Breaking Revenue Plateaus: Unlocking Sustainable Growth in Your Estate Planning Law Firm

Have you hit a revenue plateau with your law firm? Ever wondered how to break through this infamous barrier? 

Tune into this episode of The Marketing Lawcast where Jennifer Goddard, CEO of Integrity Marketing Solutions, shares her expert insights on scaling estate planning law firms. 

In this episode, you'll explore:

• Innovative digital marketing techniques to overcome revenue plateaus in your law practice.
• How to attract high-value clients and expand your client acquisition methods beyond traditional referrals.
• The role of a strong online presence in growing your estate planning law firm.
• Transforming your approach to client acquisition with a focus on digital strategies.

This podcast is a must-listen for estate planning attorneys looking to elevate their practice, enhance their digital marketing efforts, and achieve sustainable growth. Jennifer's insights provide a roadmap for law firms aiming to thrive in the digital age.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome. I'm Jennifer Goddard. I am the CEO at Integrity Marketing Solutions and I'm going to be teaching this class today on getting beyond referrals and how to unlock ongoing sustainable growth. And if you have hit an income or a revenue plateau in your law firm, this is gonna be a great class for you because we're really gonna focus on how you can break through virtually any revenue plateau. Whether you're plateaued at 250,000, 300,000, 600,000 or a million and a half this, these are the strategies that will help you break through those revenue plateaus.

Speaker 2: 0:40

Before we dive into today's episode, a special shout out to our sponsor. Quid Pro Quo. Are you a law firm looking to scale or sell your practice? Qpq's expert team can help you unlock your firm's full potential. Stay tuned for valuable insights brought to you by QPQ.

Speaker 1: 0:56

So what is the dilemma? As we get started, just kind of give in an overview of what are we really talking about. One thing I wanna be sure that you understand if you have hit a revenue plateau, these are very, very common to people who are successful. So give yourself a little pat on the back. If you're at a plateau, congratulations to you. I know you probably have seen people kind of bragging about oh I doubled my revenue. Well, you know what? Doubling your revenue when you're at $10,000 is not as difficult as breaking through those plateaus where you wanna just see like 20% more, 35% more, and you're at a much higher level. So kudos to you. Don't feel badly if you've hit a plateau and you're like I need to bust through, and I've tried a lot of things. First, let's start off by giving yourself a pat on the back. Successful people hit plateaus. That happens. But the problem is you're kind of sitting there thinking I really wanna grow, but I don't wanna stretch myself any further than I already have. I don't wanna blow up my overhead, I don't wanna hire a lot of people, and so it seems like maybe it's a dilemma that's hard to fix. You may have tried everything, or you think you've tried everything already and you just still hit in that kind of that glass ceiling. Well, we're gonna talk about how you break through that and I don't want you to think it's impossible, because we've done it many, many times with many attorneys. So what kind of our job is to make the impossible possible? So let's just talk and make sure we're all on the same page as to what is a revenue plateau.

Speaker 1: 2:45

It's any point, and it doesn't matter the dollar amount. It's any point where you kind of been stuck for a year or more and that point is somewhere short of your goal. So, if you wanna put it into weight loss terms, you wanted to lose 30 pounds. You've lost 15 and you can't get past that. So kudos that you lost 15, but your goal was 30. So it's kind of the same thing with your revenue plateaus. Your goal was maybe a million, so you're at 650,000. Well, 650,000 revenue is great, but it wasn't your goal. So you still have hit a plateau, so you're stuck.

Speaker 1: 3:28

The key to understanding how you break through a plateau is realizing that you're going to have to do something different to break that inertia. This is the same way with any kind of a fitness journey you can get into a routine where, even though we might be running five miles a day, our body's gotten very efficient at running five miles a day and so we're gonna have to do something different to break that plateau. It's the same way with your revenue, so just doing more of the same is not gonna be the answer. So the first thing is that mindset okay, what if I have to do differently, if I wanna break through here, if you don't know us already, just a little bit about integrity marketing.

Speaker 1: 4:13

We started in this business in 1995. Kyle Crawl is our president, I'm the CEO. We've always been focused exclusively on estate planning and elder law. We offer online marketing solutions and we also do strategy planning, training, sales training, coaching and provide support. So we're a very comprehensive marketing and practice growth agency and we've always been instilled to the state that we are focused on helping estate planning and elder law attorneys and our mission is to help you guys grow a great law firm that is profitable, that's enjoyable and that gives you the ability to have a big impact in your community, for the families in your community and for your family and for your future generations. So that's who we are Moving right along.

Speaker 1: 5:09

This idea of plateau. We never want to plateau out. We may hit a plateau, but we don't want to just stay there. So that's kind of the quotation that you have here is we never want to plateau out. We want to be getting better every day. So when do, or how do revenue, revenue plateaus? How do they happen?

Speaker 1: 5:32

The typical estate planning and elder law firm is built typically on two foundational marketing strategies. The first one is referral marketing and the second one is live workshops, and sometimes people do both. And what will happen if you're really reliant on referral marketing is that at some point, it just feels like your referrals are tapped out. You just can't seem to squeeze any more out of your referral network. There are lots of reasons why that may happen, but it's a common occurrence that you've got referrals, you've got referral partners, but you just are not getting past that plateau.

Speaker 1: 6:13

And here's something that you need to know it's a two-edged sword. It's both a challenge and a huge opportunity. 69% of wealthy investors say they are self-advised, in other words, they're not connected to a financial advisor. They are using online tools and resources to manage their investments, which means that if you are relying on financial advisors to send you a state planning or elder law clients, you are never going to reach the biggest part of that market. There is a huge opportunity that lies beyond referrals. Not only is that 69%, but it is growing. It's changed vastly since about 2015. When we only saw about 30% of wealthy investors being self-advised, in 2022, that number is drastically grown to almost 70% and in certain age groups, like the 40 to 49 year old age group, it's 77%. So, like I said, that's a bit of a double-edged sword. It means that if you're relying on referrals from financial advisors to send you a business, you're trying to eke out a living on an increasingly smaller slice of the market. But, on the other hand, it also represents this huge opportunity beyond referrals that there is this huge market out there that you can cap into beyond getting referrals.

Speaker 1: 7:58

The problem with live workshops the attorneys that we work with who plateau out, and they have been relying on live workshops. It's kind of a three-fold problem. There's only so much time that you have to devote to giving workshops and the cost of putting them on and promoting them and getting people to show up is a big cost and it's doing nothing but going up and you probably felt the squeeze most of the attorneys that come to us with this issue have felt the squeeze that, even though their cost of doing the live workshops is going up, their fees are not going up. So the people that they're and that comes to the quality, the people who are coming into the workshops are very price sensitive. So even though it's costing you more and more and more to get butts in the seat, so to speak, you're not able to charge more commensurately, and so these are two of the very common ways that people end up hitting a plateau that they can't break through, or that glass ceiling, and while both of these strategies can be a good part of your marketing mix, they do have some problems or some challenges that you need to be aware of. How does this lead, then, to that plateau?

Speaker 1: 9:19

Well, the common denominator with both of those strategies is that your lead flow depends on you doing things, your effort, and that has two things that work against you. The first one and I see this all the time is burnout. You know you kept thinking that at some point you'd get some momentum in this practice and the business would just roll in on the regular and you could relax a little bit. And because that's not happening. You get a little burned out with the routine, the routine of it. I have to do this. I have to keep taking these people out to lunch, I have to keep going and networking, I have to keep doing the workshops. And it starts to burn you out a little bit and then, even though you know that it could have an impact on your revenue, you just you have to take a break and as soon as you take your foot off the pedal, your revenue flounders. That is so common because attorneys have this huge, amazing work ethic and you just always feel like if I just do a little bit more, if I work a little bit harder, then that's going to bring in more business and I'll reach my goals. But at some point everybody's body, everybody's mind, everybody's family kind of puts the brakes and says you've got to stop, you've got to take a break. And that's when you realize that you've kind of locked yourself in to this situation where you have to keep your foot on the pedal and as soon as you take your foot off the pedal a little bit, the revenue goes down. So it's a big price that you pay.

Speaker 1: 10:57

So the other one is the finite resources. Your time is finite and it doesn't matter how efficient you become. You can do everything you want to do to improve your internal processes and just make things as efficient as possible. You're not getting any more time. You're not. Everybody gets 24 hours right. We get 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and nobody gets any more. So you can try to be efficient and I think you should try to be efficient with the way that you spend your time but you're just not going to get any more of it. So that is a finite resource.

Speaker 1: 11:34

So sometimes you get to this idea where you think I just have to hire some people, but it's worrisome because you don't want to take on the extra expense. So that's how we end up at these plateaus. We have something that's working well. So, like I said, pat yourself on the back. So you have something that's working well but is burning you out and you can't really put any more logs on that fire to get a bigger fire. That's how we hit that plateau.

Speaker 1: 12:06

Now here's something that I think is really dangerous, and I see this a lot. It's this idea that, well, maybe you know it's just so hard to break through. I can't work any harder than I'm already working. Maybe I just stop right here and I want to talk about why that's kind of a danger zone. I understand that there is more to life than making money. Money isn't the most important thing in life, but it is reasonably close to oxygen on the God of Heaven scale. That's a quote from Zig Ziglar. A lot of attorneys will hit this what I call a comfortable plateau, right around $250 to $300,000 a year. If you're a solo practitioner and a true solo, that can be a very comfortable place to say, okay, I'm done, I'm not going to work any harder, I'm not going to do anything different. It's just too hard. I'm going to stick with this. That's enough money for me.

Speaker 1: 13:09

But it can be a very frustrating and somewhat dangerous at that revenue level for your law firm. That's not what you're taking home, that's what you're earning in your law firm. It is a constant struggle with expenses. You've got to keep your expenses down, you've got to keep your overhead down, and what that sort of means is that you personally are doing a lot of things yourself because you're trying to cut the costs. It also means that you cut corners on purchases purchases that might be able to propel you forward, like a better document system, like better technology, like investing in marketing. You kind of pull back, you contract around those expenses, even though they could be the things that would push you forward At this income level, this revenue level.

Speaker 1: 14:04

You're very worried about it and so you struggle along with outdated technology and dealing with solutions that don't really work. So it sort of becomes like the self-fulfilling prophecy. It's like I need more money to make more money. I don't have any money, so I'm not going to spend any money and so I'm not going to make any more money. So it's really a frustrating place to be stuck.

Speaker 1: 14:28

And then you always have this kind of thing hanging over your head that if you just had a few off months, if you ended up really sick or your spouse ended up sick or something happened, or maybe some of your referral sources drop off the face of the earth which has happened to many of the people that we talk to A couple of bad months and you could be in real financial trouble. And that makes you feel like you just can never take your foot off the pedal. You can't get ahead and at this revenue level some things are just out of reach for you and your family, like a vacation home, private schools, having a college fund so your kids don't go into debt for school, or even fully funding your retirement. And even if you don't feel those pinches right now, when you start to think about the future, whether you're gonna retire or sell your practice and then you realize you know what, it's just not profitable enough to entice a buyer and you haven't really earned enough money yet to retire comfortably, let alone build a family legacy. And it's so ironic because you've been working with people all your entire career who have done all those things. You've been protecting other people's family legacies. You've been protecting other people as well, and you know you don't wanna miss out on those things.

Speaker 1: 15:49

And so I would caution anybody who kind of gets to that point and thinks this is just too hard and there's more to life than making money. So I'm just gonna stick right here. Very common attitude. And if the only way to make more money were for you to work harder and to sacrifice more for your business, I'd have to agree with you. But you don't have to take that choice. There are ways to bust this plateau that preserve your time and your mental health, as well as your physical health and your time with your family. It can be done so you don't have to just settle.

Speaker 1: 16:27

So let me talk about some of the strategies that people typically use that just don't work to bust a plateau. So the first one is doing more of the same. We are kind of hit on that, just thinking I'm gonna get more referrals, I'm gonna do more workshops. Typically that does not work to bust that plateau. You've heard it said that what got you here is not what's going to get you there. It's very, very true. So I want you to kind of stop thinking that I'll just work harder. We gotta do something different.

Speaker 1: 17:01

Getting better internal processes is always a great idea. It's always a good idea to become more efficient and to spend your time more wisely, to be more profitable with the money that you're bringing in. But important to know that that's not a strategy to break a revenue plateau. Your revenue will stay the same. In fact, it could even go down because you're spending so much time focused on these internal processes and becoming more efficient. That may be an investment you're willing to make, but I'm just telling you that it's not a strategy to bust a revenue plateau. It may be a strategy to buy back some mental health and to deliver better client service and to possibly become more profitable. But if you want to earn more money, just working on being more efficient is not gonna get you there.

Speaker 1: 17:56

Same way with hiring more staff. Typically, when you hire staff more staff you're increasing your expenses and not necessarily bringing in more money. Oftentimes people will get to a point where they're like if I just had an associate attorney or a very talented, experienced paralegal, I could keep them busy. I could just funnel all this business over to them. Well, that may be true, but you've got to get the business. So you've still got the revenue plateau to deal with.

Speaker 1: 18:29

Cutting expenses again a very good idea, but it doesn't break the plateau right. And then also just ignoring it and hoping for the best. A lot of people do that and they just think, well, maybe things will change tomorrow. It'll just get better magically. It doesn't. Breaking these plateaus takes a concerted, intentional effort that I'm going to do something different, I'm going to be very strategic, and just hope is not a business plan there. Okay, is your law firm truly achieving its maximum potential? Our partner, quidproquo, understands that making informed decisions is essential to the success of your firm. That's why they offer comprehensive valuation services tailored for you and your business. Are you ready to elevate your firm's success? Contact QPQ today at info at quidproquolawcom, or visit them online at quidproquolawcom and set up a clarity call to get started today.

Speaker 1: 19:40

There's only one thing that breaks a revenue plateau, and that's more revenue. So if that's your goal, then you just have to get more revenue in. Revenue comes from two things. It doesn't come from cutting expenses or hiring staff. It comes from sales, and sales come from lead flow. So when we look at how do we bust a revenue plateau, we've got to go right straight to lead flow and sales. Those are the two things that we have to focus on, because those are the things that are going to bring in more revenue. So let's talk a little bit about how do we fix the lead flow.

Speaker 1: 20:26

First question is what's wrong with it? Typically in this situation, your lead flow depends on you. You're getting your leads from referrals and workshops. That means that you're the person responsible for that lead flow, and yet you don't really control it. You don't control the timing or the quality of the referrals that come to you. You're dependent on someone else who's in control of that, and typically that leads to what I call the revenue roller coaster Some people call it the Feast or Famine Syndrome where you'll do a workshop and you get a lot of people in the door and then it dies off. And then maybe you have a season where your referral sources are all focused on a state planning. You get a lot of people in the door and then they focus on something else and it dies off. So when we talk about busting through this plateau, we are not saying that you should stop getting referrals or you should necessarily stop doing workshops. We want to kind of master the transition.

Speaker 1: 21:35

Okay, our growth strategy will be to find another source of leads, and that lead source needs to be consistent, reliable, predictable. It needs to be expansive or scalable and you need to be in control of it but not responsible for doing it. So it needs to be something that you where you can trade your money for time instead of trading your time for money. So how do we do that? What's that other source of leads for you that's going to solve these problems? Well, first I want you to examine what you're doing that's working. Now, like I said, you know, pat yourself on the back. You hit a plateau. Good for you. That means you're doing some things right Now. Let's look at those things. Just because it's bringing in revenue doesn't mean it's working for you. So you want to ask these questions as you examine your revenue sources right now.

Speaker 1: 22:39

Does this strategy bring the types of high quality prospects that you want and need? So look at your workshops and look at who is in your referral network. Are they bringing? They may be bringing you business, but is it the business that you need to really grow and break through that plateau? Does this strategy support a premium fee structure? Because that is going to be a big part of you generating more revenue Is being able to command premium fees.

Speaker 1: 23:13

Does this strategy give you time freedom? Because if your time is necessary to make this strategy work, then it's not something you can do more of. You're going to have to find something that leverages your time, doesn't require your personal foot on the pedal all the time. Will this strategy scale up with you or is it finite, based on the amount of time that you can put into it? Then, when you look at these things and you say, well, there's a problem with this and there's a problem with that, are those problems that you can solve.

Speaker 1: 23:53

Could you tweak this strategy to make it more effective, to make it more profitable and enjoyable? For example, do you have referral sources who, even though they may be sending you business, they're not sending you the right kind of business? Maybe you need to examine where you're getting your referrals from and maybe let some of those go and maybe get some others into your network. So there may be some tweaks that you could do. If your workshop isn't bringing you the quality of people, maybe you need to change something about your workshop, where you are promoting it, where you are holding it, what is it about? So there are things that you may be able to do with strategies that are not necessarily working for you, that you could tweak them and make them work for you, and asking these questions will be a good start. If you haven't already mastered digital marketing, then adding effective digital marketing to your strategy can solve a lot of these problems.

Speaker 1: 25:02

It can be the key to breaking through Digital marketing. If you do this properly, you can laser focus your client attraction so that you're only bringing in high-quality prospects. You can support a premium fee structure. If you do it like that, you also can leverage automations and this concept of omnipresence to give you more time freedom, so you can be everywhere without actually being everywhere. So while you're meeting with a client, your marketing is out there. It's not like stopping because you're meeting with a client. So that omnipresence concept really buys back a lot of time freedom for you. The thing that's so cool about digital marketing is it's also expansive, meaning it can grow Once you get it dialed in. You can add money, you can add different strategies and it can just keep growing for you. And it's not infinite, but it's definitely expansive. The key is getting it right. So it's your brand message, it's your market position, it's your conversion strategy, your automations and the consistent deployment. So I know that some people have tried digital marketing and so it didn't really bust that plateau. But maybe it's because, like some of these other things, it needs to be tweaked, it needs to be fixed so that it works well.

Speaker 1: 26:35

I know a lot of attorneys believe some things about digital marketing sometimes based on their own experience that I call myths. Some would still do a little bit of myth busting. I know a lot of people have been told you don't grow in a state planning or elder law firm with digital marketing, that it's all about referrals. Well, remember, guys, I told you how much of that wealthy investor market is never gonna come to you through a referral from a financial advisor. That's almost 70%. Depending on the age group, it's almost 80%. So I think referrals are an important part of growing your practice, but you don't wanna skip this huge untapped market that you can never penetrate if you're relying on referrals from financial advisors.

Speaker 1: 27:29

Digital marketing doesn't deliver the leads. It only delivers low quality leads. It's a huge waste of my time. If you see yourself in any of these, then you're pretty common for an attorney the idea that people hate to be spammed by email, when we all hate to be spammed by email. So the answer to that is don't spam people. You can still use email. Just do it in a way that it's not spam. My clients are not on social media. I hope no one is believing that anymore. All of our clients are online these days because virtually everyone is online these days.

Speaker 1: 28:08

Digital marketing costs too much, and it can be. If it's not dialed in, it can cost a lot. But you have to kind of readjust your thinking. If every single client that ever came to you came through a referral and you feel like clients should be free In the digital marketing space. You're going to pay for your leads. You're gonna pay something to get those clients. The trick is to figure out what is the amount that you have to pay to get a good client and is there other ways to reduce that amount. But they are not going to be free unless you do really good with your organic marketing, and we're gonna talk about that as well. So you can get free leads, but you also can find a place where it's very profitable for you to exchange your money for time. So we're all very used to exchanging time for money. Let's turn that on our head and exchange some money to get some time back by using this marketing strategy that gives us leverage of our budget as well as our time.

Speaker 1: 29:19

So I just wanna talk a little bit about some of the results that we have gotten by employing digital marketing strategies with firms that had hit a plateau, just so you know that these strategies actually do work. It's not a myth, it is a real thing. So I'm gonna show you just a few examples. I'm at an estate planning firm in Minnesota and their whole problem was just that the revenue plateau. They had done very well, but they hadn't been able to get past that. With the strategies that we put in place, we saw an 89% increase in their lead flow that they previously had not had and an additional 1,000 consultations booked. So a bigger firm. But you know how much harder it is to make those strides when you're already at a high level. This isn't somebody that was just starting out. This was someone that had gotten to a point where they had hit that revenue plateau. These are the kinds of things that we can accomplish. Again 81,591 visitors to the website in a year, 75,000 of those from organic that means that was free. 266 consultations booked that they had not been able to tap into before. Another firm a 96% increase in lead flow and 400 consultations booked Again. These are all firms that had hit a plateau. One more here from Virginia 351 phone calls right through the website, 273 consultations booked.

Speaker 1: 31:04

I wanna talk just a little bit about my client, rudy, because he's really representative of what can happen here. He's been practicing for 47 years. Very boutique, niche firm with three attorneys and seven support staff. When they came to us, what he wanted was more revenue. He wanted to break through that plateau and he wanted it to be more reliable and more profitable. He just felt like as many of you on this webinar probably feel the same way he had maxed out the revenue that he could generate based on referrals and workshops. So what we worked with Rudy was this comprehensive strategy, which covered branding his website, marketing automations, video marketing and paid advertising. In the first nine months of this year, we've generated 1078 new leads new leads for Rudy. These are leads he was not getting before, and that firm, in less than a year, broke through that plateau and grew by 35%, which, as you know, that's that hard thing to do in a seven-figure firm. It's not like we added $10 to the revenue, right, it's a big improvement. So to break through that glass ceiling, you have to do something different and you have to look at your marketing for your lead flow and your sales for your conversion rate and optimizing that lead flow.

Speaker 1: 32:44

We'll talk about sales. Every sale, according to Zig Ziglar I like using quotations from Zig every sale has five basic obstacles no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust. So what we coach our clients on is a sales system for estate planning in Elgerla that we've developed and we call it the trust selling system. There are five key pillars to this high ticket selling and the first one and they go by the acronym TRUST. So we start with true intentions. We want to be sure that we set our intention before every meeting or every call, that we're going to approach every prospect with empathy, with compassion and being truly committed to serve that person, not to enroll them, not to have them sign an engagement, not to close them, but to serve them. When we come into those meetings with those intentions, we will win every single meeting because we can always leave people better than we found them, even if they don't become clients.

Speaker 1: 34:02

The second thing is, when we get into that meeting, we're going to establish rapport or make that human connection. We're not just going to jump right into getting all their information and what's their net worth, what assets do they have and where are they. We're going to find out who they are. We're going to ask some questions and build some trust and help that prospect feel comfortable telling us the truth about their situation. Do they have a drug addicted child? Do they have a troubled marriage between one of their children and their spouse? Do they have a special needs member? They have to feel comfortable with us to tell it before they will share those things with us. That's what we establish rapport.

Speaker 1: 34:52

Then we go into uncovering their problem. We still haven't necessarily gone through all their assets and added it all up. We want to know why they're here, why did they call us? What is it that's waging on their mind? Because that is the problem that they will pay to solve, not the problem that you think they have, but the problem that you uncover by asking powerful questions. You've established rapport. Now you uncover the problem that they face and the pain that they feel around that problem.

Speaker 1: 35:31

Then we have standards, our own standards. As we're going through this process, we're going to size up this prospect. Do they meet our standards of someone that we will bring on into our firm? Is it someone I can help? Is it someone that I want to help? Then we stick to those standards. When we've gone through all of that, then we offer what is the best solution for that prospect. We offer that not with what's the best solution for me, what's going to make me the most money? It is the best solution, not the one we think that they can afford. We may have to tweak that solution to get within their budget. We may have to refer them out, but we're committed that when we get to offering that solution, it is the best possible solution to their problem.

Speaker 1: 36:29

We coach our clients and teach from staff people to the principal attorney on this system that helps them optimize the lead flow. Getting more lead flow is imperative, but it's not enough. You've got to be able to optimize that, to actually engage clients and engage them at premium fees. The main mindset that we take away from here is not to settle. Don't just accept the status quo and say, well, I fit a plateau, here I am. There are strategies that can bust through that plateau. We've seen it happen time and time again. Here's how this all boils down, guys. We first have to drive the leads. Remember fixing that lead flow. We use organic marketing to do that so that we can keep our client acquisition costs low. We use some paid advertising to do that. We track that and we look to ways that we can optimize that and still realize that we are going to pay for leads but we want to keep that client acquisition cost as low as possible.

Speaker 1: 37:43

Then we look into the database. That's why I'm giving you that guide on database reactivation. You probably have a database of prospects, current clients and referral sources. How do you turn that into moving the needle somehow into more referrals, into people that will book a call with you? How do you do that in a way that you don't go into spam and make people upset and people unsubscribe? There are certain steps that you can take in a database reactivation campaign. Simply just that will make a difference. We'll bring up new referral sources, we'll bring people into book calls and appointments with you and get client referrals. Just doing the database reactivation can bring in some more income. I'm giving you that guideline, that step by step, at the end of the class today.

Speaker 1: 38:49

Then we want to maximize the conversions. That's why we look at the sales process. We also look at the website. Is the website converting? Website isn't just a brochure online. It's not just a pretty face. It needs to do a job. It needs to convert the people that visit that website into new leads for you, new appointments, new calls booked.

Speaker 1: 39:13

We look at your reputation and your authority online because that can set you up for sales success. A lot of what we do in our marketing is about building your reputation and your authority, not just with Google, which is very important that's your visibility, but also with your referral sources and with your clients and with your prospects so that they feel comfortable doing business with you. We want to be sure that we have automations in place so that we don't have leads falling through the cracks. Then we look at all of that data and that's one of the best things about digital marketing is we have tremendous amounts of data that we can use to optimize the results. We look at the marketing spend and we look at the fees and we look at the closing ratios and what's driving the best business. We use that data to optimize our outcome. So for organic leads, we focus on SEO, search engine optimization and authority and trust building online.

Speaker 1: 40:23

For paid leads, we look at what are some of the platforms that we can spend some money on to drive leads that will fit our target avatar and will close or will become clients people that we can serve and serve at premium fees. So we look at social media advertising, typically on Facebook, great return on investment as well as pay per click. In some instances, some practice areas and some markets, google's local service ads can be very effective. So we want to look at all of our options for paid leads that can help us break through these plateaus. Then, of course, the database and I've talked a little bit about that your list of clients, referrals and prospects can be a gold mine for potential growth. Then, once we have that lead flow going, we really want to look at maximizing those conversions on the website with automations, making sure that leads don't fall through the cracks, by using automation to make sure that we're following up with every lead that comes through.

Speaker 1: 41:35

Guys, getting reviews online one of the most important things you can do to build your trust and authority online. Then, of course, optimizing all those results by optimizing your marketing spend, by making sure that you can command premium fees and work with the leads that are coming to you. We want to be able to raise the fees and the closing ratio. At the same time, guys, I'm going to give you some checklists and some step-by-step guides to implement some of these things. I've given you a set of questions for you to ask yourself about the marketing that you're doing now. Are there tweaks that you can make to make those things more effective for you and to bring in more revenue?

Speaker 1: 42:27

But the truth of the matter is you all made an investment to get legal education, to get your law degree. I kind of tongue-in-cheek so you didn't go to the Google online school of law. No, you invested the time and the money to do that. You're not just making guesses about how you should draft trust or how you would help a senior qualify for Medicaid, help to pay for a nursing home. You're an expert in your field, your law firm and your career deserves and needs expert help.

Speaker 1: 43:02

If there's something that we can do to help you, we will be very, very honest with you. I really encourage you guys to go to that website, imsrockscom. Forward slash, apply and make a call book, a call with my team to talk about your strategy. Just be honest Say this is my revenue point. I've been here for over a year. I need help to get past this. It's just like getting with a personal trainer. There's nothing to be ashamed about that. There's no ego involved. These are the numbers. This is what we have and this is what we've done and this is what we need to do.

Speaker 2: 43:41

That's a wrap for today's episode. A big thank you to our sponsor, quid Pro Quo. Qpq is your partner in law firm success, offering expert guidance on scaling, selling and optimizing your practice. With a team of experienced professionals, they bring real-world insights to the table. Are you ready to take your law practice to new heights? Visit their website at wwwquidproquolawcom to learn more and start your journey toward a thriving and sellable law firm.