How Call Tracking and Text Messaging Can Lead to More Cost-Effective Client Engagement
For legal marketers, attribution can be a challenge. According to a 2014 study by IDC, law firms regularly under-spend on marketing compared to other industries — meaning legal marketers may have less to invest in paid channels that lend themselves to easier attribution. It can be a catch-22 where your limited budget leaves you with less ability to determine just how well that budget is performing.
But even if you’re lacking a robust budget brimming with easy-to-attribute channels, there are still ways to maximize your marketing spend and drive leads. Let’s take a look at two ways to level up your engagement on a lean marketing budget.
Integrating Call Data
More firms are getting on board with data-driven content marketing. They’ve begun positioning themselves as thought leaders, mapping out lead generation campaigns and collecting marketing analytics that help them understand customer journeys. But even so, their map of those customer journeys can often seem incomplete.
If your firm is like most, you rely on phone calls to create the majority of your leads and conversions. And phone calls can feel detached from the other digital marketing you’re doing — but they don’t have to be.
Using an effective call tracking platform, you can now sync buyers’ online and offline journeys, providing you with a complete marketing picture. Not only can these call-tracking platforms identify who’s calling and from where, they can also tell you which channels or pages on your site the prospect navigated through before calling. This helps you understand where and why your client is calling, better engage with them (both on the phone and digitally), and apply your precious marketing dollars to the highest performing channels.
Mobile Engagement
In the age of online attribution, calls are too often considered yesterday’s channel of choice. This ignores the fact that most of us are attached to our phones 24/7, and that many consumers of legal services prefer to talk on the phone. In order to take full advantage, your website must be optimized for mobile devices. Make your design mobile friendly, including click-to-call forms that drive direct contact and form fields that are responsive across all devices. And remember, follow-through is everything. Slow responses to completed forms can kill an otherwise easy conversion.
Responding to inquiries or requests doesn’t have to consume staff hours. To make follow-up easy, your call tracking platform should also have the ability to trigger automatic alerts, call backs, emails or texts.
Integrated short messaging service (SMS) campaigns are also a great way to follow-up quickly, and can be leveraged for other forms of communication, as well. Use texts to inform prospects or partners of legislative changes that might impact services, invite your audience to networking events, confirm appointments, extend special offers — in short, to really supercharge engagement. Best of all, text messaging can be coordinated and tracked right through your call tracking platform, pulling all the relevant metrics from your SMS campaign into the rest of your marketing data.
“Old School” Marketing Still Works
Despite the digital revolution, we know that much of your business is, and likely always will be, cultivated through referrals, networking and word of mouth — channels that are not always easy to track or attribute. Yet, social media, blogs, testimonials and case studies continue to blur the line between online and offline.
The best bet is to keep a foot squarely in both worlds. Leverage the technology and tracking strategies above, and find ways to integrate existing relationships into your digital strategy — in your client-focused content, through social media and by adding mobile components to offline events.
Most of all, keep an eye on technology solutions that can marry multiple channels and strategies into a unified, integrated picture. The more you know, the more responsive your firm can be — and the more bang you can get for your marketing budget.