Things have shifted and many attorneys are scrambling to figure out where the next opportunity lies. Covid-19 has shut down courts and dried up potential clients so let’s face it: your next marketing move needs to be the right one. The good news is this case study works for any size of law firm – regardless of city size or strength of competitors. There is a catch though – you have to change your mindset and think differently about your marketing in order to get in front of your ideal client.
This new digital marketing strategy can help you generate much needed revenue and brand reach – it could even save your practice. Dive in!
The Challenges
The need for more visibility without massive increases in budget.
High-competition metro (Seattle)
High cost-per-click for non-branded practice area keywords
Desire to produce more lead volume without a large budget increase
The need for awareness and staying top of mind
For over 80 years, the Walthew Law Firm has helped those in the Seattle area, and Western Washington with workers’ compensation needs.
The team at Walthew Law Firm was really looking for a partner they could trust when it came to their workers’ comp lawyer marketing needs. They first heard of Nifty almost 8 or 9 years ago at a conference in Seattle where owner Mike Ramsey spoke. The Walthew Firm liked what they heard, but they still weren’t ready to pull the trigger quite yet.
Almost 6 years after that first interaction, Patrick and the rest of the firm were ready to make a difference in their online visibility and hired Nifty to start an SEO campaign for them.
In a highly competitive market like Seattle, the firm had relied on their 80-year reputation and experience to compete. However, maintaining top of mind awareness for potential future clients had been a major challenge for the Walthew team. They met with the Nifty team to come up with additional strategies to help in this area.
Fortunately, they weren’t starting from square one with their digital strategy. Nifty had already worked with them closely to create an attractive website paired with an effective local SEO strategy, and winning search ads campaigns, but we won’t go into those specifics since this case study focuses on the firms paid digital advertising strategy Nifty put together for them.
The Walthew Firm wanted to achieve more lead volume, and they wanted to do it without a drastic increase in their marketing spend. As their workers’ comp attorney marketing partner, Nifty analyzed their current efforts and identified a range of options, ultimately opting to focus on social ads. The low investment needed to reach their exact target audience making social ads an appealing option for Walthew.
According to Episerver’s “Reimagining Commerce” report, “Around 92% of first-time website visitors aren’t ready to hire you as an attorney, they’re simply there to look.” This type of data helped further drive the importance of social ad utilization.
Because attorneys are typically a high emotion and/or high commitment service, and social ads are often targeting those in the awareness stage of the consumer funnel, it’s expected and observed to produce more residual lead volume through other direct intent channels (see graphic below).
The Solution
Audit of branded search volume, and existing marketing strategies
Highly-Targeted Social Ads focused on workers compensation
Well designed ads to resonate with the target audience
Close communication with the Walthew team to combine their market expertise with Nifty’s digital advertising strategy
Since Nifty had existing ads management and SEO services in place for Walthew, and had for some time, it was relatively easy to identify historical trends and expectations. The existing performance of these efforts was audited closely, to establish a baseline in anticipation of the residual impacts from social ads.
From this audit, Nifty was able to conclude that 8% of incoming website traffic was via branded searches. This demonstrated immense room for improvement, and Nifty went to work crafting a range of targeting options.
Facebook allows for very detailed targeting capabilities that Nifty was able to utilize in putting together an optimal target audience.
A wide range of campaigns were created ranging from workers comp-specific behaviors and interests (excluding any attorney’s or law firms from this targeting who would also match the criteria) to those in blue-collar or high-risk job types with a combined interest in injury-related websites or search behaviors and also recent research into law firms.
Finally, Nifty worked closely with Walthew to identify high-risk companies in the region who had previously produced workers’ compensation claims. From here a list of addresses were targeted so that employees of these locations (with specific demographic constraints) would also see the ads.
The goal was to not only capture the interest of those further along in the consumer funnel (currently looking for workers comp attorneys), but also increase brand recall for those who might need Walthew Law’s services in the future (company locations) and create ads geared toward these specific people.
The Results
550%
Increase in monthly branded search volume (organic and paid channels combined)
85%
Increase in search ad lead volume (with the same budget)
51%
Decrease in search ad cost per lead
In January 2018 Walthew’s branded search volume accounted for only 8% of overall traffic. 12 months later that number had grown to 24%, and by June 2019 that number had risen to 47%.
While a 550% increase in the branded search volume was certainly impressive, the Nifty team wanted to prove the true value of social ads. A closer look at search ads lead volume (with no budget changes) revealed that lead volume had increased 85% compared to the same time frame before and after social ads.
Cost per lead via search ads also decreased by 51% in favor of the far cheaper branded clicks (≈ $1.71 per click) compared to non-branded clicks costing upwards of $30 per click.
This increased lead volume and improvement in marketing budget efficiency has made it easy for The Walthew Law Firm to further increase their investment in social ads, SEO, and search ads over time.
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