There are clients who see the cases coming in and just don’t care about ROI tracking. I’m happy to continue making them successful, and partnering with them to track return on investment (ROI) takes time. If clients don’t want to, fine. But I personally strive to show that my company is providing clients with a return on their SEO investment, because that’s our entire purpose.
For clients who want to partner with us and track ROI, the first step is your intake process.
Questions You Should Be Asking New Clients
You’d be surprised at firms that spend heavily on advertising but have no means of knowing which, if any of their ad campaigns to attribute new cases. Are those phone books actually generating you leads? (They aren’t.) Is that TV ad on cable news doing anything for you?
Adding a couple of simple questions to your intake screening process is the key to ratcheting up your marketing and advertising game.
First, simply ask how they heard about you. Did a friend refer them? Did they see your ad? Did they turn to Google and find your website? You should know every single way you’re paying for marketing and advertising and track them for every new case.
If they aren’t a referral, and they Googled for a solution, ask if they can remember what they searched for. Many won’t remember much specifics, but those who do can provide your SEO expert a wealth of information.
Attributing your cases to different ad or SEO campaigns simply puts you in better control of your advertising and marketing budget.
Coordinating With Your SEO Expert
I personally stay piped in on every client’s lead generation. If I get a notice that a client generated a new personal injury lead, I’m probably going to text my contact at the firm to see if they have someone on the case and see if they think it’s a good one. Lead generation is just exciting, and I enjoy seeing the payoff of my work for my clients.
Coordinating with your SEO guru enables them to dive in and study the lead, particularly in big PI cases. With just a little info about the case, I can glean a lot of good intel about their time on the site and what worked. We’re constantly striving to adapt, change and grow, and this helps us mature our strategy for a campaign.
Spreadsheet Tracking
Having a spreadsheet tracking your cases, projected case value, actual case payout (when it happens), and attribution source (Google, referral, AdWords, etc) is the ultimate way you’re going to be able to have great data at your fingertips. This is mostly true for PI firms. It is still great for higher volume firms, it’s just going to be more time intensive.
Projecting estimated settlements is especially important for PI firms, who may take years to see the first dollar hit their bank account from an SEO campaign-driven case. That’s just the nature of Personal Injury, but it still lets you project ROI and know that you’re on the path to profit.
ROI Expectations
ROI expectations can be tricky. Let’s assume you’re an injury lawyer charging 35% in a market where you’re probably going to be paying $4,000 per month for three years before you see your first dime. You certainly expect to add to your pile of open cases, but it’ll take a while to see money in the bank. We don’t want to tell you what your ROI will be so much as how easy it will be to attain ROI.
Let’s take a 36-month view. You will have spent $144,000.
To get a feel for your break-even point, the moment when you go In The Black. For this example, it will be projected ROI. The formula will be to divide $144,000 by your 35% fee.
The resulting breakeven point: $411,428.57 in projected settlement fees from cases driven within 3 years.
Now estimate your average case size. Let’s just keep the big 7-figure cases out of this and estimate $50,000. That means you need to land 9 cases to fully be In The Black.
9 cases in 3 years is only 3 cases per year. Year one is going to be light, but we have created on-paper ROI in year one in the past.
This first means isn’t really to show you how much you will make, but it shows you how easy it is to start seeing a return. Besides, you may have that 7-figure case sneak along in the first three years and blow out expectations.
We have a free ROI calculator to help people play around with the numbers themselves to anticipate their expectations and break-even points.
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