Digital Marketing Plan for Lawyers Part Three: Google Maps, Social Media, and Paid Advertising

Ever wondered how your law firm can outrank competitors and secure that coveted spot in Google's Map Pack? You're about to get a crash course in digital marketing mastery specifically tailored for law firms aiming to conquer the digital space in 2024. We're peeling back the layers on the complex world of on-page SEO, Google Business Profiles, and how to craft content that not only resonates with your audience but also with Google's algorithm. And if you think social media is just for sharing memes, our deep-dive into its surprising SEO benefits and audience building tactics for retargeting in paid advertising will have you rethinking your digital strategy.

Let's talk foundations. Before you even think about splurging on pay-per-click campaigns, there's groundwork to be done, and I'm walking you through every step. From ensuring your website is a conversion powerhouse to producing engaging content and building your email list, these are the non-negotiables that set the stage for a thriving online presence. And when we do venture into the realms of Facebook and Google ads, I'll guide you through targeting the right demographics and making data-driven decisions on where to allocate your hard-earned marketing dollars.

Closing the deal isn't just about attracting leads; it's about converting them into loyal, high-paying clients. If you've been struggling to harness the full potential of internet leads for your estate planning or elder law firm, you'll find our insights on maintaining premium fees and optimizing your sales process invaluable. Plus, we're not just talking theory here—I've got a practical toolkit to help you engineer your business targets and a checklist to audit your current tactics, ensuring you're on the fast track to achieving your revenue goals with finesse and certainty.

Download ALL of the Bonus Materials mentioned in this series: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1FkQdF41WIR82zGtgO86jmy0BkE6DnUdz?usp=sharing

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hi and welcome back to the Marketing Lawcast. I'm your host, jennifer Goddard. I recently did a 90-minute masterclass on your 2024 digital marketing plan. In today's episode I've distilled that down to about 30 minutes and we're really going to focus on getting you ranked in the Google Map pack. Email marketing, social media, marketing for estate planning and elder law attorneys, and paid advertising. We're going to talk just a little bit about sales. Let's dive right in.

Speaker 2: 0:34

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: 0:49

Are you ranking on the map pack? That's that three. There's only three that show up in the map pack. How important is that? Well, remember we said 84% of the clicks on that shaded area that included the organic listings 44%, or almost half of the clicks, are right in that map pack. So it's important that you do the things that get your firm listed into the map pack. Here's how we do it for our clients. The first thing is we do their on-page technical SEO. We make sure all of that's done properly. Then we optimize their business profile, make sure that's done properly. Then we really have a strategic plan, an automated plan to make sure we get plenty of reviews. All of these things influence whether you show up in that map pack. Then we use a signal-generating strategy. That's a content strategy. As well as syndicating that content to digital media, we do it in a way that we're sending to the digital media the signals, the links to our Google business profile, back to our blog, back to our website. Those are all signals that go directly into the Google algorithm. That all helps to pull that authority into your listing. That's how we get our clients to rank in the map pack. It's on-page SEO. It's that Google business profile, it's reviews, then it's this signal-generating strategy that we use with their content to make sure that Google is aggregating all of this authority around your listing. That's it in a nutshell.

Speaker 1: 2:45

Next thing Are you currently active on social media? I get a lot of pushback from people about not boning to be active on social media. I want you to wrap your head around the fact that most of your clients and many of your referral sources hang out on social media. When you engage with your audience directly using relevant content on social media, it's also really important to understand that Google is looking at your social interaction, engagement and content as well. One of the things that we have seen be so powerful is optimizing our videos and then distributing them across social media. We see that engagement and that visibility go up. Then we see that our rank goes up as well. There's two different things you want to track. How visible are you online Then? What's your actual rank? That visibility will drive the rank on the search engine results pages.

Speaker 1: 3:52

You also can build your audiences on social media. That will help lower your client acquisition costs, because it's very inexpensive to do so. You're not paying $35 or $50 per lead. You're building those audiences organically and getting direct referrals, improving your SEO and then building audiences to which you can retarget with your paid advertising. I don't know how many of you guys have ever visited IMS's website and then gone onto Google and you start seeing our ad pop up everywhere that you go. We try to follow you around the web. That's very inexpensive strategy to implement.

Speaker 1: 4:31

If you're building those audiences, are you leveraging your email, your email list, using email to get reviews, to boost your social engagement, to get referrals and to nurture leads? We use email automations for all of these things. You guys can be doing that as well. Don't underestimate the power of your email list. Are you tracking your return on investment? Are you watching your traffic trends on Google Analytics? Are you tracking how you're ranking online for important keywords? Are you tracking where your phone calls are coming from? For our clients, we set all this tracking up in a CRM called Lawmatics and they have a dashboard where they can go in and look at those numbers at any time. We also have Google Looker Studio that's brought right into their website, so when they log into their website, they can look at their Google Analytics and see all these numbers. You guys need to be looking at these numbers on a fairly regular basis. That's how you do your strategic planning. One of the things that we do with clients is we don't just send out a report saying here are your numbers. We meet with our clients every month and then we say here are your numbers and this is what they mean. Let's talk about strategy based on the data that we have now. What's our next step going to be? If you can find someone who will help you with that, you're going to be way ahead of getting great return on your marketing investment.

Speaker 1: 6:13

Now, as we continue up that growth acceleration map Towards the top of that map, you saw that we have paid advertising For our state and the elder law clients. We typically look at three types of paid advertising to see what is going to work best for your strategy. The first one you guys are probably all familiar with is Google Ads, google paid search. Thing about Google paid search is it's expensive, but the leads have a high level of intent. In other words, they went online looking for you and they clicked on your ad. They may not match your demographic, but they are looking for an attorney, so there's a very high intent For certain practice areas and certain strategic plans.

Speaker 1: 7:08

Google Ads make a lot of sense. We're going to break this down in just a second. For most of our clients, a better buy, a better bang per buck, will be on Facebook. We can target by demographics. So we know, even though these people may not be looking for an attorney right now, we do know that they fit the model of who needs our services. So we're at least talking to the right people. The cost per lead is typically much lower than with Google Ads. Then we have local services ads. You guys have probably seen those. I'm going to show you what they look like. They're very targeted by geography. We don't have a lot of other types of targeting. With those. They are lower cost per lead generally than Google Ads. They're probably a higher cost per lead than Facebook ads. So those are the three types of paid advertising that we look at with our clients Whether any of those make sense for you and which one.

Speaker 1: 8:13

Let's dive a little deeper. The first thing is, before you start talking about paid ads, I want to be sure that you can check all of these boxes, that you have this strong foundation. I'm not going to go through every one of those. We've already talked about them. Why is that so important? Because you're going to lower your client acquisition costs two ways. When your foundation is strong, you're going to get clients basically for free because you're getting them organically You're not paying per lead or per client. But the other thing is your ads will perform better and your cost per lead will be less when you have this foundation. Let me give you just one example Across pretty much any industry. If you look at Facebook leads, the average cost per lead on Facebook runs around $50. Really well optimized campaigns about $35 per lead. When we work with our clients and we add Facebook advertising on top of this organic foundation that we've built, our clients are getting leads in the $12, $13, $14, $15 per lead range. That's the big difference. When you have this foundation, your paid advertising performs better.

Speaker 1: 9:41

Before you even start talking about oh, I need to start doing paid ads, make sure you can check all of these boxes first, that you've got your organic foundation well established and that your website is ready to convert leads. When people land there, it really should look a lot like this pyramid we start with that website designed for conversion, then we make sure that we're doing all the things we need to do to make sure you're showing up on Google's page one that's your search engine optimization. Then we're producing great content and we're distributing it and engaging with people on social media platforms, and we've got our email marketing and automations in place to nurture leads and make sure that no leads fall through the cracks. When we have all that moving for us, then we add in paid advertising and then in that scenario, paid advertising works very, very well and your costs are not astronomical. But if you don't have this foundation, you can be spending a tremendous amount on paid advertising and you'll get leads from it, but you're paying a premium cost for every one of those leads. I can't tell you how many attorneys I speak to who call us about for help with their marketing and I find out that they're drowning in debt because everything that they have their budget has all been spent on pay per click, because in their mind, that's what marketing was. Oh, I got up my marketing, I'd better go do some paid advertising. And they missed all of this. It's almost like an iceberg, right? The PPC is the tip of the iceberg that people see, but there's all this underneath that supports that in a strong and healthy marketing plan.

Speaker 1: 11:35

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Speaker 1: 12:37

So, like I said, facebook is usually the biggest bang for your buck in a state planning and elder law very personal fields of law and you have a lot of opportunity to provide education and to help people feel comfortable with you. When you engage on Facebook Very highly targeted demographic, you can grow an audience and makes it very inexpensive and effective to retarget. If you set up your lead ads on Facebook, you can use those lead ads to grow your email list to continue with marketing. Then, if you combine those lead ads now, you don't always have to have a funnel to run Facebook ads. That's another misconception people have. If I don't have a funnel. I shouldn't be running Facebook ads A funnel like a webinar funnel ads running to a webinar and then to a book in a call. That can be very, very powerful, but if you've done all this work and developing your social presence, it's even more powerful. And then one caveat I have for you guys regardless of who you have managed your Facebook ads, make sure there is a testing phase that people are testing your creative, testing your, your offer, your headlines, your copy. Before you commit your budget, always test on Facebook because the testing will give you. The stats in Facebook are amazing, so the testing will give you amazing stats and insight so that you have a much better chance of your ads performing well.

Speaker 1: 14:11

Paid search, like I said, high intent, higher cost per lead, somewhat difficult to set up properly and to manage properly, so a lot of negative keywords that need to be filtered out. There's a lot to managing Google ads, so you probably need someone who has a pro to help you with Google ads. Search ads they work better for things where you have a higher fee, a higher volume of searches and a higher sense of urgency on the part of the lead. I always tell people, if you wanna start with Google ads. Probate is a pretty good starting point, because when people are going through a probate when someone has died, they realize they have to file a probate. Depending on the size of the estate and the state that the probate will be filed in, that can be a very complex and intimidating process. So they go online looking for a probate attorney. Okay, so there's a sense of urgency. Again, depending on your state, probate fees may be very high. In some states they're extremely high. So it's okay if you have a higher cost per lead because you have a higher fee involved. You know, if you're doing a basic will package and that's what most of your state practices is, basic wills and you're charging $795, which I hope you're not but if that's your situation, you can't afford a higher cost per lead, and so Google ads don't make any sense in that situation. Okay, so page search on Google can be very effective, but you need to be sure that it fits with your strategy and don't just start throwing money at it, because it can be an absolute money pit, particularly in a state planning in Elgarlaw.

Speaker 1: 16:04

Then we have this local service ads. I don't know if you guys have seen them Most people have by now. They show up at the top of the search results page and there's usually three of them. They there's some controversy about whether you should be using LSA's local service ads or not. I'm kind of gonna go through the pros and cons of them. The first one is they're very easy to use. That can be a pro because you probably don't have to hire a professional to manage them. It could also be a con because you could set them up yourself and put a lot of money into it and it might not be a right fit for you.

Speaker 1: 16:38

Okay, but they are easy to use. There's fairly automated. Google will walk you through the process. If you want to try them. You probably do not need someone to set it up for you. You can probably do it yourself. They may generate cheaper leads. Your cost per lead is gonna depend on how many lawyers are focused on that market in your city, in your target city. So estate planning leads. We find average around $50 per lead on LSA's and they have about a 25% conversion rate. So you're gonna be paying about $100 for a new case. That's wildly dependent. You can fluctuate wildly based on your market and your practice area. But I'm just kind of giving you a feel for generally what they cost, so they can be cheaper, particularly because now you don't have a management fee involved as well.

Speaker 1: 17:33

Right, they will show up as Google Spring For some people. Maybe that gives them a little bit more authority, a little cache. It wouldn't mean anything to me, but for some people it might be important. The ads do appear at the top of the page. Sometimes it might make sense to start with some LSAs. If you're still trying to get your SEO running and you're still trying to get all of your foundation built and you're not showing up in search, you might want to put some budget on these LSAs so you can at least get in the game and be on the top of that search engine results page. That's something that could be a big pro for, maybe a temporary, maybe it's a bridge for you for a few months until something else is starting to kick in for you. It also gives you a chance to test and maybe you start out with the idea that it's going to be temporary, but you know what it's really doing well for you and it becomes permanent. So it's easy to get set up. It's easy to get started. It's also easy to turn it off, so it might be something that could be part of your strategy this year.

Speaker 1: 18:42

Now, having said all that, there are some cons, okay. The first one is you don't get the opportunity. When people click on your LSA, you don't send them to your website, you don't send them to your webinar, you don't have any opportunity to really set the message or set the tone or start the process of pre-qualifying them. They're going to reach out to you right away. Some of the people that I talked to who are disappointed in their LSAs say they get too many unqualified callers. Now, if it is a spam call or a robo call or some out of your area, you can dispute that and Google will give you back your money. But if it's just somebody that's not qualified for you, you're not going to get your money back on that lead. So sometimes people say to me I tried LSAs and I got a lot of calls but they weren't very qualified, and that's in part because all the ads look the same, they're very generic and you really don't have any ability to differentiate yourself from your competition. I want to go back to that.

Speaker 1: 19:54

There's one more thing that's happening with LSAs right now that you need to be aware of. We're hearing from clients that they got a call from Google, from their LSA, and after the call Google called them and said we noticed that you reached out to Joe Smith. Did you know? There are other attorneys who also practice in this area and here are their phone numbers if you wanted to call them. I haven't heard a lot of it, but I have heard of it happening and that's not a very good thing. For once you've gotten off the call with somebody. You think that you got them booked and then Google calls them and basically tries to send them to another attorney as well. So that's something to be aware of.

Speaker 1: 20:48

I kind of, as you can tell, kind of on the border about whether LSAs are a good thing or a bad thing. I think for me the idea would be if you could use them as a temporary bridge to get in the game, so that you're showing up on page one, at the top of the page. That can be both a way to start driving leads and also to test whether this is something that's going to work for you, and maybe at the end of the three months you say now let's turn it off, I've got my organics is running, I'm going to shut that down. Or you say you know, in my market it's working pretty well and I do have clients for whom LSAs are working well. So it's not a silver bullet but it's definitely something that might be part of your plan.

Speaker 1: 21:34

Questions to ask yourself about whether you should be using LSAs. Firstly, do you have a system in place to screen the calls and pre-qualify prospects? If you don't, it could just be very annoying to get a lot of these calls. Can you cover your phones for most of the hours, of most of the days? Because if the phones are not answered, then Google is going to stop showing your ads. It doesn't matter how much budget you put on them. Are you okay with a generally lower income, less sophisticated prospect? You might be if you're just getting started out or if you've added an associate and you just need to drive some business into the firm. Do you have a lot of five-star Google reviews, because that's really important. Your Google reviews is about the only differentiator that you have on LSAs. So the more that you have, the more authority you're going to have on that LSA and more likely people are going to click on it. Do you have capacity in your firm now to handle that lead flow and that call volume.

Speaker 1: 22:36

I'm going to go back and say do you already have a strong organic marketing foundation? Do you have some budget that you could put to it? It's not like you can't get started here for like $100 a month. You're going to need to put some money behind it to make it even get traction. So you might want to give them a try. It might be something that you say, okay, we're going to first quarter, we're going to run some of these LSAs, we're going to get them set up and see how they perform and just monitor it and make sure that it does actually work for you. I want to just show again I can't show it too many times this model of progression Once you master one of these lower rungs, then you can move up. If you haven't mastered any of these lower rungs, you may wanna go back and master them Now at the top. We've talked about paid advertising. We also wanna optimize those results boosting the average fee, boosting the closing ratio. Okay, again, just remember those like three sections nine clear steps to getting this all working for you and firing in all cylinders. I talked about average fee and closing ratio.

Speaker 1: 23:59

What I see the biggest issue for estate planning in elder law firms when they start getting business from the internet, getting leads from the internet is converting those leads at premium fees. I've talked to a lot of attorneys who say, yeah, I actually put up roadblocks from people from the internet. I can't take any more internet leads because I can't close them. They're all bad right. Converting at premium fees, especially when you start using internet marketing, is a big challenge and it's one of the keys to making the ROI.

Speaker 1: 24:34

Guys, I have a web in your bonus materials. I have a spreadsheet for you and I want you to walk through it. I was kind of getting short on time running over already so I don't want to go through it too deeply. But with this spreadsheet you can put in your actual numbers how many cases, your actual revenue, your actual fees and figure out what would it take if you didn't change your fee and you didn't change your closing ratio. How would you possibly get to your annual goal?

Speaker 1: 25:12

And what I find is a very eye-opening experience when people go through this worksheet, when they realize there's no physical way for them to see enough people and close enough people to achieve their $500,000 a year goal. They have to change their fee structure in their closing rate, and if they don't do those two things, there's no amount of marketing that's gonna get them to their goal, because physically you run out of time, you simply cannot do it, and bringing on more staff in order to be able to do it only means your top number goes up, but your bottom number goes up right along with it. And I've seen so many attorneys who've gone from, say, $400,000 to $750,000 by not going through this activity but instead hiring staff to be able to handle the extra work, and at $750,000, they were taking home less money than they were at $400,000. If you have a goal of annual revenue, that's more than what you're making now. I want you to get into this particular worksheet and reverse engineer how you're going to get there and you will see pretty quickly that boosting your average fee, being able to close for higher fees which is a part of marketing, making sure you're attracting the right clients as well as sales process and then being able to close people. I heard the other day someone said well, if you raise your fees, you're gonna lower your closing rate. There's some truth to that, but you do not want to see your close rate go into the tank, just totally tank when you raise your fees, which is what happens to people. Raise your fees now you can't close anybody, and so you go back to lowering your fees back to where they were before. What you want to do is be able to raise your fees without tanking your closing ratio, and when you reverse engineer your revenue with this worksheet, you're going to see that that's the ticket. That's what you have to do. So the question then is how do you do it? Well, I want you to look at your sales process and ask yourself if any of these apply to you. Are you here yourself saying all of my internet leads suck. I can't close my internet leads. Do you say my market will not support higher fees? I'm different, my market is different. My market won't support them.

Speaker 1: 27:58

You're tired of chasing prospects who have to think about it after you've gone through your entire first initial consultation. If most of your business has always traditionally come from financial advisors and referrals from financial advisors, it's a strong indicator that you may not have ever actually developed an effective sales process or an effective sales skillset. The reason is those financial advisors are always in sales training. They're the best salespeople on the planet and they're pre-selling your prospects. So your closing ratio from referrals may be very, very good, but as soon as you get these internet leads, your closing ratio can tank because you need a sales process yourself, because you don't have that financial advisor in between them, in between you and your prospect. The other sign is if in your initial consultations you are talking more than the prospect, it's a pretty good sign that you need to switch to work on your sales process, because if you're seeing their answering questions throughout that consultation, it can be very difficult for you to close that client. If you are asking the questions and they are giving you information, james always says that's like putting gold in your bag Every time they give you more information. That's how you show the value. You get their information, you find out what's bothering them, where their pain points are, and then you can show the value much more easily and close at a much higher fee.

Speaker 1: 29:33

So I know we've covered a lot of ground this morning. How are you doing? I've got a checklist for you guys. That's in the bonus materials. You can go through it. Ask yourself these questions Are you doing all these things? Are you firing on all these cylinders for your digital marketing. When you go through that checklist, you might say I can see it's pretty clear to me that I'm going to need some help. If you do feel that way, I would like for you to go to our website and schedule a call a discovery call with my team. Imsrockscom forward slash apply. There's no obligation and we don't do any hard cells around here, so it's a discovery call. If you think you need some help with some of these things, let's see whether we might be able to help you. I hope you enjoyed this 30 minute slice of my master class on how to design your law firm's internet marketing plan. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any of the other episodes in this series.

Speaker 2: 31:00

If you want to learn more about how to design your law firm, how to practice to new heights, visit their website at wwwquidproquolawcom.