Speaker 1: 0:01

You're tuned in to the Marketing Lawcast with Jennifer Goddard. This is where estate planning and elder law firms turn for high-octane marketing strategies and powerhouse success stories. Brace yourselves for game-changing digital marketing tips, professional sales training and exclusive interviews with industry gurus and top-tier attorneys, smashing the six and seven-figure barrier. It's time to drive your practice to success. Welcome to the Marketing Lawcast.

Speaker 2: 0:40

Good morning and welcome to our class today your 2023 digital marketing plan for estate planning and elder law attorneys. For those of you that I haven't met yet, i'm Jennifer Goddard. I'm the CEO at IMS and I'll be your instructor today. We're going to be focusing today on getting your digital marketing right. We're going to focus on estate planning and elder law in particular. We're going to look at new trends in digital marketing, and I always tell clients if you don't have digital marketing done right now, if this is something that's a weakness in your law firm, you have a huge opportunity. You can literally triple your revenue by getting this done right, and I'm going to show you how in this class. So let's jump in and get started right now. Our plan for this session is to set clear goals and targets for the year, to realign your key performance indicators, or KPIs, and your tracking to help you achieve your outcomes. Map out your plan to accomplish your goals, look at your budget, your channels what channels will you use for your marketing and what are the important trends that could cause you to need to tweak your plan or make some changes And then set you up for massive success in 2023 and beyond. So that's our plan for the day. Now, what we normally find on webinars is that people will bug out before the webinar is over. I want you to stay through the entire class, because there's so much value, guys, throughout this entire class. So I have what I call an ethical bribe. For those of you who stay to the end, there's going to be a bonus. I'm going to share with you a Google Drive folder that will have in it, for your use, all of the marketing planning worksheets that I'm going to show you today A list of the top 100 keywords that you need to be optimizing for if you're practicing in a state or elder law. An on-page SEO checklist for your website, so you can check through your website to make sure that it's properly optimized. The worksheet that I use for diagnosing or reverse engineering, your target revenue. And the ultimate online marketing checklist. I'm going to share all that at the very end of this webinar, so those of you who stay to the end are going to get a bonus. Now, when you click on that link to go to the Google Drive, all of those worksheets, all of those documents, are going to be ready for you. What you want to do is make a copy of them for your own use and save them to your own Google Drive or download them for yourself. They're free for your use, but you won't have edit access because we don't want you to ruin the files for someone else. So make a copy or download to your hard drive and stay to the end to get these bonus documents.

Speaker 2: 3:38

Now for those of you who don't know me, let me just take a second to introduce myself Again. Like I said, i'm Jennifer Goddard. I'm the CEO at IMS And I have an MBA in business leadership and strategy. But further I know the business of law. I have been studying law firms for the past 30 years And since 1995, I have worked exclusively with estate planning and elder law firms. I understand the unique challenges and why oftentimes typical law firm marketing falls flat for estate planning and elder lawyers. What you're doing is unique. It's different. It's not the same as marketing a personal injury firm or a bankruptcy firm or a firm that specializes in DUIs. It's very different, and so I won't waste your time by just throwing spaghetti on the wall and waiting to see what sticks.

Speaker 2: 4:30

I'm not going to speak to you directly about your needs and how to get to your goals, and you know, you got to know I'm not a salesperson. I'm not here to sell you anything. I'm here to help. My mission is to help estate planning and elder lawyers grow their firms to seven figures or beyond with ease, with margin and with a healthy work-life balance. I know that it doesn't do you any good to get to a million dollars in revenue if you're burned out, stressed out and done practicing law. I'm going to show you how you can leverage these systems to grow your law firm to whatever income level you want and still maintain your joy of working and your work-life balance.

Speaker 2: 5:16

So we're going to start with setting goals. It's important for us to set clear goals and goals that are attainable. They can be stretch goals, but they need to be attainable goals. I often talk to lawyers who tell me their goals are to make more money, to work with more clients, but those are very ambiguous. That may be a starting point, but to really have clear goals you need to reverse engineer those. Look at where you are now and then understand where you want to go and how you are going to get there. Put very clear point on those goals I want you to think about this year, but then looking forward a few years in the future, because we want this to be profitable and sustainable. We don't want you to have just one good year. We want you to have a more profitable and enjoyable practice into the future.

Speaker 2: 6:18

So, when you're thinking about your 2023 goals, i want you to also have that longer term vision, looking down to at least 2025. What will be your annual revenue? How many new clients will you be working with, and why are these goals important to you? Because if they're not very important, you're not going to work very hard at them and you're not going to achieve them. So really think about what's important to you in terms of revenue and impact. How many clients do you work with and what are those clients? Who are they? What are they like?

Speaker 2: 6:55

Then I want you to pull right back into today and work on what are your goals for this year. We want to look at what's your current average monthly revenue. How many new cases do you typically get per month? now? So let's say your goal is I want to hit $50,000 a month, but today you're only doing $7,500 a month, so you might have a little bit of trouble getting from $7,500 to $50,000 this year. So you might want to readjust that goal and really look at what's going to take to get there. And it's not just how many leads do I get and how many new cases do I get, but what's the average fee, what's your closing ratio, how many people do you need to meet with before you get a new client? And then, currently, how many initial consultations are you doing per week?

Speaker 2: 7:55

Now, what we have for you guys in that Google Drive is some worksheets that will take you through that process. I'm just going to open one up real quick. So, on this first worksheet, we're just going to look at your annual revenue goal. So you'll put in your revenue goal and it's going to calculate for you what your monthly target is. Now, if you know your average fee, it will tell you how many new cases you're going to need every month to hit your monthly target. So let's say that your average fee is $2,500 across all cases and your goal is $500,000 this year. You're gonna need 17 new clients a month to hit that goal. If everything stays the same, right, that's your average fee. That's the number of cases you need.

Speaker 2: 8:51

Now this next worksheet, we're gonna look a little bit deeper to say what's your current closing ratio. So you're gonna need to know how many people do you see before you get a new client And that is gonna tell you what your closing ratio is. So you have to put that number in there. So you're gonna put in your target revenue, your average fee and your closing ratio. Then it will calculate for you how many leads you're going to need, how many new people you need to see every month to hit your target goal. Now there's a couple of more things you're gonna wanna know. Do you know now what is costing you to get a call booked, to get a lead on the phone that you can then convert into a new client? I just put in the number of $150. You're gonna need to know that number. So if you have $150 as your cost per call booked and you need 30 leads to make your goal of 17 new clients, then your advertising budget is set for you. $4,545 a month is gonna be your advertising budget And it's just simple math. It's not anything that should be emotional to you, it's just this is what it costs me to get a call booked and this is my closing ratio. The only way I can change these numbers is if I change my average fee, change my target revenue or I change my closing ratio. So if I can boost my average fee and boost my closing ratio, then I can reduce my costs and still hit my goals. So I've got this. These are all things that you guys can play around with and put in different numbers. Now we also have a budget planner for you based on your projected target goal.

Speaker 2: 10:57

Now I wanna talk to you a little bit about marketing budgets. We look at approximately 5% to 8% is a status quo. So whatever your current revenue is, if you're spending 5% to 8%, you're probably not gonna go down from that for your marketing budget, about 10% will get you a little bit of growth. But if you're on a growth path, you need to be allocating about 15% of your revenue for marketing. In a state planning in elder law, you're very lead dependent new client dependent for your revenue. So get realistic about what your budget needs to be to get to hit your goals. Then you can just work through this worksheet to figure where you're going to allocate your marketing budget for 2023. And one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make is they have lofty goals but they think they're gonna get there spending $100 a month And you're gonna be just as well off to go to Vegas and put that into the slot machine, because it's just not gonna happen for you if you don't invest into your own practice enough money to feed the growth. So you can play around with these numbers and see where your marketing budget should be allocated and how much you should be allocating.

Speaker 2: 12:24

Then we have one more worksheet in this little workbook and this is a marketing calendar. Now I've just filled it in with some example ideas, but this is for you to use as to what are you gonna focus on with your pay per click for every month of the year. What are you gonna focus on with your email marketing? What's gonna be your theme or your highlight? Where are you gonna focus any SEO work that you might do, press releases that you might send out, content that you might create, and then, if you do webinars or workshops, what are some of the topics that you might focus on Month by month. Again, this is your calendar. You can use it. I just put in some ideas. This is not necessarily recommendations, but ideas for you guys, okay, so what is your goal for 2023? How many leads will you need to get there and what's gonna be your budget allocation. So that's the beginning of this marketing plan.

Speaker 2: 13:29

The next thing is, once we have the goals and we know what our budget needs to be and we've kind of worked through what our allocation of that budget will be, what's gonna be our strategy? How are you going to get strategically from where you are to where you wanna be? So the strategy that we use that works for our clients very well. We call it the growth acceleration model And you can move through this model. Let me go back up. You move through this model from left to right, from the base. So the first thing is we have to drive leads And we're going to use organic SEO first to drive those leads. Then we're going to layer on paid search And then we're going to look at our database and email marketing. Once we're driving appropriate number of leads, then we look at how do we can maximize the conversion of those leads. So we're going to take a look at the website, we're going to take a look at our reputation online that can impact our conversion. And then how are we following up with new leads to nurture them to become clients, to book a call with us, by leveraging automation to do this.

Speaker 2: 14:51

Once we're driving leads and we're maximizing our conversion, the next thing is to optimize the results of all those efforts. So sometimes, when everything is working, the only thing that's holding you back is your budget. So sometimes the first thing to look at is we need to add spend, we need to add budget to this plan. It's working, but it's anemic because we're not feeding it. So sometimes the first thing to optimize your results is to put more budget in there. The second thing is to boost the average fee so that every new lead is maximized for your revenue to get you to your goals. So sometimes when I work with attorneys, i see they have lofty goals but if they're charging $500, $1,000, $1,500, is their average fee, there's just no way for them to physically see enough people and close enough cases to hit their goals. So really working on boosting that average fee so it's a premium fee may be the next step to optimizing your results. And now you don't want to be able to. You don't want to start raising your fee and see that your closing ratio bottoms out. So sometimes optimizing results means we really have to look closely at the entire sales process. So we boost that conversion ratio while we're raising the average fee.

Speaker 2: 16:17

So let's go back to conversion. Is your website optimized to convert? Here are some of the things that we want to look at. That website is the hub, so we're driving all the leads into the website. If we're not converting on the website, that's going to be one of the first places that we're going to look to improve performance. So let's talk about how important this conversion ratio is.

Speaker 2: 16:49

Let's look at the first scenario. We've got 1500 visitors per month to the website with a 1% conversion rate, which is pretty common. That website would be generating 15 calls a month with a 30% conversion rate, going to convert 30% of those 15 calls into new clients. That website would be generating four to five new clients a month at an average $2,500 fee. That website's generating $11,250 in new revenue a month. Now, that's a decent return on investment for a website, but it's not enough to grow your practice. It's not enough to hit seven figures. So if we take everything else being the same except, we redesigned the website for conversion and we boost the conversion ratio from 1% to 3%, now we have the same number of visitors, the same conversion rate. In other words, your closing rate for these calls is the same, but now, instead of 15 calls, you've got 45 calls. Now, instead of four or five new clients, you've got 13 new clients. You haven't changed your fee, you haven't raised your fees yet, but now you've got a website that's generating $33,750 a month.

Speaker 2: 18:07

You see how important it is to design the website so it converts visitors into calls and new clients. That's one of the first places that we look for. Any new client is how can we redesign the website so that it will convert visitors into clients? Now I'll tell you. One of the issues that we run into is sometimes the attorney isn't on board with that idea and they're more interested in what does this website look like? how pretty is it? How do I like the colors, etc. Or I wanted a certain amount of education on my website. Sometimes the biggest battle is just getting the attorney to agree that we need to design the website. The structure of the website has got to be designed for conversion. This is why This is the difference between a high-performing website and one that's average or below average.

Speaker 2: 19:13

When you're talking about trying to grow this practice, one of the easiest places that you can do this is designing the website to convert. What do we have to do to design it to convert. Well, there's a few things here. We want to speak to your target avatar. We want it to be relevant to your ideal client. We want to be real with the authentic images of the team and not a lot of stock photos throughout that website, so that you come across as real and authentic and approachable and someone that I would like to book a call with. I would like to work with Some of the ways that we do that.

Speaker 2: 19:51

We can use video and multimedia elements. Any website that we add video to will always start to perform better if that video is well-placed and well-produced. We want to leverage social proofs. We want to showcase your online reviews prominently on your homepage. You can use this indication tool like BirdEye or Write Local. We want to be sure the phone number is in the upper right-hand corner, no place else. There shouldn't be anything else up there in that right-hand corner, but if you don't have your phone number there, that's where people look for it, so it needs to be there.

Speaker 2: 20:26

We want to be sure that we have a web form that prospects can fill out. We want to be sure that we add to the website some of the symbols of authority and trust, like your bar association, if you've been recognized by super lawyers, we want to be sure that we have those authority symbols on the website, because that gives people a sense of assurance and will help them be more comfortable booking a call with you. We want to be sure that we have very clear calls to action on every page and that that call to action speaks to your ideal client, to your target avatar, and that it tells them exactly what to do next. We don't want to confuse them with lots of competing calls to action. A website will definitely convert better if we let prospects book an initial call using the Book of Call button in an online calendar. Websites that change that don't convert as highly as websites that have that. We want to be sure that the site loads fast, because people will bounce off if they have to wait for items to load on your website. And then we want to engage those people who do visit the website immediately with some type of marketing automation. So whenever we have people that are filling out a form, making a call, booking a call, we want to be sure that we have automation in place to engage those people right away. And we want to use automation, because we can't always be there 24 seven to do it ourselves And we don't want things to slip through the cracks. So it's very important that we use automation to engage people immediately So they don't have to wait three days or four days before they hear from anybody at the law firm.

Speaker 2: 22:20

I just want to give you a couple of examples of some of our clients who are doing these things very well. This is one of our clients who's in Lynchburg, virginia. They've got a nice photo of their whole team. It's not overly formal, it's very welcoming and genuine. And then they have all of these authority symbols on their website. So that helps people to feel comfortable about reaching out to Robert Haley and his team. Now another of our clients is leveraging video on her homepage And it was very simple to create this video. We walked her through the process, we helped her. I think we did this video completely remotely And we have a whole video production department that helps our clients with these kinds of things. The video helps Carol to come across. She's got a very warm personality and people feel very comfortable engaging and reaching out to Carol because of her video and the way that she comes across in that video Another thing that we do is showcasing that social proof.

Speaker 2: 23:24

We syndicate the reviews back to the website And we give our visitors an opportunity to read more testimonials, to read more Google reviews or to leave a Google review. This is becoming increasingly important with Google's recent algorithm update, and that's a whole other webinar or class that I could teach on that specific SEO update. But let me just tell you this The acronym for this update is E-E-A-T, and the first E stands for experience. So they want to see content on the web from people who have actually experienced your service. So, guys, these reviews are so important, we want them on Google, but then we want to syndicate them back to the website so that Google will see the signals between Google Search online and your website and see that people are creating content and they're giving you these five-star reviews who have actually experienced your service. So when we look at making this website convert, we want to be sure that we've got all of the fundamentals in place.

Speaker 2: 24:42

Now here's a quick checklist for you guys Is your website, your current website, designed to convert? Is the phone number in the top right corner of every page? Are you using authentic images, videos and photos of yourself and your team? Do you have a compelling call to action after every block of text? Are you giving prospects the chance to book a discovery call online? Is your website mobile-friendly? Does it look good on a cell phone And does it load fast both on the cell phone and on desktop? So guys, take that checklist, look at your website and see if it's actually designed to convert or if it's maybe subverting your marketing efforts because it's not got these fundamentals done right.

Speaker 1: 25:37

That's a wrap on this edition of the Marketing LawCast. Thanks for joining us. Head over to wwwimsrockscom for more growth-focused insights. If you're ready to skyrocket your firm's marketing, don't hesitate to book a free discovery call with our team right on our website. Here's to your success. See you next time.