<\/noscript><\/p>\nOur Newcastle based law firm has now created a workable plan to implement the marketing tactics that will drive their strategy – and hopefully their sales. They know exactly what needs to be done, who is responsible for doing it, when it has to be done by – and who is accountable for making sure that it’s done. If they\u2019re smart, they produce a plan like this for the whole year ahead \u2013 not just the initial three months of the campaign. They can modify the plan later on.<\/p>\n
In Part 6 of The Intelligent Marketing Puzzle, we’ll be taking a look at measuring your results, which is the only objective way to know if what you are implementing is achieving your strategy – or just burning valuable time and money. It’s also how you make your marketing become predictable.<\/p>\n
Part 6 of The Intelligent Marketing Puzzle \u2013 Measure Your Results<\/h3>\n If you\u2019ve been putting the pieces of The Intelligent Marketing Puzzle together, you should by now have a fairly detailed marketing plan. The simple reality is that if you have a plan and follow it through, you will definitely do a whole lot more business than what you will without planning and consistent execution.<\/p>\n
To get the most out of your marketing plan you\u2019ll also need to measure your results. There are many free and paid tools that you can use to measure certain metrics, and in time you might want to do that. The important thing, for now, is to understand what you wish to measure and devise a simple way to do it. You can build more complexity into your monitoring as you progress.<\/p>\n
Why measure your results?<\/strong><\/p>\nOver time, measuring your results allows you to:<\/p>\n
\u2022 Minimise or completely eliminate marketing activities that produce few or poor quality clients<\/p>\n
\u2022 Focus more of your time, effort and money on marketing activities that produce the clients you really want<\/p>\n
\u2022 Understand and ultimately reduce your cost of client acquisition<\/p>\n
\u2022 Build high levels of predictability into your marketing activities<\/p>\n
If that doesn\u2019t excite you into wanting to measure your results then I don\u2019t know what will!<\/p>\n
What to measure<\/strong><\/p>\nWhat you really want to know is what\u2019s working for you and how much that costs. Tracking this can be as simple as using a piece of paper and a pen, with some simple arithmetic added in later \u2013 plus making damned sure that you consistently record what you want to know. I\u2019m going to stick with our mythical conveyancing lawyer to illustrate how this might be done.<\/p>\n
Our lawyer has decided to use the following marketing advertising\/discovery mediums:<\/p>\n
\nFacebook\/Blog (Direct)<\/li>\n LinkedIn\/Blog (Direct)<\/li>\n Local Newspaper Ad<\/li>\n Referrals (Agents)<\/li>\n Referrals (Others)<\/li>\n Street Signage<\/li>\n Yellow Pages Online<\/li>\n Web Directories<\/li>\n Website (AdWords\/PPC)<\/li>\n Website (Search\/SEO)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nIn this campaign, our lawyer wants to attract new conveyancing clients.\u00a0All of these marketing mediums will offer fixed price conveyancing.<\/p>\n
What does our lawyer already know?<\/strong><\/p>\nLet\u2019s take a look at what our conveyancing lawyer knows right now:<\/p>\n
Direct Upfront Costs<\/strong><\/p>\nThe spreadsheet below shows the direct upfront costs, in dollars. The second column displays “per-use” costs for items such as bottles of bubbles which can be calculated and expensed, as consumed. The third column is for upfront costs that might reasonably be amortized over a period of time, such as PPC and SEO setup fees, as these are generally a onetime expense. For the sake of simplicity, I’ve chosen 12 months as the period for all amortized expenses. Both per-use and amortized costs can now easily be taken into account when calculating your return on investment from marketing costs.<\/p>\n
NB:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0You’ll find this easier to view on a desktop or laptop!<\/em><\/p>\n <\/noscript><\/p>\nThere are some other costs that our lawyer could add in if they wanted to make it complicated. They already have a website. They\u2019ve already met the cost of that some time ago, so all they need to do right now is meet the cost of editing the site to reflect their fixed fee conveyancing offer and add a landing page for their free eGuide. Our lawyer has to pay staff and other overheads regardless of what marketing takes place, so that\u2019s been left out of the equation too.\u00a0You know there are many other costs associated with running your practice. It’s your spreadsheet, so make it as simple or as complicated as you want to. Personally, I’d keep it really simple, just for now.<\/p>\n
Recurring or Monthly Costs<\/strong><\/p>\nWe’re going to use the information we have to work out the recurring or monthly costs of conducting this marketing campaign. Some of it is really easy. If our lawyer gives away a bottle of bubbles, that costs them $10.50, including the cost of the label. A paper-based eGuide costs them $1.70. Easy peezy! Let’s take a look at those less tangible expenses and how to group them.<\/p>\n
NB:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0You’ll find this easier to view on a desktop or laptop!<\/em><\/p>\n <\/noscript><\/p>\nAs you can see, I’m not a great graphic designer. I’ve used colour in order to make it easier to understand how expenses might be grouped together, in order to work out how much each source of new business is costing you. For example, if you look at PPC Setup, PPC Management and PPC Ads I’ve grouped all of that together – including the amortized monthly cost of the initial setup. I’ve done the same with bottles of bubbles and labels, but in that case, we have a known cost per item – so I’ve simply estimated a certain level of usage per month for those items.<\/p>\n
Later, you’ll see that I’m going to consolidate some of these costs even more. For example, to me, it makes a lot of sense to consolidate and split the amortized cost of graphic design and website editing\/programming equally between SEO and PPC – making that cost directly attributable to a metric you can easily measure. You might want to consolidate printed eGuides and bottles of bubbles too, as they both belong to the cost centre associated with referrals from real estate agents. Again, it gets down to what you want to measure and how complex you want to get. I’d keep it simple.<\/p>\n
Don’t Blow the Budget!<\/strong><\/p>\nIt’s important to try and stick to a budget that your practice can afford. We can now easily see that our lawyer needs to invest $7,157 upfront in this marketing campaign, which actually includes the first month’s cost of several recurring items such as YellowPages Online, some web directory ads and local newspaper advertising. This is well inside the $10,000 budget initially set for upfront costs.<\/p>\n
Monthly direct costs are estimated at $3,699. Again, this is well within the $4,000 per month budget set earlier.<\/p>\n
Looking good? Time to set a sales forecast.<\/p>\n
Sales Forecasts<\/strong><\/p>\nYou’re never going to forecast sales correctly. That’s especially true when you have limited or no information to work with from your past marketing efforts. There will be some things that you’ll be able to figure out without a lot of trouble. In the case of our fictional lawyer, they know from previous research that on average a homebuyer will spend $1,239 on their fixed price conveyance of $695, when other services\u00a0(in particular Wills and Enduring Powers of Attorney)<\/em>\u00a0are sold as add-on services. They also know that around 30% of new clients will come back again at some future point in time. For now, let\u2019s assume that each new conveyancing client generates $1,239 in revenue for the practice. Let’s take a stab at forecasting three months worth of sales.<\/p>\nWe’ll shoot for one new conveyancing client for each working day over the next three months. Let’s say that’s 60 days – so we want 60 new conveyancing clients from all sources. 60 x $1,239 = $74,340 in revenue. We now have a very simple sales forecast.<\/p>\n
You may have a lot more information to work with, in your practice. Perhaps you’ve been actively marketing for several years and have been tracking new client sources, average client spend, client return rates, etc. In that case, you can create something more complex\u00a0(and considerably more accurate)<\/em>. In the absence of such information, the best you can do is take a stab at it. Just do it and live with the imperfection.<\/p>\nTime to create a tracking system<\/strong><\/p>\nOur lawyer can now create a simple inquiry tracking system. When I say simple, it can be as simple as a paper form on the reception desk, next to the phone. On the form the person answering the phone or who greets walk-in clients marks off the lead source, by simply asking new inquiries where they found out about the firm. The user places a 1 next to the inquiry source each time an inquirer confirms where they first found out about the practice. Effective doesn\u2019t need to be complicated.<\/p>\n
The form might look something like this:<\/p>\n
<\/noscript><\/p>\nIn the real world\u00a0(especially if you employ professional assistance)<\/em>\u00a0you will very likely have analytics tracking in place on your website that tracks a range of activity, including leads capture, phones calls and a whole range of other useful information. The\u00a0“how to”<\/em>\u00a0of all that is way beyond the scope of this article. In reality, what you see above works just fine most of the time. When I first started to track inbound inquiries in my accounting practice this was exactly what we used. Once again, you can get as complicated as you want with this. I’m a great believer in simple.<\/p>\nThree months later…<\/em><\/p>\nPart 7 of the Intelligent Marketing Puzzle – Review, Refine & Repeat<\/h3>\n After all of your hard work we\u2019re about to place the final piece of The Intelligent Marketing Puzzle \u2013 or are we? Really, we\u2019re about to look critically at what you\u2019ve done already, review the results, decide what\u2019s working\u00a0(or working best)<\/em>, determine what\u2019s not working so well \u2013 and then make some important decisions based upon the facts. Let’s get right into it!<\/p>\nGather your data<\/strong><\/p>\nIn Part 6 of The Intelligent Marketing Puzzle we looked at our mythical conveyancing lawyer and the data they had gathered before launching their first three-month marketing campaign. We\u2019re going to now take a look at the results of the campaign and use that information in conjunction with the data we gathered earlier to analyse the results. Here\u2019s what they produced in terms of new conveyancing clients at the end of their first three-month campaign. The spreadsheet includes new clients, gross fees generated and the average fee generated per new client from each marketing source:<\/p>\n
NB:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0You’ll find this easier to view on a desktop or laptop!<\/em><\/p>\n <\/noscript><\/p>\nIn this case, every marketing tactic that our lawyer employed over the three-month campaign produced something. It’s already clear that some marketing sources produced more new clients than others and that the average client spend for each marketing category differs significantly. Let’s take a look now at what it costs our lawyer to generate each new client.<\/p>\n
Our lawyer already has a spreadsheet that shows them the monthly cost of each advertising medium. All they need to do is work out the number of bottles of bubbles and printed eGuides they’ve given away, and working out their cost of sales becomes quite straightforward. In the spreadsheet below I’ve assumed that our lawyer has given away 32 bottles of bubbles and 47 printed eGuides\u00a0over the three month period of their marketing campaign. I’ve also consolidated a few cost centres, as mentioned earlier, just for the sake of simplicity.<\/p>\n
NB:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0You’ll find this easier to view on a desktop or laptop!<\/em><\/p>\n <\/noscript><\/p>\nReview your results<\/strong><\/p>\nWorking out the cost per client is as simple as dividing Total Cost by New Clients\u00a0(see above)<\/em>. That’s not the whole story though. What we really want to know about is the return on investment\u00a0(ROI)\u00a0<\/em>generated by each type of ad.<\/p>\nCalculate your ROI<\/strong><\/p>\nThere are many ways to calculate ROI. A very simple method is to take Total Revenue and subtract from that the Total Cost\u00a0(see below)<\/em>. You then divide that figure by Total Cost. The spreadsheet below uses this extremely simple method to calculate our lawyers ROI on each category of ad spend. Just note that this method does not produce an ROI figure for what are effectively cost-free new clients, such as direct referrals. Simple common sense applies here.<\/p>\n <\/noscript><\/p>\nThe table above shows us that not all of the advertising that our lawyer undertook produced a positive ROI \u2013 it cost them money for nothing! A quick glance at the table reveals their costliest marketing tactic\u00a0(Web Directories)<\/em>\u00a0had had a negative ROI of -19.66%. By contrast, referrals from real estate agents produced a very healthy ROI of 4,372.75%, with a solid average client spend of $1,278. Our Lawyer is now armed with a great deal of information to inform what they should be doing during their next three months of their marketing campaign.<\/p>\nRefine your tactics<\/strong><\/p>\nOur lawyer needs to take a critical look at each tactic used in their campaign in order to decide if they should continue using that tactic or not. To keep it simple, we’ll assume that our lawyer is going to continue with their fixed fee conveyancing offer and will attract a similar number of new clients and a similar amount of revenue for each tactic employed over the next three months.<\/p>\n
Costs will vary a little from our lawyers first campaign. In order to decide what tactics stay and what tactics are dispensed with, our lawyer has chosen an objective standard of a 150% ROI (1.5 times their investment) as the “knockout” benchmark. For a tactic to be used again it will need to hit that ROI benchmark.<\/p>\n
Using the knockout benchmark of 150% ROI our lawyer is immediately able to eliminate both YellowPages Online and web directory ads from the next three months of their campaign, saving them a total of $484 monthly – or just over 13% of their monthly marketing budget. That money can go straight to their bottom line or be poured back into more productive forms of advertising.<\/p>\n
Our lawyer might look at any number of other metrics here as well. AdWords\/PPC is clearly a costly tactic at $418 per new client – but it does produce a consistent number of new clients for the practice. By comparison, SEO produces fewer clients but each has a significantly greater dollar value and lower acquisition cost for the practice. Should our lawyer divert some of their monthly AdWords\/PPC budget to SEO?<\/p>\n
Estate agent referrals offer a huge ROI for our lawyer. Should they do some more outreach to local real estate agents and see if they can create more centres of influence amongst them, as referrers? What is the personal time commitment required for our lawyer to do this? Can somebody else in the practice take care of this? Should they consider employing somebody either part or full-time to take care of this for them?<\/p>\n
The options are endless when you have good quality information to work with. The longer you gather that information, the more informed your decision making can become and the more profitable your marketing will be.<\/p>\n
Refine your plan<\/strong><\/p>\nOur lawyer and their team now need to step through each tactic and make a decision about what is the best way forward with their marketing plan over the next three months. Let’s take a look at each tactic not already knocked out and consider the opportunities.<\/p>\n
<\/noscript><\/p>\nBlog, Facebook & LinkedIn<\/strong><\/p>\nEach team member involved in creating blogs and posting them to social media takes an average of 45 minutes to write and post a blog, then link it to social media. At an average of three blogs per month, a group investment of around two an a quarter hours per month is required to continue with this activity. Using our available data we can easily calculate that blogging and social media posts generate an average of one new client a month and average revenue of $737 per client.<\/p>\n
The SEO consultant engaged by our lawyer has advised that there are organic search benefits attached to regularly posting blogs on their website and sharing them on social media. Whilst that benefit appears to be a little less tangible, new clients acquired as a result of search\/SEO are of higher average value than all other new client sources and offer an attractive ROI for the practice.<\/p>\n
On this basis, blogging and social media sharing gets the tick of approval and stays in the campaign, unchanged.<\/p>\n