Lawyer Monthly - August 2021 Edition

64 WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM | AUG 2021 This is an often overlooked element of creating your legal marketing budget. As I have stated previously, there is not and should not be a one-size-fits-all budget for a law firm and the location of your business is hugely important in determining how much you need to spend. It is well known that there are some locations with more law firms, attorneys and lawyers than others, so we can deduce that if you are operating in one of those areas you will need to spend more than someone with a law firm in a small town. As you can see, there are three times as many law firms in New York than in Dallas, and over 80% more attorneys in practice – many of whom are vying for the same customers as your law firm. You need to consider how this impacts your budget, because it is clear that a law firm in New York is going to have to spend more than one operating in Dallas due to the competition already present in the area. This needn’t be as childish as finding out what your competitors spend and then adding 10% on top of that figure, but it is very useful to benchmark by making yourself aware of your competitors’ marketing practices and working out roughly how much they are spending. Assuming their marketing is good, if they are spending £10,000 a year on marketing and you are spending £2,500, who do you think will be getting more leads and securing more new customers? Although as mentioned previously a smaller budget spent well can outperform a larger budget spent poorly, it is likely that if your competitors will be able to reach more customers if they are spending significantly more than you on marketing. The best practice here is to try and stay at least on a par with your five closest competitors. For example, one competitor might have the following in their marketing canon: • A new website including a blog and SEO – approximately £4,000. • Active Google PPC campaign and appearing at the top of the paid search rankings - approximately £1,000 per month. We can surmise that if the website and PPC campaign look good, they are likely to be spending at least £16,000 on marketing in a year. If you do not benchmark against your competitors and you are not aware of this, you probably will not be in a position prepare to compete with them. It does not matter if you do not necessarily spend the same; just make sure you include it as a factor when you are building your budget. This also works both ways, so if all your competitors’ marketing is non-existent, then to capture a larger share of the market you can get away with a smaller budget. Location Competitors 9877 law firms 3286 law firms 10555 attorneys 18809 attorneys new york city Dallas, Texas Customers Your Reach Competitor Reach