5 Out of The Box Tips for Law Firm Digital Advertising

In jazz improvisation, “outside” playing describes an approach where one plays over a scale, mode, or chord that is harmonically distant from the given chord. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outside_(jazz) )

Greats such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and John Coltrane all went “outside” the changes and produced some revolutionary music, as well as concepts, that musicians still study today. These jazz innovators were all advanced masters of music theory, and the approaches they took were calculated – it wasn’t accidentally playing the wrong note or lack of understanding a chord progression that lead them “outside” – it was deliberate experimentation and countless hours of practice. They knew the fundamentals and were reaching for something beyond them.

Before we go further, we know what you’re thinking about jazz….

…but hear us out.

In this article, we’re going to look at how to go “outside” with your Google Ads campaigns. Just like with jazz music, this does require a high level of understanding, competence, and respect for the fundamentals. If you go “outside” all the time, the context is ruined and the effect has less of an impact. So, too, with our law firm pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns – best practices, campaign setup guidelines, and industry standards are there for a reason. They are effective, tested rules and tactics that get results.

The catch here is that everyone knows them, and therefore everyone uses them. The tactics we are looking at in this post are measures to take advantage of what the other legal PPC advertisers are doing and maybe find some new ways to reach potential clients without dropping major ad budget in the process. I am not suggesting that solid account management fundamentals and optimizing for high-intent keywords is a bad thing – in fact, quite the opposite. You build on the fundamentals, but don’t get stuck on them – you can unlock some alternative approaches with a little experimentation.

Saving a Percentage Budget Toward the End of the Month

This tactic takes advantage of a lot of the auto-pilot / automation solutions that are out there. Budgets are set on a monthly or daily basis, and pacing can be an afterthought. What happens is that your competition spends their whole budget early, leaving inventory on the table at the end of the day and end of the month. This means less competition and lower prices because there aren’t as many advertisers in the auction.

The best way to get this going is to set aside some budget to experiment with, and check your own data to make sure you aren’t crossing over with any campaigns that are already running. Maybe set some schedules on everything so you can be sure your “maximum end of day/month budget” test is getting the attention it deserves.

Buying Surround Words

Think about what services a potential client would be needing in addition to a lawyer after they were involved in a serious car accident. Keywords like “chiropractor” and “occupational therapist” may seem like the intent would place these way out of bounds and irrelevant, but what if they were searching for those services without realizing they could talk to a lawyer? Or what if they were searching for those services first and were waiting to make a decision regarding legal representation?

In order for this to work right, you MUST use creative ad copy here. This is no time to fall back on a generic “injured in an accident” PPC ad. You have to address the situation more personally –  “Medical expenses starting to pile up after your accident?” for example. This is most effective acknowledging the specifics of situation (why they are here looking for a neurologist) and the hardships it has created, and offer a solution.

On the results end of this, I had a client sign what ended up being a $50K case from the word “neurologist.”

Buying Brand – Slogans, Catchphrases, Brand Associations

In my experience, it’s not a bad idea to pick up the keywords for your law firm name. This ensures you are at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPS) ─ always good for those lazy-click mobile phone searches ─ and you add to the number of times you appear on the page, which has been shown to be beneficial.

According to Searchengineland, running paid ad campaigns that 1) offer precise messages and 2) are located next to your organic listings on Google can increase overall click-through-rate (CTR) and lead to a higher return on your investment.

There’s nothing really “outside” about simply buying the keywords that are your name or your law firm name, but there is another option to check out beyond just a proper name:

Got a Slogan or Catchphrase? BUY IT!

“One call, that’s all.”

“In a wreck? Get a check.”

“Personal service, effective results.”

Any of those sound familiar? Pretty common taglines ─ some have been turned into jingles on TV commercials ─ but do this: Google them.

Not a lot of ads are there, right? Maybe none ─ at least in the examples I checked. This is a low-cost, high-reward opportunity. You take the top of the SERPS, you get to use ad copy to define what message is associated with the phrase ─ and bonus, if it’s yours, you’ll probably get a couple spots on the page, which is a good thing.

Side note: You can buy whatever phrase you want here ─ even if it’s not yours ─ but depending upon state bar rules, this may or may not be ethical, so tread lightly here.

Beyond that, just … use your imagination.

Using Google Trends

This is an old trick, but worth checking out if your goal is strictly to get some name recognition on the cheap. This technique has more in common with TV ad spots or putting your logo on the scoreboard at a baseball game. You are getting it out in front of a massive audience for low cost/effort. This is also the most dangerous tactic in this article, and you can get into real trouble using it, so if you decide to try it out, make sure you have a thorough understanding of how it works and how to set up your campaign to avoid disaster.

Go to Google Trends https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US to find trending search terms/queries.

You can get pretty granular here – location, time of day, etc. You should spend a little time getting familiar with how the different filters work and what are “good” indicators for popularity of a search (which is the subject of a different article).

Once you have a list of trending topics, do some research. This is critical – a negative brand association can be devastating, so take your time and make sure you are not going to be associated with any trends or topics that may have negative implications. (Although I suppose this depends upon your appetite for risk.) In my experience, sports and music are typically pretty safe subjects that always have something trending that’s getting a good amount of traffic.

Once you have your trend identified, buy the keywords associated with them. You will want to run a strong branded search ad ideally incorporating a slogan or mission statement if you have one. Remember – the objective here is to get your firm name in front of as many eyes as possible for a low cost. Do not expect calls or conversions out of this, as it is not a direct response tactic. This is all about brand reinforcement. Like a billboard on a popular stretch of highway.

How it can go wrong? CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING → You don’t want to buy and associate with trending topics that may cause conflicts down the road. For example:

• News items that become legal battles could color your stance.
• You buy Oregon Football, they get embroiled in a scandal.
• You buy a celebrity, and they die. Then your ad is popping up … on their obituary notice.

Also, budget. You will probably get more impressions than clicks, but you still need strict limits or day parting (time ads are running) to be sure you don’t go broke on accident. Trends can help, though, if you look at time of day and set your ad schedule to run concurrent to volume trends.

Retargeting/Remarketing 

The cool thing about remarketing is that you can make all kinds of audiences based on user behavior ─ pages they visited, pages they didn’t visit, returning visitors, etc. A great way to get into this is by looking at your new vs. returning data in Google Analytics to determine the different opportunity windows for your remarketing ads.

For example, all website visitors is OK, and it is a default setup from Google Ads. However, you need to exclude people who actually converted because you have no reason to keep showing them ads.

Blog post readers could indicate someone trying to learn more about how to proceed in a particular situation and therefore have a higher level of intent than someone who only visited the homepage of your site for 5 seconds and then left.

ALSO – bonus hint – shorten the membership duration of your audiences based on what you know from past clients. How long after being in a car accident did they wait until they contacted a lawyer? Your intake team should have this data for you (and if they do not, they need to start collecting it). You probably do not need to be following around a user for 60 days AFTER they visited your site for the most part – although your data will tell you a more exact duration.

For a brand reinforcement lift in this scenario, you may want to try a more direct sales message for the first 48 to 72 hours after they leave your site, but after that, go for a more general branded ad.

This will give you visibility and keep your firm top of mind in those cases where a potential client is stuck in the research phase of their search for legal help. Please note: These timeframes are arbitrary. Filter your data, test a time frame, and adjust based on results.

Wrapping Up From Outside

Taking a creative approach to your advertising can lead to some great results. However, that does not mean I am suggesting focusing heavily on any of these suggested tactics as a cornerstone strategy for your marketing campaigns. Remember – best practices are there for a reason. Solid account management and mastery of the fundamentals of paid search optimizing are going to be where you want to focus the majority of your efforts – and budget.

So how should a law firm try these tactics out? Your best bet is to set aside a small portion of your budget for your own personal “Advertising Skunkworks.” It doesn’t have to be a lot, but you can go far with a small budget and some creative “out-of-the-box” ideas. Just make sure you’re realistic about your expectations, measure your results, and build on what you learn from your experiments.

***DISCLAIMER*** As with any advertising campaign, there is potential for error and discrepancies regardless of the abilities of the individual administering them. The tactics in this article are presented for informational purposes only and should not be construed as a promise or guarantee of results. Use at your own risk.

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How To Map Your Law Firm Client Journey

Have you ever been lost in the forest?

Have you ever been lost, ever?

These days we have an app and a map for almost every journey we take, from raising a child to building a business.

And yet, the one journey that most law firm owners fail to map, is that of their own clients.

Let’s find out why mapping the customer journey is important, how to do it, and then cover how you can expand and apply it in your law firm.

WHY MAP?

At first glance, it seems like mapping the customer journey is another marketing mirage.

Mapping the customer journey in your law firm is not an empty gesture, but a legitimate and necessary step to ensuring your marketing’s effectiveness. How can you advance into the future or go anywhere new, if you don’t first establish where you are?

If you define and map the ways marketing brings business to your firm, and then track client experience, then you can measure marketing effectiveness, staff performance, client satisfaction, and find opportunities to reduce costs.

HOW TO MAP?

The first step to mapping the journey is identifying all the touch points and relationships that the law firm has with clients.

Use a timeline of your sales cycle and overlap staff and strategies responsible at each touch point.

A typical customer journey should cover these five client touch points; Awareness, Acquisition, Consideration, Service, and Loyalty.

Imagine having the answers to these questions;

• Who is seeing your marketing & referring business to your firm? Who is aware of your firm? How can you increase that?

• What makes your clients choose your firm over others? What makes you unique?

• What happens during the consultation that makes clients sign? Is there clarity in your materials, intake structure?

• Are client matters & cases being handled on time? Is there a particular issue that keeps cropping up with a certain paralegal?

• Is there anything your staff can do better?

• What kind of media do clients consume & how can you keep in touch after disbursement?

Well you can have those answers!

If you turn the above questions around and ask your clients & staff at your firm, you will have the beginnings of not only a customer journey, but also some amazing client experience data that can inform your marketing, guide future strategies, and more.

We have a FREE Client Experience Survey to get you started! -> DOWNLOAD HERE

 

 

GOING DEEPER

When you start documenting the touch points & experiences of your clients, you can see that every interaction matters.

But without editorial control, information overload cancels out the benefits of their being any helpful info to begin with. As a legal marketer working with a law firm, you can’t map out every single moment, but you can look to your staff for guidance.

At Sawaya Law Firm, to answer their top time-wasting questions, they partnered with Consultwebs to create an interactive timeline of their client journey, explaining every step of the way from intake to disbursement, in plain language.

Because I worked in-house at the law firm and personally created this campaign with the partners & Consultwebs, I will say, getting the content for this project took months. Thankfully, you won’t have to spend that much time learning how to do it. I’ll tell you how and in less time…right now!

• Create client survey based on the questions above but adapted for your firm.
• Send out an email to relevant staff at all client touch points, and ask them to provide their top ten client FAQs.
• Map out the client timeline against the case life cycle and all relevant touch points.

We decided on 14 client touch points that we felt could answer the most FAQs, help convert potential clients, pre-qualify leads, speed up consultations, and generate a sense of trust as well as bring down the anxiety of our current clients. Those touch points for our auto injury cases were;

Injury

Medical Treatment

Intake

Consultation

Retention Agreement

Creating a Case

Investigations

Case Manager Call

Meet Head Attorney

End of Treatment

Demand Letter

Negotiations

Settlement

Disbursement

Review

• Overlay the FAQ questions from staff, filter out the trends of client questions based on the touch point and then get the partners to answer those top questions as they explain each step.
• Edit these answers to the point that a child can understand them. We used an app called Hemingway – http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ which analyzes your content for grammar and grade level. We never went above an 8th grade reading level, and kept everything as short as possible.
• Once it’s ready to become an interactive timeline, get in touch with us here! We can do this! It’s easy!

CONCLUSION

There are so many ways to employ marketing these days, but very few avenues can guarantee marketing effectiveness as well as understanding your client’s journey, at your law firm, inside and out.

When you have the answers to your experience survey & client’s top FAQ’s, when you can define their experience, when you have a map, then you can speak plainly and provide the kind of guidance that attracts potential business to your law firm.

Want more advice on law firm marketing? Sign up for the Consultwebs newsletter, follow us on social media, and subscribe to the LAWsome Podcast.

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OK City Lawyer Goes From “Depths of Despair” To Booming Practice and Weekend Rounds of Golf

At 60-years of age, Phil Ryan has never enjoyed running his law practice as much as he does now.

Phil Ryan

Phil’s disability practice at the law firm, Ryan Bisher Ryan and Simons in Oklahoma City, OK, is experiencing an average of 50% year-over-year growth in its disability caseload, and just recently Phil was able to take a 2-week vacation with his wife, something he had not been able to do in over 10 years.

There are a number of factors that contributed to the renewed growth and success of the law firm, but Phil puts his relationship with Consultwebs right at the top of that list.

The firm was established by Phil’s father in 1984 and had seen the highs and lows of the legal industry over the years. At one point, the firm employed 23 lawyers, with offices in three cities.

Phil took over running the firm as the Managing Partner in 1996 after his father took a leave of absence due to illness. It was a time Phil calls ‘The Heyday’ of Workers’ Compensation cases. “Back then, there was enough money coming in, it was difficult to screw up running a law practice.”

Lack of Leadership

However, as Phil acknowledges, he was more of a managing partner in name only, rather than exerting any authority, and the firm didn’t really have anybody leading the way.

“The partners never met with each other,” said Phil. “We never discussed goals, how we were doing, numbers, what’s doing well, what’s doing badly, who’s signing up cases. The things partners should be talking about. It was just on its own trajectory.”

Revenues began to trend way down, compared with the heyday. The firm was looking out for the best interest of its clients, but less so for themselves. For Phil, the sleepless nights took their toll.

“We never got to the point where we couldn’t make payroll,” said Phil, “because I took out a line of credit on my house.”

But something had to be done.

“It was 2014 and we were running the law firm like it was 1984. We needed a leader or we weren’t going to survive.”

So Phil decided to step up and start exploring solutions.

“The money wasn’t coming in like it used to. Something had to change.”

Phil started to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the firm so that he could figure out the solution. Then he started to take action.

First Action Steps

Phil attended his first PILMMA Super Summit in 2015, where he met Consultwebs’ Vice President of Business Development, Tanner Jones, as well as Tim McKey from Vista Consulting.

“Tim got me to start thinking about the firm strategically, and I started talking to Consultwebs about the possibility of them taking over our online marketing.”

Phil’s big concern was the lack of cases, which he put down to the firm’s choice of online marketing provider at that time – a company that’s considered by some to be a heavyweight in the industry.

“We were paying 5 grand a month to our prior online provider and getting next to nothing in return,” said Phil. “They hadn’t updated the website in – literally – years. We did hear from them, but only when it was time to renew the contract, which is the complete opposite of our relationship with Consultwebs.

“Our prior provider had a big focus on selling us more services, like listings in their own directories. And they were engaged in promoting our local competitors who were also their clients.

“At the time we finally left the other company, we were opening around 10-15 SSD cases a month, around the same for Workers’ Compensation, and around 3-5 Personal Injury cases per month.

The team at Ryan Bisher Ryan & Simons

“Less than 25% of those cases came from the Internet. When we were with the other company, the majority of our caseload actually came from referrals and running some highly targeted and low-cost TV ads on specific digital TV channels.

“We’d get a monthly email from our prior online provider that was, frankly, ridiculous. It would say ‘You received 749 new leads last month,’ without any explanation of what, why, when, where, who or how. It didn’t match up to reality.”

Goal of Return on Investment

Phil decided to take to take action on his business and hire Consultwebs to overhaul the law firm’s website and online marketing.

“We started off with very low expectations, and a general attitude of ‘Please help us, we need some help,” said Phil.

“I really just wanted us to make a return on our marketing investment. Since we weren’t getting that from our prior online provider, if Consultwebs could generate a return on investment (ROI), that would be a substantial improvement.

“We actually pay Consultwebs more than we paid our prior online provider, but it’s really working out for us.

“My target for this year, 2019, is $720,000 in SSD case fees, $60,000 a month. To get to $60,000 a month, I average about $4,000 per winner, so I have to win 15 cases. That means I need to get 20 to a hearing which means I probably need to sign up about 25 cases per month. We’ve hit that goal three of the last four months or even exceeded it and I am actually exceeding my revenue goal.”

Find out how Phil Ryan massively cut his cost-per-lead by signing up for our FREE case study.

Putting The Law Firm Back on Track

Phil can’t emphasize enough how crucial Consultwebs has been in putting the law firm back on track.

“Fred Boettcher, my old mentor, just passed away recently, at the age of 80. I gave the eulogy at his funeral. For Fred, his big deal was always new cases. He would say, ‘If you’re not growing, you’re dying.’  Wherever we were traveling together, he’d call the office and his first question would be, ‘Any new cases? Any new ones you want me to call?’ The last two years, I’ve been driving everybody in the office crazy by saying, ‘That’s not how Fred would do it.’

“Caseload is the most fundamentally important thing for the survival of a law firm, mine included. While we’re growing the caseload with Consultwebs, I’m managing most of the other improvements to the firm, like implementing a new case management and dashboard system, so that we’re more efficient.”

Not A Typical Vendor-Client Relationship

Phil sees working with Consultwebs and his Digital Marketing Manager, Michael “Garney” Gardner, as more of a partnership than a typical vendor-client relationship.

“There’s an inherent trust with Consultwebs,” said Phil.

“Number one, Garney will make suggestions that we do things, even if they’re not going to make Consultwebs anymore money, but will work out well for the law firm. When I’ve talked to Garney about taking up a service that Consultwebs offers, for example pay-per-click, he’ll say, ‘Even though it makes Consultwebs money, you know, Phil, I don’t think you’re ready for that yet,’ or, ‘I think there’s ways you can do it better.’ He’s looking out for me in the long run. That’s pretty comforting.”

Although Phil’s only goal at the beginning was generating an ROI, Garney had other ideas.

“Garney immediately set targets for performance,” said Phil.

“I take a close look at a new client’s existing performance and case data,” explained Garney, “then I estimate what I believe to be realistic and achievable goals in the time-frame, based on what we’re going to do and my experience with other clients.

“Every client needs to have a regular conversation with us about how many leads are coming in, and how many leads are converting into clients,” said Garney. “That’s when you switch from being a vendor to being a partner with the client.”

“That’s not the industry norm, and the many sales emails in my inbox will attest to that,” said Phil.

Find out how working with Consultwebs – even from the onboarding process onwards – is different from the ‘industry leaders’ and why it works so much better for law firm owners. Sign up for our FREE case study.

The Difference Is Noticeable

Phil acknowledges that the changes in the law firm and in his attitude over the last two years have been profound.

“My wife has definitely noticed the difference,” said Phil. “She recently told me that there were two instances in my life when she could tell that I was just simply miserable. I don’t remember what the first one was, but it was many years ago, probably some family thing. The second time was around that time I had to take out the line of credit on the house.

“I’d go to sleep fine, but then I would wake up at 2 am and stare at the ceiling until 5 am.

Phil and his wife on a well-earned trip to San Francisco

“My wife said that she was just so worried about me at the time because I was unhappy, under pressure and always so stressed out. She said, ‘It’s a godsend to see you like you are now.’”

Taking time off away from the office is no longer a problem for Phil. He enjoyed that 2-week vacation with his wife a couple of months ago, but Phil remembers trying to do that during the ‘leaderless’ years and not succeeding.

“Once, I had scheduled two weeks off in Vail, Colorado, the same place we went on vacation just recently,” Phil explained. “At that point, I had never taken off two straight weeks in my life. Something happened at the office right before we left and instead of 14 days of vacation, I ended up coming back after six days and leaving my family in Colorado.

“It was horrible,” said Phil. “I now have arthritis in the toe I broke from kicking the desk, because I was so annoyed.”

Healthy Work-Life Balance

“When we went away,”said Phil, “I would call in and probably had at least two or three conversations on the phone with the office every single day, anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour.

Phil Ryan on a weekend bike ride

“Now I will probably only check in every other day, at around 4:45 pm, right before the office closes.

“It’s completely different from just a few years ago.

“In 2013, I was in the depths of despair,” said Phil. “I was taking boxes of work home every single night and every single weekend. It just had to be done.

“It’s all different now. Occasionally, maybe if I have a hearing at 8:30 am the next morning, I’ll take the case-file home if I didn’t get a chance to review it in the afternoon. That adds up to maybe an hour, a couple of nights a week.”

Enjoying the weekends is something else that Phil has started to achieve – and it’s all the more impressive considering it’s with a much bigger caseload than when Phil was under constant pressure.

“Now I play golf on Saturday and go cycling with my buddies on Sunday. Or sometimes the other way around. Just a few years ago, I wouldn’t have had the time to do any of it.”

Growing From Strength To Strength

Having achieved a sensible work-life balance while building the law firm back up to its former glory, Phil has continued to make the law firm stronger.

“I’m rapidly getting to the point where I can only do so much and need help,” said Phil. “I can grow the caseload for the benefit of the whole firm, but I can also work on the business. I’ve been re-reading a lot of Michael Gerber.

“Social Security Disability has probably doubled in the last five years for us. I was just looking at the 2019 mid-year numbers. My fees for 2019 have already exceeded 2014 and 2015 for the entire year.

“I went ahead and hired somebody just for intake on Social Security and Disability, but now they handle the intake for all three practice areas.”

But Phil repeats, over and over, that he feels like he’s really only just begun to do things right. In fact, he wishes he’d done this 15 or 20 years ago.

“Building great systems enables the firm to grow and function at scale. It’s definitely important because I’ve only just begun. I’m 60 years old, but I feel like I’ve really come into my own in just the last two or three years. I realize that what I’ve been working on the last couple of years and what I continue to work on is going to allow me to scale.”

Find out how the relationship between Phil and his Digital Marketing Manager at Consultwebs plays a crucial role in the success of his law firm. Sign up for our FREE case study.

Steady and Dependable

It’s the steady and dependable flow of new leads and the growth of the firm, thanks to Consultwebs, that has helped Phil change his outlook.

“I’m within a stone’s throw of being able to hire another SSD lawyer, for the sole purpose of freeing me up to have more time to work on the business for all three practice areas.

(L-R) Patrick C. Ryan, Charles T. Simons, Philip D. Ryan, Rick W. Bisher

“Scale allows me to be gone not just for an afternoon or a day. It’s going to allow me to be gone for a week, and I can foresee a time in the not-too-distant future, when I can do what I need to do without even coming into the office,” Phil explained.

“We’ll be helping more clients, and I’ll be making more money in the process.”

“Now, life seems doable, whereas before I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to get it all figured out. I wasn’t sure that I was ever going to be comfortable.

“Now I’m comfortable in my skin. I’m comfortable at home. I’m comfortable at work and not only that, but I feel like, we’ve only just begun.

Planning For The Future

“My broad plan is to grow my revenue base in all three practice areas by another 50% in the next two to three years. The five-year goal would be to double our revenues.

“My goal is to be backed off cases and the day-to-day running of the firm in five years. And Consultwebs is key to me achieving that.

“I said to one of my partners, ‘You know, the deal is, what we made in the first six months, if we play our cards right, instead of being half a year, that can be a quarter, and then it can go from there.’

With that optimism, Phil is thinking about all possibilities for the future.

“I don’t know that I’d want to ever sell the law firm, but I’d like to be able to sell it. When you sell your law firm, the value isn’t in the building or the book of cases you have. The real value is in the systems that you have, and the great team of employees who work with those systems.”

Phil’s Digital Marketing Manager at Consultwebs, Michael “Garney” Gardner has his own perspective on Phil’s rapid improvement.

“When I first started with Phil and his firm as a client, he was absolutely buried under workload. Now I see him taking vacations and being much more relaxed. Just recently we were talking about how to take his firm to the next level. That’s a long way from where we started, around 18 months ago.”

New Goals

Now that Phil feels energized to lead the charge with his firm, he has a new personal goal that he hopes to achieve in the next year or two. Phil plans to take an extended trip to Europe so that he can watch the Open Championship golf tournament and the Tour de France. Of course, that wouldn’t have been possible without his partnership with Consultwebs.

“I put my faith in Consultwebs and they are delivering for my law practice,” said Phil.

“I think I have the best-looking legal website in my market now. It gives me a sense of comfort that things have been done right and that I’m given numbers on a regular basis that actually mean something to me.”

“Garney and I touch base regularly, whether it’s him keeping me updated with a report or checking in on where we are on numbers. We track the progress together.

“Consultwebs aren’t salesmen,” Phil explained. “They actually care about the end result. They truly want to help you. They’re experts at doing what I need, which is helping a law firm generate more leads at a reasonable cost. I don’t know where we would be without them.

“I must get at least 5 emails a day promising to get me at the top of Google’s search results. If they could really do that, it would be an easy thing to achieve. I know it isn’t, and I work in a very competitive marketplace.”

“When I got to meet Phil in person at the 2019 PILMMA Summit,” said Garney, “he was so excited about his upcoming vacation. He was still focused on his goals for the law firm and we had a productive meeting, but he wanted to enjoy his time away from the office with his wife.”

“I’ve said to my colleagues that we get so caught up with the Google game, that you forget there’s a bigger story there. We focus on improving a law firm’s ROI and we don’t realize we’re helping the owner sleep better at night.”

“Consultwebs is working out just fine for me,” said Phil. “They’re delivering on their promises.

“Hiring Consultwebs is one of the best decisions we ever made.”

Find out how regular calls between Phil and his Digital Marketing Manager at Consultwebs play a crucial role in the success of his law firm. Sign up for our FREE case study

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Why Does Your Law Firm Have a Website?

“Why does your law firm have a website?” 

You might not have ever asked this question, because you have either made up your mind and have a website for your law firm, or don’t.

However, to truly understand what you are hoping to achieve with a website is the only way to make it work for you. Your website should have a mission statement. Only then can you build, change, adjust, add to and improve your site, with the key concept of driving leads and getting cases.

’Incomplete’ Answers

In our opinion, the following statements, by themselves, are not strategic reasons to have a website:

• “Every firm needs to have a website these days.”

• “We need something to point the rest of our marketing to.”

• “So people can get in touch with us.”

• “All of our competitors have websites, so we need one too.”

• “That’s how people find lawyers now, on the Web.”

• “We want a website to show people how great our firm is.”

These are important considerations, but if these reasons explain your law firm’s website, you are missing out on a lot of potential. The statements above don’t provide much guidance for strategy. They certainly aren’t mission statements.

Finding the ’Right’ Answer

There is not a one-size-fits-all answer to the question of why your firm has a website. A site’s purpose will vary depending on many factors, such as:

• Your practice areas
• Your geographic location
• What your firm’s goals are for growth, income and specialization
• The size of your market and potential audience
• The size of your firm
• Who your clients are
• What sources your cases currently come from
• Other elements of your firm’s brand and marketing

By focusing on the right pieces of information, and crystallizing some concepts in your mind, you can begin to analyze whether your site is fulfilling its mission, whether you had previously defined it or not.

The following questions are meant to help you achieve additional clarity about your firm’s goals, its website, its target audience, your site’s purpose and your desired outcomes for it.

Consider your firm and your clients…

What are your firm’s overall goals? By examining what your firm wants to accomplish on a larger scale, you can better develop a Web strategy to help achieve firm objectives. Think about how your website fits into the overall plan.

Who is your current clientele? What are the geographic, demographic, psychographic, and other characteristics of the people who your firm currently represents? What, if anything, do they have in common? What makes them different from any other group of people?

The more you know about who you serve, the better you can serve them with your website (if that is one of your goals). Also, you’ll understand more about how to find and cater to more prospects who are like your current clients (if that is one of your goals).

How did your current clients find you? Was it by reputation and word of mouth? Was it by referral? Did they find you on Google when searching for attorneys in your area, or did they go right to your site because of another marketing effort?

Do you want more prospects to find you through search engines? Knowing where your clients come from, and what parts of the funnel your website is involved in, is helpful in gaining insight and planning strategy.

What questions do your clients have? Are they concerned about cost, timeframes, and how the whole process works? Does your website provide helpful resources that can help existing clients and new prospects, addressing their needs and making them more comfortable with their situations? Can your website help in communicating with current clients, providing FAQs to answer their questions and minimize the volume of nonessential calls to your office?

Now let’s think specifically about your website…

What is your website really for? Serving and communicating with current clients? Impressing referred clients so they feel comfortable signing with you? Providing helpful information to the public? Sharing news about the firm and its results? Bringing attention to an important legal issue? All of these and others may be possible answers to that question.

Many firms would say their website’s purpose is to increase awareness about the firm, bring in new prospects with the right kind of cases, and sign them up as clients. Many firms are looking for a positive return on investment from their websites as marketing vehicles.

Only you can answer that question, specifically, for your firm’s website, but knowing what you hope to accomplish with your website is crucial. How can you design and develop a website, write content for it, drive traffic to it, and make additions and changes to it, if you don’t even know what it’s for?

Obviously there may be a lot of steps in improving your website to fulfill its mission statement, but you certainly need to know what you want your website to do before you can plan out and execute how to accomplish it.

And perhaps the most important question… 

Who is your website really for? In just about all cases, the answer should not be, “for the firm.” Unless your site is an intranet page for your attorneys and staff only, chances are your site should be designed and developed for clients, prospects, and/or the public as a whole.

Does your site speak mostly about your firm, your record of success and your attorneys’ impressive backgrounds, or is your content focused on informing and helping clients and prospective clients? Do you provide unique and informative resources that the public will find helpful?

Is your content written in a way that your clients and prospects will understand, or is it more in the language of your colleagues? Would a visitor need a JD just to understand what is being said? It’s often suggested that sites for the public be written between a 5th and 8th grade reading level. How does your site compare?

Be sure you know who your site is meant to speak to, and strategize accordingly.

Taking Action

Once you have successfully defined your website’s mission, you can begin to analyze its current performance in fulfilling that mission. For example, if you’ve decided that you want your website to drive six new case signups from Google searches each month, you can start to analyze all of the aspects of your website that would lead to achieving that goal.

• Is the site ranking for relevant terms to bring enough searchers to your site?
• What strategy can be used to get better rankings?
• After visitors hit the site, are they finding information they need and engaging with the site, or are they leaving?
• Can changes be made to pages to increase the percentage of visitors who will contact the firm?
• Can improvements or additions be made to the available contact options that would lead to more case sign-ups?

By determining where your site may be lacking, in terms of accomplishing its mission, you can lay out a plan to make adjustments and improvements to work towards achieving success.

To Sum It up

Just about every law firm has some kind of Web presence these days. Far fewer have a deep understanding of what they want from their website, how it fits in with their law firm’s goals, and who are the most important people to consider with regards to the site. By clearly defining your website’s mission statement, you can ensure that all of your decisions are governed by a unified purpose, which will lead to greater success.

 

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Of Lawyers, Leads, and Legal Marketing

Leads!

That’s what marketing a law firm is all about, right?

Calls and clicks that turn into cases ─ that’s all marketing is, right?

So signing up for a lead generation service is the smartest and most cost-effective way to get some marketing in the air and some business in the door, especially for a small or solo law firm, right?

Investing $10k with a large digital marketing agency is seen as a gamble. Whereas, a handful of annual injections, $1k here or there, to get some quick leads seems safer. Right?

Working for a law firm marketing agency myself, I may have some bias here. But after interviewing and speaking with marketers and lawyers alike, I’m discovering a more complicated and costly picture around lawyers, lead generation services, and marketing.

First, let’s explore the differences and definitions of marketing and lead generation. Then we’ll finish with advice for lawyers looking to increase leads, save money, and take their marketing beyond the campaign.

Leads: Not the Only Part of Marketing

“We sell, or else.”

This fantastic quote from famed advertising legend David Ogilvy has consistently helped center the marketing methodologies here at Consultwebs.

Our success as a law firm marketing partner is dependent on the success of our clients. That’s why we take a comprehensive look at marketing that’s not just exclusive to lead generation.

Leads are a massively important part of marketing, but they are only one end of the spectrum. Without a balanced marketing strategy, just “drumming up leads” can actually have a negative impact on your business and your online rankings.

Until recently, I had no opinion on lead generation services working with lawyers.

When I managed an intake call center at my old personal injury law firm, we had to go through leads generated by these services, knowing that the volume of leads always outweighed the quality.

For those prepared to sift through the noise to find the gold, lead gen services have their place in the marketing mix.

However, after a recent engagement with a solo on Twitter, my opinion has become more strongly flavored, tinged with bitterness and scorn.

NOLO and the solo

This lawyer first reached out to inquire if any other lawyers on Twitter were having trouble accessing their Martindale Hubbell/NOLO lead gen sites?

After she got in touch with an account rep, she messaged this –

I followed up with her to inquire whatever happened with the site, told her I was going to write a piece on it, and was shocked, but not surprised, at her awesome and frank response.

At this point, I started getting enraged in my head and then doing some math. Meanwhile, I got another message, which made my calculator burn even hotter.

MATH BREAK!

Say this lawyer charges around $350 an hour for her time. And she spends 7 to 8 hours setting up profiles and payment plans, choosing filters, filtering leads.

She’s lost the ability to make $2,800, right there!

Now, add on the $700 (or $35 a lead) she pays for NOLO = $3,500!

After the work and missed billables, the actual cost of these $35 leads, was $175.

I messaged this lawyer back and showed her my math and got an amazing response.

And so it got me thinking, if this solo is having to lose all her billable time to crap fixes for one piece of the marketing pie, which is lead generation, then there stands a chance to put a marketing partnership on the bargaining table that addresses this issue and also delivers higher quality leads, over time, at better value.

Marketing: More Than Leads

As covered in our Legal Marketing Nutrition Guide, an effective marketing strategy balances lead generation activities with brand-building activities: Sales Activation vs. Brand Growth.

Besides the indisputable fact of diminishing returns from short-term investments, without a portion of your marketing budget focused on growth, you’ll never have the financial stamina to reach any goals.

As covered in our Marketing Marathon Mindset, an effective law firm marketing strategy understands the balanced and comprehensive nature of proper marketing in order to win the race.

By establishing strong foundations at the intake and return on investment (ROI) levels and building up toward activities solely designed to convert, the Legal Marketing Nutrition Guide is a good starting point for lawyers looking to go beyond the next campaign.

Another way to think about marketing is to break the activities down by objectives, like Attraction, Conversion, Branding, and Delight/Loyalty.

If you aren’t managing and maintaining client expectations at each point of this process, you are not properly engaged in marketing and should expect heavier workloads with patchy results.

So, marketing is not just about getting leads, it’s about improving the quality of leads you get, and that is the secret of effective marketing.

Law Firm Business Development Solutions from Consultwebs

You can do your own law firm website design, pay a couple thousand dollars for a lead gen service, do some marketing and social media when you get to it, and perhaps, for a while, things may work out.

But what about next year? Or the year after?

Who is in your corner?

Law Firm Marketing Beyond The Campaign isn’t just our tagline. It has been our vision for the last 20 years, and our clients’ success in marketing their practices online and generating leads, as well as cases, is what we hope to see with every law firm of every size.

I wanted to use this space to just lightly, but directly, pitch the services Consultwebs brings to lawyers and law firms, and outline and compare some of the differences and value we offer.

• Law Firm Website Design – $10k Total (Actual Client Results: 90 leads a month from site within 18 months – $33 to $90 lead potential)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – $5k+ Monthly (Actual Client Results: Site traffic increased by 900%, 4 to 6 page rank jumps within 18 months)
• Digital Advertising (PPC) – $3k+ Monthly (Actual Client Results: 50 to 100 quality leads within 90 days – $20 to $50 leads)
• Social Media – $500+ Monthly (Actual Client Results: Family law firm enjoys $23 leads) – View this Case Study

Along with these services, as well as dedicated marketing managers who work with you, Consultwebs offers law firm marketing strategy and original content written for your practice area, focused on driving qualified leads through your site.

In Conclusion

Lead generation services can work to generate calls and leads for your law firm. However, the benefit of these services must be balanced with proper expectations and scope.

Whether you choose to grow your law firm’s book of business with Consultwebs through marketing, or a lead generation service, or smoke signals, the most important concept to takeaway from this is balance.

A goal of marketing is to draw people to your business, but success in marketing is when you’ve given them a reason to stay.

With your law firm’s marketing activities balanced between the two pillars of Legal Marketing Nutrition ─ Brand Growth and Sales Activation ─ you can generate more qualified leads that turn into cases, over a longer and more reliable timeframe, at a greater value.

Interested in giving your clients a reason to choose your law firm online? Get in touch.

Want more advice on law firm marketing? Sign up for the Consultwebs newsletter, follow us on social media, and subscribe to the LAWsome Podcast.

 

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When Law Firm Marketing Seems Too Easy: Overcoming the Perils of Overconfidence Bias

The practice of law is a confidence game. Even if you may not know exactly what you’re doing, you have to appear as if you do. It’s how you get and keep clients, win your cases, and ultimately grow your practice.

But it can be dangerous when the line between confidence and false confidence is crossed. Overconfidence bias appears when someone believes in their expertise more than evidence suggests they should. Have you ever had a client tell you exactly how to handle their case? As if they have a law degree? There’s no evidence to suggest that they know what they say they know, yet they firmly believe they’re right.  They do this to their detriment – and yours.

Overconfidence can be a problem for growing a practice, especially when it comes to making marketing decisions. Not all lawyers have experience in law firm marketing – but many believe they know enough. I mean… how hard can it be? Honestly, having worked in the legal and marketing professions, I can say they seem easier the less you know, and in both, mistakes show up in the details. For instance, not all marketing strategies are created equal.  For some practices in certain locations, a TV ad might make perfect sense. But change one aspect of your situation and television may be a waste of time and money. A novice may not be able to spot the details that make a specific marketing approach work.

Unfortunately, human beings aren’t great at gauging how hard something is. In fact, the harder a task is, the greater the risk of overconfidence bias.  Humans generally underestimate learning curves because they don’t know what they don’t know. Everyone does this, at least once, without knowing it. It’s being human.

To protect ourselves from overconfidence bias, we need to adjust the way we see and handle certain situations.  To ensure overconfidence bias doesn’t negatively affect your business or marketing decisions, consider doing the following as you decide on a marketing strategy or tactic:

1. Second-guess your decisions. It’s uncomfortable to do sometimes, but it can be necessary. Ask yourself how you know what it is that you think you know. Is there evidence? Do you have data? Do you have substantial experience? If you can’t come up with a good answer, stop there. If you do have an answer, make sure you’re not being affected by what I call a “decision pitfall.” In other words, were you swayed by social expectations or some other mental short-cut? Did you tell yourself “this is what a successful lawyer would do” (acting on identity) rather than “this is what’s good for my business” (acting on objectivity)? Re-examining our decision-making processes can keep us from becoming overconfident.
2. Set out to prove yourself wrong. We don’t generally do this, but if anyone is good at it, it’s a lawyer. To win a case, you have to see it from the other side, and then prepare for all contingencies. The same is true for the business side of your practice. You have to prove the counterargument to understand the strength of your own position. One way to do this is seek help from a marketing professional. Their greatest value isn’t always in executing a plan for you.  Sometimes they can assist you by telling you where you may be going wrong with your marketing strategy leading you to a more customized approach to building your practice.
3. Ask yourself what you fear and what you hope for, especially regarding your decision. And avoid acting on it. Many cases of overconfidence are really about emotional management. We “confidently” arrive at a decision because it’s what we want to have happen, or because it helps us avoid what we might be afraid of. If you really want a financially lucrative practice, you have to get understand the source of your decisions, even if it involves reaching out for help.

These days, self-awareness is praised as strong positive quality. It requires looking inward and being self-reflective. But we all have blind spots, to where all the introspection in the world won’t always give us true clarity. But if we look outside ourselves, specifically to what behavioral and social scientists have learned about human decision-making, we can be armed with knowledge to make better choices.  “Know thyself” is a popular mantra but knowing and learning more about human decision-making generally can really take you, and your practice, to the next level.

Nika Kabiri, JD PhD, is a consultant and market researcher who uses Decision Science to help businesses grow. Check out her services and reach out to her to learn more about making optimal decisions for your practice.  

 

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7 Tips for Law Firm Marketing Success

With almost a million different advertising platforms, apps, search engines, and digital marketing vendors/coaches/consultants entering the ring each day, marketing a law firm online can seem like a knock-out, losing battle before the first bell.

But the lawyer who is armed with the right knowledge and strategic insight on marketing can begin to fight on equal footing with competitors and make progress.

Here are seven tips for marketing success you can take back to your law firm:

Accept the fact that no one cares about you

I’m sorry. No one wants to hear this, but it’s true.

Legal marketers spend so much of their professional lives looking at their own slogans, logos, colors, and taglines, that they fail to realize the challenge their marketing is up against.

Being overly familiar with your marketing material can create the false impression that everyone knows you, people see your logos all the time.

This seems like a simple mental barrier to overcome, but the impact on marketing is huge.

Accepting that no one knows your tagline, no one thinks about your color schemes, no one recognizes or cares about your brand or your logo – this  is the only way to create distinct, memorable, effective, and properly distributed marketing campaigns.

Underestimate the prominence and familiarity of your marketing, and you’ll create more prominent, and more effective, campaigns.

Understand that everyone is distracted. No one notices anything.

Your marketing’s number one goal is to be noticeable.

Marketing and advertising are not a competition against your competitors. You are competing against life itself.

Why do people paying for marketing only focus on sales?

I get that if you don’t make money, then it’s over. But if your marketing strategy doesn’t account for the full spectrum of awareness that leads up to the purchase, then you’ll never get the sale.

Walk backward from the close …

People won’t buy your brand unless they’re convinced. They aren’t convinced because they have no brand preference. They don’t know if they like you or not because they don’t know about you and aren’t even aware you exist. So the first and most essential goal of marketing is awareness.

Creating affinity, preference, and mental salience, and then generating enough of this to finally get the sale.

Without building a proper runway for your marketing, nothing will ever take off.

Know the two main marketing functions. 

As outlined by the Legal Marketing Nutrition Guide, law firm marketing works in two ways:

• Brand Growth
• Sales Activation

Brand growth works its marketing magic over longer time periods.

Sales activation is focused on shorter timeframes.

One of the key aspects of the brilliant research underlying this graph and the studies in marketing effectiveness by Binet & Field is that while brand campaigns help to create sales opportunities, no amount of short-term results can ever amount to the lasting effects of long-term brand growth.

Without a strong brand foundation, the more a law firm employs short-term marketing campaigns, the less they are effective.

Understanding the two marketing functions of growth and sales is an essential component to creating marketing strategies that facilitate foundational, and lasting, changes in the business development efforts of your law firm. 

Establish and define your brand.

I bet you think you have your brand established for your law firm, or you have a pretty good idea of what makes you unique and differentiated in the marketplace, right?

Most lawyers either think their work product alone is what defines them, and they don’t need to market, or that they already are marketing in a definitive way.

Well then do this simple exercise:

1. Look at your content.
2. Take your logo off of it.
3. Compare it to a competitor.
4. What’s the difference? Is there one?

With a weak, indistinct brand, what’s to market?

Strongly branded and differentiated products manifest perceived value. Check out this brand awareness study from the excellent marketing book “Eat Your Greens”:

You say that’s marketing trickery?

You say your law firm is small and doesn’t need a brand?

With no brand to differentiate you from competitors, where would the perceived value of your business come from?

Discover and define your brand before you build a marketing strategy for your law firm. Once you have a distinct brand onboard, engineering effective marketing campaigns becomes more likely.

Build your strategy. 

Marketing is typically, and wrongly, used synonymously with promotion. Strategy and tactics are also confused and misused.

Marketing is not just about promotions or communications – it is the complete diagnosis, research, proposed execution, and solution for a business problem.

Part of solving the marketing problem is deciding on strategy, which is a set of tactics employed to achieve business goals.

This free Marketing Strategy Worksheet provides you a chance to answer a few questions to verbalize, understand, organize, and develop a law firm marketing plan that helps you achieve your business goals.

By defining goals, timelines, resources, and expectations, this worksheet is a great way to find the starting line for your law firm’s marketing marathon. Questions include:

• What is your brand? How do you differentiate within your practice area?
• Do you have strong, memorable, distinct brand assets?
• What is the desired outcome you expect from marketing? Case/leads/calls/clicks increase by 20%?
• How are you currently measuring your marketing efforts?
• What are you currently paying for marketing and advertising?
• Do you know your cost per lead/case?
• What is your target cost per case from an ad campaign?
• Are you using call tracking?
• Are you prepared to hire more people to pick up the phones once the leads come in?

Once you gather the intelligence from across your law firm necessary to answer these questions, you’ll begin to formulate strategic thinking around marketing and begin to see how it can impact your business, as well as how to measure these effects.

Select your tactics.

You have a strategy. You have strong brand assets. You know you are shooting for awareness. Now it’s time to select the tactics you will use to achieve your strategic goals.

Strategy is most important in guiding what you won’t do. Choosing what to ignore is an important aspect to focusing your marketing.

Remember to balance brand growth and sales activation initiatives. You will need both to achieve results in the short and long term. That’s why it pays to be selective with marketing tactics.

You don’t have to be everywhere and do everything. You have to be where it matters, delivering what matters to your intended audience.

So ask yourself some questions …

• Are your potential clients on Facebook or LinkedIn or social media at all?
• Do your clients watch TV and listen to the radio?
• Are potential clients accessing your site on desktop or mobile?
• Are there patterns in the signed cases coming from a specific zip code?
• Is there a type of case that brings in more revenue than others?

Once you understand a bit more about your caseload and how your clients engage with media and content, you can select tactical channels and ad campaigns designed to engender the same types of responses and results with potential clients.

Establish your measurements. 

Some lawyers do a poor job of tracking marketing performance metrics, like cost per case, at their law firms.

Most, however, don’t track anything at all. According to our informal survey, 80% of lawyers were not tracking how much money they spend to get a case in their door.

If you knew what campaigns gave you the best return on your marketing investments, wouldn’t that make some marketing decisions a little easier?

Luckily, our “Measuring Marketing ROI in Your Law Firm” webinar walks you through how to effectively track, measure, and optimize your law firm’s marketing return on investment (ROI).

Among the topics covered in this webinar are:

• How to track leads in your law firm
• How to calculate cost per lead
• How to boost your marketing ROI

Also, we have our ROI Calculator and a FREE Guide To Boosting Your Law Firm’s ROI to assist in establishing the proper marketing metrics in your firm.

Setting up marketing metrics like cost per case, cost per lead, and ROI is essential to telling the proper story of your marketing journey.

Only when the measurement of marketing tactics is in place does the strategy of the campaign (balanced between short-term results and long-term growth, cognizant of the indifferent marketplace, and based on a strong brand) begin to take shape and define itself in the analysis of the metrics.

Said another way: You don’t know how far you’ve come until you look back on the road you’ve traveled.

Want more advice on law firm marketing? Sign up for the Consultwebs newsletter, follow us on social media, and subscribe to the LAWsome Podcast.

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