EP 293 - How Law Firms Will Win in 2025 Part 2

The key to this is you've already done the work. This could be going back to a blog that was written three years ago that used to get you a ton of traffic and now it doesn't anymore. Maybe it just needs to be updated. So go into your dashboard, find out what pages are getting visits.

Find out which ones aren't. If you have pages that are not getting visits, maybe it's a couple of tweets to that page if you think it's relevant to your practice. Again, you don't want to just have content for content's sake. You're listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast presented by Market My Market with your hosts Eric Barsono, Ryan Klin, and Chase Williams, the go to podcast for learning from the experts and the legal community about effective ways to grow and manage your law firm.

Welcome back to our second half of how law Firms Will. Win in twenty twenty five. Let's jump right into the second half of our tips. So number seven on the list is do PR or public relations, and this can mean a lot of things.

Obviously, there are PR companies out there that can help you, but you can do a lot of this on your own. For example, you can speak at a conference. You know the conference circuit. If you don't know anything coming up, do a couple of Google searches.

You'll find conferences and find a niche topic. Most of these. Conferences want somebody who is a subject matter expert in something, so that's one way. You can also reach out to a local reporter.

One of the things that I've seen done very successfully is if there is a story in the news that has something to do with a topic you know a lot about, look at the person who wrote that article. That person is a journalist and part of their job is to find new interesting stories or to follow up with stories that they've already done. So in that case, it's usually very easy to find their contact information, whether it's on LinkedIn or they'll have their email address. On the local news.

Reach out to them, see if they'll do a follow up story, and it's a free way to get. Your name in into the media. I think it's my turn to jump in for the SEO side of the PR because I don't want to say it's an ulterior motive, but there are just added benefits of having an ongoing plan for some of these public relations and make me look like the other PR, which is press release POTH which they kind of go hand in hand. And so I'm sure that some of our listeners I've heard, well, you don't really get SEO benefits or backlinks from doing typical press releases, and that may be true that Google maybe crack down on that over a decade ago.

Your predical go through PR web or PR news wire, you find an SCUO package if you go down to pick that route with some of the squ that you do. May not be as. Familiar with some of the new offerings that have really come up in the past couple of years, and to hear about maybe working actually with a PR AGENCYED or doing what's called digital PR and actually getting into places that aren't really just prey to play. These are places that really do vet the news they do go through and they have people that work at local or nationwide news that will kind of vet stories and we'll post them if they're relevant and they find them to be newsworthy.

And so there are people that have more opportunities of gin and back length that you can't just purchase. You have to have a legitimate story, and you do have to have a PR partner that is able to represent you for these publications. So we've seen a lot more of that over the past couple. Of years, and there's a good opportunity to get some more visibility and get some more authority from places that every law firm down the street, they can't all.

Just participate in the same things you are. Yeah, and the key of PR, as Ryan said, is you really need to do something you need. It's going to take some work on your side. Even if you hire a professional R agency, they are going to interview you for hours to find out.

What it is that's newsworthy about yourself. So go the route of hiring a PR agency if you don't have the budget for that, really come up with some ideas, several of them that you think could be newsworthy, and then find avenue is whether it's online press releases or it's contacting the local news. Stopping into the next one. We have here using the AI to repurpose content and expand reach and so Mark my Market has put out plenty of content out there, you know on our website, and we've actually done videos and guide on making the most out of any content you do as far as repurposing.

So if you create a video you can transcribe the video and you can kind of condense that into a blog. You can u qas, you can do snippet and do it on social media. And I think we've talked about the level of sophistication with AI. It's for anyone listing just back to back days, you know, about a week apart, and THEI has just come a long way with being able to, Yeah, again, take either visual content or sexual content and then break it up into snippets or bring it up in the social posts and do all sorts of stuff that we were very much viewing manually on a day to day basis maybe eighteen months ago.

And you've had a lot of success yourself with repurposing video content, which has been something that typically it took a professional to do, and it's paved a ton of time and has had i'll say, the results. Yeah. The key to this is you've already done the work. This could be going back to a blog that was written three years ago that used to get you a ton of traffic and now it doesn't anymore.

Maybe it just needs to be updated. So go into your dash forward, find out what paide is are getting visits, find out which ones aren't. If you have pages that are not getting visits, maybe it's a couple of tweaks to that page if you think it's relevant to your practice. Again, you don't want to just have content for content's sake.

But if you've got pages that were great three years ago and you can see that they've had a downward trajectory, use some of these eight eye tools to give you some hints on how you can update that. It's also a great way to us, as Ryan mentioned, to use video content. Anything that you've done and is high quality work, you should be able to repurpose that six months or longer from the. Time that it was originally posted.

Yeah, that's a great point with even updating content. So maybe it's not always repurposing. But according to Google, with they EAT standards, the expertise experience authoritativeness bustworthy myth, there's a level of you know, I guess expectations per content tend not to reference lake or reference any sort of data or statistics. You know that's five years ago.

And so some people will say, well. Chat GBT if you're using that as a resource, Saying well, these results for what's being presented is kind of up to like twenty twenty two. Right, it's not like always in. Real time, but there are other tools out there that will actually kind of find sources and citations that will support it in real time, and so updating content is definitely a viable source, even audio.

I think that some people on the team were experimenting with like putting text into Google Docs and actually giving it to I can't think of AI tool off the top of my head, but it's actually making audio files or even turn a podcasts themselves. So hopefully we're not replaced, you know, by AI as far as this podcast goes. But I mean when you. Look at the whole gamut for the different mediums of delivery of content, it's trying to cover all the bases now, including imagery and infographics.

Yeah, great points. The next item on our list, number nine would be newsletters to past clients. The people who do this effectively, it's a real true value to them. And what I mean by this is you want to touch your past clients about once a month with something, and a newsletter is a nice way to reach out and inform hundreds or thousands of people that you may have worked with in the past.

Now the newsletter should not say, Hey, we're local, remember us hire us if you ever need a personal injury attorney again, you really should be trying to give them three or four items that can be easily swapped out each month. For example, it could be a local news story that you comment on. Let's say that you're a criminal defense attorney and there's a big, high profile case in town or in the state. You might just give your little take on that.

Then it might be an update to the law, whether it's you know again, personal injury or criminal defense or family you can give them an update, show your expertise. I would personalize it a little as well. If you're a local coach, if you performed or submitted your time or money to a charity, put that in there. Any types of photos and images that you and your firm took for you know, Halloween is coming up, you know, just to date this podcast or the fourth of July.

Really personalize. What you're trying to do is you're trying to give them just enough value that they don't hit unsubscribed and maybe a tiny reminder at the very bottom. Ninety nine percent of this newsletter needs to be them focused, information focused, value, focused and then hey we're XYZ Law firm focusing on personal injury or criminal defense whatever. That may be.

Yeah, I think that this is a great routine on a monthly basis. As you said, that's it's not a lot of work, and it's mostly templatized. And really you're just remain on top of mind. It's not even so much that they're even click through every single you know, blog snip bit or recipe feature or some images from your following costume contests that you had, but just being in front of people in a meaningful way that makes all the difference.

And I would go as far as seeing you know, this is an opt in for all your current and previous clients, but it's also great for other other Larwriors and other businesses. It's good for really every angle to for people to know what you're up to and that you're still there. And it's just kind of one of those things that might be a timing game where it's the defend it. You have a male a list of five hundred people, and one person gets and goes, you know what, that's exactly who I was planning on reach out to this week.

And that's all it takes from this situation. So this is a good meaningful like load bear or touch point that I think most businesses should have. And we do it of course, So I guess is practice what you preach on a monthly basis. We do it for legal and we do one.

Specifically for dental clients, and seem to be the newsletter for L and P itself, and so we try to only believe in the newsletters because we're rolling out new newsletters on an annual basis. Yeah, the other thought I'd leave you with is every attorney that I've ever spoken to says that their best clients come from referrals. So help push that process along with a newsletter. The other thing that I'll remind you of is there's only twelve months in the year, so you only have to do this twelve times to get an entire year's worth of value.

The toughest part about it is going to be initially setting up your template, you know, section A, section B, section C. Then you just need twelve different things for each of those sections each month. So once the initial work is done, it will probably actually be fun for you to accomplish eats month because you'll get to go through that month and fill it in with some of the news that you'd like. To share with your past clients.

Absolutely, so we're actually a number ten, which is interesting because we're gonna have twelve total, which is nice full added bonus for all listeners. So we did six yesterday. So yeah, so number ten would be open another GBP office. So what we mean by this is a lot of people are familiar with the term virtual office.

We're not talking about that where you just have access to a Regis or Divinji building. Those are really hard, if not impossible, to get verified by Google. What we're talking about is investing in another office that you would have a desk at, you could have a name played at, and in most markets you can get something like this between one hundred and four hundred dollars a month. That might sound like a big expense until you realize that the number one path into a lawyer's website is the Google Business Profile or what we call Google Maps.

That means when the LSA show up, when PPC shows up, when the maps show up, when there's organic forty to sixty percent of all clicks, and if you're dividing that into four sections, forty to sixty percent of all clicks will go through maps. So what does that mean if you're in you know a city so or I'm in San Diego, if I open up a virtual office into Mecula, which is about forty five minutes away, Yes, that might cost me three hundred and fifty dollars a month. It is another property that I need to get reviews for.

But now I have access to being in the maps to a whole new market that there's no way my Google business profile in San Diego has. A chance to reach. This is always going to be one of the bigger opportunities for clients. And I don't think that we go a year without talking about something local related.

And I think one of the reasons that this comes up specifically on this one is that may notice from our own experience that GVP become more and more difficult every year, so not to talk to people out of it. The way this can you look at is more like an opportunity. I think that there are people that throw in the towel when it's like I can't do the virtual office anymore because I need to set it up by taking the video and walking around the office, and then we had to switch to do in the satellite office, which we're talking about the dedicated office with signage that doesn't cost fifty dollars a month unfortunately, but once it's established, provides a lot of value.

And I think that this is also timely because this week we were just talking about the FU rolling with reviews and so for some people, and I don't have anyone that top of mind, but I think that it'd be fake to say that there are some firms that have engaged with either you know, pay to play with their former clients or current clients and using that I don't think would be deemed very ethical by their state bar association. Austairly is not going to be by the FDCD at this point, but also just purchasing and outright these reviews.

So sometimes when there appear to be more and more barriers to entry for something like this, you know, some people will just go in another direction. But I think that you know, for for lawyers who are listening, if they want to see this as an opportunity, you know, you just have to be pretty thorough with how you vet the office and making sure there is the legitimate satellite office. It doesn't have a million lawyers already at the location with a bunch of reviews, and also have a meaningful and hopefully ethical plan for actually generating the reviews, because if you don't pass a certain threshold and our local experts will say, what twenty twenty five five star reviews, then it may actually kind of just be in limbo as far as visibility for quite some time.

But again I look at this as you know, there's some some work and there's some considerations, but once it's up and running, it still works extremely well. All right, let's cover number eleven. Now this would be local Facebook groups. So what I mean by this is whatever community you're in, and this doesn't have to be citywide.

This could literally be a small community. There are typically Facebook groups that will announce things like lost pets or a driver that was driving too fast in the neighborhood. Join as many of these as you can realistically within uh your either where you live or where your office is. And the reason is because people will ask questions about everything from you know, which air conditioning company did you use to come in and replace your air conditioning?

To what lawyer should I hire for this? So it costs you nothing be active within those groups, meaning don't just say hey, I'm a lawyer, I'm here to help. Try to be active within the group. But then when somebody does have a legal question, whether it's your practice here or.

Not, you can be very helpful. If people love to be in contact with lawyers. Oh there's a lawyer in the group, very well regarded profession, and it's a way for you again to. Be involved in your local community and to help pick up cases.

So we're already at number of twolves, are we? And I think this is a great way to wrap it up because it summarizes a lot of these conversations or a lot of these points we made over the past couple of days. And it's just the importance of. Working with for thinking marketing partners, whether it be consultant or your fractional CMO or your agency or really even your vendors at this point because it's competitive and we can't be doing the same thing year after a year and expect the same results.

And so. This part may sound like a little self promotional, but this is pretty painstaking work for us to be able to put together these points year after year up to year to predict what's going to happen for the following year based off of surveys and research and focus groups and looking at data and really analyzing what's working, what's not, and really these these fault points here, the only one that touches on previous years is the GVP because of the update, the level of difficulty prevetting office, plus more considerations to review generation.

But eleven of these points three unique and the ten points last too unique ten before And so yeah, I think that it's very important for law firmness in these competitive spaces that are getting much more competitive, to really have partners across the board that are always looking for what's ed a level of complete non complacency and always working to be better and provide more value for their clients. Yeah. And the other trend that I've seen recently is a lot of digital marketing companies jumping into the legal space.

Now, good on them, you know, if they're trying to expand, But the amount of acumen you need in this one small niche which is arguably the most competitive online marketplace there is, which is legal marketing, legal digital marketing, I would just highly suggest no matter who you work with, you work with a specialist. There's different resources, there's different directories, there's different rules. There's different rules for lawyers than there is for somebody who's got a bakery or a sandwich shop.

So having somebody that understands that and isn't trying to pigeonhole you into what their process is for just other digital providers or businesses would be something that would be an advantage to anybody you work with. Is Ryan mentioned whether that hiring a you know, CMO, make sure that they have, you know, a lot of experience helping out law firms if you're looking at agencies like ours, I think that's just something that is a must have because of number one, the competitiveness of this arena app but also the niche resources that are available to a law firm.

You know, I don't think that marketers always have to wear every single hat. Like talking about. Specialization and legal, there's always specialization, you know, content marketing or organist, social and paid SOLDI school and others could be dedicated people. If it's a big team, of course you can meet multiple people and each one can be specialized in some of these areas.

But but do you think that there's the level of responsibility that didn't exist. At least when I was working in house, I mean I only worry about ywords and traffic, right, that was pretty much efentive it ten years ago. Little did I know much about. Inpake or nurture or follow up or conversion, which I would have been nice at the times, but you learn over time.

So you know, scos No, there's a level of thought leadership, an awareness where SCO is concerned about your intake or your intake specialists is probably concerned about them your SEO, the intake person the same. Well, there has been you know, enough traffic, you do intake, and we have to look at these laning pages, and we have to look at messaging because it's not converting at a rate where the intake can even do intake. So you see how it kind of crosses over this level of expertise for awareness, it's important, I think at this point in time for that it'd be kind of like cross accountability or at the very least awareness.

Yeah, and with that it wraps up our how law firms will win in twenty twenty five. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast presented by Market my Market. You can check out additional episodes and recaps at Legal Mastermind podcast dot com.