Leads are the lifeblood of your law firm, so legal marketing is an essential investment. If, however, you’ve dedicated significant effort to digital marketing and have yet to see a desirable return on investment, it’s possible that your approach isn’t targeted enough. 

What if, instead of throwing time and money at a variety of platforms and solutions you don’t understand, you paid directly for qualified leads furnished by a third party? This approach could deliver the clients you need while allowing you to focus on more important matters.

Known as attorney pay per lead generation, this approach allows you to cut through the complications of other marketing methods and get straight to business. It’s great as a short-term solution while you build your digital presence, but you can also rely on it to deliver leads long-term.

Lawyer pay per lead can be a valuable option for practices with limited marketing experience or significant budgetary constraints, but it won’t automatically produce quality clients. This approach must be implemented strategically, as your law firm might otherwise waste valuable funds on leads that are unlikely to pan out in the long-run. Without the right approach, you risk falling into the trap of short-term thinking followed by a cycle of inefficiency and lost opportunity.

To help you decide whether to invest in lead generation and how to proceed, we’ve highlighted both the advantages and risks associated with pay per lead:

Pay Per Lead Benefits

From cost savings to a better-defined campaign, pay per lead can provide a variety of benefits that may be difficult to achieve with other marketing approaches. These include:

Defining Campaign Goals

If your campaign lacks vision, a pay per lead approach will force you to dig in, develop a sense of direction, and come up with a blueprint for your campaign. The right pay per lead solution can help you define clear goals for your marketing initiative — and determine when you’ve arrived at these objectives.

Draw on Marketing Expertise

If you’re intent on moving forward with organic marketing or self-directed pay per click initiatives, get ready to take on a steep learning curve. From keyword research to platform selection, you’ll encounter a variety of complications along the way.

The difficulties don’t end once your campaign is up and running; the marketing scene is constantly changing, and, by sticking with the status quo, you risk falling behind the competition. Despite all this effort, you’re still not guaranteed to attract leads or produce conversions.

Pay per lead providers take over the most complicated aspects of legal marketing. They use research-based approaches to deliver a higher volume of qualified leads. This approach provides more guidance and an easier-to-follow path to obtaining leads and convincing them to convert.

Leads Are Already Qualified

Perhaps the greatest benefit of pay per lead is that every prospect that arrives by way of this system should be qualified, at least to some extent. These leads can be referred to as “warm” in that they may require some additional nurturing but have already expressed a clear interest in the types of legal services provided by your practice. This “warm” status may facilitate faster conversions, thereby streamlining the process and potentially improving your firm’s marketing ROI.

Improve Lead Response Time

The effort to gain leads is only the beginning. Once you’ve scored a qualified lead, you need to make the most of that opportunity. Under a pay per lead system, you can immediately be alerted by phone or email to ensure that you respond to your lead’s request promptly. This could grant you a significant edge over the competition.

Pay Per Lead Challenges

Pay per lead can be helpful in certain situations but only if integrated correctly within an overarching legal marketing structure. Without a tailored strategy, you may encounter these common pitfalls:

Struggles to Build Rapport

Under a conventional marketing model, law firms slowly nurture prospects through every step of the sales funnel. This can feel slow and frustrating at times, but the effort ultimately builds a sense of trust that allows the attorney-client relationship to get off to a great start.

Pay per lead solutions sometimes skip through these steps, thereby limiting important opportunities for relationship-building. If your firm opts for this approach, you’ll need to develop an alternative method for developing rapport with potential clients.

Filtering Out ‘Bad’ Clients

Not all prospective clients will be an ideal fit for your law firm. Under a conventional marketing model, you can afford to be choosy, only moving forward with cases that match your legal style and practice area. Pay per lead, however, may spark pressure to take on less-than-desirable prospects because you’ve already made a discernible investment, no matter how small.

As previously mentioned, leads may initially appear to be warm or fully qualified — but the very streamlining that makes pay per lead seem advantageous could cause you to miss signs of trouble and move forward with ill-advised cases.

To avoid this problem, only utilize a pay per lead generation service that targets clients based on specific, predetermined parameters. You’ll still need to do some vetting on your own, but early filtering should save valuable time and effort while producing a better ROI. You should trust from the get-go that your lead generation solution is capable of identifying which clients fit your practice.

Making the Most of Pay Per Lead

While the challenges outlined above should prompt caution when adopting a pay per lead approach, they shouldn’t necessarily cause you to drop this model altogether. If you develop a strategy with pay per lead’s potential weaknesses in mind, you can avoid this solution’s most common pitfalls. This can be used alongside a traditional organic marketing model to drive both the short-term boost of immediate leads and the long-term benefits of strong SEO.

Martindale-Avvo: Your Guide to Pay Per Lead

Still not sure if pay per lead is the right approach for your law firm? Look to Martindale-Avvo for additional information. We can help you craft a marketing campaign that delivers a high volume of qualified leads without sacrificing on quality. Contact us today to get started with pay per lead or other legal marketing methods.