Network Affiliates

Be honest.... YOU ARE NOT TRACKING. How can you make intelligent decisions when you do not know what is working?

You know you need to track the effectiveness of your advertising. You need to know what works and what doesn’t so you can stop doing the things that do not work and keep doing the things that do work. But, do you really know how to track?

You ask the prospective caller…So, where did you hear of us?
They say they “saw you on radio”. Maybe the yellow pages, maybe TV. Maybe on a sandwich board on 8th and Main Street?

Tracking is complex. You cannot simply sit back and guess. You may assume that your phones are ringing more this week because of a new ad, and you may be wrong. It could be a minor change in your law firm’s media buy, a flurry of hits on your law firm website, or maybe an older ad has just started driving the message home and picking up business. Or, you may be right, but those calls may not be quality calls that result in new cases.

You are probably familiar with some of the old, basic ad tracking techniques such as tying a special phone number to a particular ad campaign or the promotional codes that retailers sometimes use. Today, you must have a much more sophisticated tracking system in place, and it must be comprehensive.

Just think of all of your marketing and advertising tactics. Of course, you must track your TV and radio ads, but you also need to track your online advertising. (You should insist that your website marketing firm uses Google Analytics.) As you branch out into social media, you need to track the effectiveness of your posts. That includes the comments you make on other blogs. Even if you participate for your own pleasure, it is still marketing and you need to track it.

Obviously, technology can help you with your tracking on many levels, but you also need to ask your clients why they decided to call your firm in the first place. Gather all this information in your client management software such as Needles, Client Profiles, etc. If your firm’s software doesn’t help you evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing, you should be looking for some new software….

When you make marketing decisions based on guesswork, even guesswork that seems logical, you are just throwing your money and time around aimlessly. Not only do you risk dumping money into something that does not work, you may wind up pulling your best ad because you do not know it is bringing in business.

Also, gather information from your colleagues about what their tracking data shows. At our semi-annual client networking meetings, our clients share this information with each other and it makes them stronger and more effective. As an ad agency that has been working with law firms since 1981, we also have years of empirical data about what works and what doesn’t. It all comes into play.

When you start to get the picture of how tracking really works and what is involved, it can be overwhelming. You do not have to do all this yourself. Network Affiliates has a proprietary tracking system called AdTrack that we use in combination with your advertising, so you can really evaluate the effectiveness of your legal advertising campaigns. Contact us today to find out how you can finally track your advertising and make the best marketing decisions.