Tired of waiting for your reports to come in from your marketing agency? Have you ever tried to look at a commercial analytics platform, like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics and cringed? Do the numbers provided by your SEO agency mean anything at all?
After years in the legal marketing industry, I know one thing for certain: in order to compete with the big boys, we’re going to need a dashboard. To be fair, most of those agencies’ dashboards don’t have much at all, except for some basic website statistics: overall traffic, number of calls and emails, etc.
At a minimum, we will need that.
But what if we take it further? What if we build something that not only presents data, but provides actionable insights on how your firm can be doing better?
For example:
- When do most of your calls and email leads come in?
- How long do your calls last?
- When the phone rings, does someone answer?
- Where are your leads coming from — which marketing sources or referrals?
- Which website content is impactful for your business, and what is a waste of space?
- How are third-party sites affecting your business? Are those paid ads paying off? What about your directory listings with a major legal website?
When I worked in a legal marketing agency, I saw plenty of cases where people would paper over bad news with incomprehensible statistics. They would tell the client “website traffic is up 75% this month!” What they failed to mention was that a whopping four people had visited the website, rather than one.
Not all data blindness is nefarious either. Both when I was in house at a firm, and when I was at a legal marketing agency, I witnessed law firms throw money at marketing channels, hoping to see what sticks. And this is great! Experimentation is how you find the next big thing, the “Moneyball” solution to your underfunded baseball team — to borrow the Oakland Athletics metaphor.
But, I am also a very strong believer in a principle I had pasted to my wall for most of the last decade: “what gets measured, gets funds.” I saw many firms kick off the new marketing channel, see a spike in cases overall at their firm, and assume that one caused the other, only to later find out years later that it was simply a coincidence and that all the money they spent on advertising with a particular website produced diddly squat.
Today, if you are sufficiently motivated, you can track every single call, email, and website visit hat comes from an online referral source. So yes, you should experiment. Our data systems will empower you to do so while remaining confident that your money isn’t being burned on nothing. We also plan to incorporate some basic CRM and marketing automation elements — auto-responder emails, follow-up reminders to schedule consultations, calendar integration, and perhaps even Lawpay integration so you can get paid.
Our hope is to offer this dashboard as a standalone SaaS product — an add-on to any WordPress installation. Given that the vast majority of small business websites are powered by WordPress, this will create a massive market potential for us, and a massive amount of transparency for small law firms out there.
