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[Music] welcome to the Josh Durban show because law school didn't teach business hi everybody Josh gurbin here and welcome to episode 8 of the Josh gurbin show this is the show where we talk about how to be a better business person I'm just such a huge believer that if lawyers spent a little bit more time focusing on the business side of our profession we would all have much more fulfilled legal careers so today I want to talk to you about digital marketing in other words how do you get clients from just having a digital online presence in today's world acquiring clients through the web is just critical the vast majority of law firms have already started doing this but could be doing a much better job and whether you're just starting out or running an existing practice there's a lot that can be done to acquire clients through the internet when I started my practice in 2008 I had zero clients and the only way that I got the practice off the ground was through acquiring clients through digital marketing this was mainly pay-per-click and SEO at the time social media wasn't as big there wasn't other platforms that you could use to try to acquire clients so it was solely through pay-per-click and SEO and over the years not much has changed sure I have networked a little bit better and I have people that refer me business but the vast majority of new clients still come in through these efforts eleven years later so there are really four main pillars to a digital marketing effort in today's world the first is pay-per-click or otherwise Google Adwords the second search engine optimization or SEO the third would be social media and the fourth would be places like up Council or places that can refer you work because you have a profile on their website so the very first place you need to start with any digital marketing effort is going to be pay-per-click marketing and this is for a couple of reasons the most important is that it's going to help you define your keyword strategy and what this means you need to find keywords that will convert when people search for them for your law practice so for example when I started out keywords like trademark registration file a trademark how do I obtain a trademark all these different things trademark attorney trademark lawyer all these different keywords could be bought on Google and send traffic to my website and what pay per click advertising is really good at doing is showing you which keywords convert better than others so if somebody was searching for how do I obtain a trademark where somebody else just searched for trademark registration and those people came to my website I could see who converted more often was the information seeker on how do I obtain a trademark somebody that converted not all the time was someone that was looking for a more specific thing like trademark registration did they convert pretty well yes and so what you can end up doing is you take a look at all the different keywords you can think of and research determine which ones are converting better and then that will eventually lead to where you focus your SEO efforts but not to get ahead of ourselves here let's focus on pay-per-click a little bit longer pay-per-click is the easiest and most instantaneous way to obtain clients online and this is because on day one you can become the number one listing on Google for any particular keyword if you're willing to pay for it but you have to be careful because while you can pay to be very high in a Google search you can also burn through a ton of cash because you're gonna pay maybe twenty thirty dollars a click for highly competitive keywords and you don't just want people clicking and spending twenty or thirty dollars of your hard-earned money without some kind of science behind it without understanding where those people are going on your website what they're doing when they hit your website and being able to then handle the lead that may be generated in an effective manner so when you're starting your pay-per-click marketing efforts here are some simple steps to follow to avoid overspending and trying to diagnose what is going to work for you or what is not the very first thing you have to is your website now I have a whole other video on how to create a website for a law firm but when you're talking about pay-per-click if you're going to pay for someone to come to a very specific page on your website it needs to look nice it needs to have call-to-actions meaning how are they going to get in touch with you it needs to be inviting it needs to provide information so really think about the page that somebody's gonna hit after they click on one of your ads so for example if I have an ad that's running on the keyword for trademark attorney when they come to whatever page I direct that ad to that ad should talk about a trademark attorney most likely myself and what I can do for them or what I've done in the past and provide some information about trademarks in general and have an easy way for them to get in touch with me not only that but the website needs to look nice and professional so when somebody hits the page they don't just bounce right off of it and go back to Google that would be called a bounce so if somebody clicks your ad and comes to the website we want to have things that are gonna capture them and keep them there as long as possible part of the reason here is that Google is going to track how long this visitor stays on your website and if they don't stay for very long they're gonna charge you even more to come up higher in the pay-per-click listings so have a very engaging website have a lot of good information we're talking videos pictures spend some money on the page or pages that you're going to direct your traffic to because ultimately if you have very little they're not much there you're gonna spend a ton of money to generate traffic and none of it's going to convert to a lead the other piece of infrastructure you need to have in place is how you're going to handle a lead that comes in through your website so again we can send the traffic to your website we can have a beautiful website it could generate the lead but how are you going to convert that lead to a client and that means that somebody has to be available to answer the phone and somebody has to be available to answer a contact form and if you want to be really high-tech about it you can have an online chat function for your website that somebody is monitoring and answering questions on it the most important thing to know is that your prospective clients are not going to care if you don't answer the phone or get back to them quickly because there's five other lawyers that will so if somebody calls the law firm you need to have somebody be able to answer the phone this could be an internal person or you can use a service like call Ruby we've used over the years to answer the phone live and make sure you capture the lead make sure you find out why the person's calling what their number is what time you can lawyer could get back to them and if you're just starting out you need to answer the phone yourself you know 2008 2009 2010 when I was starting I answered the phone when it rang now is it possible to get every call no but that I get 80 or 90 percent of them you bet because I knew every time that someone called I was spending money to get them to call me and I wanted to have the best chance to convert that lead and make my money matter so once you've thought about your infrastructure you've got the website and you've got how you're gonna handle leads and get back to them really quickly in place again whether that's internal whether it's hiring a service just having a whole plan in place the next thing you have to think about is your ads with Google AdWords you're going to look at not only keyword selection but then the creative on the ad what words are you going to use what offer are you going to provide and in today's world Google has all these little ins & outs you can have a sub like call-to-action buttons on the ad you could put phone numbers addresses all these different things to help your ads stand out and you need to learn about all these things I could spend an hour on a video just going through all the little ins and outs of how to set up an ad on Google AdWords that's not what I'm here to do today but what I can tell you is that if you're going to use Google AdWords you need to spend the time to learn it and this could be buying books watching tutorials online just spend a day at least a day watching and reading and learning and when you go to start experimenting make sure you understand you don't know anything yet right so if you just assume you've watched everything and now you know when you get in and actually do it you're gonna find it's totally different so don't spend five hundred dollars and one day start with small spends and see what to the ads see how the ads are performing see what happens to the traffic that they're generating but definitely definitely educate yourself because it's going to be very expensive once you turn the switch on and you don't want to be throwing money down the drain the other thing you can consider in AdWords is their services and there's agencies that will help you develop AdWords accounts and will help you write ads and pick keywords and all these kinds of things the suggestion I have to you is that none of these agencies even if they claim to be working with law firms really know as well as you do how your practice works and I can tell you that as someone that learned Google AdWords and got dangerously good at it any agency that I brought in to try to manage it always ended up causing all sorts of problems my spend would go through the roof and my conversions would go down because nobody's gonna watch it and take care of it like you will especially when you're paying ten fifteen twenty dollars a click you need to be on it so my strong suggestion is when it comes to AdWords you know how to handle this yourself or somebody internally is really good at it that understands your law practice and can monitor it on a daily basis otherwise you're gonna spend thousands of dollars a month to have somebody else manage it and you're not going to get as good results as opposed to if you knew what you were really doing so hope you found this sort of primer on pay-per-click advertising helpful it is hands-down the most effective way to get your phone to ring in the law firm and that's because when somebody is coming to Google and running a search to solve a problem and your ad comes up they're very likely at a stage where they're looking to hire somebody so what we'll talk about with social media in a moment is you can't direct and add to someone on social media that's actively looking for your product or service right but with Google AdWords or if I matter Bing or Yahoo although they just don't get as much traffic you can so if somebody's online looking for a trademark attorney and I can serve an ad while they're doing that there's a very high probability that if my ad is effective my website is effective my offer is effective they're going to give us a call and then I have an opportunity to close elite the biggest problem with pay-per-click that you will find when you get into it is that the cost continuously goes up but more and more competitors come into the marketplace in 2008 I was probably one of three trademark attorneys that were heavily focused on Adwords and there was three positions at the top of Google for the ads very convenient in the sense that we all could you could tell somebody would bid a little bit more one day and jump in top of the other person but it was costing like two or three dollars a click for some of the major keywords that we needed to hit so it allowed me to deliver the services and a very effective fee because my advertising was costing let's say two or three thousand a month and that could generate anywhere between ten twenty thousand dollars a month in sales so you had the margin there to make it work now in today's world those same keywords could cost fifteen or twenty dollars so you're talking about the allison's a percent increase in fees from Google in order to be able to run the same campaign I ran in 2008 to the campaign I can run today but I'm not running the same campaign I ran to in 2008 today for that particular purpose but also because of our next pillar which is SEO or search engine optimization and what SEO is is it's your best defense against the rising rate of Adwords if you can do it right but SEO is far from the instantaneous results that AdWords are it can take months and most likely years to get effective results in 2009 about a year after I have my practice I started investing in an SEO plan I spent about $3,000 to $5,000 a month depending on where we were and it took at least a year and a half to two years to get to a place where our website was ranking high enough and generating traffic that was producing business so I had to invest fifty sixty thousand dollars and in today's world probably would have to be a lot more to start seeing the return now here's the kicker though is it's not like pay-per-click where I spend a dollar and it goes away right I get to click and then it's an end of the transaction with SEO if you're doing it right you're going to be consistently there so all the investment adds up over time so if you look at now the hundreds of thousands of dollars that we've invested in SEO over the years every single day that's producing upwards of a dozen leads for our law firm so that investment is we're just reaping the rewards of it at this point and it's going to be very difficult for someone to catch us because we've been doing it for ten years so if you're gonna start today a trademark law firm for you to overtake me in their rankings it's going to be very very difficult because of how long and how hard we've been working on it and Google doesn't reward somebody that just comes in and throws a lot of SEO whether it be links or content all these other things matters how long you've been there how natural you've built things so it is not possible to SEO it's something you need to invest in for the long run and you need to have a budget for it so whether it's a thousand dollars a month two three this is where an agency is helpful okay I know I just railed against agencies when it came to AdWords but when it comes to your SEO you need to probably outsource that unless you are a super technical person there's so much that goes into it you need to outsource it okay and I'm gonna make a whole other video on SEO for law firms because there's a lot that goes into it but the thing I will mention here is that you must hire someone you probably need to spend a minimum of three thousand dollars a month to have an effective campaign and you need to work with an agency that's not going to give you the runaround and say that links don't matter links have been very hard to build lately and that's a huge part of SEO and a lot of agencies say oh just develop the content and you'll naturally get links no you need to find an agency it knows how to build links that is the most critical thing you can ask somebody when you're hiring them that's just my tip for today do a whole other video on more intricacies with SEO later but definitely hire someone and hire someone that's competent in link building in addition to helping you create content for your website and just remember with SEO it's a long-term investment you must be patient it is literally going to take years to have the rewards come in it's also why you need to be educated and know if the agency you've hired or the people you're working with know what they're doing because if they're headed in the wrong direction you may not know for a year right you may not you may take it a year before you realize oh wait none of that was working so you need to understand what they should be doing again do your research do your homework read up about this learn about it become proficient in the language of the profession of SEO so that when you talk to your SEO professional and you're hiring someone and you're looking at what they're gonna do and how much they're gonna charge you for it that you know what you're getting and you know it's going in the right direction but constantly monitor them constantly make sure that you're checking in at the end of the day we only get what we inspect and not what we expect okay so when you hire an outside agency like this you really have to be on them every month make sure you know what's going on what links are getting built what content is getting created and that investment in the long run should reap significant rewards now the third pillar want to talk about a social media you know social media is kind of the hot and sexy thing these days you know let's get on Facebook Instagram LinkedIn yeah that's all great I will tell you this the advertising dollars you will spend as a law firm on Facebook or LinkedIn it's going to be very hard to match the effectiveness of the advertising dollars you're going to spend on Google pay-per-click and that's again just because the fact when you go on Google you can direct an ad to someone that has a particular need in a particular moment and it's a much different ballgame in social media now I think social media is most effective for local law firms because what you can do is you can own the territory in other words you can create a video about wills trust in the States you can create a video about your criminal defense practice about your personal injury practice about your local corporate practice and things you can do and you can confine the social media ads to a very specific geographic area and to the very specific demographics that you'd like to attract to your to your website or to your practice and when doing on a very local level and doing it daily what happens is you start to build brand awareness and someone will say oh yeah if I ever have this need I know who to call right or somebody that's oh I need to make a will I never got around to it Caeser add 15 or 20 times on Facebook may ultimately finally call you or may have a something happen in their family and they need a family lawyer right or they have you know somebody passes and they need some help with an estate and they've seen your ad over and over again they're going to then probably give you a call but that type of brand awareness is something that builds over time something that's pretty expensive to do and doesn't typically lead to instantaneous results the way that paperclip does so I highly recommend that you're on social media and you have a presence organically that you're you know your law firm has pages on Facebook on LinkedIn on Instagram on any other platform that you think might be helpful for your particular practice and be posting content be active try to acquire followers and things like this and mess around with the paid advertising the hardest thing with paid advertising on social media is the creative in other words you need to have something that's engaging right on on on Google pay-per-click we can you know do a text ad that's all it is is coming up with fun text which is hard enough but on Facebook and on LinkedIn you need to have video or you need to have pictures you have something that's very engaging and that kind of contents very hard to create so if you're good at it you can probably very well exceed on those platforms you can hire an agency to help you again but that's going to be a again a longer-term investment in brand building around the community than it is going to be instantaneous calls to your law firm something to experiment on every law firm level but will not be for everybody so the final pillar here are these sites like up Council and now even that allow you to go on and create a profile and basically bid on work that people you know come to that platform and try to find an attorney I'm gonna be really honest with you here I do not think you should use these platforms I think it just means you're being lazy and the reason I say that is because it's really easy to go create a profile and start to try to bid on work that's coming in through a website but a couple of things one you're gonna be bidding against other lawyers and it's just gonna drive down what you're gonna be able to charge and you need to set your rates if you're a good lawyer people should come to you because you're a good lawyer not because you're a hundred dollars cheaper than the other guy but on these websites you're gonna find that it's a race to the bottom on pricing the other thing that you have to consider is that now you have a middleman between you and the client that's a horrible place to be I have Amazon sellers I liken this to Amazon because we have Amazon sellers that will sell millions of dollars of merchandise okay they'll be moving millions and all of a sudden Amazon makes a change or a competitor comes along and they go from moving millions to thousands and they freak out and I get calls oh my god somebody's doing this or that or Amazon's changes how can they do that that must be against the law right No Amazon owns the platform you're playing in their sandbox if you want to plan your own sandbox and set your own rules make your own sandbox don't play in somebody else's but if you're gonna go to Amazon you're gonna ride and fall with what happens there okay so you can go to one of these websites and you can start to get a ton of clients right and things are going really well oh my gosh this is a great but then they change something and that all goes away so if you're going to use it I'm gonna use an up counsel whatever it is to generate referrals to your law firm use it sparingly make sure it's no bigger than 10 or 20% of your practice because if you're ultimately playing in someone else's sandbox they can pull it out from under you at any time and I mean look that's true about SEO too you know you could work really hard on SEO Google can make an algorithm changing there goes all your listings okay that's happened to us you know we've had years where we've gone down and come back up in the rankings and things like that but that's reason you can't just rely on any one form of advertising but especially don't rely on a form of advertising where somebody's between you and the client don't be lazy about there's so many ways that you can digitally market your law firm that if somebody goes online whether they're on Facebook Linkedin Google being wherever they are they can find you and you can do it by just learning about these different techniques and executing on them so I hope you enjoyed today's primer on digital marketing again we could probably make a video on each one of these things and we'll at some point but I wanted to give an overarching view of what the digital marketing place looks like now let's try to get as discussion started so we can share our experiences and see how accurate my experiences have been compared to you and your law firm and help in the general community here figure out the best place to start from them so here's today's discussion question what has been the single best thing you've done from a digital marketing perspective and what is your area of practice so for example if you're a family lawyer and you find social media has been highly effective let us know if you're a attorney that does general corporate work and you find that AdWords has been the most effective let us know so please just drop me an email Josh at Josh gurbin calm or you can just leave a comment on the YouTube page find us on Instagram Facebook Linkedin leave your feedback there just whatever you prefer to leave your feedback all those places we accept it and I'll if the questions if I get enough questions together will either answer them on social media or we'll even make a video that goes through connect share and everybody's experiences so thank you so so much for joining us today if you have any show topics that you would like to see please again my email address Josh at Josh gurbin calm send them to me I'm always looking for new show topics any comments suggestions all that kind of stuff please send it my way and if you haven't yet go to the YouTube page and subscribe to our YouTube channel tons of content there or go to iTunes subscribe to the podcast you the podcast is the same as the video we just you know cut the audio and make the podcast so you can listen to it watch it however you like to consume our content that would be fantastic and please please please always leave a rating or review tremendously helpful so thank you again and I'll see you at the next show you [Music]