Most agencies selling marketing to law firms describe themselves as performance marketing agencies. Look a little closer and you'll find that very few of them are law-firm specialists. They work across trades, ecommerce, dental, real estate and finance, and they have a "law firms" page because every industry gets one.
The pitch is persuasive: Google Ads, Meta Ads and SEO, measured to the dollar, with a dashboard full of leads. And in the last few years these agencies have won a lot of law-firm clients. We see it in the firms that come to us mid-contract, or after they've left one.
The problem isn't that performance marketing doesn't work. It does. The problem is that it's being sold as the whole of marketing when the best available evidence says it's only half the job, and for most firms it's the smaller half.
This article explains what that evidence says, where it comes from, and what a law firm should actually do about it.
What you're really being sold
Performance marketing is a sugar hit. It produces a fast, visible spike in enquiries, and it stops the moment you stop paying for it.
That's not a criticism of Google Ads. Paid search captures people who already know they need a lawyer and are searching for one right now. Capturing that demand is valuable, and most firms should do it well. (We cover how in Google Ads for lawyers.)
But look at what a performance-only programme leaves you with:
- You rent your demand. Every enquiry is bought at auction, and the price is set by whoever else is bidding on "family lawyer Brisbane" this week.
- Costs rise and stay volatile. As more firms and more lead-generation businesses enter the auction, clicks get more expensive. Your cost per enquiry is set by the market, not by you.
- Nothing accumulates. When the budget stops, the enquiries stop. Nothing about your firm is more memorable or more trusted than it was a year ago.
- The dashboard flatters it. Last-click reporting gives paid search the credit for clients who were going to choose you anyway because they'd heard of you.
Agencies that work across every industry are structurally drawn to this model. It's measurable, it's easy to report on, and it can be run from the same playbook for a plumber and a family lawyer. What it doesn't do is make your firm the one people think of before they search.
The long and the short of it: Binet and Field
The most cited evidence on this question comes from Les Binet and Peter Field. In The Long and the Short of It (2013), published by the IPA, they analysed 996 advertising campaigns across 700 brands and 83 categories in the IPA Effectiveness Databank. They compared what worked in the short term with what worked in the long term (IPA presentation, Binet & Field).
Their central finding is that the short and the long are different things:
- Short-term effects ("sales activation") are fast and easy to measure, but they decay quickly. Rational, offer-led messaging produces a large immediate response that falls away almost as fast.
- Long-term effects ("brand building") grow slowly, but they accumulate. Each exposure adds a little to how the brand is remembered and how it's valued, which lifts the baseline of demand over time.
Their summary is blunt. Short-term effects are vital for efficiency, but long-term effects drive growth and profit, and you need both.
Three findings matter most for law firms.
1. Direct campaigns win in year one and lose after that. In the IPA data, direct-response campaigns were more efficient over one to two years. Over three years or more, brand campaigns were far more efficient, and the efficiency of direct campaigns fell away. If an agency judges results quarter by quarter, it'll always argue for direct. The data argues for patience.
2. The optimum split is roughly 60:40. Across the dataset, the number of very large business effects peaked when about 40% of the budget went to sales activation and about 60% to brand building. Binet and Field later refined this to 62:38 in Effectiveness in Context, and the IPA has continued to revisit the guidance (IPA blog). This is a guide, not a law, but it's a long way from the 100:0 activation mix most performance agencies run for law firms.
3. Search doesn't build brand. In the same analysis, adding paid search to a campaign was associated with fewer brand effects, not more. Search is an activation channel. It harvests demand that something else created.
For firms that act mainly for businesses, the most relevant follow-up is Binet and Field's work with the LinkedIn B2B Institute, The 5 Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing. It recommends roughly a 50/50 balance between brand building and activation, and finds that the more famous a company becomes, the better its business results (LinkedIn B2B Institute).
We wrote about Binet's more recent thinking in What Les Binet and Sarah Carter can teach your law firm about marketing.
The 95:5 rule: most of your future clients aren't looking yet
The second piece of evidence explains why the short alone can't sustain a firm.
In 2021, Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute published what's now called the 95:5 rule, through LinkedIn and co-published in Marketing Week. His example is directly relevant to our industry: corporations change major service providers, such as their principal bank or law firm, roughly once every five years. That means only about 20% of business buyers are in the market over a whole year, and something like 5% in any quarter (John Dawes, The 95:5 rule).
Dawes is clear that the 95% isn't a precise figure. It's a heuristic, and the true ratio depends on how often people buy in a category. But the logic is what matters:
At any moment, most of the people who will one day need your firm aren't looking for a lawyer.
Performance marketing only reaches the 5% (or whatever the real figure is in your practice area) who are searching today. It does nothing for the 95% who will need a lawyer next year or in five years.
That has real consequences for a law firm. Most people need a family lawyer, a personal injury lawyer or a wills and estates lawyer rarely, perhaps once or twice in their life. When that moment comes, they don't start from zero. They start with whatever firms they've already heard of, been told about, or seen around. Dawes's point is that advertising mainly works by building memory links that activate when the buyer comes into the market. If your firm hasn't built those links, you're competing for the in-market 5% on price and position in an auction, against every other firm doing the same thing.
Byron Sharp: mental and physical availability
Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow (Oxford University Press, 2010), from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, gives this a working vocabulary. Brands grow through two things:
- Mental availability: how easily your brand comes to mind in buying situations.
- Physical availability: how easy you are to find and buy from when someone is ready.
For a law firm, physical availability is being findable and easy to contact: showing up in Google, Maps and AI answers, a fast website, a phone that gets answered, an intake process that converts. Performance marketing, SEO and AEO mostly live here.
Mental availability is whether your firm's name comes to mind before the search starts, when a friend says "my marriage is over" or a business owner says "we need someone to look at this contract."
Sharp's research makes two further points that law firms routinely ignore:
- Growth comes mainly from reaching more buyers, especially light and occasional buyers. Most clients of any firm are one-off or occasional. Targeting a narrow, already-converted audience over and over doesn't grow the base.
- Consistent distinctive assets matter. Your name, colours, tone and recognisable elements should be used consistently so that each exposure builds on the last. Most firms change these every time they change agencies.
Performance marketing can deliver physical availability. On its own, it does very little for mental availability. That's why so many firms find their cost per enquiry rising year after year: they're paying to be found by people who have never heard of them.
Jenni Romaniuk: be remembered for the right moment
Professor Jenni Romaniuk, also of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, adds the most practical tool in this field: Category Entry Points (CEPs).
A CEP is a buying situation, the moment or need that makes someone think about a category. In her paper for the LinkedIn B2B Institute, Category Entry Points in a B2B World, the foreword puts it well: most purchases start not by searching Google, but by searching memory (Romaniuk, LinkedIn B2B Institute & Ehrenberg-Bass).
For a law firm, CEPs are specific and knowable. For example (test these against your own client research):
- "We've separated and can't agree about the kids."
- "Dad's died and we can't find the will."
- "I've been injured at work and my employer's insurer has called."
- "A supplier has stopped paying and we're owed $80,000."
- "We're buying a business and the vendor's lawyer sent a contract."
The firm that's linked in memory to the most important of these moments, for the right audience, gets considered first. That's what brand building means in a law firm: not slogans and logos, but becoming the obvious name for a specific set of situations.
This is also where brand and performance meet. CEPs tell you what your search terms, landing pages, articles and AI-ready answers should cover. They also tell you what your brand activity, such as video, social, sponsorships and referral-partner content, should make people remember you for.
Mark Ritson: bothism, not tribalism
Mark Ritson's contribution is the corrective to the whole argument. He calls it bothism: refusing to pick a side between brand and performance and instead finding the mix that suits the problem (Mark Ritson, Think with Google).
Ritson is explicit that most marketers get pulled towards performance because of the immediate ROI. He uses the 95:5 rule as a warning against obsessing over the bottom of the funnel.
That's the balance we're arguing for. This isn't a case for firing your Google Ads agency and buying a billboard. Smart firms play the 5% properly, and they do it in proportion to the long. They don't make the 5% their entire strategy.
Why law firms are especially exposed
All of this comes from research across many categories. The following points apply it to legal services.
Clients buy rarely and under stress. Most consumer legal matters are once-in-a-lifetime or close to it, and they often arrive in a crisis. People in crisis default to names they recognise or names someone they trust gives them. That's mental availability, and it's built well before the crisis.
Trust is the product. Choosing a lawyer is a high-risk, hard-to-evaluate decision. Familiarity reduces perceived risk. Binet and Field found that brand building, emotional messaging and fame reduce price sensitivity over time. For a firm, that's the difference between being compared on fees and being chosen on confidence.
Referrals are brand. Many firms say "most of our work comes from referrals" as if that sits outside marketing. Referrals are mental availability in the minds of past clients, accountants, financial planners and other lawyers. Brand activity that keeps your firm visible and distinct to those people is referral marketing.
AI search rewards brands, not bids. AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and Perplexity draw on what's said about firms across the web, not on who paid most for a click. Consistent expertise, reviews, mentions and a clear identity make a firm easier to cite. Measuring this is still immature. We cover the practical side in AEO for law firms.
Professional rules constrain the sugar hit. Australian legal advertising rules vary by state and practice area. Personal injury advertising in particular is restricted in several jurisdictions. A playbook copied from another industry can create compliance risk as well as wasted spend. Check the rules for your jurisdiction before any campaign runs.
What a balanced law firm marketing plan looks like
Here's how we'd sequence it, in Practice Proof's GET FOUND → GET CHOSEN → RUN BETTER → MORE & BETTER MATTERS framework.
1. Diagnose before you spend
Before deciding on a split, find out where enquiries and opened matters actually come from, what they cost, and what share of your work comes from people who already knew your name. Most firms don't know. Start with law firm performance reporting that tracks leads through to opened matters, not just clicks.
2. Get the short right, then cap it
Run search and paid social to capture in-market demand, and run them well: tight geography, the right practice areas, proper conversion tracking and fast follow-up on every enquiry. Then cap the share of budget that goes to pure activation, rather than letting it absorb every new dollar because it's the easiest to report. See Meta Ads for lawyers and how to build a smarter law firm marketing budget.
3. Decide what you want to be remembered for
Pick the practice areas and Category Entry Points that matter most commercially, and define how the firm should be known for them. This is positioning work, not design work. Start with law firm brand strategy and strategic positioning for law firms.
4. Build the long, consistently
Choose reach-building channels you can sustain for years, not months. For most firms that means a mix of:
- Video: practical, recognisable and featuring your lawyers. See law firm video production.
- Broad-reach social and YouTube: aimed at the 95%, not just retargeting the 5%.
- Content and SEO: answers people find before they need you, built around your CEPs. See law firm SEO.
- Community and referral-partner visibility: among the accountants, planners and other professionals your clients trust.
- Distinctive assets used the same way everywhere: name, colour, voice and recognisable faces.
Consistency is the hard part. We've written about why in marketing consistency beats your killer strategy. For an example of a firm using distinctiveness well, see how Slater and Gordon nailed distinctiveness with ads.
5. Measure both horizons
Short-term metrics alone are misleading, as Binet and Field's own data shows. Track activation results, such as enquiries, consultations, opened matters and cost per opened matter, alongside brand signals that move slowly:
- branded search volume;
- direct and referral enquiries;
- share of enquiries from people who already knew your name;
- unprompted awareness in your market, where budget allows.
See how to track brand awareness in a law firm.
What to stop doing
- Stop judging all marketing by last-click cost per lead. It will always favour activation and quietly starve the activity that makes activation cheaper.
- Stop changing your brand with every agency. Each refresh throws away the memory links you paid to build.
- Stop buying "leads" you don't own. Lead-generation schemes that sell the same enquiry to several firms build someone else's brand, not yours.
- Stop expecting brand to pay back in a quarter. The evidence says it takes years. Plan and budget accordingly.
What split should your firm use?
There's no universal number. Sixty-forty is the best-known benchmark from consumer categories, and 50/50 from Binet and Field's B2B work. Neither was calculated for Australian law firms. As a starting position:
- Consumer-facing firms (family, wills and estates, personal injury, criminal) are buying for rare, high-stakes moments. They should lean further towards the long and treat the 60:40 benchmark as a reasonable direction of travel.
- Commercial firms should start nearer 50/50, with brand activity concentrated on the referrers and decision-makers who choose firms.
- Firms starting from zero brand may need a heavier activation share early on to fund growth. They should still set a date and a budget for shifting the balance, rather than drifting into permanent dependency on paid clicks.
The right mix depends on your practice areas, market, capacity and margins. Diagnose first, then set it, then review it every year using opened-matter data, not monthly lead counts.
The bottom line
Performance marketing agencies aren't wrong that measurable, short-term activity matters. They're wrong when they sell it as the whole answer, because the evidence from Binet and Field, Sharp, Romaniuk, Dawes and Ritson points the same way. The firms that grow durably capture today's demand and, at the same time, build the memory that creates tomorrow's.
The sugar hit feels good. It doesn't build anything. Smart firms play the 5% in proportion to the 95%.
If you're reviewing an agency relationship, two further reads: what most law firm marketing agencies won't tell you and switching marketing agencies: a guide for Australian law firms. Or talk to us about diagnosing where your firm's growth is coming from and where the balance should sit.
Sources
- Les Binet & Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It: 10 key principles of success, IPA / Thinkbox presentation
- IPA, "The next chapter for The Long and The Short of It"
- Les Binet & Peter Field, The 5 Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing, LinkedIn B2B Institute
- John Dawes, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, "The 95:5 rule" (2021)
- Jenni Romaniuk, Category Entry Points in a B2B World, LinkedIn B2B Institute & Ehrenberg-Bass Institute
- Mark Ritson, "What is bothism?", Think with Google AU & NZ
- Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know, Oxford University Press, 2010
Dan Toombs
Lawyer & Founder, Practice Proof
Dan Toombs is a lawyer, law reformer and founder of Practice Proof. Admitted in 1997, he built his first career inside the legal profession — practising law, leading legal organisations and driving law reform — before building the marketing, technology and AI practice he has now run exclusively for law firms for 20 years.
In that time, Dan and his team have helped law firms grow from single offices into multi-office and national practices, ASX-listed brands and acquisition targets. That experience gives Practice Proof an unusually deep understanding of both sides of law firm growth: what happens inside a legal practice, and what it takes commercially to make one grow.
Thomson Reuters featured his law-firm marketing advice as early as 2014, on positioning firms to win business online, websites and social media. He is also the founder of FirmRanker, which researches how AI systems discover and recommend law firms. Dan is a Winston Churchill Fellow and Australia Leadership Award recipient, with national recognition for his work in law and human rights.
If you want to know what 20 years of growing law firms could bring to yours, talk to Dan and the Practice Proof team.