Mid-Year Legal Marketing Review — How’s Your Marketing Plan Working? Five Things to Review

If your law firm is only performing a legal marketing review at year-end, it may be doing itself a disservice. A mid-year review makes sense for most businesses so you can gauge whether you are on track to achieve your goals or need to make some adjustments. Here’s what you need to know about doing a mid-year review and a list of things your law firm should consider during this process. 

What is a Mid-Year Marketing Review?

Similar to a year-end review, a mid-year marketing review takes a close look at your law firm’s marketing strategy for the first six months of the year. Specifically, you will evaluate and assess all of your efforts to understand what you have accomplished and uncover where you might have missed the mark. 

Why Your Law Firm Needs a Mid-Year Legal Marketing Review

Legal marketing strategies aren’t set in stone. These are programs that can and should change whenever conditions reveal new challenges or opportunities. Planning out an entire year’s marketing can be challenging. While it is based on the information available at the time, market conditions and user behavior might change, which can impact your plan. 

Depending on your legal practice areas, you might experience seasonal changes or find that other external factors impact your business. Taking a closer look at your goals and actual results mid-year is an excellent way to determine which strategies are working and which ones could use some improvement. 

5 Things to Consider During Your Legal Marketing Review

Performing a mid-year legal marketing review is necessary if you want to get the best possible results from your strategy. In the fast-paced digital marketing world, things can change quickly, and staying static with your program can be equal to moving backward. When you conduct this essential review, here are five things your firm should consider to get the best insights and results. 

1. Website Goals and Conversions

At least twice per year, you should examine your website’s analytics to determine your progress toward your goals and key performance indicators, such as click-through rates, conversions, and bounce rates. Here are some things you can focus on with this website review:

• How do users find your website, and what actions do they perform when they visit?
• What channels are your best performing and convert the most traffic?
• How do people usually arrive at your practice area pages and contact pages?
• What resources refer the most traffic to your website? 

The answers to these questions can tell you which of your marketing strategies are working and which ones need re-assessment. You can decide if you need to devote additional resources to certain areas over the remainder of the year. 

2. Content and Campaign Performance

Your law firm’s website is critical, but it won’t get very far without engaging and SEO-optimized content. Your mid-year review should include an in-depth look at your content marketing strategy to see what’s working and what could use some improvement. 

This is another area where you can dig into your analytics to determine which type of content your audience interacts with the most — written blogs, video content, or infographics. If your content is optimized for SEO, how well is it ranking in the search engines? Is it driving valuable traffic to your website? If there is content that misses the mark, are there ways you can improve it so it is more engaging? Finally, consider your most popular topics and see if you can find ways to build additional content from them. 

3. Re-Assess Your Audience

Since your target audience drives many of your digital marketing decisions, it’s important to make sure your understanding of that audience is still accurate. If anything has changed or you have had some misconceptions about your potential clientele, it’s time to make some adjustments. 

Take a look at your analytics again to see if you can get any demographic data. Another place to learn more about your target customers is social media. As you engage with people and run social media campaigns, you can collect valuable data related to demographics as well as common customer concerns and pain points. 

4. Review Your Online Feedback

Most law firms serve a local clientele, meaning people living within a specific geographic area. As consumers search for an experienced and knowledgeable attorney to trust with their legal matters, they overwhelmingly turn to online reviews as part of their vetting process. 

If your law firm isn’t collecting online feedback, this is something you’ll want to review periodically. Specifically, how do you “ask” clients to give online feedback once their case is resolved? If your current program isn’t working, it’s time to try some other tactics, like sending email requests. 

In addition to getting enough online feedback on sites like Google and various legal directories, you should be monitoring these platforms so you can respond quickly and appropriately. If someone leaves a positive review, thank them. If the review isn’t stellar, apologize and invite the client to contact you personally to discuss the matter. These types of responses can elevate your brand in the eyes of legal consumers. 

5. Competition and External Factors

The legal industry is highly competitive. How closely does your firm monitor its competitor’s activities and marketing strategies? If you don’t do this at all or rarely, this is something you should reconsider. 

Conducting a semi-annual competitive analysis can help you gain valuable insights into your current industry landscape. You can assess your competitor’s marketing strategies and see if there’s something you can improve upon to get ahead of the curve. 

This is also a good time to evaluate any external factors that might impact your industry and clients. For example, the pandemic and various economic factors have altered the legal landscape for some firms. At the very least, how consumers find and connect with service providers has shifted in recent years. 

Get Help With Your Law Firm’s Legal Marketing Strategy

As a law firm, you already have enough challenges to face without having to worry about how to create and run a successful digital marketing strategy. If you’re looking for ways to get found and chosen by your target audience, having an efficient and effective legal marketing plan is the answer. And, conducting a legal marketing review can help you adjust your marketing strategy so you a better able to hit your marketing goals. 

Too Darn Loud Legal Marketing specializes in helping law firms maximize their resources with a results-driven digital marketing strategy. Contact us today to schedule a free consultation and website evaluation to learn about how we can help your business.