How To Create An Ad Budget For Your Law Firm

The reality is that your law firm needs more leads and more clients…Now. But marketing may have been put on the back burner for whatever reason. 

Now is the time to cut the excuses and come face to face with reality.

You need more clients to survive. The quickest way to infuse more leads and ultimately more clients is to create an ad budget for your law firm and launch an effective ad campaign (hopefully with an ad expert like Exults). 

Where do you start? Focus on building an advertising budget, then actually execute the plan. 

Want to set up your law firm’s ad campaigns right the first time? Let’s start the conversation to build out a plan.

Why Your Law Firm Needs To Create An Ad Budget

In the world of advertising, there is no one definite answer to finding the perfect ad combo.

With continually changing algorithms, user behavior, and popular platforms, it can be a full-time job to set up and operate an ad campaign. Beyond the time it takes to run ads on your own, the biggest issue we see with law firms is that they do not create an ad budget before they press “publish”. 

As a result, these campaigns usually run up costs, produce leads that you may not actually want, and bring more headaches than profitable clients. If you’re spending most of your budget on social media advertising, it may not actually be your best strategy. Creating an ad budget can relieve some of your stress and set you up for future success.

But what is an ad budget? An ad budget simply allows you to track how much you’re willing to spend for each lead (i.e. your cost per lead). 

5 Steps To Create An Ad Budget For Your Law Firm

To avoid the common mistakes of running ads, it’s important to create an ad budget for your law firm. There are 5 things you can do to create that and set you up for future advertising success. 

1. Determine Your Law Firm’s Expenses

First, you need to have a firm understanding of your law firm’s expenses. This could include bar association dues, MCLE subscriptions, insurance, office space, hardware, software, and other miscellaneous expenses. The goal here is to see where your money is currently going and where there are opportunities to trim your expenses. 

2. Review Your Sales Forecast

Once you know where your law firm’s money is going, review your sales forecast. 

What revenue marks do you need to hit to cover all of the expenses or overhead you carry? In other words, determine your breakeven point. 

We don’t want to stop there though. Identify your monthly or annual revenue goals. Then compare where you currently are revenue-wise to your revenue goals. You want to see where the sales gap is. Some great questions to ask when you’re comparing those 2 numbers include: 

• Why aren’t you reaching your goals right now? 
• Where did you come up with your revenue goals? 
• What happens if you don’t meet your goals? 

Then, review how you currently attract, nurture, and close leads into clients. Are you conducting the necessary activities to fill, maintain, and close your sales pipeline? For example, if you need to close an average of 5 clients at an average of a $10,000 retainer each month and your average close rate for discovery calls is 40%, then you know you need to talk to 12-13 prospects per month. 

Don’t forget about seasonality! Know your low and high seasons for your business. This will help you to anticipate sales. 

3. Define Your Law Firm’s Marketing Investment

More than a third of potential clients start their attorney search online, which makes digital ad management essential. But there’s more to setting up ads than you’d think. This is because ad management is similar to turning on and off a fire hose. Once you put a budget behind it, you get leads. But once you turn it off or press pause, your lead flow dries up immediately. We want to ensure that you’re building a marketing funnel that continues to feed your business regardless of whether ads are running.  

That’s why we recommend looking at your entire law firm’s marketing investment. 

Start by evaluating whether you need to create or revamp your website. In this day and age, your clients will Google you and evaluate your credibility based on your site. It also includes setting up email marketing to nurture clients, landing pages to convert prospects, and social media marketing to put a face to your firm. 

Once you get a good understanding of where else you need to invest, it’ll make it much easier to determine your law firm ad budget.

Ready to experience the results driven by Exults? Contact us for a custom quote today! 

4. Find The Gap From Your Marketing & Sales Efforts 

Next, it’s important to search for the gap in your marketing and sales efforts. Every law firm and business has some. This will help you and any other marketing provider you work with create a strategy that will sustain your business growth. 

Don’t know where to start? Try looking at these areas:

• Awareness. Consistent brand awareness can boost your revenue by up to 33%! Your audience may not know that you exist or that you solve a problem they didn’t know they have. Make them aware of your law firm and the problems you solve for them. 

• Engagement. Prospects know you exist but they may have not connected with you. Move the client relationship forward with an engagement campaign. 

• Conversion. Have a great conversation with a prospect but are ghosted? Follow up with them to get the ball rolling again. 

• Retention. Working with a client once and never seeing them again? Maybe that works for your firm, but retention could also mean getting referrals from your previous clients. 

Each of these areas requires a different ad strategy and may impact your overall ad budget. So it’s important to identify at least one area you want to focus on. 

If you need to work on each area, an ads partner like Exults can help you to build different campaigns that build on top of each other. This makes a clean experience for your prospects. 

5. Find An Ads Partner To Drive Results

Lastly, connect with an ads partner that is equipped to drive results for your law firm. Exults takes all the information you’ve collected in the first 4 steps to develop a campaign strategy that will scale your firm how you want. All you have to do is engage with the leads we produce for you and close business with them. It’s a formula we’ve implemented for hundreds of law firms and businesses over the last 19+ years. 

Want To Drive More Business To Your Law Firm?

We’re here to make money for you. When you work with Exults, you have a new ad experience. We provide the reality of your campaigns with metrics that actually mean something to your business so that you’re able to make informed decisions moving forward. 

Your law firm is waiting. It’s time to start the conversation and get a custom quote today.