David Carter 0:00

Good afternoon. Thank you for coming to the solo and small firm, Section CLE. Today we're going to be talking about how to increase your online presence as a small firm or solo practitioner. Before we get started, though, Hillsborough County Bar associated Chacin wants to make you aware of the 15th annual pro bono River Run 20th annual judicial Food Festival. When is it you might ask it is Saturday, March 23 2020. For the race the 5k. If you want to sign up for the 5k, it starts at 10am. And there's a judicial Food Festival is at 10:30am. If you want to get any information about the race registration, food booths, any kind of sponsorship sponsorship opportunities for your your firm, visit, hills bar.com. So again, that's the pro bono River Run judicial Food Festival, all for a good cause. So today, is a speaker, who's going to be speaking to us about how to increase your online presence as law Smith. He's a fractional cmo and the president of taco Baba, which is a strategic advisory. He's a CMO of SMB strategic advisory and omni channel integrated marketing agency located in Tampa. He's got clients all over the world. He is as the son of an attorney, he understands kind of what, what law firms need to do to comply with ethics rules and things like that. So he understands the importance of not just, you know, throwing out anything to the wind as far as advertising, he graduated from Auburn University in 2006. And I will let law take it from you. Yep.

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 1:36

This light off whatever you think's better. Does anybody have a preference? You see better? off you can see better? Alright. Thanks, David, and everybody for the opportunity to do this. You know, and coming up with this deck, I've never done this before. So, you know, bear with me on this. And one of the, the accolades, or one of the things on my resume is I'm moonlighting career as a stand up comic. So if I use some new metaphors, that's why probably, but I probably won't be very funny with this presentation. Because I feel like this is very formal. And there's a lot of rules with the bar. So I, but coming up with this deck, I was trying to, there's no way I can kind of teach you all everything you need to know, in this amount of time, the online presence is vast. What I'm hoping to get get you all get out today is a few takeaways, some low hanging fruit, you can you can take care of executed on your own, but kind of some one on one knowledge of every part of online marketing and online reputation. And then, but really, I want to just kind of open it up to questions for most of this time. If that works out, is that cool that we're good. And so I I know y'all like seeing an agenda. So here's an agenda, you know, approach. And then we'll get into the online marketing categories of SEO, organic social media, paid social media, PPC ads, some kind of warnings, what to look out for, I get to sit up and come right in. You're right on time, you're all good. And then questions and few takeaways. And then if anybody wants this deck afterward, I can figure out how to get it to y'all because I have a bunch of appendix slides that we won't go over. But so approach, the biggest thing I want to kind of get you philosophically to kind of understand is macro to micro. A lot of people focus on tactics to go, we need to, we need to have a presence on Facebook, we need to, we need to do you know, we need ads everywhere. And it's like, before we even get to any of that you have to really go big to small and it's kind of what are your business goals? What's the revenue goals for the year is an easy one to kind of put out there? put a date on it, but put, you know, three months, six months, nine months, 12 months, three year five year? What are those revenue goals for your firm kind of thing? There's probably other business goals but that's that's an easy one everybody can do as a business owner. A resource on it, okay, if you're a small shop, you're, you're with, you're by yourself, you're solo firm. How much time do you have to dedicate to this what or is a time or money kind of thing that you're able to? Can you outsource it? What do you what do you have right within arm's reach of you. A lot of people skip these first two things. And it's not like you have to sit down write a business plan necessarily, but you got to know these things about your business first before you can kind of move forward into working on your online presence, your strategy and planning. You know, for most of y'all a strategy to If a simple strategy will be top of mind, reminding people that your firm's around is a huge, local hyperlocal marketing strategy, right? You see a lot of firms, I'll use Morgan Morgan as an example. I know they have German Shepherds, because they penetrate you to make sure you remember, they're around all the time. And they try to get into everywhere. Now they're at the high level, they're doing this as a market share to keep competition out. For smaller firm, you can work as they do with like realtors, or they call a sphere of influence. If you're your friends and family, you know, friends of those friends, acquaintances out and you kind of work from that, that center all the way out? You know, what's your network? Like? What's your firm's network? Like? That kind of thing? Your brand, this is kind of the most elastic term, the last decade in business, I feel like, you know, the brand is your logo, you know, it's just, it's more than that it's messaging is more important. Who are you as a firm? You know, why should I hire you? What's the advantage? Why, you know, I need those value props to know, like, why should anybody higher yields firm? Those kinds of things, that messaging that everybody on your team should have, like military like call back? You know, who are you? What do you do? Why are you better those things? target audiences, this, this is kind of an area I find very interesting. A lot of people think they know who their potential clients are, but never really sit down to break it down. It's like feeling versus actual. So, you know, if you're a personal injury firm, for example, you're trying to knit you know, people focus on auto accidents you're trying to focus on, how can we get them to know us before it happens? So it's more about the win of the personality, right? How do we how do we figure out how to target the audience that needs help, right after they got an accident. So that's the that's the puzzle to figure out, for example. Your inbound, that your inbound ready, you know, your website is functional, it works it the forums, get sent to your email, all those kinds of things, your phone systems work, you know, all the phone numbers listed online, that are out there for your firm, those kinds of things. Be prepared to be ready, as I say. Define your metrics and KPIs. So now we're drilling down a bit. So I want to know my cost per lead cost per acquisition, what does that look like? Well, let's look at I'll find an industry standard numbers for those numbers. They're out there you got to do a little bit of research but and it's it's gonna be different in every city or every state to but you could kind of figure out okay, my cost per leads $100 for qualified leads, you know, my cost per acquisition, you guys usually have a 90 to 95% close rate those whose Jimmy John's bags what's it called? My add was off the chain there for a minute. But you want to define metrics just like defining your business goals? Same thing now we're drilling down to the marketing strategy. What are those look like? What What's the spin going to look like? Campaign content creation. Okay, now you got those set? What's the campaign look like? You know, if you're a family law attorney, you know, maybe your angles like an amicable divorce as much as that is kind of like hope hope actually happens in in practice, but what what is your that goes back to your brand messaging, who are you have that shoot through your campaign, right? Project management, organize everything out, detail it out, you guys use Clio, or practice Panther or any of these practice management systems, they all have a, I think they all have a project management portion to them, you have to treat this as you know, something you have to pay attention to through firm. The beauty of marketing is that you could do you could schedule a lot ahead of time. You can get a lot you can, I mean, if you really wanted to, you can schedule your campaigns out for everything for the year in q1 If you wanted to. So tactical execution. This is more kind of what I was brought here to talk to you all about platforms and how to use them and then analyze and you have to look at the results. You got to create time in your schedule, maybe once a week to go okay, and we are really on the right path. And I know that's that's tough because a lot of y'all, your bandwidth is already stretched right? But you got to find 510 minutes skill, are we on the right track for what we're trying to do. And then continuous improvement. I, again, I have all these slides, they've got a lot of stuff on it, I'm going to try to break them down real quickly for you, Seo is basically being found the ability to be found online, right. So a lot of people are going to pitch you SEO services. That's one thing. But the ability to be found the the low hanging fruit of date your company on on Apple Maps, Google Maps, Bing Maps, yes, Bing, some people's laptops and devices default to Bing. And it might be it might skew to an older crowd as well. But, you know, find out what you need to be listed on Google My Business or Google business profile, I think it's called now, that's everybody should be on there. Everybody should have that. It should be filled out as much as possible. And I'll show you so I pull on pulling up an example of this is gonna sound like a Talladega Nights Ricky Bobby kind of quote. But number one in SEO is still number three, if this makes sense. So when you search for something, there's two ads in front of it in search. But the first thing, this is the highlighted part, I searched criminal law firm, for my place in wells wood. So this is what popped up for me.

To get as advanced to get as high ranking, it's, the best thing you can do is create content through your blog that is original, and do it on a repetitive basis. Now, there's a lot you're probably thinking, that's the last thing I want to do is write another write anything after doing it for clients, right? You guys are opinionated. That's why I love working with attorneys, you guys, you guys have opinions? You guys have your own thoughts on how things are going? It's like hanging out with comedians, honestly. Because there's no, I don't know how to feel about that. Everybody's got an angle on on any question you ask them. So you know, I would say, try to take that and run with it, and have it tangentially kind of make sense with what you're doing. You don't have to reinvent the wheel either. If you're doing blog posts, you can look at other other firms that do blog writing and posting, analyze what they're doing and put your own spin on it. So social media, so again, a lot of firms like we need to be on Twitter, and I'll go why. It's called x now, why are you saying Twitter? But it's, but like, that's, that's not where they're targeted audiences if you're a family law firm, right? That's probably not the best place for it. That's the data is not great. The, you know, because like, top 10% of the conversation dominates, or 10% of the people dominate 90% of the conversation there. It's very half and half not kind of system. Facebook's you know, as much as we don't want to miss it, Facebook still relevant. They've done a good job at making that the you have to sign in to Facebook to get to other apps. So every it's like Facebook's Like a bad hookup. You know, everybody's had one and no one wants to tell you about it. But they're all on their Instagram. You know, Pinterest is actually the best if you have a female targeted audience. Because 90% of what women pin to their board they buy. Now I know your service and not a product. But you gotta go you gotta go fishing where the fish all right. So I just pulled up, Morgan and Morgan and Morgan Morgan and Morgan Morgan. And, you know, those are, these are different examples of the same content pushed out. There's online schedule, there's scheduling apps like later that I use, or HootSuite buffer, there's a bunch of tools, you can schedule all your content ahead of time. You can do it within the apps too. Now organic social media, it's this is more of that reminding people y'all around, right. This content right here is gonna is a humble brag strategy. I call you know, look at how much we got this client kind of thing. That's great. Not it's a little gaudy that everybody wants to do that. But it's one of those things where they're reminding people how good they are. You might not read it 100% But your subconscious mind so. So paid social media versus Pay Per Click ads. I want to kind of make a real division here. Social media, usually you hear about something, and then pay per click search, you go with intent to look for it. So I'm on Pinterest, I see Jimmy Choo shoes over there, those are sweet. I'm gonna go over to Google and search if I can by itself. So that's the big, there's a big division between how these ads kind of function as, as their own category. So paid social media can be great, because the targeting can be really good, you have to go within the bar rules. So that gets a little tricky sometimes, but but if it's if it's just getting your content out to the people that already liked your page, or liked your profile, or whatever, that's, again, another way to use it, not actually just awareness. But you're not trying to close on clients right there. Or if you're a class action lawsuit kind of person, that might be a great medium for for you. Because I get a lot of those, your data has been corrupted by this company. And this law firm wants you to tell you about it that that is like a simple transaction right there. Here's Morgan Morgan, oh, you can look up all everybody's Facebook ads on their page, if you ever need to look at it, you go to the About section, and go to page transparency, you can see every ad that's out there. So if you need ideas for creative or frequency, or you know, when out whatever, you can analyze other firms that are posting on there. So this is example, I this is how I can see all 10 of the ads, they've done the last 10 This is just pulled this out as at least as an example. Call to Action, very specific, or they're targeting kind of thing. So So I want to get into I think this slide might be out over but I have. Alright, so I've This is the only thing that matters for marketing, return on investment. Right? That's, that's the number one metric you need to have. I'm putting x amount in. And if I'm y'all I quantify my time, you know, internally, because how much time am I spending to do this? I track that as best you can, and put $1 to it. Because that's an expense, your time is your commodity, right? You know, you're not selling legal products. No one in here is right. I don't even know what that would be. But, you know, you need to always think of it this effort as an ROI metric. Right? That's, that's the Holy Grail. That's all that matters. They're spending x Am I getting? I'm spending $1,000 In my getting 10,000 back, you know, what is that? What does that multiplier look like? Okay, so that was out of order. But But here's PPC ads. So I searched criminal law firm, in Rosewood, where I live. And this is what pops up. The first two are those Google screen, that's local service ads. That's something all of y'all can sign up for, you have to go through a verification process process takes about a week. But you can get listed to get calls that are, I'd say a lot more precise for what people are looking for. You know, and it says that Google screen, you know, right there. So they're, they're pumping they have, Google has their own products to push to. So they prioritize this over everything else in terms of advertising, that are more expensive. But you know, you can also tailor that if you get bummed calls, you can let them know, you can dispute it as they come in. And you don't have to get charged for that. So I recommend that for every law firm if you have the budget to do it. And then your normal PPC ads, the sponsored ads in text form. That's what pops up right there. There's gonna be two of them. Most of the time. Non PPC ads, you know, you can have those display image ads that pop up, those are fine. I would say if we're starting from square one, you don't need to mess with that too much. But you may want to look at other channels like Avvo has their own advertising system. You know, there's a couple tailored for law firms kind of directories like that, that have their own ecosystem of ads, that ABA is more expensive than Google. But people, the people go in there we're going with intent to find an attorney. So it makes sense as long as your ROI is always on top. So like I said, our lines most important metric and then here are my four holy metrics for marketing, cost per lead cost per acquisition. Session, average revenue of a new client and lifetime value, right? If you're a criminal attorney, your your former clients might be coming back around in a couple years. So your lifetime while your, your cost per lead cost per acquisition could be high, because there's a very saturated market, your lifetime value after you get that new client pays off in the long run. So you have to kind of think of all four of these, if you know these four numbers, you can figure everything else in your marketing and sales funnel. Everything else is deductive logic from there. Again, I'll send you all this deck, if you want. So I've just kind of looked up what the average cost per lead for personal injury, criminal defense, family law, business law, civil law, your CPA cost per acquisition, that's the sale, that's the new client.

Now, these numbers look pretty low to me. So, you know, I was trying to find numbers. But just as an example, you can find this information, you should have to do your own research. It's kind of like reading the news now. Like, I have to read the news. And then I have to go find the sources I got it from. And now I'm doing my own book report research to figure out if this story is legit. So when you're looking at research numbers like these, you know, try to find a few sources. That makes sense. And then again, it's going to be skewed to the area. Tampa is like one of the highest per capita legal marketing, metropolitan areas in the country. can't swing a dead cat without having an attorney here. But But like, in other places, not so much. They have restrictions on that, on a lot of that. So there's 1.3 million attorneys in the country, right? So you got to kind of figure out that the data is out there. I throw out these warnings. My footer is messed up on this slide. So ignore that. But anybody calling you to sell you on, hey, your website needs updating, or you need a Google Business Profile presence, you need SEO Services, anybody calling you i would have your spidey senses kind of kicking in. There's a lot of call centers that all they do is roll calls, they scrape business data, and they're just rolling calls to to their call sheet, and just trying to make you know, hundreds to 1000s dollars. So I would say this is an I don't know if I can't say don't I can't say just ignore them completely. But I'll say, you know, be a little kind of hesitant anybody pitching new services have a phone or email that you never emailed before, kind of thing. I wouldn't say try to be pragmatic over motional ally, you're busy. If you're if you're really small, firm, like you're under five employees or something, you know, like, it's tough to really you go on gut a lot of the time you go on intuition. But I would say this is more math based. And I know y'all hate math, usually. I'm a former D one mathlete as I like to tell you, but I, you know, this is way more math, it's not the it's not the days of madmen where you're sitting around looking at a creative in the morning for four hours. This is way more pointed, and an analysis and you can have the analytics to look it up. And then I would say, create time to create time, you got to find time to reschedule that, really make sure you do this for somebody, or it might be on the weekends, until you can kind of shoehorn it into your regular work. You know, that's kind of my advice to everybody. Make it a goal to not have to look at this stuff on the weekends, if you can. And I here's the approach again, I just want you all to think philosophically, big to small. I can't tell you how many times people do this the opposite way. And it doesn't work. They go I need you for PPC ads. And it's like, yeah, but you have no brand. Who are you? What do you know, you don't even know who you are as a brand. So like, you don't even know who your target audience should be. And back to the target audience thing. If you have previous clients, you could look at the data as a whole of your CRM or whatever your contact resource management app is. You could probably find, okay, this demographic, it seems to be the majority of my clients and previous maybe I should extrapolate that out and target that group. If that makes sense. Okay, But, and then now I'm gonna leave out the questions because I don't want to talk as much anymore. I told you I was gonna get zoom through. But do

Attendee 1 25:13

you see SEO? Importance or SEO itself changing in the future? Was AI? Is that affected in any way? Um,

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 25:21

so yeah, AI is kind of like, everyone's kind of frightened of it right? It's, it's the fear of the unknown. Seo. So Google owns 96% of organic search, which to me is a monopoly, it's very scary. Because they, if you get really down, if you give me a couple of beers, I'll go down the rabbit hole with you on it, you know, because they control a lot of what people see when they search, right. And that's a weird thing for communication. We've never had that we've never had one newspaper ever, you know, back in the day, we've never had one periodical that owns a lot of it. But I'd say, you know, Google has. So it's a loaded question. So SEO, I think will always be relevant, at least in the next 10 years. Let's say that. Because Google benefits from it, they want, they want you to create content, they want you to make content, which is why I was pushing blog posts as an easy thing y'all can do. You know, they want original content creators, because that creates more stuff to search on Google. So I don't think that will go away. The AI component of creating content, that's where it gets a little, we're right in the flux right now where it's a little tricky, because there's a lot of AI. There's content writers or content writers, then there's AI content, like procures where they basically pull other articles automatically redo it, and pop it on your site without you having to do anything that I notice being condemned by Google, the AI content writers, those are still good Jasper by word. Zodiac. These are all writers that can do it in your town, and in your, if that kind of teaching a little bit, but you can even get into, hey, I want to have a professional post that's this long, and mentions these key parts referencing xy and z, that is still considered original content for them.

Attendee 1 27:33

So to piggyback on the AI thing, there's been stories in the news about lawyers making like a motion with AI and AI made up a case site, and the lawyer gets disbarred or whatever. On the marketing side. As you've seen people use an AI and it's grabbing other people's marketing things. Maybe put the wrong law

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 27:53

firm in there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you start, like, like, Why have paralegals right? To cut you need, you need to check the stuff it does it for this AI era where it's like, it doesn't do it like the Jetsons, like we want it to, it's not just like, click a button it gets it gets the output you want, you know, it's you see it with the AI are they all kind of look in this weird tone, a very shiny and like two nights, you know, it's not great enough to be believable. There are a lot of AI writers, like if I if I was a intellectual property law firm, I'd be using AI a lot my ops for sure. Because it's pretty transactional. It's like a lot more process based kind of casework, really. But it's tough. As far as like creating content. I would play around with it. But again, you got to know what you want to talk about. You got to know what you want to put out there as firm. So I'm gonna go back to big to small, macro micro? Answer. I don't know. That's a tough question. Yeah. I mean, I could do a TED talk on it. I feel like I'm trying to I'm trying to keep it concise.

David Carter 29:12

Well, so along those same lines, like if, if you have somebody like Morgan and Morgan, whoever, who that that already has this gigantic library of blog posts, and they posting, let's say, three times a day, is there any way to possibly compete with

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 29:25

that? Well, yes. The one thing we didn't go over and it wasn't on the curriculum beforehand, was email marketing to, again, you have your own network of people. How many of how many people know that you have a firm, you know, in your network of friends and family? What about their friends of friends, right? How many people know you're an attorney and run your own firm? That's, that's always a good kind of look in the mirror kind of thing. You know, I look I and I, my family doesn't know what I deal at all. So I understand I've tried to explain it as a like a, as a little bit of a puzzle to go, how can I get my 76 year old dad to understand what I do for work? Because they're still pitching me to be a lawyer? I'm like, I'm 39 I think the sunset on that one. But you know, I think it's, it's a long game, the organic stuff, the long game, if you're gonna hire an SEO company, at best, you'll see it four to six months results. So you have to think of these tactics. They're not all right away. That's the long game. You almost have to feel like, the way I look at it. It's like writing a book almost like I'm doing it one page a week, kind of thing. Now, Morgan, Morgan probably doesn't post three blogs a day, because they would oversaturate and get decent advice advised that way. So there's a sweet spot of not doing too much, you know, but you know, they can review a case like the humblebrag. One they had, they can have a long blog post talking about what, what's publicly out there for that case. You know, those keywords are what people might search, it's very specific for a prospective client.

David Carter 31:18

So what are they looking for? Like, if you're gonna try to get on the first page on SEO? Like, what have you like, what are you looking to do? Are you looking to write one blog? Like, how do

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 31:26

you bet I want yeah, I'm trying to give everybody kind of, I don't want to overwhelm everybody, because this can be, this can be a lot. But I would say frequency wise, start with one blog a week, if you're really good three a week. But don't be y'all tend to have a perfectionist thing with a lot of a lot of these marketing aspects, you know, I get it, that's your job, we shouldn't be perfectionist, so that's fine. But in the beginning with this, it's it's mitigating risk, it's really like, it's better to get something out there, that's a, b, b minus, than the never get it out there to get that A plus content out there. That's the big mistake a lot of people make. You know, I would say, speak to the target audience you're trying to target. Right? If you're, you know, in a Spanish neighborhood, like I am, and you'd want your, your clients are mostly Spanish grandmas that drive CRVs. And rap floors, because that's all I see traffic around me is maybe speak to them about what you're doing, you know, and how you help someone, like marketing marketing one on one is that people want to see themselves reflected back, right? You know, you always see the before and after you focus on the after for the weight loss stuff. Because people want to go, oh, I want that. I want to do that. I want that after picture kind of thing. So think about that direction.

Speaker 1 33:04

Be a little more specific. Are there still algorithms with Facebook? And with it, I mean, I'm gonna let social media use an X. But I think a lot of people use Instagram, tick, tick tock like, are there? Are there algorithms that you need to post this many times a week, or you're really not really seen? Or you need to post these times a day or something like that? Yeah.

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 33:25

I would say in the beginning, just just throw spaghetti at the wall, right? Because you need a sample size of your own data. You can look up algorithmic things. But it's really tough to find because it changes the algorithm is. So for example, later, app.com, that's the social media management tool, I use the app, they have good resources on like, Hey, here's, here's what we know about the algorithms. Because that stuff so proprietary, they're not going to give it out, right? And so you really have to kind of treat it like, Alright, I'm going to, I look at it like a puzzle. I'm going to figure this out. But for now, you have probably everybody probably has a good baseline of like, okay, I'm just going to start pushing stuff out. And then then when you have a sample size of enough posts out there, you can look at your own analytics and go, Okay, more people responding when I do it on this time this time. I'm

Speaker 1 34:26

sorry, I'm done when it comes to this stuff. Does Facebook Give me those analytics? Yeah, I have to use something.

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 34:33

Yeah. Are they all all the channels have all that? Yeah. But I go back and forth. So I'll look at the analytics, what's going on over there. But also, if you use one of these social media manager apps, they have their own insights too, sometimes. So it's tough to find like a specific prac like a law firm. That's exercise. School in this area to compare it to, you know, like, it's hard to go one to one to find that algorithmic info. So you have to kind of use horse sense in a lot of ways. That's why analysis is a big part of this. The unanalyzed life is not worth living.

Attendee 3 35:17

My maybe too specific in terms of the Florida law, Florida Bar requirements. It I used to my understanding was if you like posted things on Facebook, or LinkedIn, where people actively wanted to hang out with you, then it was okay to post some general information articles. Yeah. Okay. But like sponsored, it seemed like that would be spotty

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 35:45

as well. There's a lot of nuance with that in the bar. So, you know, I try to review their roles, you know, as much as I can, you know, once a quarter at least, you know, because I always want to protect my client as well. Definitely. So, it's one of those things where, yes, you can target but I think what, in the general, and y'all could break this down? I could probably, but I would say generally, if you're scraping data, if you're buying email lists, buying, you know, data to target, that would be a big no, no, I mean, that's not cool. Within the platforms, they have their own terms about that. I would say, you know, reach like retargeting is an issue that some firms do and some don't. It, it's kind of in this weird gray area, right is retargeting. Someone goes to your site, user goes to your site, and now you see ads following you everywhere, on other platforms and stuff. Okay. You know, I have a lot of a lot of firms that don't want to do it, because they don't want to even necessarily have different

Speaker 1 36:57

rules with direct solicitation as opposed to an advertisement. And I think you're, you're treading in that.

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 37:04

I mean, you can make a case either way, I think. But I don't know. You guys don't mean.

Speaker 2 37:09

So the Florida Bar has a, I mean, I'll preface it with I think it's ridiculous. And we fear sounds like it's optional before we're trying to do business. And when you open up everything, I say 90% of what I see on LinkedIn, social media is in compliance. So you're good. You're competing against other people. So it's about trying to find what's consistent with what's consistent with like, your brand, where you are, how comfortable you are on what's a gray area, how comfortable you are with footfalls but the Florida Bar has some pretty extensive FAQs on social media where it breaks down, you know, because if you're paying for data of Hispanic women CRB, you could literally get all that and pump out ads to Hispanic women, definitely. And the bar treats it differently, ethically from other prior distillation. And, but from a whole spiel of just a post, there's like 40 pages of things. And like, We're smart attorneys, and I'm sitting there trying to figure this out. It's a bit ridiculous. There are like the rules themselves are in touch with the practicality of what the world is. I mean, like, even creep on my stuff, or whatever. And like, I found my comfort zone and edge of like, I'm not going to bury the Yeah, this is just my personal opinion sided bias for relationship. Like as a watermark and every picture every post or like, because for data so is it on the click down more portion of my about my firm? Yeah, I mean, like if the bar crucifies me for that everyone's getting disbarred.

Attendee 3 38:52

Yeah. My my little descriptive names with you know, contact your favorite estate planning.

Speaker 2 38:59

Yeah. And so I would read all those and I've found to like, yeah, as you guys probably already call the helpline, like, you don't ask the question to one answer to feel good and fine. Or you lead them going? So I'm reading this and it seems fair that I could do this because I've been seeing this Yeah, is that correct? And like they're moderately so like, from my plan? I had the FAQs I don't know like file no like spoke to Bob and for them all. Right, so like, but and then just from a practical like, who you're targeting whatever, but I say I'm just saying up like the fact that it's 40 pages to figure out like what push ads when I could open Instagram right now and get pumped ads from like, some blonde chick in Georgia who's like the criminal lawyer and some like bro from New York and none of them are barred here. Yeah. Like it's their,

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 39:54

their waste of money. They're not targeted correctly. They can't practice right. Yeah. Uh, but yeah, that I mean, that's really thank you

Speaker 2 40:04

for a lot of what they do is just do sleazy kind of referral deals inside like,

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 40:08

so that's another big warning to look out for. There's a lot of like lead generation services out there, right? That are gonna get you X amount of leads. Anybody that promises you, I'm gonna get you X amount of qualified leads and don't know your business. I'd say that's a big red flag. And a lot of y'all, not Y'all not this room, you guys are smart. I'm saying, attorneys as a whole, you know, you're busy. So you just go, oh, that's an easy fix. But when things are too good to be true, they usually are right. And so I appreciate that insight, though, you know, I would say it's really it has to be relative to what everybody else is doing. But you got to still look at what everybody else is doing first, to make sure you know, you're, you're on par. And the one thing I forgot to mention about your SEO question was I was talking about ongoing SEO aspects, reviews or big, you know, getting reviews, allow your practice management system, have that as an exit to your cases? Or at least an integration to an app that does it like bird eye, or a bunch of these, you know, the savvy one send an email that said, Would you review us yes or no? And if they say, No, it leads to like a comment box, or they they're getting out all that shit talking directly. And then it diverts them from actually doing it online. That's brilliant. Yeah. So there's like, you got to think psychology and a lot of this stuff, right? And it's, if they say, yes, you can lead them to your Google My Business or the ABA or whatever listed on. The other part with SEO is your website is huge. Your website needs the technical SEO aspects that can be you know, depending on how tech savvy are, that can be as easy as watching YouTube videos to make sure your website's up to up to snuff, or hiring an SEO company to do it. I would say your website is the hub, all the things we've been talking about are spokes. So your website is more important than any of this stuff. It's your salesmen while you sleep, it's usually the first thing people see that don't know you already, right? If they're hidden an ad, you're sending them to a landing page, don't can't have it mean, you might say your 24/7 Open phone lines. But realistically, people may not want to call in the middle of the night, looking for your services, or weird hours, right? So you have to make sure that's set up correctly. Because everything I talked about with these tactics, it's all to come back to the site to get a meeting with them to get a call. Right. That's really what you're trying to do. Any other questions? Any other? You got? A comment? So no, I was gonna say I was gonna actually let you just roll. You have inside I don't cuz you're in right. I'm detached. So I can I can look at it, you know, from a detached point of view, but I always find the experiential learning hearing from someone that's in

Speaker 2 43:21

Yeah, I mean, I'm, I have a unique marketing approach that I get that later but just barely group of, you can frame it with respect to solo and small firms. That's all of us here, or if it helps any more to fit like maybe transactional lawyers to do lawyers, but where do you see kind of the next phase and trends of you know, high ROI and waste activities the next 510 years when I give kind of a practice example that you know, 15 years ago, that you know, you would you know, the Florida bar you get some news article published out or you put on the website that was a big thing like those pre podcasts pre YouTube chant like there wasn't really that then it started to become a little bit more of okay, you know, there are some people that are doing a few things on not quite YouTube debt, but like maybe like little blurb clips or or there are podcasts but there's like four right and like to actually get on it you had to be authoritative, like there were forlorn podcasts and sort of scale and and you know, now people are getting so loose and loud with what they put out there that that I'm 90 so much flat wrong. So and we live in this add society were saying it's complicated doesn't sell, say if you want passive income, what you do. Oh, Concord advantage. Right. And so

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 44:56

right, that's the marketing one on one right, here's the solution right away. Right. So we're not going to tell you how how hard it is. Yeah. But I

Speaker 2 45:04

think that attack like I don't I just, you know, it's a game you're going to lose like I would never compete with Morgan Morgan with the same TV as it's just the 1000 100. You would I would compete on a different framework, like if your tennis or wrist injuries or whatever, like go to the squash courts, like go play, do lessons and go like, Be the guy there teach lessons like so?

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 45:29

Yeah, you're you're 100%. Correct. And actually, you kind of led me to where I was going to say, we're only talking about online, you should have these offline tactics as well. But I was brought here to do

Speaker 2 45:42

yes. Is that just put just limited to the online? Like, where do you see because I've been asked and that and even previously, you know, awards used to mean a thing. There's chambers, or there's whatever. Now it's your the top 40 under 40 or 30, under 30. And how should you pay for this? And yeah,

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 46:03

trophy, the trophy scam wins my favorite. Yeah, this $500 trophy.

Speaker 2 46:07

And I think that it's gotten at least more generally well known. So it's ever been out where everyone's like, I mean, I got nominated for like 12 BS awards. Numerous things I've never heard from and like, but yeah, right down the line, it's like, but to get a we need $2,000. So what do you see is the next trend when I know that? Like, like, again, my view of pumping out a lot more content, I think we're gonna see an exponential increase of garbage content out there with a lot of his algorithmic items when we're lawyers can't verify a hallucinated case and the legal pleading, do you think when they have their admin pumping out content with it, like it's going to turn to a warzone of just and even like LinkedIn, it used to be quality, informed posts and thoughts. And now it's degraded to what I view almost like what old Facebook was. So what So where do you see the future on online marketing? As you can say, I'm wrong on those thoughts? I'm not No, no,

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 47:14

no, you're that's just my thoughts. You know, your thoughts are definitely echoed. Right, that it's definitely, there's so much saturation, there's so many segments now, right? There's so many, you know, if you had, if you had a pickleball dad market, Reddit might be your best place to be hanging out with, right. It's one of those things where that's why I emphasize the website, you control your own narrative there, you're not, you're not succumb to algorithms on platforms. And then everything goes out from there. So you write a blog post, and then you repurpose that, as opposed on all those other channels. That's just a medium to get them back to you. You own your own messaging, your own opinion, through your website. And if you're talking about time of putting blog posts together, that's what I do, I use otter AI, and it gets my mumbly raspy voice and it will, it'll fix it over time, if you kind of edit the first few of them. I'll be in the car and just reel off a rant and they'll go okay, this, this will be good for a blog post later.

Speaker 2 48:25

And maybe a better way to frame like, a case example is, you know, speaking engagements like and, and it still is fairly true to the day like when you go like I tend to like the business law, ABA or Florida Bar section. Like they're very, very good attorneys, they're experienced, they say good stuff, most of them have good collateral materials and so like you can actually believe what's going on and some good dialogue. And online there are people like the Grant Cardone just lawyer style that has 100,000 More finances and we're in a weird world now like well which you get an invite to do you know that podcast and join speak on even though it's kind of conspiratorial rambling, you know, that or the bar like Where? Where do you see like, I guess why is it I see that eventually spiraling out and it will eventually burn itself to a point where no one can trust half of these.

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 49:23

Well,

Attendee 4 49:24

everyone's like, where the self published book era? Everyone's like, I've got a book I'm like, I couldn't write one today to buy one and I guess Oh,

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 49:31

yeah, I'm writing one just to say I wrote one Yeah, I'm just be like a wrote a book What's up, barely read now. But it's one of those things where I think this is this can get really existential kind of but it's it i You have to focus on who you are, as a brand or a firm and go out like that just make horses decisions. If you're deciding between two speaking engagements, right, podcast interview, and a speaking engagement. It goes, it all comes back to time with me. All right? Because some people, you know, it depends on your work life balance as well. Right? If you're a solo owner, and you have a family, is this something that's going to move the needle? Or not? Right? Is it more valuable to be with your family at this time, you know, to do this, or to work on your process, your operation side of a lot of things, so that it affords you time with the family later. So you're not working 8090 hour weeks like crazy, right? So it goes back to that approach of like, what do you want to do with your business? You got to know that first, right. When it comes down, when it comes down to making decisions like that simple cost benefit? Right? Okay. If they're even if they're even engagements, you know, the podcast is, it gets a lot of views, it'll be there forever, the speaking engagement, has the better audience. I would try to find like, I would go look at the podcast and go to former guests, maybe reach out to those former guests. Hey, Did this help you get the word out there? No, yes. Most people will probably answer you too. Or the student engagement? Is this something that is going to push us forward as a firm in one way or another, either credibility, and the real, and I would repurpose it, I'm driving this on video. I don't know if I'll do anything with it. But I possibly could use it to repurpose later. Because I don't wear suit often. And I did it for you all know. But it's one of those things where you just really have to a lot of this stuff is horses, and you remind me of one thing, the offline stuff, you know, be the mayor of your town, but make sure you're you're not going to events just to go to them to limp into it. Like a chamber of commerce meeting. Those are pretty bad. As far as networking, because the people that go to them, it's in and out. They're not always it's not consistent, right. And it's a lot of people that you don't have the time during the middle of the day to go these things. You know, I have a lawyer client that he doesn't do the lawyer lunches, he doesn't do the he's not friends with any attorney. He like hates attorneys. And he does really well. But he's that's his, that's how he, that's how he rolls. He's a weird guy. And he knows it. He does, but he doesn't find any benefit in it. He's like, I have friends that I don't need attorney friends, you know, kind of thing. Unless you refer cases back to each other. That's a big part of how you all bring in cases to it all depends. That's why it's like this is so nuanced. Like I could do a strategy for each one of y'all right about on whiteboard. But everyone's gonna be different. You know,

David Carter 52:50

what I was gonna say to his point, like, so basically, I do think things are headed in that direction where people are overloaded, and they think it's all BS. I still think they don't understand the awards are BS, but

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 53:00

we like badges. But we'd like those little

David Carter 53:04

badges on my website and stuff like that. Attend them like, hey, you know, my dad's been a trial attorney and millions and millions of dollars of products. He's raised like five on, you know, so what does it really mean? Nothing. But

Attendee 1 53:16

I do think like, we were in a space like

David Carter 53:19

20 years ago, where these big advertising firms cater to the people that didn't know the game. And now people are like, oh, oh, great. I get calls from people that would never have those firms anyway. So like, a lot of my clients would never have hired a big firm anyway. And you know, I'm competing against personal injury lawyers. So to me, I think that's why even more now than ever, and continuing Google reviews are the most important. And not like Facebook reviews, our reviews, all that stuff. Google reviews, like if you can get somebody to leave you wonder if you can believe Google, because and, and they people know when they're fake, you know. So like, you can like all my reviews are real. And when I have clients call me just off the movies, like they skip right past the ads. And they're looking for Google reviews, and they read mine. And they're like, these are like authentic people that were actually happy with you. And that's why I called you I hear that all the time. Because I do think it's going in that direction where people are like, sponsor no offers in Miami.

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 54:13

That's a great point. And he's been I personally, I know, he's been diligent about that. Over what a year and a half of just like, I'm gonna get everybody to try to give me a review, and try to get them at their happiest point,

David Carter 54:26

right? I go t shirts and cups and pens and stuff. Am I happy with this? Today's the day like leave your view because if you hit him up six months later, they don't like

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 54:35

it the best. The best tactic I can tell you is offline. My mentors push this to me and I fought it and he's 100% Correct. And he's a multimillionaire over and over and over. And he's a CEO of firms to set up to sell it comes in the CEO says sets him up to sell and he's been telling me for years and I finally was listening to him. He writes Happy birthday cards and writes and snail mails and send them. What do you get the mail? That's good, that you don't know is already coming. And that's relationship marketing is the gross business term for this. If anything, for me personally, it just a little bit of gratitude, to think about that person and send it to him. And longterm now be the best thing. Because that that shows you're thinking about them and you took 10 minutes out of your day. You can write one of these minutes, send them out, because everyone goes, I don't have time for that. It's like, he takes an egg beater clock winds it up makes you sit there for 10 minutes in silence.

Attendee 2 55:43

This might sound kind of cheesy, but I keep stationary in my car, and stoplights. I

Attendee 5 55:48

can do that. Yeah, I mean, however, I write handwritten letters to you all the time. I get a lot of like, good feedback from that.

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 55:55

I write thank you cards and handwritten Happy birthday cards. And I have the time for it. Everybody does.

Attendee 3 56:02

You know I do handwritten thank you notes. Girls.

Law Smith Comedian Fractional CMO 56:05

Happy birthday coming out of nowhere though. It's like yeah, oh, man, this person really gives a shit about me. So I appreciate you all. This is a fun exercise for me. And because it's one o'clock, right. All right.