Page 28 - PIC e-newsletter Spring Issue 8

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Paid Social
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LAW FIRMS
This increase is driven predominantly by B2B law rms; however, consumer law rms – particularly those in the personal injury and clinical negligence market – still plan to increase digital marketing expenditure by 22%.
So what are the types of digital marketing that rms are employing and what are the likely drivers of this increase?
GOING DIGITAL
Digital marketing for new
customer acquisition
Firms that acquire a large percentage of new work via the internet, do so by generating large volumes and quality traf c to their website. The most common types of tactics to achieve this success are:
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
Rise in digital marketing
for new business acquisition
According to the latest Financial Benchmarking Survey from the Law Management Section of the Law Society, the overall median marketing budget was 2.1%, with a quarter spending over 3% and a quarter just 1%.
For the majority of UK law rms who responded to our latest digital marketing survey this amounts to an annual budget of between £20,000 and £200,000.
So how much of this budget was allocated to digital marketing in 2017 and how does this compare to rms’ plans for 2018?
Analysis and commentary about marketing in the UK legal market states that most rms do not expect their overall marketing budgets to change much at all in 2018. What we are likely to see, however, is that digital marketing expenditure as a percentage of overall marketing budgets will increase by 30%.
Legal marketing spend on digital marketing tactics in 2018.
+30%
Paid Digital (PPC & Paid Social) accounts for the largest percentage of rms’ marketing spend, particularly for those offering consumer legal services.
This is not unsurprising due to its measurability; with 72% of rms responding to our survey stating that Paid Digital directly contributed to new customer acquisition in 2017. Additionally 58% of rms who invested in SEO last year said it contributed signi cantly to acquiring new customers.
Paid Digital directly contributed to new customer
acquisition 72 in 2017. %
TV and Radio continue
to be the preserve of a small
minority of UK rms, where it can be the 2nd and 3rd largest digital marketing spend after Paid Digital. However, other recent analysis in the market has shown that spend on TV and Radio have seen a small but steady decline in the past ve years.
A hot topic in the digital marketing sphere is Voice Search, due to its effect on SEO.
Voice Search is growing at a rapid pace, and for good reason – it’s fast, convenient and allows you to easily search on the go. As the technology and programming behind Voice Search gets more re ned, services like Siri, Google and Cortana become much more reliable. In fact, in 2012 the
word error rate was over 20%, but now it’s as low as 8% – as it gets better at picking up our speech quirks.
INDUSTRY EXPERTS
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