By Chris Homer
Avvo
If you are looking to secure more leads from Avvo, heavily consider advertising on their website.
We receive the same question all of the time regarding advertising dollars. “How do you know if advertising with Avvo is the right way to spend money?” The answer is right in front of you. First, do some Google searches for the keywords you want to generate business from Google. You will most likely find that there is a result for Avvo linking to a practice area page on their site. These pages are geo-specific and contain a list of all relevant attorneys nearby. You will notice a couple of the lawyers at the top of the page are ‘Sponsored Listings.’ There is also a display ad on the side of the page that takes up a lot of prime real estate. These are the two options when it comes to advertising on Avvo. If you see Avvo is ranking well for the search terms you want to target, look into buying ads on those keywords.
Once your profile is optimized, you can start evaluating how these ads fit into your budget. The average cost of Avvo advertising is between $100 – $300 a month for sponsored listings. These sponsored listings are able to place you above everyone else on the page and lead to a much higher CTR.
The biggest question to ask yourself is, “How many leads do I need to generate from these ads to make the investment worthwhile?”
AdWords
The problem is that bad marketers and attorneys who don’t know what they are doing are driving up the cost for everyone else. When someone overspends on ads, it drives up all other law firm’s costs. This is not going to stop and the price will continue to rise. It is also a perfect example as to why properly targeting ads is so crucial to their success.
Despite this, if you understand your lead flow and revenue per case, you can then set a proper budget and run a successful, cost-effective campaign.
Here is how it works. The name of the game in AdWords is CPA (cost-per-acquisition), or how much you are spending per lead. Every click has a cost associated with it, and based on how well your campaign is performing, that cost can either increase or decrease. The goal of your campaign is to lower your cost per click (CPC) while increasing the number of leads you generate from AdWords. In order to lower your CPC, you must maintain a high-quality score across your campaigns. Quality score is determined by the expected click-through rate vs. the actual click-through rate. If Google expects your ad to have a CTR of 1.6% and your ad is receiving a CTR of 2.4%, you will exceed their expectation and therefore have a high-quality score. The high-quality score will then reduce your CPC and hopefully decrease your CPA.
AdWords is a great way to get an immediate return on your investments if done properly. Usually, after 3 to 4 months of fine-tuning your AdWords campaign, your cost will begin to decrease.
Before deciding on an advertising strategy, I ask everyone to answer one final question. What is one lead worth for your law firm? If you can’t answer that off the top of your head, then we need to figure out a rough estimate of what a lead is worth. Simply take the total revenue of the law firm last year and divide that by the number of clients you had. This is a really rough estimate of what one client is worth to you.
Why is this important? If you know that 1-5 leads turn into a client, you can then calculate how many new leads you will need each month to meet your quarterly and annual goals. It helps measure ROI and dictate where to spend your marketing budget. If Avvo ads are within your price range, then buy some Avvo ads and let them generate X amount of leads at a margin that is acceptable for your law firm. All of this stems from understanding your ROI on marketing. Once you know that, you can run marketing campaigns that will help immensely in the growth of your law firm.
So, what is a lead worth to you?