Looking for end of year tax-write offs? Prepaying for digital advertising is one of the easiest ways to reduce taxable income for your business. At the same time, it can help you generate more revenue in 2025. Here’s how it works and how to maximize its benefits:
How It Works:
The IRS allows businesses to reduce their taxable income by deducting expenses that are considered necessary and ordinary for running the business. Digital marketing falls under these deductible business expenses.
Tax Deduction Eligibility: Prepaid expenses for advertising are generally deductible in the current tax year if the service agreement is signed, and the intent of use is clear.
Prepayment Definition: Prepaying involves paying for advertising services in advance for campaigns that will run in the next year. This could include things like paying for website design and development expenses, website video production, SEO, Google Ads, Meta (Facebook) Ads, or any other type of marketing you run in 2025.
Key Benefits:
- Tax Savings: By reducing taxable income in the current year, you lower your overall tax burden while still having advertising funds ready for next year’s campaigns.
- Better Budgeting: You can lock in rates at current prices, avoiding potential cost increases next year.
- Securing Future Campaigns: This strategy ensures marketing momentum by having resources allocated for the next quarter or year.
All the ideas below qualify as deductible expenses. So, here are 12 marketing ideas for you to consider as we approach the end of 2024:
1. Re-design your website (to improve conversion rates and generate more leads!)
Your website is the foundation of all your marketing success, yet most law firms do not invest enough in their website. They spend thousands of dollars each month on marketing in order to send visitors to their website…that is not optimized for converting website visitors! More than 90% of all law firm websites today are not built with CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) in mind. This means that for most law firms, they are not generating as many leads and new cases as they could if they had a better website. If you want higher quality leads and high value cases, it all starts with having a great website that impresses site visitors, encourages more case evaluation requests and is built SEO friendly. This is exactly what iLawyer Marketing specializes in.
2. Law firm videos to increase website conversion rates
In a recent study, 90% of consumers aged 30 and up said that having a video about the firm would help them in their decision process of hiring a law firm. Video is one of the best ways a law firm can increase the conversion rate on their website. Of course, a video that does not impress visitors can also hurt conversion rates, so not all videos improve conversion rates. At iLawyerMarketing, we regularly conduct consumer studies to learn how consumer think and what they respond best to. We utilize this insight and make sure we create law firm videos that will increase the consumers trust in your firm, which ultimately leads to more leads and signed cases. If you don’t have great video on your site, consider having video created for your firm, improve conversion rates and lower your tax bill all at the same time. Here’s a sample of our work below.
3. Run Law Firm Branding Video Ads on Social to increase brand awareness
Running awareness ads on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube (and depending on your target audience, possibly TikTok and LinkedIn) is another marketing idea. If you are looking to create more brand awareness, video is a great way to do this. With the use of demographic targeting on these platforms, and depending on what types of cases you are looking to generate, this may make a lot of sense for your practice. There can also be an SEO benefit, since Google loves brands. If Google sees more consumers are searching for your law firm’s name on Google searches, this is a positive ranking signal and can help improve overall rankings.
4. Run OTT/CTV Ads to increase awareness and lead volume
Have you ever considered running OTT or CTV ads? OTT/CTV refers to streaming services that provide content over the internet, bypassing traditional cable or satellite television platforms. When you see advertisements on platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, or other streaming services, these are OTT or Connected TV ads (CTV). These ads can be highly targeted based on the viewer’s interests, viewing habits, and demographics, making them an effective tool for marketers. For law firms, this is another branding play that can increase awareness for your law firm in the geographic market you want.
5. Have a linkable asset created for your website to help improve rankings and to help with PR
Linkable assets are share-worthy pieces of content on your site that can help your website improve overall rankings by generating more links for your website. Depending on the type of asset you have created, they at times can also help you attract attention from local media outlets. We’ve had many linkable assets and clients featured on local news sites (and even TV).
These aren’t your standard pieces of content on a law firm website, but are usually data driven content that can be very helpful in the link building process. Some of most successful law firm clients have our team create multiple linkable assets every year. Additionally, these are great for PR, as local news sites like ABC, NBC, Fox or other local outlets often cover the linkable assets we create for our clients.
6. Run lead ads on Facebook & Instagram to generate more leads
Since advertising costs are tax-deductible, you might consider running ads on Facebook and Instagram. Retargeting ads, awareness ads, or both may make sense for your law firm. There are hundreds of millions of Americans that use Facebook and/or Instagram every single day. However, most Facebook/Instagram ad campaigns we see are poorly run and end up being a waste of money. We do Facebook and Instagram ads in the legal vertical better than most other agencies out there, so you are in great hands with iLawyer. Our ability to target “in-market” audiences that are more likely to be in need of hiring an attorney give us a powerful advantage over other providers.
7. Run a Google Ads campaign to increase leads and new signed cases
Most law firms are familiar with Google ads, but most law firms who have tried running ads on Google in the past have not had a great experience. Click costs and LSA leads costs are constantly on the rise, which make it a big challenge. The reality of running Google Ads is that just like SEO, it takes time to optimize the campaign. However, if managed correctly and with the right sized budget, Google Ads can be a powerful way to help you sign up more new cases. It takes a great landing page that will maximize conversions, manually managed ad campaigns by highly experienced law firm paid search experts, offline conversion reporting (which our proprietary software does) and the appropriate budget. Over the years, we’ve had plenty of clients pre-pay ad costs to help lower their tax payments at the end of the year.
8. Have a specialty website developed to help you target specific cases
Are there specific types of cases that you would love to generate for your law firm? Bicycle accidents? Truck accidents? Child custody cases? Wrongful termination? Creating a specialty website dedicated to the types of cases you want has proven to be a very powerful way to generate leads and cases.
9. Add additional content to your website to increase traffic and leads
Adding more content to your site, as long as it’s not low quality or simply auto-generated, is always a good idea. This helps to increase the number of keywords you could be found for, can help improve your topical authority and can help improve trust and rankings with the search engines. If you are adding 2,000 words of content to your site each month, you may want to increase to 4,000 or 8,000 words, or even more depending on what your needs are. This content can be used to create new pages, add new blog posts, refresh existing content or increase the length of your current content to convert standard length pages into long form pages. Most importantly, creating consistent content should help you increase your lead volume.
10. Expand Your SEO to target a bigger geographic area
Last, but certainly not least, is expanding your SEO efforts. You may currently only be targeting your local city or county, but it may make sense to target additional cities, counties or even the entire state. The more local geo areas you appear on the first page of Google results, the more leads and cases you will be able to generate for your law firm.
11. Invest in Mass Torts
Mass torts can be a smart way to generate more revenue for your firm. It’s not something that you will cash in on quickly, but it certainly can be incredibly lucrative. Some firms we work with have generated over $100M in income on mass torts settlements alone. If you are a personal injury attorney, this is something you should consider. Many firms today don’t handle these cases themselves, but they generate the leads and send them to other firms for a piece of the settlement or verdict. With mass torts, you can either:
- Advertise for these cases with SEO or Paid Ad campaigns
- Buy signed mass tort retainers
12. Run a Focus Group Study or Consumer Study on Your Website
Running a focus group study or consumer study on your law firm’s website is a powerful way to gain valuable insights into how potential clients interact with your website. By gathering feedback from consumers, you can find out what your potential clients may think about your website and the information it contains. You can identify problem areas and learn what parts of your websites are most impactful to visitors. Ultimately, this can help you learn how to convert more visitors into leads (and hopefully into new clients!). This is something we’ve done for our clients for many years.
Any questions?
We’d be happy to answer any questions you have. Feel free to call us our fill out a contact form below if you would like to discuss any of these ideas further.