Jeff Sterling Hughes

00:00 Social media is not this massive legion opportunity for attorneys. It just isn't. Right, like most people aren't gonna, you know, they get in a car accident or, you know, they're having a family law situation.

00:11 They're not gonna go on Instagram and search for a family law attorney. Like it's just not how people make my decisions. They would Google it.

00:17 And if they're Googling it and they're getting to your social media side, well, we're looking at more social proofs. Well, hello and welcome to the J.

00:29 Sterling Hueshow, where we share the secrets and the strategies of how we are building a rapidly growing family law practice.

00:34 You know, over the past nine years, we have grown from zero attorneys to 24 practicing attorneys and about $15 million in revenue.

00:42 And my purpose here is the document, what's working and what's not working in our firm with hopes that you can take that and you can re-contextualize that for your practice and shorten your success curve.

00:51 And I have a credible guest with me today, Paul Mackowitz. Paul runs Honorable Marketing. And I first heard Paul, I heard you on another podcast.

00:59 And I was just in raptured with what you had to share. Just your information was so spot on and quality from a standpoint of helping lawyers grow and build their practice.

01:08 So Paul was gracious enough to come on my show and share with us some of the strategies and tactics he uses with helping lawyers to build their online presence and manage that.

01:17 So Paul, with that, what have I left out? What's your story? Yeah, I guess the biggest thing for me is I'm a military veteran, so I pride myself on efficiency so I'll try to be as short breaths here with some of the examples I do tend to ramble on occasionally, but a big part of building my company in

01:34 my agency was I've never been very good with mentors. You know, I always wish that I had better mentors, but sometimes you gotta like look in your history and learn what not to do as opposed to what to do from some people and I was, you know, bless lucky enough to be an early hire for a company called

01:52 Main Street Hub, which some people may have heard of. They used to be the largest online presence management company in the U.S.

01:58 They're brought by GoDaddy for like 140 million about five years ago or so. I was one of the very early people in there.

02:04 I think it was the 15-16 tire in the New York City office. And I actually built my own desk and all that year and a half later when I was free to move on.

02:14 I was managing a team of 60 people and we hit the Inc. 500 fastest growing companies list back to back years.

02:21 An absolute amazing experience as far as learning. Really more about online presence as opposed to before that, you know, I did some social media management.

02:28 You know, I had built websites growing up, things like that, you know, so I had a rudimentary understanding, but actually digging into what makes business owners unique and special.

02:37 That was something that I emphasized certainly a lot during the sales process and I found that you know that all kind of gets dropped as you hand that off to the production side that kind of no matter how well you put those notes in and eventually in New York City I met the future wife and she had a 

02:53 job opportunity in Miami and luckily I was at a point in my life I was like yeah you know what I'm very uh value driven I'm very useful for a company I'm sure I could find a digital agency that that needs somebody and I started working with a company called on the map marketing okay super cool company

03:07 I'm still very close to them and they worked much more with attorneys as far as SEO and website design where there are two big things.

03:14 So as the director of business development, I came in there and I kind of adjusted some of the services that we had so that we could form a little bit more high level online presence management.

03:24 You know, they weren't doing any social activities, so we did some limited social activities. They weren't really doing anything about reputation management. And so I introduced a little product with that.

03:31 And things went awesome. We hit the Inc 5000 fastest growing companies listed in the row. So I spent like four years in a row hitting these awesome growth milestones.

03:39 And then the wife got the dream job offer out in Los Angeles, and I had just been promoted to the VP of Clyde's success.

03:47 And came to the CEO of OTM and said, hey, I think I'm super excited about this opportunity. But I'm going to do it from California and they were based in Miami.

03:58 So luckily, we had a great relationship and he didn't want to lose me. So he gave me that opportunity and said, hey, what are you out there?

04:04 We just all opened up the sales office and so I mean another sales guy went out there and we opened up the sales office and kind of built out the West Coast Peace of that company and then what year was this roughly Paul?

04:17 Six seven years ago. Okay, so I'd say 2017 2018. Got it. Okay, um And then while I was out in Los Angeles, we all have those moments in our life where we succumb sometimes to greed or for, you know, grass is always greener.

04:32 And I had a gentleman come to me and offer me a boat load of money to come and help him build this digital agency.

04:39 So it jumped at the opportunity, right? You know, as an opportunity to provide for my family and, you know, we weren't married yet, but I was working on that engagement ring, all those things.

04:47 So I started working for this guy and I built up, you know, in just nine months. You know, we had two dozen clients, you know, 10 people, 10 employees, like, so we're fast growing.

04:57 I hit the ground running. I was ready for this opportunity to kind of be a leader, and before then I always saw myself as a really good number two.

05:04 You know, you give me a vision, I can execute. And this is my first opportunity to kind of have something that I built myself.

05:11 And we're doing very, very well until one day I got to the office and got a call from one of the other financial backers of that company and told that that gentleman had been sent to prison for 25 years, and they had been keeping me in the dark about it all because they didn't want to distract me, was

05:28 what they said. So he had a criminal case going on without anyone knowing about it apparently. Yep.

05:33 Yeah without even informing us. So it was 25 years for what do you do? Child p**********. Oh my okay.

05:40 Yeah. Yes. And it's crazy because this one was again, there's moments in your life. I got a lot from the military and that's probably my best example professionally.

05:49 I'm like I just really don't know some people. They can put on this facade and yeah keep people in the dark, but suddenly I had 10 people looking at me asking me when they're getting paid, and I had no answers, and I had nothing really to give them, because I unfortunately, as much as I felt like, oh, 

06:05 This is my thing that I'm building, I wasn't the financial backer, and it wasn't really my company. So that was my, my kick in the ass to, all right, I think it's about time I go do this myself.

06:16 Yeah. I had learned a lot between Main Street Hub and OTM and just built a company that I wanted to be more rooted in a lot of things that we learned in the military like the Army Corp values There's a good acronym loyalty duty respect Selfless service honor integrity personal courage.

06:33 Look at this my my drill sergeants would be very proud of me Yeah, they're remembering the Army Corp values because the main street hub the average client life span was about six and a half months With on the road you mentioned.

06:44 I think there was a reputation management company So they did more mobile websites sales management for media. And then on the map, did more websites and SEO.

06:53 So between the two, I got a real kind of deep understanding of a total online presence management. And I just, you know, crazy idea in the marketing industry of like, what if I just never lost clients?

07:06 What if I just, you know, what's it a sales organization? But we're actually a production organization that brought in some sales every once in a while.

07:15 And so when that company closed production organization. I haven't heard that in this context. Where my clients come first and foremost before any new sale.

07:25 If I have conflicting hey, here's a new sales opportunity and here's a current client, I always err on the side of taking care of current clients.

07:31 Okay. You know, I always want to make sure that the production side and this one reason why we have it grown incredibly fast over here.

07:37 We've grown steadily, you know, about kind of how I envisioned it. But it's because, you know, I've 10 employees in my company.

07:44 I'm the only person that does sales. Okay. Everyone else's website developers are production assistants or graphic designers. You know, everything is designed around making our current clients very, very happy.

07:54 Okay. And I think I skipped a distraction here. So going back to that, the dirt ball goes to prison. Okay, get good rid of this there.

08:01 You're left looking at these employees looking at you saying, where's my paycheck? And that's when you decide to start honorable marking at that point.

08:08 Yes, well, initially we actually called hashtag smart marketing. Okay. But I'll get into the name chase you in a minute.

08:14 But I still have one at my CPO, who is the production officer. I call him my Renee Zelliger because that's truly like how that moment felt like Jeremy Guyer.

08:22 I was like, guys, so I guess guys go home because I don't think you have jobs anymore, but I'm going to go do anything once come with me.

08:28 And he's like, man, man, let's go. And so it was me in this dude sitting on a sit down like how should West Hollywood going?

08:35 All right. So what do we do? Like, what do we call ourselves? And side hustle in Miami where I'd help people set up their smart homes, they'd go home with their Alexa and hook it up to the lights and do this that the other way.

08:46 So I already had an LLC called Hashtag Smart and I was like, well, you know, that's kind of how we want to look at online presents, right?

08:53 You want to do things efficiently, you want to do things the smart way, you want to ensure that you're covered everywhere, but not adding this massive task to your schedule.

09:01 You know, so let's find efficient ways to do that and that was kind of like our initial The whole idea of it was online presence management, but with a bigger focus on retention and being like a one-stop shop, like an extension of the law for, as opposed to a contractor, right in there.

09:17 When I moved to Greenville, I changed the name to Honorable Marketing because one, smart is a double-sided sword. I talked to my friends, I said, hey, give me the top 10 words you think of when you hear my name.

09:29 What do you think about me? And smart wasn't in them. But I thought I'm not a smart guy, but that was just like, that was something I identified with.

09:38 But one thing that nine out of the time of them had on there was honorable, is that, you know, if I say I'm going to do something like that, it's on it, things like that.

09:44 And so I felt that really matched the ethos that I wanted to instill into my company as well, is, you know, if we say we're going to do something, we get it done.

09:52 If we demand a pretty open availability, if a client calls me at eight o'clock at night, I still answer the phone, you know, because I can take that.

09:59 we have efficient systems that I can, you know, hop on, boom, boom, boom, send the note. It goes off to the right people and, you know, there's no reason that I can't take a five-minute phone call to solve a problem that obviously is not really thinking about because it's eight o'clock at night for them

10:11 too, right? So, let's handle this right now and let's move in the right direction. Let's be action-oriented in everything we do.

10:17 So, a lot of things that I've been able to pull from the military side plus some of the short companies that I always saw in the marketing industry has allowed us to really, you know, build a company that I could be very proud of with honorable marketing.

10:29 So, just describe what all Audible marketing does for law firms in particular. Most of my audience are lawyers and family lawyers, so how would you take care of a family law lawyer?

10:40 Yeah, it's a lot of it today is what Gary Vaynerchuk talks a lot of the time about attention. You know, attention is everything in marketing today, and there's really two pieces of that.

10:50 That's awareness. I have to understand you even exist in order to pay any attention to you. And then there is what you do, the attention that you do get and how to use that kind of like synergistically with everything else that you're doing.

11:03 So we look at total online presence as opposed to digital marketing, you know, a lot of people say like we have a digital marketing agency.

11:11 And I'm soured on that as much as law firms are, right, hearing the phrase digital marketing because for one, You're at the whims of algorithms.

11:19 You're at the whims of Google and their PPC and how many bots are clicking ads and it's like always an uphill battle when you're just thinking in a digital marketing mindset.

11:30 But when you start thinking about it on my presence, then marketing gets fun. Then you start getting the thing about what makes me special.

11:36 Why would somebody choose me over the guy down the street with some of these massive firms that are 10, 12 states?

11:44 Why would somebody choose, you know, like a Morgan and Morgan, or would they choose a local PI? Yeah. So, understanding that stuff, I find that I turn into like half-business coach, half-marketing of the company's because so many lawyers, you know, you're busy, you're in court, you're almost like you

12:03 offer fractional CMO services for law firms. I am listed as a fractional CMO for few law firms. Interesting. Okay. But that's also something I extend out to even our clients that we handle their entire online presence.

12:15 Generally, my fractional CMO services come if they have an in-house marketing team or if they're already working with the market that they feel today.

12:21 Pretty good and they just don't want to, you know, rock the boat by changing everything, you know, they might bring me in more than that consultant role.

12:27 Most of our clients though, we manage their entire online presence because I'm going say the entire online presence, give me an example of what that could look like for a smaller family law firm.

12:38 Sure, so it's generally website design, SEO, search engine, social media management, reputation management, business listing optimization. Okay, and paid search, I'm assuming in there too?

12:47 Yeah, quite a bit of paid search, but I have a partner company that we have came most of our paid search.

12:54 He came from Scorpion and kind of didn't like what they had going on. He's extremely good at what he does, and so when he and I met each other, we kind of satisfied some needs for each other.

13:06 He was saying, hey, I love running paid ads with the worst thing is running a paid ad to a garbage website.

13:10 Can you start helping these people out? I'm like, yeah, well, I don't like running paid ads because I don't like having to pay attention to algorithms and, you know, bot clicks and validating users and things like that.

13:20 I was like, so maybe you handle that stuff. So, uh, we should have social resources for it. Okay, I'm sorry, I didn't interrupt you there, Paul.

13:26 It's not your fun. On the social side, what is managing their presence look like, like, practically, are you in production, content generation, or you're just placing what goes on there?

13:36 Yeah, so I'm a little bit too brutally honest sometimes, you know, for my own company's growth good. Social media is not this massive legion opportunity for attorneys.

13:46 It just doesn't, right? Like, most people aren't gonna, you know, they get in a car or something, or, you know, they're having a family law situation.

13:51 They're not gonna go on Instagram and search family law attorney. Like, it's just not how people make my decisions. They would Google it.

13:58 And if they're googling it and they're getting to your social media side, well, we're looking at more social proof. If they're looking at your social media, there's probably only maybe five tops attorneys that they're considering at that point, right?

14:11 Or it's real early and we want to build an emotional connection with them real quickly. So your social media, what has like professional, how are they going to feel comfortable that no part of their case is going to slip through to your fingers if you know your own and social media looks like do-do, 

14:26 and you've got a lot of that slipping through your fingers, right? So one, you've got to look professional. Two, you want to give people reasons to like you.

14:34 We all buy from people that we like. So well, there is the benefit of, you know, it was saying on the PI side, $30 million case, and highlighting big verdicts of big settlements and winds.

14:45 And that's a nice, on the family law side, that's not necessarily, you know, going to pull that emotional string. But having smiling faces, is showing rectified families, showing either a sales mentor one time, you used to always talk about selling the sizzle, not the steak, right?

14:59 You want to, you're selling an end-all outcome of, hey, if you come to me, I'm going to handle your situation.

15:04 I'm going to be heavily invested in you. I'm going to care about you and be compassionate about you. And also, you know, you can find ways to be relatable.

15:12 I have one attorney, he loves John Wick. So we do like John Wick posts on his social media because he loves it.

15:17 He's like, this is cool, you know, this is something that I'm, and he gets comments on and stuff. I have one natural path of the doctor that we work with who loves Harry Potter right so you know we we're having a hard time figuring out like what that special thing is you know he's like oh I have good

15:30 bedside manner I'm like oh great everybody does like what one can we do and he's like well I'd like go into Hogwarts with my grandkids and like that's it what we can do for we can do some Hogwarts so you got to think of your social media as it's an extension of your your personality so ensuring that 

15:44 one the services you have you know you're highlighting those every once in a while any wins that you can if you're not doing these big verdicts you know That's where the reputation management side comes in highlighting good reviews and even your responses to those reviews That we can get into reputation

15:58 management a little bit here too, but the last thing on the social is just Give people reasons to like you.

16:03 If you do the same thing as everybody else, you can get the same results as everybody else And if you're a family law attorney, you know, I'd say what maybe 20 to 40% of them are successful And like you know constantly, you know growing and things like that the rest of my people that are you know doing

16:17 whatever everybody else is doing. And so now it's just a massive, muddled voices that nobody's really getting any attention because we're just doing the same thing.

16:25 So you gotta find ways to be different, to be unique, to sell what it is about your firm that is special, which is you as the attorney.

16:32 Yeah, that's awesome. So you mentioned reputational management. What is that? We as a people are very influenced by start ratings.

16:41 Amazon, I mean, you can blame Amazon and Netflix. That's who I blame. They're the ones that start on stars on things first, right?

16:46 But, you know, you've got your Google business listing, which is generally where about 70 to 80% of people first find a business, because that's what's tied to maps, that's just tied to what comes up during SEO searches.

16:57 So your Google business listing has to be optimized and you have to think of it of like what could I do at the moment that somebody is finding this listing to convert them right before.

17:07 I don't want to sit here and send them to my website. Now we got to hope that they click the contact us button, they got to hope that they click the call now button.

17:13 You want to streamline this process as much as you can with the reputation management. It's kind of the same thing like if on your website, you're highlighting all the good ones, but on your Google business listing, you're not even responding to reviews.

17:25 What is that saying? Every single person that finds out that you're just turning your back and you're walking away, you know?

17:30 Somebody can be saying the nicest thing about you ever, right? Jeff Hughes is the greatest attorney ever, but you just don't answer.

17:36 You just turn around and walk away. Yeah. And your firm will actually respond for the lawyers. Every single one. Oh wow, okay.

17:43 Good, bad, indifferent. They took time out of their day to leafy back. Why would you as a law firm not take advantage of that opportunity, that low-hanging troop to deepen that relationship, not only with that person that left the review, you potentially can get referrals or repeat business out of it

17:59 , but the next 10,000 people that are gonna see this, you know, you are now showing the type of customer service that they should expect.

18:06 You know, you're establishing that early. That doesn't just go free. I'm sorry, it's high-pot keeper. Yeah, no, no, you're fine, like I told you, I can ramble, man, but that doesn't just go for your Google business listing, you know, like a lot of law firms forget Yelp and Yelp is the main data source

18:20 for all Apple products. So if you have an iPhone, just be like, Hey, Siri, find me a family law attorney in the area.

18:25 All that data is coming from Yelp. Okay. So if you, if you didn't claim that listing and optimize it and tell it what you do and, you know, get, get a few reviews over there, that's a huge missed opportunity for so many law firms, especially because Yelp ranks well from an SEO side.

18:39 So say the number one guy for family law and Milwaukee, say his website is 3000 pages and you're just never going to get that, right?

18:46 He started doing SEO 10 years before you're not going to catch it, right? Yeah. But Yelp is number two or three out there.

18:51 You know, that's when say like running Yelp ads might be an interesting option because you know, PBC, you're maybe looking at 60 bucks a click, a Yelp ad, maybe you're looking at four bucks a click, but it's our, it's number three in SEO.

19:02 So you know what, decent amount of people are clicking on it, and now you're showing up on top of that.

19:06 You know, so think in a smart way is the kind of like, let's take advantage of the competition in the area where the attention is and jump on that and then obviously you have to get good reviews, you have to answer all those reviews, save things, goes for AVO, for Justia.

19:18 All these isn't places where if somebody's reading reviews, you're real close to getting picked, right? They have that last moment of the decision-making process here.

19:27 You've got to jump on it be sure that you look as good as possible. Yeah, so as you're talking that the yelp thing, I don't know if our firm who takes advantage of that, so that's a great tip there.

19:36 I hyped out of a question here. So you're a family lawyer. You're just getting started. Do you have a playbook for how you would help a new firm kind of get off the ground and start building traction?

19:46 And what does that look like kind of in the steps over the years to follow? Yes, so especially in the last year, a lot of things have changed to the marketing side.

19:54 If I was starting a family law firm, the very first thing I would do is utilize something like Yaks or maybe sign up or something like that.

20:01 Get the business listings and the directories. It's just flawless everywhere. One, you never know where somebody's gonna find you. Two, those are all citations back to your website that Google is rewarding for.

20:12 Business listings is truly like the foundation. Same with review sites. You at least have to claim them all, be on them all, have some good imagery on them all.

20:20 So I just worked with a rebranding firm. And it's kind of the same thing where you sit down and really understand who you are and the value that you present.

20:28 And then start leaning into those pieces. If you were a military veteran, I would say get involved with the military veteran communities, right?

20:34 Because I get so many business for people that just like, Hey, you know, my brother's a veteran and he talked about this company.

20:40 And, you know, suddenly they're, they're talking to me about their marketing strictly because I'm involved in a, in a community, right?

20:46 Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, level of trust. Start thinking about what it is about you that, that is special that you can highlight online.

20:55 And then while you're building your website, one, I'd say, like, first to put it in a nutshell, be a little different.

21:00 and so many law firm websites all look the same. And- In your website, you eat your own dog food, so I'll give you props for that.

21:08 Your website is all about your background and your military connections. I just love that. Yeah, I mean, that's some of the value that we provide, right?

21:15 Like I talk a lot about why hiring military veterans. I hire veterans, you know, half of my company are military veterans.

21:21 Wow. Reason being is because I know they're action oriented, right? I know they're honorable. I know that if they say they're gonna be somewhere, they're gonna do it, right?

21:28 Yeah. And that's how I want to be portrayed as a as a company as well. I grew up on I grew up on Navy basis.

21:34 So I get the total vibe. My dad was military. So it was my brother. So I interrupted you again. Paul, no, you were you were talking about about what was the last thing you were you were talking about for?

21:43 Yeah. So we were talking about what we do if we were a brand new family law firm. Yeah. Okay. So so then when it comes to like understanding who you are and the value that you present.

21:52 Mm hmm. I would now that it's 0.24. or I would have needed to jump out and chat GPT and I would list out all of the practice areas and ask it for subcategories for every single one of those practice areas.

22:02 And I would start generating content around those because you think of like the low hanging fruit. Family law attorney at Lanna, Georgia, that's gonna be very difficult to rank for, right?

22:12 And to get attention for it, it's gonna be a crowded space, a lot of loud voices. But if you were to say a family law attorney for, I could go with the military veterans things, like four doors or four yeah you know two kids like interracial marriage divorce like you could play with all these different

22:30 keywords right and just drop them into chat GPT and start getting like ideas yeah different type of content that you can put out and then also start looking at the areas around you that are underserved yeah you know so say if I was in Atlanta I would search first my area So say maybe as in Kanasa, I 

22:51 would search like Kanasa family law turning and then I search Mariana and I choose Woodstock and I would search like the areas around me see where the low hanging shirt is.

22:59 I think that's one of the big mistakes we make as business people in general, right? As we all have these how I'm going to be huge I'm going to take over this big piece of the pie, right?

23:08 But if you if you could just take over a small little piece of the pie, you get a little bit of stability around what you do and this one thing I help a lot of law firms with And it's like, hey, I want to be the biggest guy in Michigan.

23:18 I'm like, great. Well, you're not the biggest guy in Detroit. So, you got to, you know, walk before you can, or crawl before you can walk here.

23:27 That's really where I see a lot of new law firms, be able to just make a little mark early. Yeah.

23:33 And then find some way to get involved in your community. Like one of my attorneys out in California, he goes in these speaks at a local police station for the after-school programs.

23:43 And I went, I listened to him and I recorded it. And, you know, one, it made awesome social content for like a month, right?

23:49 I could chop it up and I'd build out these little things to it really showed. And it's something we highlight on is on the homepage of his website is how he involved he is in his community.

23:58 You know, if you're talking about those little things that someone's going to see and have an emotional reaction to, hey, this person is part of my community.

24:04 I'm going to feel much more comfortable going with them than say like I'm working in Morgan, all right? Cause they're multiple states, you know, people we like local, we like, you know, being being able to shake a hand.

24:13 We like being able to know a phase, have some commonalities and things like that. You know, if you're a big fan of a sports team, post about sports, right?

24:21 Like find those things that you can build bonds with but also that are interest to you. It makes me your marketing just a lot more fun.

24:26 Yeah, you talked a moment ago about putting unique content on your website, kind of like your personalities show through in your value system.

24:33 And I know a lot of lawyers are really focused on that professional appearance. And so their websites tend to look like all other websites.

24:40 so do you have any thoughts or best practices for how a lawyer can think about bringing the personality into their website and making it professional yet something that people can connect to more easily.

24:52 That's a great question. I tend to push people in that direction because it is certainly not the natural inclination for authorities to say hey I want to break the mold.

25:02 And I think that's changing for one we've been designing some real much more engaging websites the other thing I would say is from not only a user experience standpoint but also from a what Google looks at in their algorithm one of the largest things that determines SEO is the amount of time people spend

25:21 on your site and I would tell some of these attorneys that like if you just have this lots of straight lines blocks with you know results right there's that just blocks and boring people are going to see that they're going to scroll down and they're going to leave the page, right?

25:36 And if they leave it under 60 seconds, you're not really getting credit for that traffic to the site. So if you can build out some more engaging elements on your site, not only is it showing off your personality a little bit more, but it's also positively impacting you from a functionality and optimization

25:51 standpoint. What I would tell law firms is one, you are not the same as everybody else, right? Like lean into what is special about you and find four or five sites that you like that art law firm sites and give that to your web developer or give that to your marketing people.

26:11 If you like a lot of white space, that's totally fine. You can do a lot of white space on the law firm site.

26:15 You just got to do it the right way, right? You just don't. There's a lot of look at where it's column, one column's empty, but you could at least throw something cool in the background of it.

26:25 That's stealing somebody's eye, but maybe it's a parallax image where the text is moving, but that image is staying the same.

26:31 And so it kind of gives your eyes, two different things to look at for a moment. You know, there you go.

26:35 There's another 10 seconds of somebody's on your website, right? They get about some things like that. But just realizing that it's, it's 2024, the breaks should be off right now.

26:45 You know, there's, um, you know, I can't speak to it from a little bit more of a spiritual side if you want, but there's a awakening going on with people right now, you know, where people don't like the big national brands.

26:54 People don't like the big corporations. People want local people want authentic. They want to know you as a business more so now than ever before, or at least modern, modern marketing history, right?

27:07 Google did a very interesting talk about this about 10 years ago. They started prepping people for it. They call it the zero moment of truth, which is the acronym that they use.

27:18 But traditional marketing has always been like a three step process. There's step one where awareness, I have to understand that you exist.

27:25 Step two is called the shelf. a lot of times when people are describing this in standard marketing it's you know at the grocery store I'm looking at 10 different boxes of cereal you know which is the one that's jumping out of me that I'm gonna pick up you know you gotta get them at that shelf and then

27:38 the step 3 was always advocacy or satisfaction you know the after after they're done utilizing your service are you to use them as an advocate to get future service did you satisfy them to get repeat business or did you fail at both in which you know they are not going to be a marketing resource for 

27:54 you in any way So what Google started talking about was this is zero moment of truth. So now they understand you exist, they've been exposed to you.

28:02 Now they're going to look you up, right? They're going to Google you, they're going to compare you. That's where reputation management comes in.

28:08 That's where social proof of, you know, just having an active social media page comes in. That's where having a website that's engaging comes in.

28:15 You know, because now we have this comparison step through all of these computers in our pockets that the shelf is maybe not as important Because, you know, you want to give them a bunch of reasons to choose you before they even get into that and so now You know, they're whittling it down to two maybe

28:29 three options and and they're doing it Another thing was to see about for law firms is like you're receptionist, you know, you're calling it for a service Yeah, you know, that's you made it through that first step It was that I'm actually be like, okay, I'm gonna get my call But like what did they hear

28:43 ? You know, so I've actually helped a few law firms right out their scripts You know what to say when somebody calls because again, it's all that emotional connection that people are forming right When interacting with your business, there's an extension of what I'm doing, right?

28:56 So finding ways to enhance it and to optimize for it can only benefit for a long term. Yeah, I asked you earlier about kind of a playbook for attorneys to start to build their online presence and get started.

29:08 And I heard you talk about listings, making sure all your listings are eaten. You know, those are the loaing for you to get those done.

29:14 You talk about niching out in your keyword and your practice, finding out, going to chat to you, finding all of those really sub niches and subsub, of niches and so forth, and then talking about content and getting in your community that is there anything else in that playbook that you think should be

29:27 mentioned? I think that all firms should hire a marketing agency to start. I think it's just so hard. There's so much to do.

29:34 Yeah, right. It's, And it changes like every day. It's impossible for a lawyer to keep up with that. Yeah, it's it's a very very difficult and I've had a few firms that I've gotten them up to you know 10, 15 lawyers and I've said you know at your point you I don't know that you need me as much more.

29:49 You should hire some internal marketing people. I'll serve as a CMO, you know, let's get you because then they could take pitches every day.

29:55 They can really, you know, reflect the firm in a better way. I'll happily train them for you. And so I've even looked at like some exit strategies with our agency.

30:02 If you know, if we're not serving the client as well anymore, but at this starting point, I mean, you really needs the people that you could trust.

30:11 And I've been doing a few talks recently on on how to treat your marketing company. And you should be a pain in their ass for the first 1690 days.

30:20 What does that look like? I would say first and foremost at least by weekly meetings. There's a rule with VA's if you've ever used virtual assistants where for every one hour you invest into it I'm sorry for every one hour that you want to save in your time you have to invest at least five hours into

30:38 training teaching follow-up on it. It's a great rule of thumb when you're thinking about a VA because say you want them to go in there and clean out your email each day.

30:47 You have to do with them, you know, four or five times show them like what's important, what's not important, you know, the worst thing in the world would be, you know, suddenly you're not getting the emails that are important, right?

30:55 So you want to be sure that they're trained really well on it, and you got to invest about five times the amount of time that you want to save long-term.

31:01 So now, you know, I don't really look at email that much because I'm a VA that does a very good job of organizing it and putting the right things on top.

31:07 Your marketing company is basically the same thing, right? So you want to, one, they should be asking you very good questions, and if you don't feel like they're asking you good questions, you should ask them why they're not asking you those like some of the ones that we ask a lot is you know if you 

31:24 could be any celebrity or author or the historical figure as you like your online persona who would that be what's fun about that is it gets some wheels turning it's not like a direct do you want to be I always laugh when people like do you want to be funny online do you want to be professional online

31:39 like what does it that you want to be you should be all those things right you should be adaptable online this what you should be.

31:43 So I like asking the question of like, what celebrity would you be online if you could be anything? And I always thought I'd be Edward and I can even tell you a reason why either.

31:52 Hey, that's great. It was an obscure one, but yeah, well, the one I got not too long ago was Paul Rudd.

31:58 Okay. I was like, I could do Paul Rudd, a little quirky, you know, cute, but not too sexy. You know, sure.

32:04 I could do Paul Rudd for you. And now we can find some things. I have some people that say like the rock.

32:08 And I'm like, that's great like real let's be badass let's do it yeah think about how much I just learned about that attorney with a simple question right like that right and another thing that I ask a lot of times is like what don't you like like what don't you like about your competitors what don't

32:23 you like about law for websites but you know because then sometimes you're with it with they don't like it makes our job easier to avoid those things be it actually narrows your focus on what's really going to benefit them.

32:37 So with being a pain in your marketing companies but here for the first 60 90 days, I think it starts with a meeting at least every two weeks.

32:45 I think that the next thing is making sure that they ask you the right questions. If they're not asking you those questions, ask them why they're not asking you those questions.

32:53 And if you'd like a list of questions that your marketing company should ask you, I think I just put a blog out about it not too long ago on our website.

32:59 So you certainly can grab that and take that to them. The next thing is, What is your website? Is it HonorableMarketing.com?

33:06 Honorable.Marketing. Oh, okay. We're we're new agey here. We got a dot marketing, you know, we're we're past the dot coms.

33:15 But the last thing is ask them for their strategy around reviews. This is really where I find a lot of new law firms and a lot of marketing companies both kind of have a bit of a disconnect next.

33:30 Herself, we have AI now. So you could take a review, you can copy it and say, Hey, Chachy PT, answer this in a full and compassionate way that will generate referrals and endure us to this client paste enter.

33:43 You'll get a really nice response. I don't recommend you just copy that and paste it right in. I recommend you still customize it from that.

33:48 Yeah. But asking your marketing company, like, you know, how do you get reviews? How do you help me get more reviews?

33:54 And how are we going to answer these reviews so that our customer service is getting displayed online. If your marketing company doesn't have like a plan for that, I generally think that their head space is not in the same as you, because your reputation is everything as a lawyer, you know, it's your

34:08 name on the living on the wall, right? So it's not to marketing companies name on the wall and they're never going to think about your business as much as you will.

34:17 Just never. It's just, it's what it is, right? My employees will never think about animal marketing as much as I do.

34:22 It's one of those things you just have to accept. And your market cover is going to be the same way, unless you be that squeaky wheel for a little bit, get to a point where you really feel like they understand you, where you really feel like they, you know, we like to say in the foxhole with you, their

34:36 interests align with yours, then they will be a good marketing company for you. What are your key benchmark metrics that you want your clients to hold you a couple to website traffic?

34:46 It's a big one. That's a great starting point because if you're looking at like analytics on conversions, it all starts with website traffic.

34:54 So these are unique visitors or like, how do you measure that appropriately? Yeah, well, what exclude bots out of that?

35:02 Yeah, what I'm trying to build is working backwards on financial investment versus the return. So if I know for every hundred visits to the website, you get a form submission.

35:13 I can say, okay, cool. So every five form submissions, you sign that client. Great. So it tells me I need to get 500 people to your website to get your return.

35:22 Right, so it gives you the numbers to work backwards with you could start working in the Google Business Listings. Their dashboard is really great for this as well.

35:31 You can see how many times the oppressions people have had, how many calls have come from it, how many website clicks have come from it.

35:36 You can also message directly through Google Business Listings down so you can start looking at that as a commercial point.

35:41 But website traffic is kind of the top benchmark that I always look at because from that data and the amount of form submissions or phone calls coming from the website, I can determine in our ROI and the actions that need to be taken to generate a positive ROI pretty quickly.

35:55 Again, I'm a little bit too honest and truthful, you're not going to get a whole lot of clients from social.

36:00 This is what it is, but you can get some good exposure that way, you can run social ads to build up your community, bigger your community, and more likely it will get a referral.

36:09 You can look at things that way, but it's just not going to be a huge lead acquisition opportunity. And then when it comes out to paid ads, my big thing is, first, be sure you have a great landing page that highlights the value that you have right away.

36:22 Before you start running any paid ads, never run a paid ad to your home page. You know, you're just, you're setting those people up for, for failure, right?

36:29 What are the components in your best practice components? Would you say for a great landing page? Well, form submission on the top half of the fold.

36:37 I've seen a bit like a newspaper. That, that very top thing. I want to see value and I want to see how quickly I can contact you.

36:43 Those are the main two things. That value proposition should be what it is special about you, you know, what you highlighted and maybe that display add or what was in the wording of your PPC add, made them click it because if it was enough to get a click right there, it's also enough to probably tell

36:57 them, okay, well, I should take this next step. Yeah. Highlighting that in bullet format, I find it's always the most impactful.

37:03 So you got a headline, form solution on one side, headline bullet points, and then right underneath that, I like to think of whatever the biggest emotional connection that I can have.

37:14 So this is generally like a tagline, you know, a tagline or could be a testimonial, but you don't want to be like too long a testimonial because you should have more testimonials as they get a little bit further down the page.

37:26 But something right underneath this heading area, I like to put a little movement into it, whether it's like a lotty animation or something, but something that's drawing their eye to that thing because I'm trying to build an emotional architecture right away.

37:39 So I really like the tag lines that are probably my favorite or sometimes we do like some tiles of Instagram posts because you know that that's the whole goal of your social right to is to build that emotional connection and so we've probably already got some really good graphics.

37:54 Yeah. Following that I look for some sort of social proof validation. So past cases like what makes us different than the large law firms or what makes us more involved in our community be like some sort of differentiation under that.

38:08 So now you've taken their eye, try to get conversion right away. Then you've built a little bit of emotional connection.

38:14 Then you've provided social proof that could also be testimonials. Then after that, I wanna have more conversion. See, if they've gotten that far down the page, you know, they obviously care, right?

38:23 Like, you got a little bit of something, you got the hook in the fish, we'll say a little bit. Now you got to, I got a little bit more.

38:29 So I usually do like a larger conversion area. So like, okay. a big form submission or maybe contact buttons, then I usually get into a little bit of the who we are, maybe highlighting a few of the attorneys, attorney bios, things like that towards the bottom because at that point, they're just looking

38:46 for a reason now to choose you and if they start seeing some faces of the people that they're gonna interact with, again, you're trying to lay that framework as to why you're likable, why they should choose you.

38:56 Well, that's a good formula. That's a great formula. Yeah, I've built so many, I don't know that I've ever like actually described it as much, but I was just thinking through as I build them, like what I have always thinking and when I find worse the best.

39:08 Yeah. But I should write down that framework. Yeah, that's a lot of social content for you right there because that's some great stuff.

39:14 You can really put deep on a lot of those because you had some real good value there. One of my last questions here, Paul, what are some of the biggest mistakes you see lawyers make online where you just like, oh, shake your heads.

39:25 Come on, I don't do that to yourself. What do you see in there? The biggest one lately is actually websites.

39:31 A lot of the law firms built their websites five, six, 10 years ago, they have an update of them. They're going to become much more forced upon people because you have all the ADA WGAC 2.0 issues going on right now.

39:45 So that's probably one of the biggest things I've had to fix over the last two years. Really big out in California, slowly coming east more and more, which that's just ADA compliance and a website is ensuring that color scheme still contrasts too much or having a button on the side that they could click

40:02 on it if you say you had dyslexia and you can't read the website, you know, they could go to an attorney and you know you could receive that nasty letter from another attorney saying your website is not ADA compliant.

40:14 So a lot of people that you know I've built websites five, six and years ago they really need to update it.

40:21 That's the biggest thing you've seen. The other big mistake, and this is a lot of businesses not just attorneys, but it's not answer reviews.

40:28 It's very quick, very easy. And also be don't have asset. Don't say thank you for your view. Like, that's stupid.

40:36 It's don't even write that thing. If you're just going to write, thank you for your review. Like utilize take advantage of that opportunity.

40:41 That person has taken time out of their day. The least you could do take a little bit of time out of years.

40:45 All right. So between websites and a reputation management, I'd say It was probably the biggest two. If you haven't optimized your business listings recently, I think that's like a real quick thing.

40:56 There's like Yaxx does a great program. Yeah, you just dropped your information in there, click a few buttons and it's dispersed to over 300 business directories.

41:03 So it doesn't have to be this big, heavy lifting thing. But if you haven't done that in a while, you'd be very surprised how many people have incorrect information out on the web.

41:11 Let's be right back big three. Well, Paul, this has been terrific. I think I could talk to you in the hour or two.

41:15 This is fascinating. So yeah, we'll have to do this again. And so, how would someone best get a hold of you?

41:23 Yeah, our website is honorable, dot marketing. And on there, we have our story and all the cool stuff. You can see some pictures of me when I was in Iraq and I was a young dumb kid.

41:32 Oh, those. Yeah, yeah. So obviously, I'm right on there. I'm really big about being a calendar follower. So even have my calendar on there if you are to grab a time of my calendar to throw some ideas around.

41:44 One of the things I've been doing for free for a lot of lawyers is just having some video recorded conversations to help them cope with some social content.

41:54 And it's pretty interesting. And like I said, I've done it for free for a few because I find that a lot of law firms are kind of stuck in ruts.

42:01 You know, they want to be out there. They want to do video. They want to do this. They want to do that.

42:06 And they just really like haven't taken that first step. So one of the things that's on there is you can go right into my calendar and schedule a content creation session.

42:16 and I will have an FAQ of the top 20 questions that people ask in your practice series, in your local area.

42:24 And then we just record it and ask them the questions and ask them some follow ups that you know, I enjoy the interview process.

42:30 And what's nice about that, and now you have a video of you as a attorney answering the questions that are asked most often in your area, read for social, read for your website, read to transcribe for a blog, like, boom, it took a half hour of your life, right?

42:43 So I also have that option on there in the contact us and then of course strategy sessions if you ever want me to take a look at your website things like that That's all available right on our website honorable dot marketing And you can also check me out on social media if you want our Company is honorable

42:59 underscore marketing my personal one is honorable entrepreneur good luck spell on it and everything Yeah, it's all just what we're honorable entrepreneur That's why my personal Instagram.

43:10 I don't do Facebook that much. I'm on LinkedIn quite a bit, so you can always look at one LinkedIn, Paul McWins.

43:15 That's right, Fania. I'm active enough over there. I get a lot of solicitation, so that's another area of opportunity for my VA, where she came in and she kind of manages some of the conversations that come into that.

43:29 Well, this has been great, Paul. Thank you so much for your time, your expertise, and what you had to offer today.

43:33 Some really viable stuff, and I can tell you from an experience in my firm grow, using a lot of these techniques that they totally work and so you're bit about helping a firm kind of go from nothing to get going was really, really good advice.

43:45 So I'm gonna thank you for that. Yeah, now I want to thank you for having me on. So I appreciate it.

43:50 It's always nice getting to speak with some like-minded people, both most interested and just positively impacting your communities. So it was an absolute pleasure.

43:59 Cool. Well, thank you.

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