Many law firms are questioning the value of their marketing efforts and investments amid the COVID-19 pandemic’s current uncertainty, with some even taking active steps to conserve resources and cut expenses. Consequently, some firms are discovering the benefits of reviewing their strategies more regularly, not just during crises or once a year at budget time.  

Something that is easily overlooked is the return on investment from social media platforms. Here are some tips on how to measure and improve your law firm’s social media ROI. 

Why social media ROI matters

ROI is contingent upon your social media strategy goals. Some examples are increasing online lead generation or gaining brand awareness.  Measuring the outcomes can improve your overall strategy by identifying and understanding the audience, pinpointing the strongest and weakest efforts, and collecting hard data to shape future assignments and budgets.

Measuring social media ROI

Once you have set realistic social media goals and implemented them, you can measure the results with simple steps:

STEP #1: Your objectives must be clear

While using social media to create brand awareness through followers, likes, or shares is essential. It should not be your only objective. Your social media objectives must be aligned with your law firm’s goals to show value.

Some example of social media objectives could be:

  • Client experience
  • Brand perception and awareness
  • Business conversions, including lead generation and client acquisition

STEP #2: Set realistic, smart goals

Once you’ve outlined your objectives, you can establish goals to meet them and identify which social media platforms will be useful. The S.M.A.R.T. framework, which stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely, can help you set realistic goals.

For example, instead of saying you want to improve customer service on your social media platforms, you should set a deadline and a figure. The result would be this: “By the end of the year, we will increase our first-response time speed by at least ten minutes.”

STEP #3: Track your performance metrics

Social media metrics help you determine if your law firm’s objectives and goals are being met. Vanity metrics, including shares, comments, or likes, don’t always offer a clear representation of your standing, but they do have value. They should be used to determine what content resonates with your audience, measure your firm against the competition, and gauge the overall health of your social media presence. 

Other metrics that provide a clearer picture of  ROI:

  • Revenue-generated metrics
  • Conversions and signups
  • Lead-generated metrics
  • Site-traffic metrics
  • Target audience engagement metrics
  • Reach metrics

STEP #4: Determine how much money you’re spending on social media

If you hope to get a good ROI with your social media campaign, you must be clear about its scope. Measure ROI using the following criteria:

  • Time employees spend working on social media
  • Content-creation expenses
  • Allocated budget for social advertisements
  • Costs related to platforms and tools

Social media ROI measuring tools

Social media platforms have tools for reporting and measuring statistics. You can also gain performance insights by using third-party tools. For measuring your social media effectiveness, implement Google Analytics. It collects and retains data showing how many people are visiting your website from your social channels. We also recommend two other tools, Hootsuite Impact and Social ROI Calculator.

Reporting social media ROI

Report your data clearly and concisely by creating templates that can be used for multiple campaigns. Metrics should be checked regularly and tools such as Google Analytics and Hootsuite allow you to generate reports with a few clicks or even schedule ones to automatically appear in your inbox. You can also easily adjust the time frames of your reports, i.e. year over year or month over month. 

Improving social media ROI

You can optimize and refine your strategies to measure your law firm’s social media ROI for improved performance. Here are three different tactics that can help legal marketers get the most out of their social media efforts.

  • Experimenting and testing: You should try different ad formats and audience segments and post during different times of the day.
  • Prove theories by leveraging data: There may be some trends that might make your social engagements more impactful. For instance, if you feel tweets with links to case studies are less impactful than ones with links to interviews, you can pull data from these studies to prove your claims.
  • Flexibility: Social media continually evolves and changes. Each quarter, you should revisit strategies and create new plans based on your findings, as well as by testing new channels and tools.            

Law firm marketing with Broughton Partners

Improving your law firm’s social media ROI can be time-consuming and may require a dedicated marketing team. Attorneys must determine the best way to manage their time and effort toward their firm’s most important tasks. 

Law firms looking for an efficient method of finding qualified claimants should contact Broughton Partners to learn about our client-acquisition services. We provide attorneys with qualified plaintiffs who have been vetted for specific lawsuit eligibility. Contact us today for a free consultation.