How To Determine Your Law Firm’s Marketing Budget Transcript

Question:

Is there a certain percentage of my revenue I should spend on marketing? What’s the best rule when starting to market my criminal defense firm?

Answer: Andy Stickel

I don’t have a specific percentage of my revenue that I spend on marketing. I look at marketing as an investment rather than an expense. What I always tell lawyers is this. The biggest mistake most people make is they do not figure out their numbers correctly. If you can figure out your numbers correctly, then you can consider your marketing as an investment in your business.

Let’s say you’re running a Facebook ad. You spend a thousand dollars per ad. From that thousand dollars, we got 25 leads which turned into two cases, (two clients). What does that tell us? That tells us that it costs $40 to get a lead and it costs $500 to get a case.

The numbers are not going to always be this clean. But, as you spend more and more time running ads You will get a more clear understanding of your numbers. Then you will start to understand how much it costs to get a lead and how much it costs to get a case.

Once you know how much money it costs you to get a case, you will have to decide how many cases you want to go after per month. If your cases cost an average of $500 per month to get, and you want to land 10 new cases per month, you will need to budget around $5000 this month to get those cases.

It is difficult. At the beginning of your marketing strategy, you are really going to be doing some testing. Just like with everything you do, in the beginning, you should be about providing value and trying to start conversations with people.

I would focus on creating content that people who just got a DUI would find extremely valuable and answers all the questions that they have. For example, how do I avoid losing my license? You might create a video about a hardship license, or create a video about the DMV hearings if that’s something that happens in your state. I know in Florida, you have 10 days to request a DMV hearing. Maybe create a video that talks about all the different ways that your law firm uses to get DUI cases thrown out or pled down to lesser charges. All of these different things that people are interested in like how do you protect someone’s reputation if they got a DUI. If you got a DUI, are you going to go to jail? These are the things people are thinking about and worried about. If you run these types of ads (as engagement ads) and then you start using Facebook’s tools to create custom audiences and basically go into Facebook’s audience section. Later you can use the list.

What you do is go into Facebook’s audience section and pull up everybody that watched a percentage of this video. Let’s say 25% of this video and add them to the list, to show all your future videos. Because, when people are watching your new videos they are a warm audience and there is a good chance that they got a DUI or they have some sort of reason that they’re watching. They are interested in your content. In the beginning, you are going to be spending a little bit more money just to kind of warm up the audience and to get your data.

Just understand that you’re going to have to spend a little bit more, in the beginning, to get to that point where you’re not worrying about what percentage of your revenue you’re spending.

But, you are more focused on how much does it cost me per lead, how much does it cost me per phone call, how much does it cost me per case? Is there a certain percentage of your revenue you should be spending on marketing? I don’t know the answer. That’s because I don’t know what your revenue is. If your revenue is $5,000 dollars then – I don’t know versus you know if your revenue is $100,000. I guess you’re just starting so you’re not doing a hundred dollars but I mean you really got to figure out what you can afford.

Another thing you can do is you can do a lot of stuff that doesn’t cost a lot of money or that’s free. You can create content. I call it the PSA style content right where you create content on your personal profile that does not feel like ads that basically feels like a PSA.

Intro, Criminal Defense Attorney Mike

If you’re a criminal defense attorney say hey everybody this is a Mike.

You guys know I’m a criminal defense attorney. I want to talk to you about something that I think is absolutely ridiculous. It’s happening to a lot of my clients right now. What’s happening is, the police are starting to set these DUI checkpoints up and I’m not advocating drinking and driving but what’s happening is they’re actually tricking people into. You basically provide some sort of information like some sort of really valuable information where you could say look if this ever happens to you make sure to know your rights. Know what your right is and know that you don’t have to do this and you don’t have to take the breath test or whatever it is.

Basically, what you’re trying to do is you’re just trying to put information out there and what will happen is if the information is valuable enough, then your friends will actually share the content because it’s actually useful information. Doing that you’ll get a lot of reach and you’ll probably start getting people that will reach out to you saying hey, I’m your cousin’s next-door neighbor. Somebody shared it and you’ll start getting reached that way. Then you can also take those videos and you can run those as engagement ads also. There are a lot of different ways you can advertise. I actually have a couple videos on YouTube about that. Ways you can advertise that don’t actually involve a lot of money or any money at all while you’re getting started. You can start kind of building up some cases and building up some bankroll so that’s kind of what I would do there.