Budgeting for marketing expenditures is crucial

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Despite all the financial demands solos and small-firm attorneys face, it’s crucial to make some room in the budget for marketing expenditures.

It may not be much, says Jared Correia, senior practice advisor at the Law Office Management Assistance Program in Boston, but knowing what you have to spend and planning ahead can bring a marketing plan into critical focus.

Start with the basics of a budget. Determine how much the firm has in the bank and how much it costs to run the firm, and then decide how much of what remains can be spent on marketing.

Correia says many current forms of marketing, including blogs and social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, are free; however, the firm should still budget for the “soft costs” associated with those activities, such as the time spent writing blog posts and participating in trade association events.

Anything that takes away from billable time should be accounted for and tracked, Correia advises. Although a plan to devote a set amount of time per week may be hard for a solo or small-firm practitioner to adhere to, it is important to know how your time is being spent.

That can make future budgeting easier, as well as help lawyers determine if they are getting a sufficient return on their marketing investment.

Correia offers the example of a lawyer who bills at $100 an hour, spending two hours working on a blog post that results in two new clients and a total of $1,600 in billable time — obviously a good investment.

Some free services, such as Google analytics or tweetwhen.com, can allow users to get a sense of the success of their blogging and Tweeting.

But without crunching the numbers and statistics, “it will be harder to decide whether or not to give certain marketing efforts more time or to let them go,” Correia says. And he doesn’t suggest a set dollar amount or percentage of budget for marketing, noting that it depends on the circumstances of an attorney or practice.

Consider, for example, the four-attorney Ziff Law Firm in Elmira, N.Y., which focuses on personal injury and medical-malpractice cases.

Because of the nature of the firm’s practice, partner James B. Reed says revenue at Ziff “is like a roller coaster, which makes annual budgeting virtually impossible.”

Consequently, rather than budgeting in dollars, the firm devotes a minimum of 5 percent of revenue to marketing, adding more in better years.