Hi, and welcome back to the Marketing Lawcast. I'm your host, Jennifer Goddard. I'm the CEO at Integrity Marketing Solutions. Today I'm going to talk about a topic that could cost you a lot of money if you don't handle it properly. When the phones start to slow down and your appointment book is looking a little bit thin, I know the pressure inside an estate planning or elder law firm can really start to grow. And it can feel like your marketing is not working. That's a moment when you could make an expensive mistake. The key is to not panic. Before you spend another dollar on your marketing, let's diagnose what might really be happening because it might not be what you think. Let's dive in. So what do you do when it feels like your marketing isn't working? Well, the first things, like I said, is don't panic and don't make a knee-jerk reaction. Step one is to verify. Why do you feel like your marketing is stalled? I like to sort of reverse engineer this and start with the end of the process and work my way back to the marketing. So if your phones are not ringing at all, that's a symptom. If you have no new leads coming in through your internet marketing, that's another symptom. It could be that your phones are ringing, but it's the wrong people calling. It's not good fit clients that are calling you. It could be that leads are coming in from your internet marketing, but the cost per lead is way too high. It could be that leads are coming in, but they're not the right people. It could be that the phone is ringing a little bit and it's all the wrong people, and the leads are coming in at a high cost and they're still all the wrong people. So the first thing I want to do is kind of zone in on what is really going on. Is it a lack of leads? Is it a lack of phone calls? Or is it a lack of the right people calling, the right people inquiring? If your appointment bookings are thin, don't just ask for marketing metrics. Sometimes these metrics can be very deceiving and they are somewhat vanity metrics. Again, you want to work your way backwards from what's really happening inside the firm. Are you meeting with people but not closing them? If that's the problem, then you have to look at it a little bit differently. It could be a sales problem. It could be that you need to work on your consultation process and maybe gear it more for those internet leads instead of just for the referrals that you get that are warmed up and ready to go. It also could be that your marketing is bringing you the wrong people, and that's why you're not closing them. So you really need to look at why are these leads not closing? Why am I having consultations, but I'm not getting hired? Is it something that's happening in the consultation process itself? Or is it that just that you're meeting with all the wrong people? There's another aspect of this. If people are calling, but they're not scheduling a consultation with you, again, look at what's happening and how that call is being handled. It could be that there's something wrong in the call processing and the call handling within the firm. Are you missing calls? Are people being put on hold? That's something that you could probably fix pretty quickly without spending a lot of money. It might be time for you to listen in on some of these calls and see just exactly how they're being handled. It might just be a matter of training that can actually fix that problem and get more calls booked into consultations. You can see that sometimes that feeling that the marketing isn't working really doesn't have very much to do with the marketing. It might have more to do with what's going on inside the law firm, and it could just be a training issue that could be easily fixed without spending any more money. Now, if the issue is that you're not having enough leads, you're just not seeing enough action, then there's a way to start diagnosing that. The first question is, is it a visibility problem? Is it that people are just not finding you online? So you want to be concerned about your website traffic, your rank on Google for key search terms, online reviews. Do you have enough online reviews? What's your Google business profile look like? Is it optimized? Are people using it and seeing it? And then there's this new thing that you might be worried about is are you showing up in AI-powered search? Now, if you find problems there, if your traffic is low, if your ranking is low, if people are just not finding you, then visibility is the first thing that you have to attack. Because it doesn't matter what else happens, if no one can find you, the rest is pretty irrelevant. Depending on where the gap is, your strategy may be to boost your search engine optimization on the website so that people can find you when they're searching for terms that are relevant to your practice area. It's surprising that in this day and age, at this moment in time, that a lot of law firm websites really are not well optimized. And sometimes that has to do with the fact that their optimization was done years ago and it's just simply outdated. It's not been updated to meet the new algorithms or the new AI search engines. If search engine optimization is the problem, then there are certain ways to attack it. We need to find out what's wrong with your SEO. It's very hard to just take a website that's not performing and install search engine optimization on it, because in today's environment, search engine optimization or SEO is not just about keywords and meta descriptions and meta tags. It has a lot to do with your website architecture or how your website is built and how it's organized, as well as the type of content that you have on your website. So sometimes it takes a complete overhaul of the website to update the SEO. It will involve creating new content, it will involve redesigning the structure of the content. Because when the AI-powered search engines are crawling the web, they are looking for content that is organized in a way that they can index it, and they're looking for authority in that content. So sometimes when we say, well, we need to work on the SEO, it's not just a matter of something that we can slap on top of a website, even if you love that website. If it's not performing, then we need to really diagnose and deep dive into that website to see what we have to do to make it perform. Now we've developed a tool that can help us with that. It's called our AI visibility snapshot. And we offer that to anyone who wants to take advantage of it. It's free on our website. Um just give us a little bit of information and we go ahead and diagnose that website to see what really has to happen in terms of particularly AI search, which is becoming so much more important. That's really a great place to start if visibility is the problem. But let's say your visibility checks out just fine. You're ranking well, people are being able to find you, the AI search engines can find you and are displaying your results, but you're just not getting the lead flow from the Internet that you want and need to succeed. Well, now that we've kind of narrowed it down, that's a lead flow problem. And a simple solution, oftentimes that people will rush into, is to launch an advertising campaign, a paid advertising campaign. That can be a great strategy, just depending on a few other factors. One of the things we want to look at before we launch an advertising campaign is how well does your website convert the traffic? So we're getting traffic to the website, we've already diagnosed that that's not the problem. But for some reason, the traffic to the website, the people who are visiting the website, are not inquiring. They're not calling, they're not booking a call, scheduling a consultation, or sending in an inquiry. So we want to look at the conversion path on the website. Are we making it easy for people to reach out to you? Are we making it easy for some for a visitor to become a lead? The first thing is most of the attorneys that we work with will have a book a call or schedule a consultation form on their website. Now that's a pretty big ask for someone who's just visited your website to schedule a phone call or to schedule a consultation, which sounds kind of intimidating and maybe expensive. One thing that I've noticed is that sometimes people will be charging for that initial consultation. And it's important to understand that charging for the initial consultation will weed out a lot of your initial consultations. It will definitely reduce the number of your initial consultations. In some instances, that's a great strategy. If you are booked out for the next six weeks and you really want to be sure that you're only working with people who are motivated and ready to go, you have a strong reputation, uh charging for that initial consultation could be just the ticket to narrow down the number of consultations that you do without impacting your revenue. But if you need more consultations, just re just be aware that charging for that initial consultation will reduce the number of your initial consultations. That's kind of the lever that we pull in order to do that. So if if you're charging for that initial consultation, you might want to reconsider is it doing for you what you want that charge to do? Are you pulling the right lever? The other thing is do you have some other ways that people could visitors could become a lead? Do you have a lead magnet? Are you, are you, do you have a download asset that people might download your ebook or they might download a white paper? Do you have a webinar where people could register to watch that webinar where people could register to watch that webinar and so give you their contact information? That's very important that you are capturing the email, the name, and the phone number for people who download the assets. So a lead magnet has to have lead capture. And before you invest in doing something like that, be sure you have a follow-up system in place. So you're gonna go look at your CRM, your marketing CRM, and make sure you have automated follow-up in place. And you have someone on your staff trained to be able to follow up by phone with these people. So you're gonna get permission to call them, you're gonna call them, talk to them, see if you can get them scheduled for a consultation. That's how a lead magnet works. So I see a lot of times attorneys will want to put a lead magnet on their website, but they don't understand that it's not gonna do any good if it's not part of a system to capture that lead, follow up on that lead, and turn that lead into a consultation. So those are some things that you can implement that don't really cost a lot of money. Oftentimes these are things you can implement fairly inexpensively and should implement before you start a paid advertising campaign. So make sure that your website has a clear and easy path to conversion. You may find that if you fix your visibility and you fix your conversion on the website, that you're good to go, that your appointment book starts to fill up again. But that might not be enough. So one thing that we can do when we have a lack of lead flow is a paid advertising campaign. And some of you may be running paid advertising campaigns and you're listening to this what podcast because the leads are too expensive, or you're still not getting the right leads, or you're still not getting the correct lead flow, you're not getting enough leads. Maybe you're only getting one or two a week, one or two a month. If that's the issue, then your advertising campaign may have some flaws in it. It may be your offer, it may be your uh targeting, it could be your budget. If you have too small of a budget, you're just you may just be throwing money away. It may cost more in your market to get a lead than your budget is. I've seen that happen where uh attorneys will kind of want to dip their toe in the water and they'll put a$5 a day budget on their Facebook ads. And they might as well just go down to Starbucks and have a coffee for that$5. I don't know if you can even get a coffee anymore for$5, but you're sure not going to get leads if you're only having a$5 a day campaign. It just costs more than that to get any volume of leads from an advertising campaign. So one of the places that I look first is what's the budget? Then I'll look at what's the creative. Those are the two things that are really the most important, and then the targeting the offer. Now, there's something else that can be going on with your advertising, and this leads me to what I see the biggest problem. It's fragmentation, fragmentation of your marketing. So you have one vendor who's supplying your SEO, another vendor who is maintaining your website, somebody else who's doing your social media, maybe somebody else who's writing your content, and then even another vendor that's running your Facebook ads. And you know what happens when I see that? I see budgets out of control and ROI absolutely down the drain. There's no cohesion through all of these things, and there's no system. So let me give you an example. If I'm running ads and I'm not fixing everything else, I don't have good, I don't have solid social media strategy, I'm not posting authoritative content on the regular basis, my website isn't being found. My ads are out there in a crowded marketplace working all by themselves. There's nothing to support my ads other than my budget. So the ads have a really big, really hard job to fix your marketing. When everything else is broken, even the very best advertising campaign with the best creative and the best targeting and the best offer, it's going to bring you leads at a very high cost per lead. When everything else is working, when your website has the proper visibility and it has a nice conversion path, and your social media is integrated and all of your systems are working together with your follow-up systems, et cetera, then the ads have a much better chance of working for you quickly, getting to work right away, and having a much lower cost per lead. And they're much more likely to bring you the right type of leads. And we see this every day. The more visible you are online, the more authority that you have online, the quicker, the less expensive, and the better your advertising campaigns can work. So when you look at your marketing and you say, I need more leads, and you jump right into let's run some ads, you're really setting yourself up for a very expensive mistake. The most important thing you can do is first look at what's going on in your law firm. Second, look at what at your foundation of your marketing and properly diagnose where the problem is, and then put your time, your effort, and your budget into fixing that problem. And sometimes there's more than one problem, but you fix the foundational problem first, and the rest kind of falls into place. Now, if you need some help with that, I have a couple of things I can offer you. The first one is that AI visibility snapshot. That's a really good diagnostic tool. It's absolutely free, no obligation. Um, you can go to our website, imstrocks.com forward slash snapshot, and just download that snapshot and we'll get that diagnostic out to you within 72 hours. And you will have some really good information to go on as to whether you have a visibility problem and what that visible what that visibility problem is and how to fix it. The other thing I can offer you is a meeting with my team, some uh one of the strategists from our team on a discovery call. And we can really look at where you are right now, what you think are the problems, maybe what we see are the problems, and whether my team might be the right fit to help you solve those problems. We always approach things in a very strategic manner. We're not saying that you have to do an advertising campaign or you have to do a webinar marketing funnel. We really look at what is the situation. So we help you walk through that diagnosis. Everything that I just talked about, that's what we do with every new client. We're just gonna dive in and see where the issues are and how they are best fixed and what needs to be fixed first to get the quickest, biggest bang for our return on that investment. So I hope this has been helpful for you today, and I want to help you avoid making a big mistake. When you don't fix your marketing properly, not only are you wasting marketing budget, but you're also, you know, reducing your revenue. You're you're keeping your revenue low. And the faster that you fix your marketing properly, the less it's gonna cost to fix it, and the faster you're gonna get revenue back in the door. Thanks for joining me today, and we'll see you next time.

That's a wrap on this edition of the Marketing Lawcast. Thanks for joining us. Head over to imsrocks.com. If you're ready to skyrocket your firm's marketing, don't hesitate to book a free strategy call with our team right on our website. Here's to your success.

This week we're going to dive into a topic that could be very expensive if you do this wrong. What do you do when the phones are not ringing as rapidly as you would like? Your appointment book is getting a little bit thin, and it sort of feels like your marketing is stalling. Well, this is a moment when you might make a very expensive mistake. So let's dive into what you should do when you think your marketing is stalled.