Don't Sabotage Your Marketing - Avoid The 3 Mistakes

In my nearly 20 years of working with estate planning attorneys, there are three big mistakes that I continually see attorneys make when it comes to their internet marketing, and it has major ramifications. Let's talk about those three mistakes that I consistently see. The first mistake is deals with framing. It's positioning the firm either as a professor or as a doctor. Now hear me out on this as an estate planning attorney. A lot of times the attorneys feel like their role, part of their role with their prospective clients, is to educate them about estate planning, and to a degree I will agree with you. However, a lot of attorneys take this thought process way too far and they apply it to all of their marketing. So, for instance, when a prospect lands on an attorney's website, blog, social media page, when they get an email from the attorney, the attorney is trying to embark some sort of education, trying to impart that onto their prospect or their client base, whether it be the difference between a will and a trust, the process of probate, how a special needs trust works, the difference between an irrevocable trust and a revocable trust, and on and on and on, and a lot of times, the assumption by the attorneys is that an educated prospect is a committed prospect. Well, I'll push back on that a bit and say that I think instead what's happening is, this is one of those mistakes where the attorney positions themselves as an educator, where, when the prospect engages with the attorney's marketing, it becomes abundantly clear that education on these matters is vitally important. And so we kind of plant the seed, when we're in that professor mode of our marketing, to tell our prospects hey, before you do anything, you better be fully informed Before you make any decisions, before you make any commitments. Fully informed Before you make any decisions, before you make any commitments, you better learn everything there is to learn about estate planning and about the different types of documents. Now, when we set that frame, when we plant that seed in the prospect's mind, this leads to a few unintended consequences when we end up getting to our sales opportunities, unintended consequences when we end up getting to our sales opportunities, the prospect is anticipating and expecting the attorney to inform them about these situations and about these scenarios or the different planning options, that the attorney is going to educate the prospect on these matters. And that's really as far as the prospect's expectations go, these matters, and that's really as far as the prospect's expectations go. The attorney's expectations, however, are that once I educate you, then it's going to be obvious that you have to make a decision or do something, and I think that's where a lot of the disconnect comes from.

This is why attorneys get the dreaded. I need to think about it. Let me think it over. You've given me a lot to think about. Or they say things like hey, I really appreciate that I've learned a lot today. And then they leave the office. Or they say they want to do more research, they want to inform themselves more before they can commit to any type of plan or document strategy that you may have laid out for them. And that's a lot of times.

The pitfall and a big mistake that I see a lot of attorneys, especially in estate planning and elder law, make, is that they focus their marketing on educating the prospect when instead they can position themselves more as the doctor or as the problem solver. And when we do that, the difference is, as opposed to saying here's what you need to know about estate planning, we instead say do you feel like this? So, instead of saying estate planning and everything you need to know about that on the website, we would say concerned about fairness in a blended family, instead of saying Medicaid planning or Medicaid crisis planning and having information about that we might say overwhelmed caring for an aging parent. I hope you can see the difference between the professor frame and the doctor frame. In the doctor frame, we're there to solve a problem, and so the expectation is that the prospect has a problem worth solving. Otherwise, no-transcript. This leads to people having an expectation similar to what they have when they go to the doctor's office versus when they go to the college lecture.

When you go to a college lecture, you listen to the professor and maybe you take some and you try to retain as much of the information as you can. When you go to the doctor, the doctor is going to ask you questions. The doctor is going to find out where it hurts. Then they're going to diagnose you based on the truth. Then they're going to prescribe some sort of education sorry, some sort of medication to alleviate that pain, to fix that problem, and in some cases it might be as intense as surgery. But what is the prospect going to do then, now that they have a diagnosis for their specific problem? Well, now they have to just take the medicine. There's something for them. They have to just take the medicine. There's something for them to do beyond just retaining the information.

So, whether it's in your blog, your email marketing, your social media marketing, your website content, your Google business profile, have all of that stuff framed around the doctor frame versus the professor frame. Obviously, as part of our Essentials program, we do exactly that when we're building out the marketing. This does a number of things. It helps with the conversion. More people are more likely to convert to solve that problem than to sign up to learn more information. They can learn information off the website. They can get information from YouTube. They can get information a lot of places. They can only get their problem solved with you and that's why the websites that we create and the marketing that we put out there converts and works so well at creating qualified prospects that are ready to move. So that's the biggest first mistake and maybe the biggest one is framing of your marketing and of your sales opportunities. Is it in the professor frame or is it in the doctor frame? So make sure we don't make that mistake or fix that mistake if you are making it already.

The second mistake is your inconsistent marketing. So one of the rules we have at Integrity Marketing is that consistent revenue requires consistent marketing. And so what does consistent marketing look like? It means posting to your blog at least once a week, at a minimum of once a week. Posting to social media at least once or twice a week, okay, to social media that you're posting, and you're posting things again that are related to the doctor frame. So all of these mistakes are obviously interrelated.

Okay, so when you're posting your content, it's not just educational stuff, it's around the problems you solve, it's around the stories you have of prospects and clients that have been through scenarios and come out well on the other end, or that didn't plan and it turned into disaster. Sharing those types of stories, that type of content, consistently on your social media, in your blog, in your email marketing. All of that has to be consistent if you want to have consistent lead flow. Kind of makes sense, right? Again, we take care of all of this as part of the Essentials program, where we develop that content, unique content. We disseminate it for you on your behalf, to your social media accounts, to your blog, your Google business profile, optimizing everything, obviously, but focusing on those issues that actually drive leads that capture people's attention. So inconsistent marketing leads to inconsistent revenue and consistent marketing leads to consistent revenue. So if your marketing is inconsistent, if it's been a few months since you posted to your blog, take a look at your QuickBooks and find out that they're probably related. You can see the consistency of your marketing. When you're doing really well, that your revenue will go up, and when your marketing tails off, the revenue goes down. Those two are connected. So keep that in mind when it comes to your marketing. And again, we handle the consistency portion of the marketing for our essentials clients. So keep that in mind.

And the third biggest mistake is a very simple one. It's just not focusing your attention on your search engine optimization. As you may have noticed, it's getting more and more competitive out there. More and more estate planning attorneys are popping up. More and more attorneys that don't actually do estate planning but say that they do estate planning are popping up as well, and everybody's vying for everybody else's attention. So how do you stand out? Well, you have to put some focus onto your search engine optimization to make sure that you're showing up, especially for those high intent search terms. Terms like estate planning attorney near me or wills and trust attorney or trust attorney in my city those are high intent search terms and you need to show up for those. You also need to know who is showing up, and you can't really figure that out by doing your own cursory Google search. It's going to give you skewed results, so you have to run a third party report and analysis to find out who is doing what. Where are they actually ranking, why are they ranking where they're ranking and why are you where you're at?

There's a few places to really pay key attention to if you're going to focus on your SEO. The first one is the amount of traffic that you're getting to your website. Obviously, google is wanting to deliver up the most credible and useful sources in its search results, and one of the ways they determine that is how much traffic is this site getting and how consistent is that traffic. So one of the things to pay attention to is are you doing the consistency in your marketing that's driving traffic to your website? Are you in that doctor frame that grabs the attention of people and brings them to your website to build that healthy amount of traffic that looks good in Google's eyes?

The second one is your reviews. Are you paying close attention, are you working intentionally hard on getting five-star reviews. When you meet with a client, you need to have a system in place to get that review, to not let it fall through the cracks. If you've got 15, 16 reviews and your competitor has 50 or 60, your competitor is going to take the majority of those internet leads that come through Google and see those reviews. The one with the higher review count is going to be the more obvious choice. So we have to put some focus into doing good work for clients so that we can get a five-star review, and then leveraging technology to make sure we follow up with these folks and get that review and get it on Google if we can. That's the preferential area to get the Google reviews is on Google.

The next is your citations, and many of you aren't familiar with citations. Maybe some of you are, but a citation is essentially where your business is listed online, and we all know the big ones Google, facebook, linkedin. Okay, but have you paid attention to Avvo, lawyerscom? What about Yelp? What about Chamber of Commerce, better Business Bureau? Literally, there are hundreds of different places where your business is listed and if you haven't claimed that profile or if you've changed offices or moved, then there's a good chance that those business listings have an old address, an outdated phone number, maybe they're not claimed or filled out at all, and if any of those three are true, it's a ding against you on your SEO. So we have to make continual effort to work on those citations and build those up, and every time that we claim a profile and fill it out properly and the name, address, phone number all match, it sends what's called a signal to Google and tells them hey, they're doing the right stuff, this is a credible site over here doing good things. So the more signals that we can send consistently, the better we're going to do from an SEO perspective. Again, we do take care of all of these.

The next is your authoritative links. So Google does look at your link tree. What Links do you have within your website that link to one another, different pages within the website? That's a strategy, but where do you link to outside of your website and where outside of your website links to you? Now, some of the obvious ones are those citations that we just talked about. When we're filling out our business listing on those profiles whether it's Better Business Bureau or Chamber of Commerce dot com on those profiles, whether it's Better Business Bureau or chamberofcommercecom. When we do that, we've built a credible link from a credible source over to a credible and authoritative website and that's what's called authoritative link building.

We do this in part for our clients through those citations. We do handle that for our clients to fill out those citations, but we do something else. That's really cool for our clients to fill out those citations, but we do something else that's really cool. When we meet with a client, we get a gauge of who they really help, who their ideal target market really is and how can they become the authoritative figure in their market for those people. So we get a full understanding about that whole substruct.

Then once a month we write what's called a long-form authoritative article and it's custom for each individual client and long-form, talking a thousand words or so. We write that article, we post it to the attorney's blog, then we submit it as a press release and get that picked up by major news outlets. Then we submit it as a press release and get that picked up by major news outlets that will then repurpose and repost that article and reference and link to our client's website in the process. So if you're doing estate planning, you're talking about legacy planning, retirement planning and leaving an inheritance. Well, we write that long form article and let's say that Money Magazine picks up that article and now they've posted that article on their website and linked to your website. That builds a very credible and highly authoritative link strategy for the website. That helps with your SEO. So again, the consistency of your marketing, the framing of your content and then the optimization of that content and the link building strategies that go along with it. A huge mistake to not focus on your SEO and figure out how those authoritative links actually affect your rankings and how you're positioned in those high intent searches. So don't neglect your SEO.

The last part of SEO really just deals with your Google business profile. Too many times I see that attorneys either haven't even claimed their Google business profile or they did, and it was years ago and it's woefully out of date. The photographs are 10 years old or five years old and the attorney looks nothing like that anymore, right so? And those things need to be adjusted. We also want to connect that Google business profile to your website and blog. We want to put content there, we want to put photographs there, we want to generate reviews there, we want to do the frequently asked questions. All of that. If it's happening on Google, the more that you can do, the better you're going to be. So you have to focus on your Google business profile, make sure it's current and up to date, post content to it consistently, work on those reviews, update the photographs, keep those current. If you have a new logo, make sure you get that on there. Your hours of operation All of that is done through your Google business profile. Again, if you're an essentials client or considering joining the essentials program, we handle all of this for you, essentially at different levels of done for you. At the highest level, we're doing all the things that we just talked about for the attorney without saying, hey, you need to go do this. We're saying, hey, this has been done and this is the result.

So, guys, my friends, those are the three biggest mistakes I see. So, framing of your marketing and your conversations Are you in the professor frame providing free education, or are you on the doctor frame solving problems? Second, is your marketing inconsistent? Are you posting at least twice a week to social media, at least once a week to your blog? Are you sending out at twice a week to social media? At least once a week to your blog. Are you sending out at least a weekly and monthly newsletter or some sort of email marketing to your list? The consistency is what leads to consistent revenue. So, consistent marketing, consistent revenue, inconsistent marketing, inconsistent revenue.

And finally, neglecting your SEO, just not paying attention to what's happening on search results, knowing who you're competing against and knowing what it's going to take to beat that person or be king of the hill on those search results. Guys, if you can tie up these three mistakes changing the framing, being consistent and focusing on your SEO you're going to win with the internet marketing. If you're struggling with this, if you're having a difficult time, book a discovery call with my team. We'll figure out exactly where you're at and what level of program that you need, and a lot of times it's start here and in six months you need to go to here and six months after that, this should be the next step. It's okay to add those things on, but you have to get on the right track Again. You can do it and we can help. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Like, subscribe, share with your friends. Book a discovery call if we can help. Have a great day. Thanks for your time today.