EP 288 - Mary Blackiston - Empathy-Driven Copy: The Secret Weapon for Law Firms

Copywriting is not typical writing. I mean, the writing that I wrote in college is so different from copywriting. Copywriting is literally just writing like you you speak. So that's why I think it's really difficult sometimes to forget all those grammar rules that you've learned and just throw everything out the door.

So that's why hiring copywriter can be really helpful for that. You're listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast presented by Market My Market with your hosts Eric Barsano, Ryan Klein, and Chase Williams, the go to podcast for learning from the experts in the legal community about effective ways to grow and manage your law firm. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Legal Mastermind podcast. Today I have with me the owner of Nomad Copywriting, Mary Blackiston.

Mary, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me saity to be be here. Sure, well, I think people can probably tell by the name of your company that you are a copywriter. And today we're going to dig into really your style and how you work with law firms attorneys on creating copy that's actually going to help them convert and really connect with their potential clients.

But before we jump into the details, of that. Can you give us a little bit of a backstory on how you became a copywriter that works with law firms. Yeah, so I became a freelance copywriter about four and a half years ago. Before that, I was working in marketing but doing more content and then I, you know, I was working for an agency for like four years before that, and then I became freelance and decided to focus on conversion copywriting.

So I went through all the training with copy hackers. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them, but basically the company that coined the term conversion copywriting, and then I, you know, decided to really go all in on the conversion copywriting. And then over the years, I started to work with more and more lawyers, and I just really enjoyed writing, you know, strategizing, researching all of that. I found it's super interesting, particularly with personal injury lawyers, civil rights lawyers, people who are speaking to lawyers, who are speaking to people who are in a more vulnerable state.

And I just really really enjoyed that work. I found it really meaningful, and I also found that there was a need for it. I see, you know, helpless websites love firm websites that I think, you know, they could really use a copywriter. So so yeah, that's kind of how I fell into it, And you know, that's really something I'm passionate about and equally find that there's a need for it.

So yeah, I agree with you, there's definitely a need for this. I think most attorneys at this point in time know A I need a website, A I need some content, and then they just check that box, not realizing how important that is to the customer experience. So if there's a potential client, let's say personal injury, which you just mentioned, this is maybe the most horrific thing that's ever happened to that person, and to just have a website with a couple of keywords sprinkled in it and contact me because I'm great, that's really not speaking to that audience.

And one thing that I really picked up out of your bio was that you like to write with. Empathy in mind. Can you really kind of explain what you mean by that when you're when you're writing to that audience. Yeah, So, by empathy driven messaging, I mean, all copies should be empathy driven.

But I find that, you know, they're different some copies more maybe creative, or it's more designed to grab people's attention or spark some kind of emotional reaction. By empathy driven is I mean speaking to people who are in a more vulnerable state. So you know, people have just been in a car accident or harassed by their their boss, or you know, people who are really in need to in this case speak with a lawyer, and. You know, different things around.

So empathy driven messaging requires My process always starts with voice of customer research, and that's super important part of the conversion copywriting process. So that might include interviewing my client, interviewing some of his clients, reviewing different forums and Facebook groups where the audience hangs out, seeing what they're saying, and also the words that they're using, how are they speaking, And that will help to ensure that the copy that I write is actually going to resonate with them.

You know. I'll use an example that I see all the time that is really cringe worthy. It's not so much the copy but the imagery, you know. For the other the other day, I was on a website that was talking about accidental drownings, and they literally had a photo of somebody floating.

You know, if that actually happened to your. Loved one, and you know, you have this photo of somebody floating, like accidental drowning. Okay, what's my image going to be? Oh, it's a picture of somebody dead floating in a pool.

Yeah, you're just you're I can't think of anything more crude than that. And I think what you're talking about is doing that on the verbal side, really trying to empathize with someone. Yeah, exactly. Normally, when I'm like creating a lending page, for example, I also like to think about the images that we're going to use so that you know, guiding the designer on that because you know, obviously you want the copy to complement the design, and the design is is a big part of the conversion, you know, conversions as well, So making sure that the copy is formaunted on the page and a that's going to get people to keep reading and to you know, having images that are actually going to resonate with people.

Like you said, I mean, I've seen on like car accident lending pages. You know, like images are just like. A car crash, and it's like this is actually really anxiety provoking just for me and I'm not even the target audience, so I can only imagine how someone who's been in that situation feels with me. Land on the page and see that kind of image be much you know, better to have like an image of maybe the law firm like smiling.

Well, you know, some kind of image is going to be a little more welcoming rather than something that's going to bring up all the trauma that they've just experienced. Yeah, you said something that I think is important, which is interviewing the lawyer. But even more important, you said that you'd actually interviewed some of their clients. Can you share maybe some of the things that you pulled out that were surprising to you?

But you know, before you had the interview with the client, you might have had some certain expectations. But what did they tell you that you were like, Oh my god, this is I need to include this type of information in my writing because it's so powerful. Yeah. Well, I asked a a bunch of different questions.

One of them was like, could you walk me through how you stumbled upon, you know, the law firm, my client's law firm, and what it was like, what the process was like working with them. And I noticed that many people loved working with my client because, unlike many other lawyers that they had spoken with, my client never rushed them. He always picked up the phone and they called or responded with the text. He never made them feel dumb, which he said other lawyers had made them feel dumb.

He was always. Reassuring them, super easy to talk to, so, you know, just kind of treating them like a friend. And so in the messaging, I wanted to convey that personable, unpretentious vibe and reassure people that my client be you know, holding their hand through the entire process, you know. So that was one thing.

I also found that, you know, many women in this situation blame themselves because maybe they didn't pay the rent on time, or they give into their well. So, my client, who I'm speaking about, he is a civil rights lawyer who helps women who have been sexually harassed by their landlords. So in this particular case, the women, you know, many people in this situation blame themselves because they didn't pay the rent on time, or they gave into their landlords and advances. So I added a section to the copy just telling people that this is not their fault and that they have a right to just say harassment, free housing.

So just reminding people of that, you know, and I think that that really goes a long way. So yeah, those are just a few examples. I could give more, but just in general, the research allowed me to get super specific with the copy and the wording and ensure that I'm. Speaking their language.

So that specific copy is what's going to have your readers nodding their heads as the reading and thinking yep, that's me. So yeah, yeah, so you're you're talking specifically to the injured person and you're saying how you can help them. One of the things you also mentioned in your bio is a lot of attorneys get stuck and then me, me, me face. Can you kind of explain what that is?

And you know why that's not the best approach. Yeah, So one of the you know, first rules of conversion copywriting is you know, to speak to you know, make it about your reader and not about you. So one of like the first things I learned was turn every sentence around to be to start with you instead of we. And obviously you can't make that, I mean, that's not appropriate with every sentence, but if you just use that to guide, you know, when you're writing the copy, that's going to go a long way.

So I just see a lot of websites, and particular with lawyers, where they're you know, saying like our law firm has you know, we've gotten billions of x x, like ten billion dollars for our work clients or you know, whatever the amount is, we have. X years of experience, blah blah blah. People don't really care, honestly, And with my previous client, we had amazing results. We never spoke about.

I mean maybe we touched on it a little bit, like way further down the page. But first I started off the page by making it all about the reader, and then when I did share my client's story, it was in relation to the reader. So why why is this important? Why is this issue important to him?

Why does he care about helping them things that I thought, you know, would resonate with the reader as opposed to just like you know, bombarding them with the results and experience and all of that. Yeah. I've seen some really good copy from you know, specifically personal injury attorneys, and a lot of it has to do with why they decided to go into that profession. You know, one in particular had a really bad motorcycle accident when he was younger and went through that process, you know, had a back injury, had to go through the process himself.

Others maybe their parent, you know, their mother or father was an attorney and they saw how it changed people's lives, and that passion needs to come through to the potential client, because the client doesn't want to think, oh, I'm just a number. Oh he just wants to get a good result because of a B or C. It's no, this person is going to be up till midnight working on my case because this is this is their calling in life. I assume those are some of the types of things that you're trying to pull out when you interview the attorneys.

Yes, yeah, for sure. I mean why is this something that's important to you? Tell me about how you got into this, you know, just yeah. I start by sending my clients are really comprehensive brand questionnaire, and then from there we jump on some kickoff calls where I dig deeper with all the questions, and it's always just to get deeper and deeper with each question I ask, and I really want, as I said earlier, more, you know, super specific examples, you know, what is that aha moment?

If there, if there is one of why you got into this, And often often you'll find that it's not actually about the money. They really care about, you know, this cause and helping people. So that's where I really want to focus on. Yeah, one of the challenges I've seen.

It doesn't happen all the time, and I'm wondering if you've had this experience and how you might deal with it. But some attorneys get very finicky about their content. So you go off and you write this great empathetic piece and it's got everything that you wanted and you're very proud of it, and then you hand it over to the attorney. Do you ever get pushback because.

They wanted to be more legal ease or they want it to be more about them? And how do you deal with that? Yeah, that's tough. I mean, I'll say most of the time when I've worked with lawyers, they've been pretty flexible and they're like, whatever is going to convert and result and you know, get the best results.

I'm up for that. So I haven't had too much pushback, I guess just because I try to clarify that on our discovery call. I don't want to work with someone if they're just going to change everything I wrote, because you know, that's. The copy that I write.

It's there for a reason, and as I said, the research is going to get the best results. So I did. I will say I did have one client that I was working with a few years ago and he basically tore apart my copy and I was like so gutted because you know, I was like just making it much more formal and you know, create. I think that kind of copy is just really creating a barrier between yourself and the reader.

And I can give some examples of that, but that's one of the kind of the things that I one of the mistakes that I see a lot of lawyers make is just making the copy too kind of formal and using this lawyer lawyer like jargon, really wordy kind of I mean not say everyone does this, but more kind of wordy sentences that you know, with copywriting, you want to kind of forget everything that you learned in school and speak to your reader like they're an actual friend, an actual person.

So yeah, I agree. I think a lot of lawyers, you know, they're they're very good writers. In their in their own right, but they're writing to a different audience. They're writing to the court, they're writing to the judge, they're writing to other lawyers.

And if you want to resonate with the potential clients, you really need to come at it from this from this different level. So I think you do a great job, as you said, you mentioned in your discovery calls like hey, this is my style, this is what we're going to do, and they really need to kind of yeah their trust in you because that's your. Special Yeah, and that's I mean exactly what I wanted to mention was copywriting is not typical writing. I mean the writing that I wrote and you know in college is so different from copywriting.

Copywriting is literally just writing like you you speak. So that's why I think it's really difficult sometimes too to forget all those grammar rules that you've learned and just throw everything out the door. And yeah, so that's why hiring copywriter can be really helpful for that. Yes, for sure, I want to shift gears a little bit into a different but similar topic.

One of your other. Expertises is running Google ads campaigns, and you know, I think you identify something that's really important. If somebody is going to spend good money on an ADS campaign, how are you going to maximize the number of clicks, the number of. People who call?

Can you? Can you tell us your process when you're running an AD campaign and how that might differ from from some other copywriting. Yeah, so I will specify. I my specialty is is with you know, analyzing the Google Ads making decisions based on the data.

So I call myself a Google Ads conversion specialist as opposed to like I work with a team of partners who execute, because I will say I'm not super technical, but you know my process after we have the campaign up and running, I like to work with clients on a continual basis to make sure that we're bringing in as many clicks, conversions and leads as possible. But I will say my focus is more on conversions, leads and sign cases more than clicks. If we're getting fewer clicks and we're getting more qualified leads, I care that.

You know, That's something I care about more than than like, are we getting as as many clicks as possible? Or you know? So I think. Some some agency as I found, are all about getting as many clicks as possible, But my focus is more on like is this resulting in ROI?

Are we getting the qualified leads that we want? And if not, how can we change that? Do you have any specific elements because I think not every attorney a lot of attorneys are aware of all the moving of parts with an AdWords campaign. You know you've got you know you're paying for keywords, which is obvious, But then there's some really specific things you can do to differentiate yourself.

Meaning when your AD shows up, you get a certain amount of words that you get to put into your AD, and I'm assuming that's really what you're spending your time on. And then when the person clicks on that, they're going to a landing page, and that land you just paid for that person to get to that landing page. It could be fifty bucks, it could be two hundred. And fifty bucks.

You paid for that person to be there. You really need to maximize that person's time there. So number one, is your messaging clear enough that they clicked on it because that's what they need. And then once they're there, what is your messaging to convert that into a phone call or a or an intake, So you is there a process that you go through on both of those uh those spots where you can actually control the content.

Yeah, So I think my my process, I like to first of all, make sure that we're making the most of the AD space. So I see that the AD space and the lending page is both really precious real estate. So I want to cut out all of the you know, like filler words, the copy that isn't the repetit, you know, we're being redundant, think of which, I see a lot of ad copy that is kind of redundant. They use the same words over and over again.

And part of that is because many people let Google, you know, mix and match their headlines, and I highly recommend instead pinning the headlines. That's almost always going to have better results. And I experienced that as well with my client. At one point he informed me that we had a few unqualified leads trickling in.

So again with this client, his focus was on housing sexual harassment, and we had a few leads coming in related to prison and residential rehab, which wasn't obviously what we wanted. So rather than like Google, mix and match the ad copy, I suggested that we pin the headlines so that stop housing sexual harassment would appear first in the ad, and that helped to pre qualified leads. And I was right. So I hypothesized that it might decrease our CTR, but would increase our conversion rate and bring in.

Higher quality leads. And the results where the CTR did drop from fourteen point two nine percent to four point two six percent, but our conversion rate for that ad skyrocketed from seven point eight seven percent to nineteen point three six percent. So and also the lead quality improved. So that's, you know, one example of you know, just changing the just pinning the odds and telling Google, I want this copy to appear you know first, and then this copy, so that can go a long way to helping to bring in higher quality traffic and conversions and leads.

Yeah, I think you're exactly right. A lot of people when you said, they're focused on the click through rate. And if you're letting Google make these decisions because Google will give you suggestions, and if you don't think Google's suggesting thing that's going to make them more money, you're poorly mistaken. So you have to have somebody who cares about your advertising budget as much as you do, as the attorney.

So it sounds like you know what the end result needs to be, which is I need to get a person who's had this problem to be connected to this attorney that I'm working with, and maybe I'm going to pay more for that lead, but it's going to be a higher quality lead, because the last thing you want to do is get a bunch of phone calls for people that you can't help. You know. That's another way to get a negative Google review is somebody calls you and you go, I don't do that, and then they go, oh, this person couldn't help me, and you know, leave a bad review, and I do you have any other examples?

Like that's what the AdWords? But have you have you worked with people where your copy alone like they started in spot A and then after just a revision of their their copy on their website, have seen some dramatic increases. I did work with another client where I can't tell you what exactly the first lending page was, but. You know, he came to me because the lenning page was converting.

At around five percent and it wasn't exactly what he wanted to where he wanted to be. So we readd the messaging on the on the lending page, and you know, the conversion rate skyrocketed to fifteen to around fifteen percent, So it was like a three hundred percent increase in conversions just. By changing the messaging on the landing page. And again that's the more empathy driven copy, which is always going to be more effective.

Then yeah, just using this we we we kind of language. So yeah, and I think, you know, the numbers are incredible. And if you're a lawyer, where one or two. More cases a month or a quarter are the difference between you know, paying the lights or going on vacation or funding your child's.

You know, college, These are these are huge numbers. I always tell people, Look, if you've got a certain budget, if your budget is whatever it is, you know, some people's budget a month is. Five thousand, some is fifty thousand. But if you're not squeezing everything out of the people who you actually attract to your website or landing page, you're really doing yourself a disservice.

And I assume you know. When someone works with you, you're not just satisfied with the first draft sounds. Like you you put it up. You test it, is it an improvement, is it the most we can improve what is that life cycle?

Look if somebody hires you to do their copywriting. Yeah, so you know, obviously we need to start with the baseline. I mean, first I'd like to see the current campaign that they're running, if they are running a campaign, you know, look at the copy, see what the obviously conversion rates are, what the lead quality is, Analyze all the data that we have, and then you know, make some some different hypotheses and like what can what can we optimize from here? What is the lowesting fruit?

So it all depends on like where my client is starting from. If we're starting from scratch, then you know, as I mean, we're basically always starting with the research. So maybe that will involve reviewing some of the research my client is done, then doing my own research and that and then you know, normally I my client does give me, you know, starting point of the copy it normally I do start from scratch with writing everything. So maybe there's a few things that will take from the from the copy that they have.

And then just testing and optimizing. So again like seeing okay, what what is the you know with my first with this client that I was working with. Again going back to the civil rights layer. We had amazing results from the get go, so he was super happy with Then we continued working together over the course of the year and those results really continued.

But the only you know, we're getting a lot of leads, but you know, as I said, some of them weren't super qualified. So I wanted to make the copy, you know, work on making an odd copy and the messaging on the lining page more specific. Add a form to the. Lining page with some questions where we could filter out people who who weren't the right fit.

We also added a thank you page survey to the thank you page of the lending page, and that also helps to the results the responses from that which you've got a ton of responses from those questions, allowed us to you know, also optimize the copy of bit so and it's a really great place to get some voice to customer. Yeah, no, it's great. I love the thank you page and getting more input directly from the potential clients, because I think anybody who's really close to the marketing side and really under you know, is deep in the legal side kind of just you know what you know, and a lot of times you can't put yourself in the mind of these potential clients to really hear things from their perspective is going to help inform the next page that you write.

All the information you shared, I think is extremely helpful. Is there anything that you feel like we missed that you know a law firm or group of attorneys should consider. I think my top conversion tips really to speak to just one read there whenever possible. That will allow you to get super specific with the copy so that even if your people convert, the people that do convert will be higher quality.

Also, just thinking about don't get so obsessed with the click, theor rate, and think more about the quality of leads that are coming in, and then just getting really personal with a copy. Don't be afraid to do something different from what other lawyers are doing. Treat your landing page like it's a natural conversation with a good friend. Try one test I do and I'm writing the copy is read the copy aloud and see how natural it sounds.

And if it sounds, you know, too worthy or like not something you would say to a good friend, then cut it out and then do your research. So the research is always going to be the best place to start, and that will ensure that the copy converts. So yeah, those would be my main top tips from our conversation today. I think those are those are all great.

If anybody listen listening to this wants to get a hold of you, what are the best ways to reach out? I can share my LinkedIn. You could also also link to my website which is www. Dot nomad copywriting dot io do dot com has taken so I have dot io and yeah, that's probably the best way to reach me.

Well, we'll put both of those in the show notes. Mary, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast presented by Market my Market.

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