Law firms must stand out in a competitive market. They simply have to be different. And to be different, firms must know how to study clients and markets. Data scientists call this process the study of client behavior, preferences, and market trends.
In other words, a data scientist would call this carefully planned law-firm marketing; getting the message to an audience at the correct time.
Studying clients may reveal a new type of client and therefore a new niche market. Thus, a new way of looking at the market creates higher demands for legal products. In terms of a Perry Mason story, a data scientist could again say that they have found a new potential suspect. (At times, though, all elements of a marketing operation are not totally aligned and cannot be fully integrated.)
Once said, this must apply to online presence!
“Advanced” means a commitment to a higher level of study, but at a cost. For innovative lawyers with insight and vision, the overall benefits of successful digital marketing must outweigh the actual cost of implementation.
Understanding Data Analytics in the Legal Industry
Data analytics is the systematic analysis of data sets to discover patterns, trends, and insights. This process is crucial in the legal marketing industry because it allows firms to make data-driven marketing decisions. Patterns within clients’ demographics, preferences, or behaviors discovered by lawyers may influence law firms to tailor their marketing.
This process enables firms to use the pseudoscience of data analysis in legal marketing to learn what kind of marketing campaign to push to the people. Also, data analytics provides lawyers with insight into raw, calculated numbers of real results. Seeing numbers, such as client acquisition rate/client over retention rate, may allow firms to create their own scales for the measurements (grading system of A+ through D-) of what population of clients are the best.
The Intersection of Data Analytics and Legal Marketing
Data analytics is crucial to the success of improved legal marketing because analytics provide the insights to make better decisions about the firm's marketing efforts. Just as attorneys learn more about their cases through the discovery process, marketing teams optimize marketing strategies by analyzing the client's age, sex, geographic location, reading behavior, buying behavior, online reputation, content positioning, and source of the original source of contact, among many other insights about the client.
Technical marketing analysts analyze more than 2,000 other features! The information that guides optimization completely removes the guesswork from marketing. Law firm administrators can precisely budget marketing expenses based on the cost to generate the desired return on marketing investment. We have hundreds of case studies that detail our marketing success at law firms throughout the country. Among the significant insights, we found that 78% of the law firm blog articles published 18 months. ago drove zero interest to read the content. In other words, we refer potential clients to underperforming blog articles.
Leveraging Data Analytics for Digital Marketing Success
For law firms, data analytics can impact the way they approach their SEO strategies and even their content marketing as they look at search trends, various keywords, and online behavior. Knowing what kind of users visit their websites most will help them optimize their content to rank in as many search results as possible. Law firms want to drive even more traffic to their blogs and main pages—traffic that is likely to have users who need legal representation.
Law firms need to know the individuals who make up their audience. Whether the marketing team sends its advertisements to a select age group, people from certain geographic locations, or those enjoying specific hobbies, user demographics can help it create the best marketing campaign. Law firms will want to keep their clicks to conversion rates in mind so the team does not have to perform another campaign. This way, firms can save money and potentially predict future trends.
Data Analytics in Lead Generation and Client Acquisition
Insights into the behaviors and preferences of prospective clients archived through data analytics have turned the art of lead generation for law firms on its head.
Attorneys and their teams can uncover buried treasure in data aggregated from social media posts, interactions on a website, and inquiries from clients, among other [variables], to develop a list of potential "good fit" clients. This form of predictive data can save firms hundreds if not thousands of hours that otherwise might be spent pursuing a lead that likely isn't to convert to a client, anyway.
Data analytics also allows firms to shore up a game plan for how marketing and sales teams approach customer acquisition, based on factors such as the (perceived or apparent) client's annual income, their overall needs, and location. Converted documents lower expectation maps with ideal customer profiles to help departments align, efficiently and see a hard return on investment for sales dollars and realize the benefits of retaining clients for life, career-wise.
In this day and age, data analytics for law firms are key tactics that have established themselves as must-haves for digital survival.
Business Development Through Data Analytics
For law firms looking to truly evaluate their marketing tactics, data analytics is a must-have. By what other means can you truly measure the return on investment (ROI) of your firm’s marketing efforts?
With analytics data from different marketing channels, you're able to easily see which marketing efforts are driving the best results (highest ROI) for your firm, and which are not.
Using these insights, you can then go back and refine your marketing strategy to focus on channels that you know will deliver results rather than those that you think will deliver results.
Not only is data analytics useful when looking at marketing data, but also when looking at other data that may impact the legal industry.
For example, changes in client behavior, demands on services due to changes that impact the general population, and competitive data should also be tracked and monitored on a regular basis.
Looking at external data sources such as Google Analytics, Bing, SEMRush, database exports, call tracking, etc., should be used as sources for data collection to evaluate your marketing success.
When it comes to marketing in the legal industry, it has become increasingly paramount for lawyers to make "client-centric" decisions. In other words, law firms now need to create more intimate, empathetic relationships with their customers. To make more effective, strategic legal marketing plans, our firm has to work off of real data and trends.
The study of all of this consumer data is called data analytics. Data analytics has begun to become more popular with modern law firms. Many legal professionals have "jumped into" learning the basics of data science. By doing so, law firms that use data analytics can make more surgical, strategic decisions about the deployment of their marketing budgets.
We will look at how to use data-driven marketing when it comes to "direct marketing" efforts in a later section. However, this section will primarily outline what data analytics is, how it works, and why it's become so important.
