If you’re thinking about investing in outsourced articles or blogs, you’ll want to know what sort of bang you’ll get for your buck.
Calculating the return on investment of content marketing is not an exact science.
But let’s think about it in two ways: the value of a new client, and the time you save by outsourcing.
Attracting new clients: Minimum spend, roughly £1,500 + VAT each
In terms of legal work, the minimum value of a brand new client is likely be around £1,500 + VAT. That’s an approximate price for a letter before action, a conveyancing transaction or an initial advice note.
If that client decides to give you further instructions, you could be acting for them for their entire dispute up to trial, or an M&A deal. You know as well as I do that it’s impossible to give an exact figure for that, but we’re looking at the tens of thousands.
And if they become a retained client, you could bring in fees in cross-referrals to the employment team, the commercial team, disputes and whatever other legal issues that client comes across.
A batch of six blogs will cost you £1,050.
So your return on investment could be anywhere from around 140% to 2,000% (if they spend £20K with you).
The cost of your own time
Then there’s the time element to consider. A technical article usually takes me 2 hours to review recent case law or policy changes to come up with a topic.
Then it takes me a day to read the material in detail, check the law, and write an article.
I charge £400 for all of that.
If you give that task to one of your own 6PQE associates, they’re probably charged out at an hourly rate of around £325 + VAT.
So that’s a good 10 hours work, to the value of £3,250.
That’s not only 10 hours they could have spend on chargeable work, but it’s also 8 times the price of my rates.
By outsourcing, you not only get a quality product (I’m writing these articles more regularly than most lawyers), but you’re also earning yourself a huge cost saving for your business, while attracting higher quality work to your pipeline.
Overall return on investment
The best way to think about your return on investment from content marketing is to think about the value it brings to your business:
- Being seen as the expert in your area
- Attracting a steady flow of the right kind of clients
- Freeing up your own team to carry out the chargeable work
- Climbing up the Google rankings to receive more enquiries
- Invitations to speaking slots, conferences and guest articles
If you’d like to begin investing in high-return content marketing, please do get in touch.