Today’s marketers have to navigate an evolving marketplace, new tools and strategies, and the changing behaviors of online users. But this makes it difficult to achieve consistent results when selling your legal services.
Benchmarking helps your law firm measure its results over time alongside those of your competitors and other factors in your industry.
Understanding and implementing benchmarking in your marketing strategy helps you achieve business goals while maintaining lasting results.
What is Benchmarking Exactly?
Benchmarking consists of aligning the marketing and business processes of your law firm with the highest standards seen in your industry and in your competitors. This helps you identify performance metrics that can guide your future marketing efforts.
There are many ways to apply benchmarking in business, and the way you use this approach will depend on the unique needs of your practice.
Benchmarking generally begins with the identification of areas that need to be improved. This can be done through research strategies that include client outreach, the use of focus groups, surveys, financial analysis, and others.
Law firms must also determine a baseline against which to measure their performance. This is done by analyzing others within your industry who have similar processes, clients, and services.
Effective benchmarking looks at the leaders in a given industry. This allows you to implement better practices within your organization and identify new growth opportunities.
Benefits of Benchmarking
Benchmarking gives your law firm insights into the strategies that improve the sales of your legal services. More importantly, it allows you to measure the success of your marketing activities, further improving its cost-efficiency and return on investment (ROI).
Strategies used in benchmarking help businesses outperform industry competitors on a wide range of indicators including client satisfaction and revenue.
It makes your marketing objective, which provides greater clarity on those activities that are producing results and those that don’t. This lets you improve your marketing efforts over time, which further improves the ROI achieved.
Having a reference point for the results you achieve gives your team the awareness of your firm’s short- and long-term performance. They’ll recognize areas that can be improved while providing maximum results.
Benchmarking Principles for Your Law Firm
Identifying what processes and metrics you’ll benchmark is the first step in applying this approach. Some law firms may benchmark their pricing while others may apply it to their distribution channels.
Other areas to benchmark can include the development of your legal services and products, managing client communications, researching your market, and the implementation of marketing strategies.
Benchmarking must include performance measurement, which begins with the baseline you’ve established. Subsequent stages require you to set new goals, delegate tasks to team members, and define the plan for your marketing.
Once these steps have been completed, you can gather and organize the data that applies to your benchmarking plan.
Through the analysis of this data, you’ll identify those areas that may be limiting your results. This is a result of understanding and interpreting data in a way that lets you evaluate your performance against others in your industry.
Your law firm will be able to outline the actions that must be taken to eliminate these limitations, improve results, and achieve a higher level of performance.
Most law firms aren’t familiar with benchmarking and the ways in which it can enhance their marketing results. If you’re not sure where to begin creating your own benchmarking plan, let us know your questions in the comments below.
Ongoing benchmarking enhances the results you achieve through this process. Your law firm will consistently reach new levels of performance and growth by observing and exceeding the standards seen in your industry and in competitors.
