost-per-case when purchasing eGenerationMarketing’s Social Security, employment law, personal injury, or workers’ compensation, give us a call at 617.800.0089 to discuss availability.