If you’re asking yourself: should I continue to do my law firm’s in-house marketing or should I hire a Digital Marketing Agency?
You’re not alone.
In the best situation, you have both. You’ve hired an experienced digital marketing agency to work alongside your in-house marketing legal expert. For your law firm or marketing department, this may not be an option.
From my experience, law firms experiment with large, well-known tools (Google AdWords, Facebook, etc.) and digital channels with a “digitally savvy” in-house marketing person, before hiring an agency.
Often there is a disconnect between the marketing strategy, that aligns with the firm’s business goals, and the in-house marketing person’s digital activities.
In these situations, we strongly suggest that an agency is hired to create, track, and execute the plan.
Here’s why.
Article Contents
Experience and Constant Skill Improvement
A digital marketing agency has experience in both the strategic and tactical elements of marketing. An agency can distribute activities and planning across a team of experienced marketers thus driving a highly strategic and metrics-driven approach to achieving your firm’s revenue goals.
An in-house marketing person usually has either a strategic or tactical mindset, depending on the education and experience their bringing to the position. The in-house person is responsible for being a jack of all trades. They must understand the market and develop a plan, share the brand unique value, drive awareness and website traffic, and capture leads. Simple enough.
For a law firm’s in-house marketing, it becomes difficult to get everything done; continually improving the company website, creating content, testing and deploying advertising campaigns, interacting on social media, sending email campaigns, etc., etc…
It’s challenging for one person to keep up with the ever-changing technology and do enough activity to solidify a strong experience across all the areas needed to execute successful digital marketing.
When your firm hires a digital marketing agency, you get much more than one in-house marketer. You get a team.
For example, Uhuru’s team, and most result driven agencies include a person or people with business growth and operations background to lead strategy. A creative director or graphic designer, writers, web developers and social media experts who not only do client work but do social media effectively for themselves. A team can specialize in specific skills and through the repetition of execution adapt and develop experience with new technology and changes much faster.
You also get tried and tested systems that are working for other companies successfully.
Rather than paying for the time of in-house marketing person to keep up with everything, you get a team that experienced professionals who can ensure your digital marketing is helping the company grow and achieve the business’s goals.
Financial Investment
You’ve hired an excellent in-house marketing and data-driven person to own the majority of the marketing funnel for your law firm.
What does this in-house marketing cost you?
Depending on your firm’s location, a typical compensation package for an experienced and qualified marketing employee is $75,000 – not to mention payroll taxes, benefits, office space, a computer, a smartphone, and office supplies.
This utilization and output of the $75,000 budget to one employee can result in a one-dimensional use of the investment.
Take this same budget, $75,000 and allocated to a digital marketing agency. The agency will develop a strategic plan that aligns with business goals, followed by the creative execution of ads, website content, social media content, email campaigns, managing the software and tools to measure and evaluate the success of the activities and report the performance metrics frequently.
Hiring an agency means no payroll taxes, benefits, IT /hardware, software, and office space. Thus the budget of $75,000 can yield a higher rate of return.
Creativity and Multi-Industry Experience
A digital marketing agency brings to your law firm the experience of working with multiple industries if the agency isn’t single niche focused. Meaning, the people helping you to grow the law firm may travel outside the legal sector to find new ideas, fresh approaches, and innovative solutions.
In-house marketing can bring valuable knowledge and insight to the company. But, that knowledge will become consumed by the legal industry and in most cases create industry blinders and decision bias. Where the in-house person, only reads and consumes industry related content and lacks the opportunity to experiment with disruptive or innovative approaches.
If the digital marketing agency has a record of success with other companies, it’s because that agency understands each client’s ideal buyer and can attack, attract, capture, track, and nurture your leads to help achieve a company’s revenue goals.
The agency is also full of creative minds that are inspired and prepared to pull in your ideal buyer and convert them.
Conclusion
There is no silver bullet and like I mentioned in the beginning, having both a person for in-house marketing and an agency is ideal. But, if you have to decide between an in-house person or an agency make sure to evaluate the return on your investment.
I’m confident that you’ll see a competitive advantage brought to the table from an experienced digital marketing team vs. an individual responsible for in-house marketing
