How to Measure the ROI of Your Law Firm’s Social Media Marketing

As a marketer or business development professional within a law firm, it’s critical to quantify your marketing efforts in order to prove to senior partners that they are indeed effective. To truly see whether your law firm’s social media marketing efforts are leading to meaningful results, you must have a method of measuring the return on investment (ROI). With a better idea of your return on investment, you can evaluate whether your current strategy is working properly or whether you need to make some tweaks to improve it. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to clearly see the ROI for social media marketing, particularly with “vanity” metrics, such as likes, getting in the way. To accurately measure your social media marketing’s ROI, keep the following tips in mind.

Have a Clear Goal

There are many different goals you can set with your law firm’s social media marketing, and your goal will impact how you measure ROI. If your goal is to get conversions, you will need to look at whether or not your efforts are resulting in new leads. However, if your goal is brand awareness, you will want to see an increase in mentions and followers over time. Some of the goals you may have for social media marketing include increasing brand awareness, attracting traffic to your main website, generating new leads for newsletters, finding influencers, or actually acquiring new clients. In the last case, ensure you have a target number of new clients you want to acquire per month.

Know the Time Period

To measure your return on investment, you need to have a specific time period in mind. You should choose a period of time that is long enough to see results, but still short enough that you will not have to wait a significant amount of time before making changes and assessing again. Once you have a time frame, make your goal measurable, such as the number or percent increase in leads you want to see.

Track the Metrics

It should go without saying that to measure the ROI of your law firm’s social media marketing campaign, you need to look at metrics. Depending on your goals and objectives, the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) will differ, and what metric you are evaluating will slightly vary by platform. Once your KPIs are set, the next step will be to set up Google Analytics, so that you can track the success of your social media activities. Here are some common KPIs to measure: 

• Exposure / Reach: Visits, views, followers, fans, subscribers, brand mentions. How many people are reading your blog or going to your website? How many people are following you on Twitter or LinkedIn?
• Influence: Share of voice, sentiment, top influencers. Is your content being mentioned or retweeted by others? Are people linking to your site or to your blog? Has your search engine ranking for your keywords and phrases gone up?
• Engagement: Clicks, retweets, shares, replies, DMs, wall posts, comments. Is your content being shared or retweeted by other people? Are your readers posting comments or asking questions? Are your followers talking about your company on Facebook?
• Actions / Conversions: Content downloads, webinar attendees, lead generation forms, pitches/proposals. How many people are downloading your content or filling out lead generation forms? Is the traffic you are driving to your website being converted into new clients? Are people contacting you for new work based upon your content?

Assign Values to KPIs

There are several different methods you can use to assign a value to your key performance indicators. One method is to assign lifetime value, or how much your law firm earns from each client on average, giving you a number to assign as the ROI every time you sign up a new client as a result of your social media activity. You can also use lifetime value multiplied by conversion rate, which measures how much each visit is worth based on the percentage of visitors that convert into potential clients. For firms that use paid social or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you can calculate the estimated value of visits generated from social media in terms of how much that would cost your firm with paid social campaigns or Google Ads.

Benchmark Against Competitors

The final step in determining the ROI of your social media is to compare your social media efforts to your competitors’ to uncover areas where your firm can stand out or enhance its thought leadership position. This will also allow you to see which social channels are most accessible for your competitors in reaching your target audience, how many posts your competitors publish per day, and the amount of engagement their posts receive.

Keep Measuring

Remember always to continue tracking the social media metrics and ROI, whether or not you meet your goal. This will let you know if a formerly successful strategy is no longer as useful or help you discover why a sudden increase in engagement occurred.

Related: [eBook] Advanced Social Media Strategies for Law Firms

Takeaway

These tactics will help your firm or business determine the effectiveness of its social media efforts. ROI measurements are important not only because they give stakeholders and interested parties quantifiable ways to view your marketing efforts but also because they allow you to see what works and what doesn’t in terms of social media. With this knowledge, your firm can better grow its business and achieve its goals.

If you need help learning how to measure and improve your law firm’s social media efforts, contact us for help today. We’ve helped countless firms in all different practice areas take their social media performance to the next level.

Updated and Republished from Aug 31, 2018