A Comprehensive Guide to Law Firm Marketing Analytics

The only way to know if your law firm’s digital marketing efforts are meeting your goals is, of course, to measure results and track analytics. Otherwise, there is no way to tell if your campaign is on the right track or running off the rails. Legal marketers cannot rely on intuition alone to get their initiatives and campaigns right, especially given the necessity of marketing for retaining clients and driving revenue.

Law firm marketing analytics support a variety of objectives such as: campaign tracking, cross-channel attribution, marketing mix modeling, client segmentation, and competitive analysis. Luckily, today’s landscape offers a wealth of leading law firm marketing analytics tools (more than just Google Analytics) that can gather all sorts of data from all of the channels in your marketing mix, and report on them cohesively. Legal marketers should keep in mind that data alone does not provide value – using the information to make smart decisions is what leads to successful marketing.

The Main Processes for Data Analysis

In order to properly evaluate the performance of your law firm’s digital marketing efforts through measurement and analytics, consider the following steps: collection, refinement, and delivery. Neglecting any part of this three-step process will lead to missed opportunities. Each of these three components are key in the data value chain.

1. Collection:

Obtaining and storing data is easier said than done. Most tools offer basic data such as clicks and conversions. Law firm marketers need the ability to dig deeper into personally identifiable information, along with behavioral and demographic insights. You want to be able to pinpoint your audience’s pain points as well as keep a pulse on their interests and actions when navigating through your law firm’s website. Also, it’s very important to make sure your data and analytics collection strategy is tied to clear business objectives before setting up your law firm’s marketing program.

2. Refinement:

As advanced as big data capabilities are, any system will work better with clean and organized data. You can assume that much of the time spent working with data is cleaning it up, standardizing, and categorizing it. Your most efficient analytics activities will leverage data that is accurate, consistent, and consolidated. 

3. Delivery:

The goal of any data intelligence is to enhance decision-making, leading to more revenue for your law firm. For this reason, it’s important that marketers and firm leaders have access to data that is intuitive and actionable. The tools that are most helpful for this are dashboards for overall reporting, drill-down and query tools, and campaign targeting and management tools. 

The Four Pillars of Law Firm Marketing Analytics

Business Intelligence:

Business intelligence (BI) leverages software to transform data into actionable insights that inform a law firm’s strategic and tactical business and marketing decisions. BI tools access and analyze data sets and present analytical findings in reports, dashboards, graphs, charts, etc. to provide detailed intelligence about the state of the firm.

Since tools tend to offer robust reporting with lots of options, marketers should focus on diagnostic areas: How is a certain campaign performing? What creative is working best? Which day of the week is best for emailing warm leads? Legal marketers can use BI to dig deeper into reporting to find opportunities, tweak campaigns, and better allocate resources. 

Descriptive Analytics:

These analytics focus on the clients behind the data. Items like client profiling offer descriptions of clients in terms of demographics. Layering behavioral data on top of these descriptions provides further context that can help law firm marketers create campaigns and find new future clients. An extension of descriptive analytics is segmentation, which enables rule-based nurturing campaigns. 

Predictive Analytics:

Predictive analytics is used to make predictions about unknown future behavior or events. Predictive analytics uses techniques such as data mining, modeling, statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to analyze current data to make predictions about the future.

Often the models offered by predictive modeling take the form of answers to questions. What is the lifetime value of a client? How many people will take advantage of a promotional period? How many meetings are likely to come from a specific lead nurturing program? Understanding the probability of various scenarios can help marketers make informed decisions. It’s important to know that predictive analytics will certainly have a gap in data – that’s where modeling comes in. You can better understand what is likely to happen, which can be incredibly powerful. 

Prescriptive Analytics:

Prescriptive analytics is the area of data analytics that focuses on finding the best course of action in a scenario given the available data. Prescriptive analytics gathers data from a variety of both descriptive and predictive sources for its models and applies them to the process of decision-making. Prescriptive analytics answers: “What should we do now?”

Takeaway

Remember that collecting campaign data is the easy part. Interpreting the data and analytics and taking appropriate action is the important – and most difficult – part. Fortunately, there are several tools available at a variety of price points to help law firm marketing teams manage analytics and apply them to data-driven decision making. 

If you need some assistance deciphering findings, or even setting up analytics tools to properly track your firm’s campaigns or monitor your website, let us know. We can help you measure and make the most of your digital marketing efforts.