Campaign Costs

A marketing campaign earns its keep only if it brings in more than it costs. The campaign’s cost sections track that spend so Outlaw can put it next to the leads and cases the campaign produces.

Hard Costs

Hard Costs are one-off expenses (a print run, a sponsorship, a one-time ad buy), each recorded as what it was, what it cost, and when it was incurred. The test is whether it is a single outlay rather than something that repeats: paying $300 once to have work done on your website is a hard cost, while the $10 a month to host it is a recurring cost.

Recurring Costs

Recurring Costs are the campaign’s per-period spend. The campaign has a billing period (every month, every two weeks; you set the length and unit) running between its start and end dates, and Outlaw generates one cost row per period automatically. If the campaign has a fixed per-period cost, each row defaults to it; you can adjust any individual period where the spend differed.

Labor Costs

Time is money, especially for lawyers, so the third cost stream is Labor Costs: the amount of your (or your staff’s) time spent on the campaign, multiplied by the billing rate. You do not record labor as its own cost line. Instead it is captured as Time Entries, the tasks tied to this campaign, and Outlaw rolls their value into the campaign’s total cost. Two hours preparing a presentation or sitting in a networking meeting is real marketing spend, and counting it is the only way the campaign’s return on investment reflects what the effort actually cost.

These costs are one side of the campaign’s return-on-investment math; the leads and cases the campaign generated are the other. The campaign’s KPI and ROI reporting in Marketing does the comparison.

Where You’ll See It

Hard Costs and Recurring Costs appear on a campaign.