Lawyer Monthly - August 2021 Edition

66 WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM | AUG 2021 Calculating Your LawMarketing Budget If we start at an absolute minimum of 3% of revenue as the least your law firm will be spending on marketing, we can amend and adapt this figure based on the factors previously mentioned. Start with a blank piece of paper, write down your own responses to each one, and then you can begin to make informed decisions about your budget. Once you know these factors and you have made a note of them, you can define your goals and set yourself a measurable, specific budget aligned to these goals. If your goal is the most common in legal marketing, which is lead generation and more customers, then you can calculate your budget based on the above factors to give you a bespoke budget that will work best for your law firm. See the example table (figure 5) for a fictional personal injury lawyer in London. Using figure 5 , if you are a new law firm starting out in London that works exclusively B2C with clients who have a lot of competitors, you know that your marketing budget will need to be higher at somewhere around 15-20% of your projected revenue. If in the table above we used an established law firm working in estate planning with few competitors in a small town, you could realistically look to spend between 6-10% of your annual revenue, or potentially less if your marketing strategy was well implemented. The key when preparing your marketing budget is to consider all the factors to create your own bespoke budget rather than using an arbitrary figure that Google told you. The creation of a budget for your legal marketing is the start of your law firm’s marketing journey and it deserves time and attention. If you follow this legal marketing budget guide, you are far more likely to succeed in growing your business and winning more customers. Type of Law Company Revenue Company Standing Location Competitors Customer Value Current Marketing Status Next Month: Where Should I Spend My Legal Marketing Budget? Personal injury. Exclusively B2C Clients. £250,000 Firm opened in 2018. Marketing presence minimal. London Large volume. Several with sophisticated marketing strategies. Average fee £5,000. Customer lifetime value average £15,000. No marketing staff or external agency. Website created in 2018. No blog function and limited website appearance, functionality and Search Engine Optimisation. Increase. Personal Injury is the most expensive type of law to market and B2C is more expensive than B2B. Using revenue calculation, the lowest figure to spend (3%) should be £7,500, and the highest figure (20%) should be £50,000. Increase. New companies should move into the 12- 20% of revenue range. Increase. There is a large volume of personal injury law firms in the area. Increase. The firm needs to move closer to competitors’ marketing spends to compete. Decrease. This is a fairly low average fee for location and a small lifetime value of customer. Increase. The lack of a current marketing resource needs to be addressed in order to create and implement a successful strategy. BUDGET FACTOR CURRENT STATUS BUDGET IMPACT Figure 5 BUDGET FOR A FICTIONAL PERSONAL INJURY LAWYER IN LONDON