Unique Challenges in Marketing the Estate Planning or Elder Law Firm

Ever find yourself scratching your head over the convoluted puzzle that is digital marketing for estate planning and elder law? You're not alone, and this episode packs a punch with tailored strategies that promise to sharpen your online presence and attract a constant stream of new clients. We dissect the complex beast of marketing in a field where one-off clients are the norm, and the competition extends far beyond the courtroom—venturing into the territory of online legal services. With a keen focus, we uncover the truth behind the cost-effectiveness of digital campaigns and why a robust online strategy can no longer play second fiddle to traditional referral networking.

Navigating the digital landscape doesn't have to feel like a trek through quicksand. We reveal how specialized agencies can be the sherpa guiding your practice to the summit of digital marketing success, highlighting the common pitfalls where many DIY attempts have stumbled. The episode unfolds the lengthy customer journey specific to this niche, emphasizing the importance of targeted education in an industry where urgency often takes the backseat. Our candid discussion not only illuminates the path to a coherent and lucrative online marketing strategy but also serves as a beacon for estate planning and elder law attorneys eager to distinguish themselves in a crowded marketplace.

Register for the free Webinar: Mastering Digital Marketing for Estate Planning and Elder Law: https://imsrocks.com/your-2024-marketing-plan/

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hi there, I'm Jennifer Goddard and you're listening to the Marketing Lawcast. Today we're looking at the unique marketing challenges you face as an attorney practicing in estate planning or elder law, and how to meet those challenges and crash through your goals in 2024.

Speaker 2: 0:18

Before we dive into today's episode, a special shout out to our sponsor, QuidProQuo. 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: 0:34

Welcome back For the next 20 minutes. We're going to focus on what makes marketing such a challenge for estate planning and elder law firms and show what it really takes to make it work for you. First, let's admit that estate planning and elder law are somewhat unique practice areas in the field of law. Unlike other fields of law, you have a unique marketing imperative. You don't usually have an ongoing revenue stream from a retainer agreement with your clients. Now, in some cases, I know some attorneys have worked out some maintenance programs with ongoing membership fees and I think that's brilliant. But most estate planning and elder law attorneys do not have an ongoing retainer relationship. They usually have a single transaction and perhaps some follow-up later on. Also, you don't usually find that you have a multi-million dollar settlement in estate planning or elder law or even a multi-thousand dollar settlement. Now I realize that sometimes you may close a probate and you'll get a fee, but typically that fee is for a lot of work that you've put in for months and months, sometimes even years, before that case closed. So you don't have an ongoing revenue stream and you don't have this big pot of gold waiting when you close or settle a case In estate planning and elder law it's really about hitting a lot of singles and a few doubles, very few home runs in terms of revenue.

Speaker 1: 2:22

You also have a lot of competition. You have competition from other attorneys. You have increasing competition from people who are maybe we might consider it unauthorized practice of law, but it seems to be acceptable practice document preparers. And then you have competition from online document services like Legal Zoom and many others. And then, of course, you have the competition from everything else that's happening in life. Unlike other fields of law your clients they can procrastinate, they're not being served, they haven't been served with a subpoena, they haven't gotten a ticket, they're not in a situation where they absolutely have to go get an attorney. So, basically, anything in life can be competition for doing their estate plan. So you have a lower sense of urgency and that really impacts the kind of marketing that you can do. That will be effective for in estate planning and elder law, as opposed to some fields, for example, like family law, where someone has filed for a divorce and they typically need an attorney to do that, and then they typically need an attorney to respond and they know that they need an attorney or they've been given a traffic ticket or a DUI, or they've been subpoenaed. Those people have an immediate sense of urgency and there are certain marketing tactics that will work really well for that. That don't necessarily work as well in estate planning or elder law, where people don't necessarily know that they even need an attorney, and they certainly don't know that they need an attorney now.

Speaker 1: 4:23

The other thing that makes marketing so challenging in estate planning and elder law is that you are under a constant need for new clients. Your only as good as your calendar is full. Typically you close your cases relatively quickly and you need another one, or there's no more revenue coming in the door. So there's this constant need for new leads, new prospects, new clients in order to keep the revenue flowing. And as you build your practice to serve the clients, you end up with some payroll and so you need that revenue to come in, and nothing happens unless you get a new client today, and you have to have a certain number of prospects, a certain number of leads, before you get a new client. So there's a very strong marketing imperative and yet some challenges about that marketing and that got to keep your client acquisition costs low, because you're not looking at getting a $10 million settlement for someone, you're looking to get in a fee somewhere between $1,500 and $15,000. That's kind of the continuum. So you can't overspend to get clients. And yet you need clients, a new client all the time, every day, a new case to come in the door to keep your revenue up.

Speaker 1: 5:54

So one question that we have come up quite a bit when we talk to estate planning and elder law attorneys is whether digital marketing is even worthwhile in estate planning and elder law. One thing I notice I monitor a lot of Facebook groups and listservs for estate planning and elder law attorneys and oftentimes a newbie will come in and say I'm just getting my practice started. What are the best ways for me to start marketing my practice and to start building up a client base? And it's really quite rare for anyone to recommend that they start doing some digital marketing, that they get a website, that they get a listing on Google my Business, that they start gathering reviews, that they start posting on social media. Usually the traditional advice is that you should start networking with allied professionals who might be able to send you some referrals. You should go buy some business cards. Let everybody you know know that you are practicing in estate planning or elder law, how to get in touch with you and then start knocking on doors of financial advisors, insurance professionals, cpas, etc. To start building your referrals.

Speaker 1: 7:20

Oftentimes, other attorneys will say I tried this or that digital marketing strategy. It didn't work for me. The best thing that I do is I get referrals and sometimes I think people think that I preach against that strategy, that I preach against getting referrals. I definitely think that you should build your personal network and that you should go out there and get referrals, do I think that's the best way for you to get started. It is a way to get started, but unless you have an online presence, unless you bring in digital marketing, relying on referrals is a very tricky strategy. It is something that can backfire on you and it can put a governor on your revenue and really slow down your process. If you dig a little deeper and sometimes people do on these Facebook groups and on these chats, you find that people who say that that you should go out and do your legwork and build your referral network will say things like I made $30,000 my first year and I made $50,000 my second year. By my third year I was really rolling and I was making over $100,000 a year. Now if you want to wait three years to make $125,000 a year, then follow that advice, because that's kind of how it works. I definitely believe you can get business from doing referral networking, but if you skip digital marketing, you're going to be waiting a very long time to get a very small amount of money in two or three years. Add to your referral networking digital marketing and you can accelerate the process tremendously.

Speaker 1: 9:34

So when we look at digital marketing just off the top of your head, realize that digital is something where you put in effort and investment at the beginning to build a system, to build a website, to build your SEO, to build your CRM, your marketing automations. You put that effort in to build that system and then that system works for you 24-7. If you think about it, it's like the best investment that you could possibly make. It's better than hiring an assistant, because an assistant will only work for you five days a week, eight hours a day, and you have to keep paying that assistant on and on and on. You build your digital marketing in. Yes, it's an investment, but it works for you 24 seven and you can make database decisions about how well it's performing and tweak it and change directions and, you know, optimize it for certain goals. So it's really one of the best investments that you can make and it accelerates everything else that you're doing.

Speaker 1: 10:52

So when I look at digital marketing and I look at estate planning or elder law attorneys, my question is who does it make sense for? For which estate planning, or which estate or which elder law attorneys does it make sense to incorporate a digital marketing strategy? And really it comes down to three things to me in my mind. The first one is Any attorney who wants to run their practice like a business instead of a hobby. If you've got a business mind about this practice and you really want to make it pay, be profitable, get a return on investment and make it A viable business, then digital marketing has got to be part of your strategy. The second one is any attorney who really wants financial security, who wants to build personal and even generational wealth. If you're looking for this Practice to generate for you the kind of financial security that a real business, profitable business, can generate, then you're going to need more than just referral marketing. You're going to need to be very serious and committed and digital marketing makes perfect sense for you because it's the way that you can scale up very rapidly. And the third one is any attorney who is willing to invest to get what they want, if they are willing to trade money for opportunity and for profits and for their goals, because digital marketing does require an investment. So if you're not willing to make an investment, then digital marketing is probably not going to be a strategy for you. But if you want to run your practice like a business and if you want the kind of financial security and personal wealth that A profitable business can generate and you're willing to invest to make that happen, then digital marketing is probably the best solution for you right now.

Speaker 1: 13:12

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Speaker 1: 14:19

So if digital marketing makes sense for any attorney that wants to run their practice like a business, why does digital marketing get such a bad rap? Well, what I've observed comes down to three primary reasons. The first one is the tendency to implement a tactic Without having a cohesive strategy. In other words, you decide to really go gung ho on social media. Maybe you even hire a social media manager or someone who's an assistant in your office to make sure that you're posting regularly on social media. But that effort, that is a tactic and it's frequently not guided by a strategy. We're going to post strategically here with this kind of content and on another platform with another kind of content, and we're going to have that pushing traffic to a certain landing page and we're going to track it and we're going to see what kind of engagement and what kind of reach we get and what happens if we change our frequency or if we change our timing. You see what I mean. You so, you so you go in all in on social media and you're just posting and posting, and posting, and then you kind of sit back and say, well, that didn't work and it was kind of destined not to work because there was no strategy behind it. But then there's another, more subtle aspect of the strategy and that's where does this social media effort fit into your overall strategy?

Speaker 1: 16:09

One thing that I'm seeing more and more, as I think everybody has come become a little bit more sophisticated with online marketing. Some of the attorneys who are most committed to growing their practice and really have had success are most frustrated with their marketing because they have one agency doing their Google ads, another agency running their webinar funnel, another agency doing their search engine optimization. Search engine optimization, somebody else built the website and then they got someone on their staff doing social media. And they have all this money going out to implement each one of these tactics. And even though there might be a strategy behind any one of the tactics, there's not a strategy that pulls them all together. I even talked to a person who had a website with one agency and hired another agency to manage the search engine optimization, and the website agency would not give the SEO agency access to the website so that they could do the SEO. And if there's breakdowns at that kind of a granular level? What kind of breakdowns are happening at the strategic level? Was the website even designed to support SEO? How can you just lay an SEO plan onto a website without having it be integrated?

Speaker 1: 17:46

And that's why I think a lot of times digital marketing even people who have kind of gone all in on digital marketing can be very frustrating, because unless you have the right hand knowing what the left hand is doing, and that they're both working together toward a common goal on which you have agreed, then you just have a lot of money going out the door, there's a lot of activity, but there's no real return on investment, no real outcome, and the occasional great lead that you get through your marketing, you don't even really know how to replicate that and get more and more of it. The second reason that I think digital marketing gets a bad rap, particularly with estate planning and elder law attorneys, is there are a lot of agencies out there who have no clue how to market an estate planning or elder law firm. You start off with a ton of agencies that don't know anything about legal marketing and they can get you into some trouble with your state bar association by violating some of the rules that apply to legal marketing. But then even within those agencies who niche down to specializing in legal marketing, there is a huge difference between marketing a family law firm and marketing and estate planning or elder law firm, and I talked about this when we talked about the challenges of marketing in these particular practice areas, and the biggest difference is that sense of urgency. So when we look at Google Pay-Per-Click ads, for example, they're usually keyword ads, niche ads, and they're based on someone going online and looking for an attorney in a specific practice area. Those types of ads work very well when the prospect knows they need an attorney and is ready to hire someone In estate planning and elder law.

Speaker 1: 19:59

Frequently the prospect does not realize that they need an attorney in this situation, even if it's a probate case, they may not realize that they need an attorney to help them through the probate process. If they've got a loved one who's in a nursing home, they may not have any idea that there are lawyers out there who actually help them find ways to pay for care. They may not know that. In fact, they probably don't know that and they certainly don't know some of the jargon that we use estate planning, wills and trusts. They probably know more about looking for a will. They don't necessarily know that a will isn't what they need, that they should be looking for an estate planning attorney. They may not know that, particularly elder law. They don't know that they need an elder law attorney.

Speaker 1: 20:56

Search-based pay per click can be tremendously effective in other practice areas and not so much necessarily in estate planning and elder law. So when you have a very unique practice area, that requires empathy, understanding and education is more of a process and the sales cycle might be longer in terms of the customer journey, from when they begin to realize they might have a problem and an attorney might be someone who could help them solve that problem to finally deciding to hire you to solve that problem. So estate planning and elder law is very specialized and quite different from other fields of law. So law firms who hire legal marketing agencies who don't specialize in estate planning or elder law frequently feel like they have overspent and they've gotten lower return for that investment. Again, remember what I said about client acquisition costs, because you're not getting a great big fee or a great big settlement, so you have to be very careful about where you spend your budget. So working with people who don't really understand what how to market in a estate planning or elder law firm can make it seem like digital marketing just doesn't work and that it's terribly expensive. We find that we've done this since 1995. We have worked exclusively with the estate planning and elder law attorneys and our approach to marketing is very different from some of our colleagues who do great job in family law and personal injury and some of these other practice areas but really struggle mightily with estate planning and elder law.

Speaker 1: 22:56

And then the third reason I think that digital marketing can get a bad rep in estate planning and elder law is because the DIY temptation is so strong. You look at these things and it looks so simple. I could crank out a website. I could go over to one of these website builders and I could figure out how to crank out a website and it won't cost me hardly anything at all. I could host it on one of these mass servers and pay only $2 or $3 a month. And then I try to do that and I have this not-so-good website on this not-so-good server. And then I say I never got anything out of my website. I think the website's a waste of time. Well, one of the reasons is because your website was done by an amateur. You're a pro in the legal field, not necessarily in digital marketing. So a lot of these things that look so simple.

Speaker 1: 23:56

I mean, how easy is it to post on Facebook? I mean, like kids do it right. Everybody knows how to post on Facebook, but not everybody knows how to use Facebook to grow an estate planning or elder law firm. So a lot of times when you talk to other attorneys who really bash digital marketing, you'll find that, yes, they have tried a lot of things, but it was kind of that DIY. And when I talk to them and I hear these stories, I'm thinking, gosh, I would love to see this in a way that's more visual. You know, you look at somebody who's built their own deck and you can see like what's wrong with it. It's very easy to see. But when someone does their own DIY digital marketing, it's not as easy to see how many mistakes were made in that process. So I think you know, between this being a very specialized field and the marketing being particularly challenging to that temptation to DIY and then to the idea that not having everything integrated into a cohesive strategy, that can really make people think that digital marketing doesn't work.

Speaker 1: 25:11

So what does it actually take to make digital marketing work for your law firm? Well, there are four things that you need to make this work for you, and the first one is strategy. You need an overarching strategy that brings everything together. I talk about omnipresence In today's digital world. We've got to be looking at so many pieces, but we have to look at them into. How do they make this puzzle so like if you have a jigsaw puzzle and you have a thousand pieces and you don't have any picture to go by, you have no idea what it's supposed to look like. Yes, you can kind of fit some pieces together, but it's very difficult to come up with that final product. And so, if you think of your strategy as being okay, this is my picture of how this jigsaw puzzle is going to turn out. And then you want to make sure that all the pieces that you're working with are from the same puzzle. You don't want half of your pieces to be from this puzzle and then you know 10% of your pieces be from another puzzle and you've got a mishmash of puzzle pieces. You will never get that outcome. So, having a strategy that brings everything together working and building synergy between each aspect of your marketing. That's the first key to success in digital marketing and it goes along with the second one, which is that integration, so that your social media organic posts build and help your social media paid advertising perform better, and that paid advertising helps your search engine optimization perform better and the SEO helps your website conversion perform better. So the integration in digital marketing is extremely important and not having it piecemealed out to different agencies who are all kind of battling for their territory. I always say you know, if I have a hammer, every problem is a nail. So if I am a pay per click advertising agency, I know that I can solve your problem with pay per click ads. Right, you want somebody who isn't working for a specific platform but is working for you and pulling all these things together for you.

Speaker 1: 27:42

The third one is investment. It does require a reasonable investment to make digital marketing work. The more money that you want to make, the more revenue that you want to bring in, the more money you are going to spend on your digital marketing. If you are content staying exactly where you are, then what you're spending now is probably going to get you there. But if you want to grow, you're probably going to have to grow your investment as well, but of course you want to grow it wisely and always be conscious of your client acquisition costs, particularly in estate planning and elder law. And then the fourth one is commitment. You have to have a commitment to growth. Like I just said, if you're content at being where you are, revenue wise, you can probably keep spending what you're spending. But if you want to grow, if you are committed to grow, then digital marketing can work for you, as long as you have strategic alignment, you have integration and you're willing to make that investment. So the bottom line is this Effective marketing is essential to the health and well-being of your estate planning or elder law firm. While it certainly can be challenging, it doesn't have to be. The real key is to successful marketing or strategy, integration, investment and commitment.

Speaker 1: 29:17

You know you can learn more about how to master digital marketing for your law firm by joining me next week for a free master class on mastering digital marketing for estate planning or elder law. This class is going to I'm going to do it live. It'll be at 12 noon eastern, 11 central on Thursday, january the 18th. You can register for that webinar on my website, wwwimsrockscom. Now, be sure and go ahead and register, even if you can't attend live, because I'll send out the replay link and all the bonus materials to everyone who registers. If you happen to be listening to this podcast after January 18th, check the links in the description below and you can still register for the replay. Thank you for tuning in to the marketing lawcast. Be sure to drop me a comment, subscribe and share this podcast with your colleagues, and join me next week for more insights and strategies. Until then, keep your dreams alive and never stop reaching for the stars.

Speaker 2: 30:29

That's a wrap for today's episode and a big thank you to our sponsor, quidproquo. 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.