Clienting: Digital Legal Marketing

For this episode, Kelly is joined by Raif Palmer, an Illinois Family Law Attorney, to dive deep on client experience and how to streamline, improve, and incorporate technology in a mindful way. 

Raiford Palmer is a shareholder in a 12 attorney divorce and family law firm, Sullivan Taylor, Gumina and Palmer, P.C. (now d/b/a STG Divorce Law).  The firm serves clients in the Chicagoland area. He has a passion for client service and law firm management, and truly enjoys working with the team at the firm to help clients improve their lives and those of their families. When not working, Raif enjoys wall climbing, skiing, surfing, and paintball with his wife (and law partner) Juli and their children.

Face-to-Face > Email, Text, Phone in Client Experience

Client Development- sharing files, Slack & private channels for client communication, using Clio & Clio Grow, has lots of referral business but they also do technology and marketing- want to grow and not just stay in neutral, resistant to change and how that affects the practice.

The practice of law and being a good lawyer is table stakes- it’s the rest of this stuff that makes all the difference.

Rebranding your firm- how to carefully do this and make sure your clients aren’t confused. Work with a branding expert and make the changes slowly over a short period of time, transitioning your brand more than full rebranding.

How being resistant to change is holding you, your law firm, and your clients back from better outcomes.

How to add something new? Experiment on a small scale, try limited options or have just one lawyer try the new technology and see how it works before you roll out to everyone in the firm.

Humanizing your firm: Read your reviews and know what people are saying about you and your law firm online.

 Note writing site: www.handwrytten.com

Gyi and Kelly dig into the Clio Trends report and break down the pieces of the study. They also have some constructive criticism and suggestions for improvements Clio can make for next year's report. 

We covered these sections:

• Referrals:
  • In 2019's report, 59% of clients sought a referral from someone they know or have been in contact with, but 57% searched on their own through some other means—and 16% did both. Compared to 2017's report, which showed that 62% of clients sought a referral from someone they know and only 37% used a search engine.
• What do clients want in a lawyer?
• Millennials & Lawyers
• Shopping For a Lawyer
• What do clients want for Client Experience?
• Responsiveness

Delisi Friday- Marketing Director at Cowen | Rodriguez | Peacock

What is it like to be an in-house marketer at a law firm?

How does the law firm get clients?

How do you avoid "the-all-things-to all people"- the idea that I have to be an expert at everything" scenario?

Advice for people hiring an in-house marketer?

• Delisi manages all of the firm's marketing and business development initiatives. Incorporating marketing and the client development process makes sure their potential and current clients have a seamless experience, and that expectations set in marketing are met in the office. 
• Off The Record- a monthly magazine exclusively for attorneys,
• Trial Lawyer Nation- a legal podcast for attorneys in over 70 countries, 
• Business development;
  • Nurturing of referral attorney relationships, 
    • utilizing the corporate suite at the AT&T Center and,
    • planning CLE seminars for attorneys. 

• Travis Patterson is the Managing Partner of Patterson Law Group – a family-owned plaintiff’s personal injury practice in Fort Worth, Texas. Travis is extremely fortunate to be law partners with his beautiful wife Anna Patterson and his supportive father, Mike Patterson, who started the firm in 1995. When not working with his clients or on the practice, Travis can be seen in endless pursuit of his and Anna’s two young sons – Hayes and Jack – and two goldendoodles – Graham and Graford.

Topics: 

• Marketing overview- what is your law firm doing to get clients? 
• Where are clients in their lives when they do legal outreach? What are your client's expectations upon contacting you?
• "Inside Out Marketing." Starting from the inside of your firm (current clients) and work your way out (future clients). 
  • What does your office look like? 
  • Create a client experience to set the tone for your clients:
    • What expectations are you setting when you answer the phone and they enter your office?
  • Reviews that support referrals 
  • Proactive Communication
  • Show up as a "human" for your clients.
• Diversifying your marketing: SEO, Videos, Paid Facebook (retargeting), Referral sources, etc.
  • Where you are marketing must match your expected outcome and where clients are in the sales funnel.
  • Retargeting is an important element of online marketing.
• For Lawyers section on your website- is that working well?
• Website within a website: Secondary/Spanish website
• Erin Gerstenzang article about being nice to your clients. 

Gyi and Kelly took a break from recording in August and they're super excited to be back, talking tech tools for internet marketing!

When it comes to marketing tools, make sure that you understand how to use them and that you are getting added ROI by using the tool.

Tools for PPC - Make sure to have tools for Speed, Mobile, and A/B testing.

• Unbounce - landing pages
• Optimizely for landing page testing
• Keyword research tools
  • Answer The Public
  • Clearscope

Tools for SEO

• Ask clients or non-lawyers how they would describe the searches they would do to get help for that issue.
• Ahrefs
• Keyword Planner
• Google Search Console- check the impression data
• SEMRush
• Google Analytics

Tracking Tools

• Whitespark
• Brightlocal

Tools for Everything Else

• Automation & social media planning tools:
  • Meet Edgar,
  • Sendible,
  • Hootsuite
  • Buffer
  • Later
  • Sprout- more expensive but has more options for larger firms
  • Mention
• Social Media Ads:
  • AdEspresso
• Image tools: 
  • Biteable, Canva, Ripple, Over, Clipomatic for story captions.
• Reviews:
  • GatherUp
  • Podium
• Email Tools:
  • MailChimp
    • Facebook & Instagram Ads 
    • Automation

On this episode of Clienting, Gyi and Kelly answer former guest Rob Schenk's questions on journalist outreach, HARO, and conferences.

Outreach

• The first rule of journalist outreach- you have to have a story!
• When doing outreach, the creative aspect is super important- don't make a journalist have to work for the story, give it to them.
• Journalists are people too- they want to know that you have more to offer than "I'm a lawyer and have things to say." Engage with them over time, "I'm here to help you cover this issue."
• Demonstrate expertise by showcasing examples from your experience. 
• Have a few outreach templates for this, which you can easily find in a Google search. Search for "PR Journalist Outreach Tools"
• Twitter: Search for subjects and people in your geographic area. 
• Focus on local reporters that cover stories related to your practice area and make sure they include your law firm website and/or your name. 
• Go where your audience is- if your audience is local, stick to local or industry-specific. 
• HARO - Help A Reporter Out, is a network for reporters and sources to find one another. You can register yourself as an expert and seek out the source requests. 
• Think about building a landing page for your lawyer outreach and speaking bio. You could include links to articles and quotes from articles here that you may not always want to, or be able to, include on your law firm website.
• Make sure to include the source material, your quote, your links, and everything needed for the article in your outreach. 
• Use Mention and Google Alerts to keep track of links and mentions where they may not link to you. Many sites now have a no-link policy.

Conference Advice 

What matters? The format, the speakers, and you. Are you participating? Who are the speakers? What are the topics? What is the format? Workshops allow you more engagement with the experts, so if you want to dive in, focus on those. 

• Legal Conferences:
  • ABA Techshow - this year will include a Marketing Technology track
  • AAJ - Their mid-year (Winter) conference includes a marketing track
  • National Trial Lawyers Summit
  • Crisp Gamechanger conference
  • Clio
  • PILMMA 
  • LabCon - Lawyerist
• Marketing Conferences: Get outside of legal if you really want to learn marketing. You only get a legal perspective from a legal marketing conference.
  • BEDLAM
  • MozCon
  • Ungagged
  • Inbound
  • Brighton SEO
  • Searchlove
  • State of Search - DFW SEM
  • PubCon
  • Engage - PDX SEM

If you want to learn something, go on the internet. If you also want to meet people, have more engagement, create a referral network- go to a conference.

Ben Sessions joins Kelly Street this week to discuss all things Technical SEO, Local SEO, and Facebook Advertising. 

Ben (The Sessions Law Firm) is an Atlanta-based Criminal Defense attorney who truly enjoys learning and doing great online marketing for his law firm and sees results in clients & cases. 

What is Ben doing for his marketing? 

• Multiple offices; Ben has 3 offices and considers how his local search will be affected by the office location. He avoids coworking spaces for this reason but we do talk about ways to overcome this.
• Technical SEO; This is looking at the backend of your site, instead of focusing on the most beautiful website. 
• Utilize link tracking, like Moz, SEMRush, Ahrefs. This will help you keep track of your links online.
• Learn SEO basics like title tags, and more. This won't take a lot of time and will help you in the long run.
• Choose your website host carefully. Ben chose a proprietary platform, which he now regrets because he feels locked in and isn't getting as much SEO benefit out of his website
• Memberships = Links. For bar associations or any other membership site, capture those links to your profile. This may be the biggest benefit to your membership. 
• Pay attention to your analytics. Head over to your Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools accounts, check them regularly and earn the basics for both of these.
• Google My Business! We talk a lot about this but GMB is a great, easy, and free tool that every law firm can easily maximize. 
  • Ben, when it comes to marketing changes & updates: "Do not let that uncertainty make you become stationary... you have to engage in this [marketing]."
• Referrals myth-busting! Ben supposes that referrals are not the main stream of legal clients in 2019.
• Make videos. Ben suggests starting on YouTube before posting to social media because you will most likely not get very much traffic but you will get experience. Also- don't just publish on YouTube.
  • One key takeaway here- experiment! 
  • Comments are actually good for your engagement metrics, so don't be afraid of them, even the negative ones!
• Reviews- Ben doesn't pay for reviews but he does pay attention to anywhere he gets them. 
  • Ben "You may not have time to pay attention to reviews now but somewhere down the line, you will need to and it might be too late."
  • Concerned about a potential client? See if they're leaving negative reviews online for other businesses and beware, especially if you are a lower volume law firm. 
• Paid Social & PPC - Ben has not had great luck managing his own PPC in the past but has found great success with paid Facebook in the short while he has used this method. Ben suggests posting videos and promoting them for engagement.
• Use call tracking and UTM codes to track your marketing efforts!
• Marketing is not set it and forget it!

Melissa Emery is the owner of Emery Law Office in Louisville, KY. She has built a successful practice out of standing up for the little guy, which is fitting because her story is one of defying the odds at every turn.

When starting her own firm a few years ago, Melissa had her team call her former clients to update their address and information. This gave them an ‘in’ to reconnect and get referrals and permission to market to them via newsletter or email.

Understanding your clients- Melissa knew from her intake that most of her clients don’t use email but they do use Facebook. She found this out by asking if they could email accident photos to her and they didn’t know their emails but they did have one because they had to in order to create a Facebook account.

Offline Marketing

• Monthly Newsletter - mailer, goes out to past & current clients, referral sources, other lawyers, personal network https://referrals.thenewsletterpro.com/l/MELISSAEMERY/
  • Not focused on law, more of a personal approach
• Phone call check-ins; her great staff helps with this, based on policies and procedures
• Birthday cards; Derby cards

Online Marketing: 

• Videos: Quality videos on your website are great for a one-off, but you can do simpler videos in your marketing. On Instagram stories, type out your audio because people often listen with the sound off.
• Reviews: Learned the hard way that if you get too many reviews in a short period of time, Google will start filtering those reviews. Create a review curation process and teach your staff.

Gyi Tsakalakis has a lot of interests but links are in the top 5. Kelly likes links too but isn't quoted like Gyi is. 

Download our Link-Building Whitepaper!

"meh, links" - The Origin Story

It's great to have structured data, a fast website, and other SEO factors but Gyi proposes that link-building is the number one SEO tool to move the needle on ranking. 

Challenge: If you have pages that are ranking without links, send them our way! 

Link-Building Expertise:

• Link buying; if you pay for content, we do not consider that to be link-buying. We're talking "here's some money, put this link on your site" which Google does not like. 
  • Sponsorships and donations in your local area are typically helpful and not harmful.
• Good links; 
  • Domain authority- don't put all your weight on these numbers. It does matter if the site is topically relevant o your audience.
  • Local links, reputable websites
• Directories;
  • Fill out the free profile but these are NOT high-quality links
  • Paid profiles are typically not going to help for links but could still get you clients because you have a promoted profile.
• Free strategies; 
  • Unlinked Mentions
    • Google Alerts
    • Mention
  • Link Reclamation