Measuring the effectiveness of your expert witness directory listings is critical for you to determine which marketing effort is working for you, and which is not. I like to base this on a Return on Investment analysis (ROI). If you pay a few hundred dollars per year to be listed in a directory, (let's call it $400 to use a round number), than anything you take in beyond that is well worth it, and provides you with a positive ROI.
Each forensic case you receive is worth such a large amount of money, let's call it $5,000, that even if you list in a directory for 10 years and get only one $5,000 case, it's still well worth it. You paid $4,000 and took in $5,000.
In my opinion, many experts make the mistake of taking a too short term look at marketing such as this. I can tell you, that if I could take $4,000 invest it and get back $5,000, I would do it all day long.
Yes, some directories may provide more (or less) referrals than others, but as long as you are getting back a positive ROI, than you should consider continuing them.
Alex Babitsky, MBA
Partner - SEAK, Inc.
SEAK Directory of Expert Witnesses
2 comments:
Alex,
I completely agree with you that getting listed on an expert witness directory is one of the very basic and important steps that an expert witness should take. But the question arises - how many directories can you join or should you join?
On top of that, which are the better directories? Also, if an expert has already joined one directory, is there any point in joining another one too? For many experts who are looking to start, the question may boil down to start looking at the best expert witness directory.
I had recently written a post about selecting the right expert witness directory on my blog (expertwitnessguru.com/blog) - hope you might be interested in reading my views on what makes a directory better than others.
Experts should absolutely, join multiple expert witness directories, (as long as they are professional publications). Attorneys use various directories to locate experts, so if you list in just one directory, you are missing out on referrals, and leaving money on the table. The listing fee is nominal, so why not list in 3, 4 or 5 directories? For a few thousand dollars, an expert can list in a handful of directories and get their information out there. I suggest experts list in 4-5 different directories, carefully track the calls they get (referrals) and evaluate them every couple of years, to see if they are generating work. If you don’t track your referrals, then you cannot measure the effectiveness of your marketing. Tracking your referrals is critical and I will discuss that in a future blog post.
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