Peter: Our industry is unique
in that it changes more in a month
than most industries change in a year.
You need a strategy to take the guesswork
out of the equation if you plan to last.
That is exactly why today's webinar is entirely based
on building an effective marketing strategy,
which we'll be going over today.
And I will be having upcoming monthly webinars
that will cover each topic in detail throughout the series.
If anyone has any questions or would like to speak with me,
please email me at Peter@Scorpion.co
and I'll go ahead and give that again
at the end of the presentation.
So let's dive right on in.
So my name is Peter Webb,
and I'm the Senior Vice President of Sales at Scorpion,
and law firms call me in typically to identify and evaluate
what they need to be doing to make the most
of their marketing.
Having been with Scorpion since its inception in 2001,
I've had the pleasure of helping law firms
come up with the tailored strategies they need
to work best for them.
And it's my goal to explain the key factors
which are influencing how you get cases today
and what you should be paying attention to
in order to overhaul and fine tune
your digital legal marketing.
As all of you are aware and can attest at this point,
the Internet's a pretty big place,
and there are over 90% of the population on it
at any given time.
The need to be found in the right places
is more important than ever.
The penalty for missing the mark,
trying to show up in front of everybody,
is a very expensive and costly mistake.
Now, some get lucky and get a case or two,
typically by happenstance.
Others spend a small fortune
trying to sway the odds in their favor.
But the ideal balance will be found in knowing
what the perfect investment of funds
to what the targeted case acquisition range should be.
This should be done and calculated for each case type
you're spending money to go after.
In other words, what your cases are worth
and what range you should be willing to spend to get it.
Guessing and getting lucky is never a sound strategy
and definitely won't last, and I can attest to that.
Well, the question immediately arises,
how is one to determine this,
especially given that the Internet is constantly changing,
as is the competition and their marketing budgets,
attention spans of individuals are dwindling and decreasing,
trends of society and what's important,
how people search today,
such as voice search versus traditional and more.
If you truly want to win and generate cases
looking at a long-term solution,
you need to have technology on your side.
You need to have a team that knows what they're doing
both with marketing as well as your area of law,
and they need to be paying attention to where
and how you should spend the budget,
not just that the budget should be spent.
I'll give you an example.
Recently a big firm called me in to do
a thorough analysis of their firm's
offline and online marketing campaign.
They started to see a steady decline in cases
and needed the help,
and they gave me their year-over-year numbers,
what they spent, where they spent it,
how many calls they got,
and other metrics to determine trends.
Their biggest frustration was that they didn't even know
where to start with finding out the most important things,
such as which dollars produce the best quality of calls,
which keywords were producing cases
and not just clicks, traffic, and poor-quality inquiries.
They had a marketing agency gladly accepting
their money each month,
and they were trying and working really hard,
but, let's face it, ineffectively working really hard
is just wasting everyone's time and money.
It took several weeks, but after pouring over
countless keywords and thousands of pages,
we fine tuned everything from the messaging
to the direction and the strategy,
consolidated and reduced the budget by close to 25%,
and the best part was the next month
we generated more cases than they had seen in months.
The takeaways are that improved messaging
by targeting who they were trying to reach,
better positioning with those messages,
and tracking to see what was producing cases
so we can improve everything
is ultimately what led to an improved campaign.
What I had done was just focused on
improving the marketing strategy.
So let's talk a little bit about that now.
There's a big difference between having
a well thought out marketing strategy
and having a website which generates random,
usually poor quality calls in the occasional case.
One is a proactive strategy
where you're purposefully ensuring you show up
and get calls for the cases you want.
The other is hoping the right people find you
and are willing to hear what you have to say
and believe you're the best fit for them
and then pick up the phone and call.
There are a lot of variables and a lot of ifs
to that second circumstance.
So to compete for cases you want,
you must be positioned to get them.
You must have messaging that interests
your potential clients and really explains why you.
There are a lot of choices at one's fingertips.
Having a strategy allows you to fine tune these
and dramatically improve the likelihood
of getting the cases you want.
It's best to speak with a legal marketing agency
who has a sound track record of producing these types
of cases to determine best practices.
The alternative is wasting a lot of time and money
trying to figure it out.
The industry has evolved into a hyper competitive market.
To survive and maximize the return
on your marketing investment,
you need an effective marketing plan,
and there are seven key factors that are critical
in devising your online strategy.
The first step is to perform an evaluation
on what the current status is
of the market you're trying to generate cases out of.
Establish the population of your intended target area.
How many of those cases happen?
And how frequently do they happen?
Is it overly competitive or is it an underserved market?
By knowing these things, you can determine
what realistic goals are
and the timeline associated with them.
For example, if you're, let's say, a DUI attorney,
you might want to evaluate how many DUI arrests
occur from local colleges, popular bars, et cetera.
You're ideally looking for the types of people
who you want as a client and can afford your retainer.
Another example would be a divorce attorney.
You'd want to look at what the total number
of filed divorces are
and then purposefully target wealthier neighborhoods
where they are performing research
or inquiring about representation.
Finally, a car accident attorney
looking to ramp up and get more cases.
It would be wise to check with
the Department of Transportation and their statistics
and identify how many crashes they are,
what time of day do they occur,
what day do most crashes occur,
how severe are those crashes,
are they truck related, motorcycle related,
if they were on highways or within the city.
There's quite a few factors you could determine
to better position when you're gonna be running it.
Knowing this information is key
to creating the foundation for your strategy
and ensuring you have realistic expectations.
The second factor is to identify and analyze
who you're competing with online.
Ideally, perform the search from the geographic areas
you want to show up in,
and there are several location-based
Google search previews that can help you with this,
and take a look at the firms that show up,
and you may be surprised to see firms you don't even know
appearing ahead of you or in the paid areas
or in the map sections.
Now, once you identify the firms,
you can determine how predominately placed they are.
Do various searches, and if they're always at top,
they probably have a decent budget in place.
If they are also in the maps area
and have a lot of reviews that are,
for instance, over four stars,
they probably have a team or a strategy in place
and have been running it for some time.
This will give you the lay of the land
and help you determine who you will be competing with
for these cases.
Now it's time to determine what your differentiators are.
You need to think of what you do that translates value
to your clients and make this abundantly clear.
Perhaps it's your experience or your track record of success
or that you will take a call day or night
or that you're a certified expert.
There are many differentiators to choose from.
You have to determine which ones are most suited to yours.
For example, a smaller boutique firm
tends to be more versatile and usually more responsive
than larger firms.
So if you could call and get the attorney on the phone
with this boutique practice,
whereas the larger firms may have you speak
with a junior associate to qualify your case,
perhaps that's your differentiator,
and then this could be leveraged with your messaging.
So when a potential client reads your ad message,
it stands out even if you're not number one, two, or three.
If you want to compete for cases,
you must compete for position.
Two out of three people tend to click on an ad
when they're looking to hire an attorney.
So for example, someone looking for a DUI attorney near me
is clearly doing a search with a hiring intent.
You can't be way down the page hoping that potential client
will bypass seven or eight firms to find you.
People are in a hurry to find what they're looking for,
so positioning is vital.
Now, assuming you are positioned front and center
and ideally in front of the right people,
take a moment and put yourself in the shoes
of your potential client.
What messaging would interest them
and encourage them to click through?
What differentiators help you stand out?
How tailored is your messaging to what they're experiencing?
And messaging can make or break a campaign.
Now, poor messaging will have you
blend in with everyone else,
whereas great messaging will interest
the exact people you want to click through.
When I evaluate the ad messaging
that a law firm has up online,
I typically ask, does this message reflect
why I should hire you over everyone else?
There is usually a lot of improvement needed
with fine tuning the messaging
to truly put the firm's best foot forward.
A lot of law firms I meet with don't know
what they should spend to go after specific cases.
They look to us to evaluate
what the correct budget should be.
There are three most important factors
that we look at when we're determining this.
The value of the case to the firm,
that's the first one.
The second one is the competition for the case,
meaning does it make sense to go after this
from a profitability standpoint?
More specifically, if it costs, let's say,
$1,000 to acquire the case
and you're charging $1,500 for it,
it wouldn't make any sense to market for this online
'cause the return is not enough.
And finally, the campaign sustainability.
We never want to start a campaign
if you have to get lucky in the first few months
to make sure we have continued success.
As a rule of thumb, firms I meet with usually need to see
a minimum of a three times return
for any type of marketing investment to make sense.
Breaking even to get a case means you're working for free.
That's just absolutely unacceptable.
Your total monthly marketing budget will determine
the best online channels to acquire
the targeted cases you're going after.
This is one of the most important factors
your firm should be paying attention to.
Essentially, where is your money going,
and what's working?
You need to have a balance of many different channels
that will funnel the correct people to your firm.
These budgets need to be fluid
so you can change them as often as necessary
to ultimately maximize your return on investment.
The idea that you can set it and forget it is not smart,
yet so many firms do it.
For example, let's say one month Google is producing
the best cases at an acceptable cost for you firm,
but then, month two, competition increases,
thus changing the landscape,
and Google becomes way too expensive,
and it makes more sense to spend it in Facebook.
Your campaign must have this type of flexibility
to constantly position you to get the best types of returns.
The team responsible for the success of the strategy
must understand the business side of your practice
as well as the marketing,
along with the circumstances involved with the cases
your firm represents.
Here's a common occurrence.
Often in the agency the firm is working with
knows all about digital marketing,
but knows little to nothing
about the business of your law firm nor the law itself.
A good example would be when you find
personal injury websites that highlight
the fact that they accept credit cards,
which is completely inapplicable in that circumstance.
So you'll see, also, commonly done
with highly generic content on websites
that are designed by uninformed agencies,
and it's immediately clear that the messaging
is not gonna resonate.
So the question to ask yourself is how confident are you
in your agency's understanding of the business of law?
The final key is to leverage technology
to ensure you're working as efficiently
and intelligently as possible.
Tracking should provide the feedback on what to optimize.
This allows you to make informed decisions
based on prior and recent performance.
Another pitfall most firms encounter
are that there are tracking metrics
that don't provide true insight into the performance
of what matters most, which would be cases.
They don't have actionable data.
They're tracking things like traffic, visits,
sessions, clicks, bounce rate as the be all, end all,
and they're wondering why they're not getting more cases.
I've met with firms that boast things
and they say, Peter, we have 10,000 visitors a month.
We rank for the terms we think we should.
We blog daily.
We have some hundreds of Facebook followers, et cetera.
And I ask one question.
What technology in tracking do you have in place
to determine what is generating the cases you're getting?
They usually say we get a report once a month
and are trusting our agency to figure this out for us.
Well, that isn't good enough anymore.
Quantity leads to quality, which creates viability.
You must use the correct measures of success
to determine what to improve or get rid of.
The better your technology, the better you can pinpoint
the holes in your campaign and address them.
So let's recap these.
Legal marketing is expensive to do incorrectly,
and missing cases is another immeasurable loss of revenue.
Building a tailored strategy will impact your success online
and improve your bottom line and return on investment.
And knowing your market, your competition,
cases you're interested in, your investment,
which online channels are best for the cases you want,
if your plan has sustainability,
and if your team and technology are up to par
will truly help to maximize your web campaign.
Well, that concludes my first webinar installment
on legal marketing.
At this point, you should have a solid grasp
on what to do when putting together
your online marketing strategy,
and you can gather a lot of this information for yourself
and determine how good your existing agency is doing
to ensure you have every advantage possible.
As always, I would be more than happy to schedule time
to evaluate your campaign and shed light
on the opportunities available to you, as well.
Feel free to email me, once again, at Peter@Scorpion.co.
And thank you all for your time,
and I look forward to helping you succeed.