Taking ROI to the next level.

• Author: Gravit, Aleisha
• Position: LEADERS

It is fundamental for a legal marketer to be able to measure the success of his or her work. Marketing and business development efforts include both an investment of time and monetary resources. on average, a law firm should project spending approximately 2.5-5 percent of revenues on marketing and business development efforts. The marketing plan should detail how this allocation is to be divided. From an ROI perspective, it is best to project marketing expenditures in budget categories for specific areas (e.g. advertising, events, print materials, etc.). Creating these budgetary categories will allow you to produce a year-to-date spreadsheet allowing for both projections and review of actual expenditures.

Aside from it being good business, tracking and measuring of marketing and business development activities not only provides reassurance to the stakeholders of the firm, it also provides the basis to assess the absolute level of investment needed and can be useful in balancing the demands of competing practices.

For example, if your department spends a significant amount of time and effort producing client alerts, take a look at your click-through and open rates for each practice and see if there are statistics to back up your argument to the respective practice or partner requesting the alert.

Between good ol' Excel spreadsheets and the more sophisticated web analytics, it is pretty easy to track the "bread and butter" activities such as events, sponsorships, website traffic, as well...