Opinion: What to measure?

Anne Malloy Tucker offers her tips on how best to track the return on your firm’s marketing investment.

As expense budgets continue to tighten, marketing and business development investments are under scrutiny like never before. While tracking return on investment (ROI) should be standard operating procedure, it is often easier said than done. Complicating the matter is determining what exactly to measure. The issue is further compounded by the lack of time available to commit to monitoring tasks, and the absence of historic benchmarks and data points with which to reference and compare.
Given these challenges, focusing on ‘high impact’ measurements becomes critical. The chance of success is greater if the variables are fewer. That being said, there are three guiding principles to review before identifying specifics metrics.
First, nearly all relevant data points are worthy of collecting if there is minimal cost and effort involved. When you find hard data, you should collect it, even if only for benchmark purposes down the road. This includes hard data that is proprietary to your own efforts – web traffic, client alert downloads, PR statistics and the like – or more broadly based market research data that comes from secondary sources. Benchmarking is a critical component in all measurement processes and data collection provides you with much needed artillery.
Second, research is a ‘must have’. Client feedback initiatives, targeted market research and competitive intelligence form the base of any effective marketing and business development strategy. This is an area where you cannot afford to short cut your efforts. The cost is comparatively minimal and the value far exceeds the investment.
Third, successful legal marketing is both an art and a science, and data and metrics tell only part of the story. ‘Selling the invisible’ is still predicated on the complex processes of developing a trusted adviser relationship, delivering outstanding legal services, and striving to continuously improve and exceed expectations while adding value to clients. To attempt to over-simplify this process to cause and effect is to underestimate the complexity of the decision-making process and the number of sales ‘touches’ involved. Measure what you can, when you can, but know that the process is a pipeline and it is relatively rare for one event to trigger a buying decision. So then, what to measure and with which metrics?

Building client relationships: With a ‘clients first’ mantra, the most useful metrics will always be based on measuring efforts in these areas: client satisfaction and feedback, addition of new work for existing clients, expansion of services to existing clients and joint marketing efforts with existing clients. Depending on the size of your firm and the types of services provided, focusing these measurements on a segment of the client population will likely be part of your overall plan.

New business generation: This focuses on ‘pipeline’ management and refers to prospects pre-identified as part of a practice, industry or geographic strategy. This slice of new business tracking looks specifically at those companies that a firm has proactively identified as prospects and the tracking enables the marketing/business development team to monitor the success of the various relationship-building activities along the way.

Competitive intelligence: Identifying and tracking peer firms is a very useful exercise providing a wealth of information to help monitor your immediate competition. A good peer firm sample would be anywhere from ten to 20 firms that share similar characteristics as yours, such as revenue per lawyer, profitability, size, practice mix, and cultural similarities. While this is more of a benchmark exercise than a true ROI metric, understanding how you are tracking vis-a-vis your immediate competitors is extremely useful over the long-term.

Your position on the charts: Not all charts, but ones you have identified as key indicators for a practice or service. This might include brand tracking or perception studies, positions on league tables, inclusion in top-20 lists, client service recognition, coveted awards or honors and other metrics. This is fairly easy to track and monitor once you’ve identified the appropriate vehicles and is especially effective in concert with competitive intelligence initiatives.
If you work to combine general data collection with targeted efforts (as above), you establish a framework that you can add to as you go. A key component is to identify the best way to present the information and to communicate it to your constituencies.

Anne Malloy Tucker is chief marketing officer at Goodwin Procter LLP. She can be contacted at amalloy@goodwinprocter.com