In this presentation, Linda Artesani of Artesani Accounting explains the essential marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that law firms should monitor to ensure profitable growth. She emphasizes that marketing is not merely an expense but a critical client‑acquisition engine that must be tracked and measured. The talk outlines the need to capture how leads enter the firm, differentiate between sales‑generating and non‑sale leads, and attribute each lead to its source (e.g., Google ads, Facebook ads, referrals, blog posts, videos). Artesani stresses calculating the customer acquisition cost (CAC) and the return on marketing investment (ROMI) for each service line, ensuring firms do not spend on unprofitable offerings. She then moves to email and content marketing, advising firms to monitor open rates, click‑throughs, and conversion from newsletters, blog posts, and videos, while avoiding spammy tactics. Social media marketing is discussed as a more nuanced channel, with attention to engagement metrics, private groups, and the decision of whether to outsource. Throughout, she ties each metric back to the ultimate goal: attracting profitable, happy clients and growing firm revenue.
Chapters
Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Accounting, and we're moving on to the next KPI. These are probably the top ones that we do for most of the firms, and there's quite a few more that we do. This time I'm going to talk a little bit about marketing your law firm. I absolutely love marketing. I love marketing our firm. Sarah is always like, she does that so well, let her do the marketing. And I love it. I really do. Like, I love doing it. I wouldn't even want to hire out. But when you get to the law firm level, you probably want to hire out. And it's important to get the right marketing in place. And that's why we picked this KPI to go over. So when you think of marketing as an expense, it's more than just that, because without marketing, you wouldn't have a way for clients to find you. So that's the biggest part about marketing. Some people just absolutely despise dealing with marketing. But there's a lot of ways that you can track marketing. I've got several articles about marketing even inside my blogs besides this one. But what should the law firm really be tracking? Because it's a little bit different than what we would definitely track. We need to track the sale or the non-sale. And I think that's a lot of places when we start to talk to the law firms about their marketing spend, we'll ask them, okay, you spent this money with this company. Does anybody tracking inside the firm? I mean, obviously you hired a company to do the marketing for you. Is anybody tracking how these leads are coming in? Because if you don't track the lead gen and how it's coming in, the lead generation, How are you going to know if your marketing is effective? Are they finding you in a different way, a referral or someplace that's not been where you're putting the dollars? So that's important to track that right at the highest level. It's the starting point. Every profitable law firm spends money on marketing, but how— what you do with that, you don't just pay, pay it and let the firm handle it unless they put a method in place to track how the leads are coming in, especially when you spend a lot of money on an ad. If you're spending money on a Google ad, a Facebook ad, you really want to see how they are coming in. And we can set that up inside the accounting space. But also, you want to track if somebody doesn't become a customer, what happened? How did that ball get dropped? Why didn't they become a customer? Maybe they weren't a good fit for your firm anyway. But you want to know that and find out what the reasoning behind it is. Or maybe the ad's not effective. So you want to look at that as well. And then obviously you want to know if you're getting the right sales lead coming in. So is it a customer that will fit your firm? If it fits your firm, then you've actually created that marketing— you've used your marketing dollar and spent money in a way that was effective because you targeted the right client. But I've seen it where the wrong clients come out of marketing dollars spent, and then you're spending money, it's really wasting money when you look at that. You want to look at the whole process as they come in the door. and then how their evolution of where they end up at the end of the day. So you want to look at that. You want to look at the sale post the marketing spend. You want to see how much money you made off of that particular service that you were marketing for and see if that service is profitable. So you don't want to be spending a lot of money getting clients in the door for services that aren't really profitable in your firm. And that's where we really come into play here. What was the return on the investment? How much did you spend and how much did you make off the client? That's always one Most firms will look at that, or the marketing firm will look at that, but you need to know those numbers. You want to know what it costs you because obviously if it's costing you more than what you're actually gaining at the end of the day, you don't want to spend more money than you're actually making. You don't want to be upside down in that part of the marketing. So you want to also measure the acquisition cost per customer coming in the door, and then you want to look at your email marketing. And a lot of firms will do generic sending out emails, make sure that you're sending it out where a client isn't going to feel like they're being spammed, or potential client doesn't feel like they're being spammed. It's kind of a delicate way to do this marketing, but it can be done effectively if you're sharing what you know and you're sharing your knowledge. And that's the most important part of any of this when it comes to this kind of marketing. When you start to get into the space of not the ads but more of the email marketing where you're sending out a newsletter, or maybe you're having a blog post, or you're having A video. It's important with the content marketing that you're following how this— the steps and how it goes. So if you hired a firm to do the blog posts, see how effective they are, how many people found you from the blog post. Nothing makes my heart sing when a client comes to our firm and says, oh, I saw Linda's video and that made me hire you. Because I'm sharing what I know here with you all on this particular KPI, and I hope I'm providing good content and giving you good value where you might turn around and buy from our firm because you need an accountant or a bookkeeping firm that can sit there and really analyze the data of what you spent on the marketing, where you targeted, where it's effective, the profitability of the matter, and then also look at how much you spent to acquire the client. And those are the things you want to look at. And if you're looking into maybe any social media marketing, that gets a little bit, a little bit more tricky because it's time spent clicking and liking posts, sharing posts. Maybe you've got a private Facebook group. That's another way that you can actually share your knowledge. And that just sets you up as an expert, which is really important when you're working in this space of trying to market to others to get people to come into your firm. If you don't market, it's really difficult to grow your firm and increase your revenue, which is the end of the day. That's the, that's the main goal of knowing how to do all of this. But it's important to know the steps to get there. So maybe you're doing the social media marketing. Maybe you are spending on a Facebook ad. are things you can look at. Maybe you're spending money on a YouTube ad. YouTube's pretty, pretty big platform. Everybody goes to YouTube looking for videos to know how, and it's possible that a service at your firm, you can help let them know how to do something very simple, but then it might lead to something more complex that they need an expert attorney to look at. So if you're an attorney that's sitting back at a good-sized firm going, this is something I really need to an accountant or bookkeeping firm that will help you with this because mine just does the bookkeeping, just does the quick— does the basic data entry and doesn't help. This is what we do with our attorneys to help them grow their firm and be more profitable. That's what we all want. Profitable clients on our side are happy clients. Much like I talked about last week, we talked about the happy client, and that's where you want to have that happiness in the firm growth. We always love watching our attorney firm, you know, our law firms that we work with grow. So I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions or comments, leave them below. And on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful week. Bye now.
