Speakeasy Authority Marketing

The 3rd (and most important part of the series) gives you strategies to overcome price objections, follow up with potentials who need to 'think it over', 'sleep on it', or are talking to your competitors. At this stage of the game, you've invested hundreds of dollars of marketing to get potentials to this point. Good phone scripts and follow up is critical to get your retention percentage above 60%.

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This is the third and final part in the 3 part series on how to become a prestigious law firm, how to become the preeminent, most respected attorney in your metro and in your practice area. In part 3, we're going to talk about once someone has searched in Google and searched the web and visited sites become convinced enough to go to your website, then gone to your website, looked at your credentials, read articles etc., and made that fear-filled decision to call you and they call your firm, what happens? This is part 3.

Do you fumble the ball and have an answering service answer the phone? Do you not answer the phone, which happens in many, many law firms, or do you have scripts and professional people that are really engaging and get a lot of callers to become potential clients and do that initial consultation? Do you have methods to get them into the office or to sign them up over the phone? Do you have methods to follow up with them to turn this caller that took such a long time and such a long effort to get to this point to retain you, pay you money, and become your client, which is at the end of the day what you want. That's what we're going to go into in part 3.

We've already covered, how to work with Google, review sites, how to position yourself as the respectable prestigious attorney and law firm online so that people will see you and run into your reviews and see different information about you and come to your site. Then we covered once they're on your website, what can you do to make sure that they become convinced that you are the person to call for help on their case. The phone call, or the email to your firm. Most law firms, you'd be really shocked to know this, they don't answer the phone 24×7. Most law firms don't even answer the phone during business hours all day. There are still a lot of traditional firms that take lunches or close early on Friday, and that's wonderful.

But you're missing out on the clients. At the very least, you've got to have your phone answered. If you can't do it, get an answering service. If you can't do it, have someone else answer the phone. If you're not around and you're in court, fine, get that phone answered because people call in. If no one answers the phone, you know what they do, they hang up the call and they call someone else. It's so easy to do nowadays. It takes seconds. There are many services I've called for and other people I know have called for, I call, no one answers, I hang up; I call, no one answers, I hang up. Sometimes it's the fifth call before someone answers. I've called plumbers, I've called lawyers, I've called landscapers, you'll be amazed.

People don't want to leave messages, they want help right now. If you don't give it to them right now, they're gone. IBM did a study several years ago, they called it the Golden Hour. They saw the conversion rates of people that called different companies and they saw if calls were not picked up, the conversion rate fell by like 70%. If someone called and did leave a message, which is much less prevalent nowadays, if they were gotten back to within 5 minutes, they were 7 times as likely to buy that company's services or hire that person than if they waited more than 5 minutes. They got to 10 minutes, it was less; 15 minutes, less. An hour was the drop-off point. After an hour, forget a conversion, it just went down to as bad as if you didn't answer the phone. People are impatient, they don't want to wait. I hope I've conveyed that to you now.

Now that you've answered the phone, how do you answer the phone? Here's another problem. Most law firms answer the phone like this. "Law Office", or, "Law firm of A, B & C. This is Mellissa, how may I help you?" "Yes, I'm calling about a so and so case", "Oh, Attorney Smith is not here. Do you want to leave a message", or, "Attorney Smith is not here. Do you want to call back?" So that's deadly. If you have someone do that, you're pushing them away. They've taken the time to call you. They've gathered up their nerve to call. Like I said in the last few podcasts, most people have very little experience with the legal profession. They are rarely in court thank goodness, they don't get divorced everyday, they don't have someone die everyday and leaving estate plan, they don't have immigration problems everyday, they don't have DUIs everyday.

All these things are pretty rare thankfully in most people's lives and calling a law firm is scary and a lot of lawyers and firms do not treat people well when they call. I've personally experienced this many times, even calling for the simplest thing. So have that phone answered but what is said on the phone, who's answering? Is it grumpy person answering the phone? Is your secretary having a bad day and being pissy to callers. Do they just say, "Law Office", all these things just push away clients. If you call somewhere and they say to you, "So and so is not in, just call back later", are you going to call back later? No, and neither are your potential clients, they're not going to do it.

You should never ever have that said. If you're in court all the time, fine, have the script. So here's a much better script. "Hi, this is Mary from the Law Office of A, B & C. Thank you so much for calling. Do you have a legal question or something we can help with?" And the caller says, "Oh yeah, I'm calling because I was arrested for a DUI two nights ago", okay. The second part of the script now, always immediately start with empathy, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry to hear that". "I was hit by a car", "Oh I'm so sorry to hear that"; "My wife served me with divorce papers", "Oh my God, that's terrible. I'm sorry to hear that"; "My father is in hospital and we don't know what to do about his estate", "Oh I'm so sorry to hear that". Show empathy.

Then engage the person in conversation, "Would you mind telling me a few details about what's going on?" We are not asking the person answering the phone to practice law but we are asking them to gather details about the case because this will help you craft your response in a much more tailored way to that person besides saying "Please hold", or, "Call back later", or that kind of thing. That's what you want because again, people hire people, and people work with people they like and they know and they trust, and if you're a jerk, if you're pushing them away, if you're being nasty, if you're just very cold to them, why would they want to work with you? They wouldn't. You have to understand. This is very important.

I hope my tone is not condescending but it's an honest tone. You have to make sure your phones are answered right. You may think your phones are answered right but you would be shocked to know that most law firm phones are not answered well at all. We've mystery shopped many firms and the people that say, "Oh, our phones are great and Suzy answers the phone. She's great", you'll be surprised when you actually record them and mystery shop them, how many bad days they have or how mean and nasty or rude and all that they are to people, you'll be shocked and you're losing a lot of money if you don't have scripts in place and you're not mystery shopping your people and you're not demanding that X and Y sit on the phone in a particular way. So back to the script to show empathy.

I ask a few questions about the case. Get some details. Here's the magic. So you'll say, "Oh my God, this and that happened to you. All right, based on what you're telling me, I have two options for you", let's say it's a two persons firm, "We have Attorney Smith. He's had a lot of experience in cases very similar to yours. He's our most experienced person. Yes, he does charge a bit more but he's for those complex cases that really need a lot of attention. We also have Attorney Jones. She's also great, she's a little bit less experienced than Smith. She handles a lot of the cases, she doesn't cost as much but she's still an excellent advocate, really great, very personable, very easy to work with.

Which one do you think will be better for you to talk to?" You're giving the person a choice and you're setting both of these attorneys up. The person has been told that they're nice, they're wonderful, they're experienced and they're told one is more expensive than the other, they're told one handles complex cases; the other handles more simple cases. The person is self-selecting. They can choose which one they want. The higher level attorney will get the juicier cases for higher fees and have less price-resistance; the regular attorney, maybe not the partner, wants to get cases but they'll handle the more run-of-the-mill ones and their prices are less and the person already feels like they're saving by going with that person. That's one great way to position it.

Let's say you're solo or you're the only attorney there, you still want to have the people answering the phone billed you up and they can do that with a script. Based on what you told me about your case, I'm going to have you talk to our attorney, Attorney Smith. She's wonderful, very empathetic, and great on the phone. She has 11 years experience with these kinds of cases, she's handled maybe even thousand cases like this. I'm going to put you on hold for a second and let me get her on the line. Would that be okay?" The person is built up and they are expecting a really great person to come on the phone, they feel cared for, they feel empathized with, sympathized with.

You're going to have a much better interaction on the phone, you're going to hear it in the prospect's voice when they get on the phone with you. They're going to be so much better, they're not going to say, "Yes, I just want to know how much you charge", and they're never ever going to bring that up because you've been positioned so well. Other thing is that the secretary or the person answering the phone can bring up, "Oh, Mrs. Smith is board-certified, which means that she's got extra training on how to handle family law cases", or, "Mrs. Smith has been trained on the very same methods police use to do a DUI arrest or breath test" and that kind of stuff. "Mrs. Smith has been certified by the estate planning council of Nevada and she's got a lot of experience", whatever it is. Build the person up, then transfer them.

I'm telling you, you're going to hear so much better people on the phone; you're not going to have people tire kicking and bothering you and harassing you and just mistreating you, you're going to get that respect that you're looking for and you're going to get retained far more often just by having the simple script. Let's say you do the consult now with the person. Not everyone's going to want to hire you right then, so you're going to get a couple of responses. Here's the next step of the diagnosis. You do an initial consult, you'll hear either "Well, I got to talk to my wife", "I got to talk to my husband", "I got to think about it", "I got to sleep on it", "I have to pray on it", "I'm talking to several other attorneys, so let me get back to you", so that's one thing you may hear. That's like a stage 1 call.

What do most attorneys do? Nothing. "Okay, well I'm here if you need me, call back". Do you have any follow up? Do you call that person later? Do you have your admin call that person? Do you email that person? Do you capture any info about them? So don't be of the attitude if they want me, they'll hire me because that's the bad attitude and you're missing out on a lot of people if you do that. Sometimes people are just not ready to make a decision today. I mean you as an attorney know this, you want to consider the facts and think about stuff and take time and I don't think rush to decisions so why would the potential clients rush to decisions?

But if someone followed up with you and give you continually good stuff and kept pace with you and all that and emailed and maybe called, not enough to harass you but enough to continue to inform you and help you and answer questions, you'll be much more likely to work with that kind of person. You know you would. Same thing goes with potential clients, so you got to follow up with them. Ask them on the phone, "I know when you were speaking to the admin or when we were speaking, your most important issue about your case was X", this leads them to a super-duper question I want you to ask from now on, with all your consults no matter what happens. Tell me, Mr. So and So, what is the single most important aspect of your case that you've got to have resolved above all others.

Let's say it's a divorce case, "I had 3 children, I can't lose custody of them because I'll die. They're my life, my children", or, "I got a DUI. If I lose my driver's license, I'm dead. I got to get to work, I got to take the kids to school. If I can't do that, I'm dead in the water. My license is the most important thing", or, "I was injured at work, workers comp case, I can't work, I can't lift things and that's my job. What am I going to do and how am I going to get through even if I do get compensation?" Or, "My mother is in hospice and she's in a pass and she has a new husband, she got remarried, they have kids, I don't want those kids taken all the estate money because the house was supposed to go to me. You ask this most important question and here's why.

When you ask that, the person is going to pause and say, "This person's really listening to me". They're going to give you the answer. You're going to keep that answer on the side because when you follow up with them, you now have a great excuse to call or having a secretary call. "Hi, this is Jane from Attorney Smith's office. Attorney Smith there was one question you had about X that was more important than anything else in your case. He's done some extra research on that and he has some additional information from you. Give our office a call at 1800 whatever and he's prepared to discuss that with you". If you say that kind of thing, you're inspiring major curiosity and you're showing the person you really care and you did some extra research, which is easy to do, and you've found some additional information.

It's a great excuse to get that person to call you back instead of you having to chase them and you've got more stuff to talk about. Now you have a second conversation or a second whack at them, much more likely to get them to retain you. It's very important to ask that. Other things to ask is simple stuff. Maybe you've written a book on such and such or maybe you have some information or you have case notes on the consult that you did. "By the way, Mr. Smith, I've taken some notes on what we talked about today. I'd like to get them sent over to you so you have a recap of what we talked about and it'll help you make your decision. What's your best email address", or, "What's your best home address? I'm going to get them out in the mail to you today", no obligation. "Oh thanks! That's great".

Or, "I've written a book on DUI defense", or, "I've written a book on family law or estate planning or immigration, that's on Amazon. It usually costs $15 but what I'll do is I'm going to send you a free copy because I think you need it and it'll help you to figure out what to do", "Oh thank you", "What's your best email", "What's your best home address", "What's your phone number". Get this info so you could follow up with them. It's very important. So, you want to find a way to follow up with somebody. You want to have an excuse for doing it so you don't feel achy, you don't feel like you're bothering them, harassing them and bugging them. You could always call someone once and say, "Just calling to see if you have any other questions, if your situation changed, what else can we do for you?" There's always that excuse.

Another excuse is the most important question, that's a great way to call and get someone to call you back instead of you chasing them. You can also email the person. Helpful articles, a summary of your initial consultation, case notes, strategies, all of that stuff. All that information helps, it's rare that people are going to take that info and bring it to another attorney and hire them instead. That information really conceal the deal when people need to think about stuff and take time. I've seen there's really two kinds of law; there's immediate problems like "I got arrested", that kind of stuff, and then there is everything else that can wait, patent, application, divorce doesn't have to be file today, bankruptcy can always wait another week, injury case, people are famous for delaying on that kind of stuff.

Most of law is not immediate and people can wait. They don't have to make their decisions today. Even other kinds of law that are more immediate, sometimes they wait anyway until their court date. So you get people that just take time. Sometimes it takes month. That's why follow up is so important, that's why how you treat them is so important. The stage one people that you talk to that we covered are people that say, "Let me think about it", or, "Let me get back to you. Let me talk to my wife" and all that kind of stuff. So now you know what to ask them and now you know basics of how to follow up.

Now stage 2. If they don't hire you right there on the phone and they want to do an in-office consult, which many attorneys love to do because they say "If I can get them in the office, I can convert them. I'm great at that", wonderful. But a lot of people have no-shows. Why do you have no-shows? No-shows are really frustrating, how do you combat that? You have no-shows because things happened once they get of the phone with you. 1) you may not have convinced them that you're the attorney for them; 2) they may still be scared and still just don't want to take action and be paralyzed by it; 3) they may tell their family or friends that they talk to a lawyer and they say, "Your Uncle Bob does law. He can help you, you don't need to talk to this guy or girl", or, "You talked to a lawyer. Are you sure you want to do this", or, "I've got a friend that's a lawyer. He can help you. Go with him and he'll do a cheaper rate or something".

These things happen and doubt creeps into people's minds even if you did a great presentation and they're really interested in you but they just need to think about it for a day or so, they're just not ready to take action. Doubt and time will creep into their minds. All kinds of things eat away at people that you have no clue are going on that can cause them not to take action. Maybe something happens and they have to go away for a few days or something happens at work and they get caught up, now all of a sudden a week goes by and they forgot. You set that consultation in the office and now they got to come in and drive in to see you, maybe they got to take off work, they got to get a babysitter for the kids, maybe the act of coming into the office really means that they're going to have to deal with the case now.

They are scared of that, it's almost as bad as going to court, going to see a lawyer. Wow, I'm really doing it, I'm really going to go see a lawyer about this. So it's a big step, so you get a lot of no-shows. Another thing is two appointments made too far in the future. That's deadly. So if you're going to make appointments within next 48-hours, the next 24-hours, do that. You may even want to say to people, "When I do appointments, we do it right away because this stuff is serious. So I have an appointment for today and two for tomorrow, and that's it. Beyond that, I can't guarantee that I can get you in". You could try to push people to get to see you right away. That's one strategy. Another strategy too is back to follow up.

If I do a great talk with you and we schedule for 3 days from now for you to come to the office, I know that you're walking through a mental minefield until you get to my office. There are many things that can blow up your ability to come. I better follow up, I better send you stuff in the mail or email, I better call and confirm. There are many things that you got to do in order to get someone over that next threshold and to get them to come into the office. You also got to realize it's worth it to spend money at this point because the person has searched. First of all, they had a problem, then they searched, then they decided to come to your website, then they took the scary step of calling, then you did a consult, you spent your time, your billable hour on the phone with this person and convinced them and all those other stuff.

You spent hundreds of dollars in marketing and time to get to this person at this point and you're just going to let them go and you're not going to invest 10, 20, $30 to get them to retain you? Are you crazy? Now is the time to double down and send stuff out in the mail or call and email and do whatever you can to get this person to actually come into the office because that's the next big step. According to you, the listener, once they get in that office, magic happens and you convert almost everybody. You have to back-up your process to the step right before and get them into the office and don't have no-shows. You may not have this problem, but a lot of people do. That's why I'm talking about it. These are all the things you do to get them in the office.

Once they're in the office, wonderful, you're magicians, now they're going to retain you. I'm still going to say something about this. If someone comes in the office and he doesn't retain you, all the same reasons we talked about apply but now, you're spending even more time, more money. The person does go into great length and they still didn't retain you, well you better pull out all of the stops now, hand them stuff, mail them stuff, give them stuff, do whatever you can to get that person retain you because again, it's a sunk cost. By that time, you've spent so much effort and time; to lose them at that point is insane.

That's how I would wait your marketing and your marketing dollars to see them. One more thing to talk about. When people first call, you'll misperceive some of them as being tire-kickers or no good. This is usually a price issue or a perceived price issue. A famous mentor of mine Dan Kennedy said, "If everyone only cared about price, everyone will be driving around a KIA while I get 20-year old clunker. No one will be driving BMWs, Mercedes, Jaguar" and all that stuff. People do. Obviously price is not the main issue. I've seen studies on this where price was a factor but it was a factor only in about 15% of cases not even close to what you're thinking. It doesn't matter that there are guys right down the street that charge half of what you do and suck and just plead people out or do the minimum.

You can overcome that, so I'm going to talk about price strategy now. What if you get those callers that say, "How much do you charge for whatever it is you do". What do you? If you answer that question or if you even get defensive about it, you've lost, so you got to turn it around on them. What you need to do is either you or the person answering the phone has to say "Obviously, it depends on the case", but let me ask you a question. Is price the most important aspect of your decision or is it getting a good result in your case?" Pause and let the person answer. Some people will say price. You can also follow up with another question. "Do you think that the cheapest lawyer is going to get you the best result?"

Let the person answer. By doing this, you're turning it around on them and you're putting them on the "justify myself defense mode" and that's what you want because if you start answering this price question and all that, you're just dead, you're going down a dark alley. You charge 3,500? John Smith down the street only charges 1,500. That's crazy. You have to justify yourself, your position is weak and you know that. You never want to get to there, you want to have ways to evade this and ways that aren't insulting and ways that don't get into a nasty conversation but ways that turn it around on the person. The best way is to ask a question.

If you get to the point where you ask about what's the most important aspect of your case, this is a great time if price comes up later to alley people's fears. Here's another strategy. I'm going to give you one more about price. There are many more besides this. You do your consult, you get to a certain point where the person says, "All right. How much do you charge?" You tell them your price and they say, "Oh man, that's a lot of money", or, "I can't afford that", what do you do? To preempt that, here's what I would do. You got to set the stage before they ever get to that question with you; or if they do ask you the question, "Say all right, let me give you a multipart answer. So for what I do, if you pay me $10,000 and go real high with this first number, I could get experts in on the case, I could show up in court as many a 10 times.

I could depose everyone in the world, I could do all these things if you pay me $10,000. I'm not asking you to pay me that. If you pay me the minimum rate that I'm sure some guys out there charge of $1,000 or $1,500, I could only do the following. I can show up to court once, I wouldn't have time to get extra witnesses, I wouldn't be able to do this, I wouldn't be able to do that, I'd be able to engage with your case a little bit but really not do much and it's unlikely I'd be able to get you a good result. That's why I charge $3,000". Now, you framed it. You frame the high, you frame the low, you took away and you made your reasons why you charge what you charge. "For $3,000, here's what I can do. I can do this, I can do that.

That's why I charge that amount. Let me compare that for you for a second. If you didn't have an attorney handle this case for you and you pled guilty or if you try represent yourself and you got a bad result, what would be the downside to you? The downside in your particular circumstance is you either wouldn't collect a settlement of $200,000 or you'd end up in jail for a year, or a permanent criminal record, or your father would pass away and you miss out on the house in the estate plan, or you wouldn't be able to get your wife here on a provisional waiver, so you'll be stuck for another 3 or 5 years, so that's the negative consequence of not getting help.

In my mind, that far outweighs the price I charge and that's why I charge what I charge and that's what I can do. So tell me what do you think the best option for you is?" That's a really powerful way to present price instead of just "I charge X" because you're giving reasons why you're framing the high and the low and it all makes total sense to the prospect and they're much more likely to respond positively for you if you do that. That's the last part about answering the phone that I wanted to cover for now.

There is obviously a lot more. If you want help and you need help in your practice to get more juice out of this orange that you're squeezing and paying a lot of money for, meaning your marketing dollars, and to get more clients retained that you're already looking at, that are already not showing up, that are already saying "Let me think about it", call 888-225-8594, or email me [email protected] and let me help you, we can do it.

This concludes the three part series of how to become the most prestigious, pre-eminent and respected law firm in your metro, in your practice areas. Remember, part 1 is available to you, part 2 and part 3; part 1 was what to do on the web to set the stage so that people will be attracted to your website and come to it and take a personal look at what you have to offer. We talked about reviews, we talked about credentials, media attention and everything.

That's in podcast 1 of 3. 2 of 3 is once they get to your site, how they make that fear-filled decision to actually call you. We went through a bunch of website elements on what you can do to tweak and change and make your website a lot more effective, a vehicle to get people to call you. 3, we just talked about scripts, answering the phone, follow up, how to handle price objections, so you've gotten the complete treatment, soup to nuts, and start to finish on how to become a prestigious law firm, the most respected one in your practice areas in your metro.

Again, if you need help with any aspects of this process, questions, implementation and that kind of thing, that's what we do at Speakeasy Marketing. Email me at [email protected], or call 888-225-8594 and we'll be glad to talk to you and help you out.

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This 2nd part will focus on several, simple, yet professional-looking tweaks to make to your law firm's website so it attracts higher quality clients and more of them, consistently. Even if you're not SEO or programming-savvy, these tweaks are fast and easy to implement.

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Today, I'm going to talk about stage 2 of 3 in the 3 part series of how to become the most prestigious and preeminent and respected law firm in your metro and in your practice areas. In the first podcast, if you haven't heard it, we talked about all the ways that you can improve your image online so when people are searching Google and AVVO and looking at reviews and all the stuff, before they even get to your website, when they're Googling on various questions and keywords. It doesn't matter your practice area, how do you stand out from your competitors so you get the click and they come to your website instead of someone else because if you can't get them to your website, if you can't show them that you are the one that they should call, they're never even going to call you.

You will never know because they won't have called you and you'll miss out on that client. Next time you go to court, you'll see those competitors that you don't like with all the clients and they'll be on the docket every single day and it's going to drive you nuts. How do you do this? How do you become the one to hire, the firm to hire? We spent about 18/20 minutes going over many different ways that you can improve your prestige, your image and elevate the respect people have for you before they even get to your website and decide to call you. This is part 2 of the series. Once you've done all that and once they come to your website, this is a very precious thing because anyone can click back on the browser and just go back to Google.

Anyone on their phone can close the window or just re-Google someone else, it's so easy and it's unbelievable. Even if they sneeze too hard, they can leave your website and go to someone else. Once you get them there, you still need to work hard to get them to call you or to email you and to ask legal questions, to do an initial consultation. You may not think this is a big step but this is a big step and here is why. Most people are not repeat offenders or most people don't have family members that die every week and need continual estate planning. Most people don't get divorced 5 times a year and need a family lawyer over and over again. Legal situations are pretty rare and most people don't have to deal with the legal system very much. They don't like it. It's ugly, it's nasty and it's scary.

I've dealt with the legal system in minor ways and it still will scare you. I couldn't imagine being accused of a major crime or in some like huge lawsuit. It'll be terrible or a nasty divorce. You have to realize that people are afraid and they don't know anything about the law. They may be researching on Google or talking to friends but they don't know that you're better than John Smith down the road, they don't know. The only way they know that is to read your information, to look at your reviews, to form an opinion about you before they even talk to you. That's why it's so critical to show up professionally, to show up prestigiously, preeminently and to really convince that person.

This attorney looks really good, really capable. I don't want to do it but I'm going to call their office because I got to handle this problem, this legal problem is just chewing me up. I am thinking about it day and night, in the shower, I can't sleep, it's affecting my work. That's the state a lot of people are in when they call. Those are the good clients because they really need somebody. Once they get to your website, what are they going to see? The first thing they'll see is a lot of times your homepage but they may not come to your homepage, and here is why. Google treats your website as if it was a dandelion, fluffy white dandelions, you blow on the spores and stuff go all over the place.

What that means is every page of every website is exposed to Google search. Let's say you and your wife are attorneys. You do criminal law, your wife does family law, and this is a very common arrangement. Someone's Googling about a sex crime, what may show up in Google is the homepage of your site, or what may show up in Google is the section of your website that talks about sex crimes, and they may enter through that particular door of your website. Someone else, 5 minutes later, may be Googling about child custody, and they may enter through your homepage; they may not. They may enter through a child custody page, they more likely enter through that page onto your website. Why? Because Google is good at its job.

It doesn't want to just throw everyone onto the homepage where it's not relevant to them. If someone's looking for something very particular, child custody, they don't want to waste their time. Google wants to look good and have people say, "I Googled something, I got my answer two seconds later exactly what I was looking for. They want to provide good search results. That's their job and they have billions and billions and billions in revenue because they do such a good job. That's how your website is treated. Not everyone comes in through the homepage, it's not like a lobby where that's how everyone walks in to get to your office. They walk in through every conceivable door and window. They come from under the carpet, to the ceiling, that's what's happening with your website.

When they first get there, does your homepage look beautiful and the rest of the pages on the site just look like crap? Do they have just an article on them and not much? Does your website look like a movie set with a homepage, the façade is nice and it's got all the stuff on it and every other page is ignored, bad idea because again, people come through every conceivable page. So you want all the pages of your website to look good. This seems like a really tough job but here's the saving grace. There's only about 4 different kinds of pages that make up an attorney's website. There's the homepage, there's the attorney profile page, and the about us page, there are article pages where an article about a particular legal question and answer will live, and those make up most of a website's pages that could be hundreds of them.

There'll be a testimonial page, if you're smart, and there'll be a Contact Us page, so those are five actually. But really most of your site will be composed of article pages, Q&A legal stuff, the profile page, and the homepage. Really those are like probably the top three pages of the site and they make up 99% of the site. So, your job is not nearly as hard as you think. If you make the homepage look good, you got a good design and you make your article page all look the same except for the content and a few other tweaks but again, good design. Then if you make your profile page look good, you get three designs, they're all still the same theme. But if they all look good, you're light years ahead of most attorneys that have websites that look good on the surface but look bad once you get to any subpage. That's the first step.

How do you make your site look good? How do you make yourself look respected and preeminent? You want to have really crisp, big, beautiful, smiling pictures of yourself. Why? Because people hire a person, they have confidence and trust in a person. They don't hire ABC law firm; they hire Jane Smith of ABC Law Firm because "I didn't realize that she is a single mother too and I am in the middle of the custody battle and she understands me because she went through the same thing four years ago", that's why you hire Jane Smith, not because she's ABC Law Firm. That's meaningless. People hire people, they do not hire businesses, they do not hire companies, they hire people.

This is true whether you're hiring a carpet cleaner for your house or a lawyer or going to the doctor or any of that stuff. You're hiring that person and that person's attitude, personality, how well they empathize with you and understand you, how credential they are, how impressive they are, all these things boil down into your decision either to hire them or not hire them. Same goes for me when people hire our firm or hire me. Knowing that people need to experience you before they call because if they can't see you and if they can't hear you, and all they see is just legal gobbledygook on the site and nothing that speaks to the layperson and nothing that tells them what you look like, what you sound like, how you are.

They are less likely to call. People don't want to call a blank wall. They want to call a human being, so humanize yourself. Have pictures of yourself smiling, not being grumpy and folding your arms or trying to look tough. That doesn't go over well. People may want tough but again, if you treat them badly, if you look down on them and they're afraid of that. They think a lot of attorneys are mean and a lot of them are. I've called a lot when I needed help and a lot of them are just downright mean. I don't want to hire those people when they try to scare you. I want someone that'll fight for me, that'll be a real advocate for my case. Nice pictures, smiling, happy. Make it even better; have some videos of you on the site, not just a commercial but answer some legal questions and put them on your website especially on pages that have to do with that same subject. Let's say you do estate planning and you're talking about Will Contest or Probate, and there are articles on the site about that. Have a video of you talking about the same thing you talk about in the article. This serves two purposes. 1) It gets to humanize you in case someone went onto that page; 2) people consume information in different ways. Some like to read, some hate reading and they rather watch. Some hate watching and they'd rather listen. People are very different. Some people will like to printout stuff and read it. Some people will read it on their Smartphone, a lot of them do.

Some people want to watch a video, so have pictures of yourself, have videos of yourself. People can see you and hear you and experience you and they'll get a feel for your personality if you have that kind of stuff, it'll go a long way to making you seem accessible and convey the image that you want to convey. This also gives you control of your image. You may not realize that. If you have nothing of yourself on the website, you actually have no image. If you want to convey yourself as professional, as skilled, as a powerful attorney that really knows what they're doing and has empathy as well and that gets good results, what better way than to talk and to be seen and heard before someone even calls you.

Their fears are allayed and they get to know that you're experienced. The next thing you want to do is remember those pages we talked about. Homepage, I'm going to start with that. Homepage is a great place to have testimonials. A homepage is also a great place to have those badges that a lot of people have. AVVO, 10.0 rating, NACDL (National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers), member of PILMMA (Personal Injury Lawyers Marketing and Management Association), member of the NACBA; the bankruptcy stuff. Whatever practice area you're in, get those badges and put them near your picture because they essentially give a halo effect to you in your picture.

People see it and say, "This person is a member of all these things, a million dollar advocates club, whatever it is". If you get media mentions, as seen on TV or on ABC news, or quoted in Legal Journal of Minnesota. All of that stuff is great to have near your picture and near your videos on the homepage. This also goes the same for your profile page and wherever you appear on the site, so credentialize yourself, give yourself a golden halo above your head, that kind of stuff helps. The number of cases you've worked on helps. If you've done thousand cases or 500 cases, the number of trials, that kind of stuff all helps to credentialize you. You want to have it on the site.

On the homepage, you want to have a great headline that doesn't just say, "We'll fight for you", or, "Divorce is serious", and that kind of thing. Have some bullet points. What I'd have is bullet points of the most common questions you get asked why because if you're getting asked the same questions 8 times a week, guess what? There are like 800 people a week that are searching and have those same questions but never made it to your website, they never recalled you. The most common question is for a reason. You can trust them. If you get asked the same thing a lot, it's being asked 10 or 100 times as much out there in the marketplace.

You want to hit people right away, with those things that they ask all the time and have it right there on the homepage. If someone's on an article page, DUI page or auto accident page or bankruptcy page, same thing, you want to definitely have an FAQ section right upfront so people could see it because those most common questions are the first thing they need to have answered before they can go deeper and engage with you further. What else can you have? Have that free consultation stuff, there are ways to slice that and make it better, calling it a strategy session, calling it a 20-minute legal engagement, phone consult, that kind of thing so you can spin what it's called to make it sound something different, which is always helpful.

Another thing you want to have is you always want to have your phone number on the top right of every single page of your website. Why? Because if you make people work and try to find the phone number, they're much less likely to call you. Don't make people work. In today's world, people are so lazy that if they have to look anywhere to do anything, they're not going to do it. So have that phone number on every single page of your site at the top right, so they know where to look. That's where they're trained to look, top right. Make it touchable on tablets and Smartphones because Smartphones now are 65%, almost 70% in this year, of all search, so mobile outpaces laptops and non-mobile now.

if I touch that number and it doesn't load into my dial screen of my phone, of my tablet and I had to type it in, that's a pain and I'm less likely to do it. Vanity numbers, don't have a vanity number on your site. They don't work anymore. People use to think 1800-calldui, or 1800-injured that kind of thing. Old phones, payphones, they used to have; number one had no letters associated with it, number two had ABC, 3 had DEF etc. Nowadays, in smartphones, a lot of them don't have that. People don't want to translate the letters, if you touch the number with letters in it, 1800-call-now, it's now going to translate the numbers and it's just an impediment to search, so don't do it.

If you have to do it, if you're in love with your number, have that but have the actual numbers above it. So, 1800-454-8181 and right below it, 1800-call now or something so at least people don't have to go with the latter one because again, I'm seeing it an as impediment, not a help. We talked about testimonials and reviews, very important. You want to have them on all the pages of your site; you don't want to have it clutter up the whole page but you want to be there because that's the third-party proof that you're good so you want to have that on all your pages. It's very important to have. Let me go into a way to make it even better. I'm just going to go with criminal defense. Within criminal defense, there is not just one type of crime. There are theft crimes, sex crimes, DUI and traffic tickets etc.

If I am on a page about DUI, do I care if I see testimonials about traffic tickets or about murder? No, I care about DUI. I want to know you help people just like me. So a great way to make yourself look a lot better is on pages that talk about DUI, have DUI related testimonials on those pages, on pages that talk about sex crimes, if you can have sex crime type testimonials. If you're a family law attorney, you have contested divorce, uncontested mediation, child support, child custody, spousal maintenance or alimony etc. On each of those pages, if you can have a testimonial related just to that, it makes it a lot more powerful than just having blanket testimonials or no testimonials at all.

Try to have the page with all your testimonials, but then handpick ones that are related to the content someone is looking at and have it on those pages. That's a real huge bonus that could really boost the effectiveness of your website. Homepage, we got that there, now we'll talk about your profile page. It's very important. In your profile page, does it look just like a resume? Most people, that's what they have. Mr. So and So graduated from Harvard University in 1980 with a bachelors and this and that and he's been practicing for 50 years, that's just like boring who-cares type stuff. What's special about you? Have you argued the case before the Supreme Court? Are you certified in Federal Court? How do you talk about the type of law that you do? So do you say we just do injury law or what does that mean?

I do injury law, Great. I, on the other hand, deal with auto accidents, with both insured and uninsured drivers, auto accidents with death or serious bodily injury. I deal with medical malpractice, you could say slip and falls, trip and falls, dog bites, bicycle accidents, motorcycle accidents, truck accidents, product liability, so you can really dimensionalize what you do and not just say one blanket statement. If you do criminal law, you do criminal law or you deal with sex crimes, drug crimes, theft crimes, DUI, traffic tickets and all of that stuff. You can dimensionalize it. Estate Planning, probate, will contest, trusts, wills, There are a lot of ways to dimensionalize any practice area you have; Immigration, family immigration, Crimmigration, provisional waivers and all of that stuff.

Have that on your profile page so people know that you do all kinds of cases. Have a link to testimonials on your profile page. What do clients say about you, what other attorneys say about you, that's important. Have nice pictures and videos, a welcome video on your profile page really make this thing your profile, a living, breathing document. Also have personal stuff on there. I am not saying to tell people your personal life, and why you think that is relevant, it is. People hire people, they don't hire businesses or blank walls, so tell people. If you have kids and you want to disclose that, say it. If you enjoy sailing and playing polo, say it. If you are a rock climber, say it. If you are injured and you're missing a leg and you served in the military, say it. It helps people bond with you. These act as dog whistles.

Certain people that have had that similar situation, they will respond to you because of that. I have one DUI attorney that was arrested for DUI. He got off but he was arrested for it and he was afraid to put this out there. I said no, that's your greatest asset because you went through the same thing that your clients are going through. Highlight it. We got him to do it and he's doing far better, he's going a number of calls because of it. If you've been divorced and you're a family law attorney, say it. I know it makes you feel vulnerable but it actually elevates you in the eyes of clients, these personal disclosures, they really, really, really help, trust me. Any media attention, this is a place to put it on your profile page.

Education, fine, wonderful; any special training you've gotten. Let's say you've been trained in field sobriety tests or you've been board-certified in your state or admitted to the Supreme Court or admitted to practice in federal court, or you've had special designations of any kind for any area of law. Put them in here because it shows that you stand out amongst other attorneys. This is your chance. When people look at you, this is typically a page where people will make their final decision to call or not so you want to have good looking profile page with a lot of great stuff on you because now, it's all about you. The more prestigious you look the more likely they are going to call. That's what's going on profile pages, don't just have a resume.

Article pages, we talked about this already. Have relevant testimonials, have different ways to consume it, not just the article but videos, audio if you can, maybe have stuff in bullet form, allow the articles, we print it, some people want to print and read, take stuff with them, let them bookmark it or save it to their phone, let it be emailable to them. All those things help people consume the article and you want to have that in your article pages. In addition, you want to have a lot of content on your site. If you do DUI and you just have one generic page that talks about penalties, fines, then you can have a 100 pages just on DUI alone, 10 DUI, over 21, multiple offences, high BAC, DUI with bodily injury or death, DUI on federal land, DUI for drugs versus alcohol, DUI when no one saw you driving, DUI when you are sleeping at the back of a car, DUI, boating under the influence. DUI when you refuse the breath test, there are a hundreds different things that can happen just in DUI.

This goes for any criminal defense type stuff, it goes for any injury case, and this goes with any estate planning case, immigration. If you have one article, fine. If you have a 100 articles and you answer every possible question people could have on a subject, well guess what, they're going to spend a lot more time engaging with your site. There are more doors for Google to send searchers through different keywords to find your site and not just a few keywords. It's very, very important. My clients that have a lot of articles on each practice area, they get a lot more traffic to their site. Once they do, this converts them because they say, "I got the answers here. I'm not just seeing a generic article.

Another thing with article page that's very important is write in layman's terms, don't write in legalese. They don't understand it, people have no clue what implied consent means, prima facie, etc. They have no clue what it means. They don't know about the law, you do, you're speaking those terms, they don't. They don't know what preliminary hearing is or administrative hearing adjudication, they don't know any of that stuff. You have to speak in layman's terms, very plain, very simple and it'll come across a heck of a lot better. You can wow them with terms later on but talk at their level and trust me, people will consume that a lot better. No matter how sophisticated they are.

If you think, "My clients are college educated and they're high-income and they're people with businesses, guess what, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times and all these high publications, they're written at an 8th grade level; some of them are written at a 6th grade level and they work so well and they are so compelling because they are very easy to understand. No matter how sophisticated your client is, the easier they can understand what you write and have video off than everything, the more likely they are to call you. Intimidation does not work. Talking Gobbledygook does not work, believe me. Make it simple, make it clear.

Moving on, we talked about having videos, very important. I am going to go into that for a quick second. Don't just have one video, don't have a commercial. We here, the law firm of A, B & C, care about you. They won't care about that stuff. Answer at least that's common questions you get in a video format. The more videos the better. If they are minute-and-a-half long and they answer questions, you can easily get 10 of them done a month, you can do a all day session, get 50 of them done, sure you'll be tired but you'll have 50 videos done and that's a lot. The great attorneys keep making more and more videos because each one answers one question typically one or two minutes long. People search on this stuff.

If you answer their question, they're more likely to engage, come to your site and call you. So videos are very important. Another important thing is to have a welcome video. When people call, who will answer? You or an admin, what's the admin's name? When you call Rebecca, our admin, will answer the phone. Rebecca is a wonderful one person. She is going to ask you details about the case, then she'll transfer it either to Mike or Sally. Mike handles this, Sally handles that. Mike has this credentials, Sally has that credential. Then our building is on the corner of Main Street and it's a 2-story building with stucco and there is the sign on the door that says, "This is right across to McDonald".

These little things help if you have an instructive video or audio that tells people about it. They know what to expect. It's a fearful process to come to the officer or to call you, these things help, and you want to have them. Probably one of the last things is testimonials and case studies. You want to have them on the site, you want to use them all over the place. You want to differentiate them but you want to have a lot of them. Two testimonials are not going to cut it. You want to have at least 10, 20, 30 as many as you can. The more testimonials people see the more likely that feeling of wow, this attorney really knows what they're doing sinks in. Some people will read through 5, 10, 20 testimonials, they just keep reading and reading because it's like soothing themselves.

They get the feeling of like patting their head and soothing themselves the more testimonials they read. I've seen people get great results once they get beyond 10. If you can't get even testimonials to be send in to you, handwritten or just replying to an email or get them any way you can but if you can't get at least 10 and you've been in practice for years and years, I mean you got to get on it. It's very important. You want to have them on your site. Another thing you can do in the meantime is a crutch until you get enough testimonials is get case studies. You worked on cases, dozens of them. Think back, this is how you do a case study. Let's say you're an injury lawyer. You don't put the person's name obviously and you obscure the facts that they need to be obscured to protect privacy. Here's a case study.

Client won $250,000 for a rear-end accident with neck injury. You go like this, "Client was driving and stopped at a light and was rear-ended by a commercial vehicle at 30 miles an hour. The client suffered these injuries. In Negotiations with the insurance company, we were able to get the initial settlement offer raised from 20,000 to $25,000. Client is very happy with the result". So that's a case study. Let's say you do criminal defense, case study, 5 years prison reduced to 3-years probation. A client was caught with a pound of cocaine and arrested and was facing 5 years in prison. When we challenged the lab method of handling the cocaine, it was thrown out and the amount was considered to be instead of one pound, one gram, which brought the charge down from 5 years to 3 years probation. That's a case study.

You can do unlimited ones of these if you don't have testimonials. They convey very similar results to people, people want to know your thought process, and how you handle cases etc., so this is a great way to do it is to have case studies on your site if you don't have enough testimonials. Case studies can be put in the same place that you put testimonials on the relevant pages, on the homepage, on your profile page. Last thing, and we kind of talked about this already. Contact us page, have one. You want to have the phone number on the top right of every page, Contact Us page, here's a problem what people do. People will put free initial consultation, they'll put a box to put your name, email and phone number and tell us what happened and all that but they'll put it all over the place and it'll obscure pages, it'll obscure content, it'll just be like constantly bugging people, contact us now.

You don't need to do that. 90% of your leads are going to come by phone anyway, and phone people, phone leads are much better than email leads. Usually email people turn into ghosts, so don't push the email, push phone. You may not even need a consultation form to tell you a truth, have it but push phone because those are much better leads for you than just relying on email. Nowadays, most businesses don't even answer the phone. It's a terrible mistake. They want people to email them, they want people to go to their website; don't push people away, don't make them go to the website, get on the phone and help them and be available because otherwise, you're going to lose out big time.

All these things are very important for when someone gets to your website to get in to take that huge step of calling you. It's a huge step, don't mistake it. This is the end of part 2 of the 3 part series. The last part we're going to go into is when someone calls you, what's going to be their experience? Is the phone going to be answered and they're going to say, "Law Office", or is it going to be an answering service that says, "He's not here, call us back", or is it going to be a well-crafted script that gets the client engaged? Is your phone going to be answered 24×7? These kinds of things we're going to go into in the third part of the series because once you get someone to call you, they've overcome a lot of hurdles.

They've done a lot of work. If you mess it up at this point and a lot of firms do, you're just burning $100 bills easy by doing this because it takes a lot to get people to call in today's age. So this is probably the most important part of the series that's coming up. If you need help in implementing the stuff that we talked about in this podcast or the first podcast, or the third one coming, call me 888-225-8594, or email [email protected]. Thank you!

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What's your plan for making your law firm more Highly Respected in your metro and practice areas? (so you attract and retain more high quality clients).

Investigate this 3 part series on how hungry attorneys can become one of the most prestigious & highly respected law firms in your metro and practice area(s).

You'll discover a simple implementable, 3-step process to turn strangers into potential clients & potentials into paying clients. Listen to the audio below or download it now.

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This is the start of a 3 part series that's going to go over a dozen or more ways that you can become the pre-eminent and most respected law firm in your metro in your practice areas. We're going to cover three areas of how potential clients find you and eventually retain you and how you can make changes to your marketing, your online presences and other tweaks so that you are perceived by them as the firm to hire, as the lawyer to hire, as the most preeminent and highly respected attorney that they are seeking amongst others.

The three main areas we're going to cover before clients ever call you are when they are searching a web, they are looking at Google, and they are looking at reviews and all that stuff. Then we're going to cover once they get to your website, what things you could do to get them to call you and consume your articles and get on the phone with you to do that initial consult. The third area after website is actual call itself to your firm and the follow up or like thereof. What happens when somebody calls your firm, how are they treated, scripts used, how are they followed up, how do you reduce no shows, thinking overs, price resistance, price shopping and that kind of thing. These are the three stages.

Research by the potential client before they ever call you, getting to your website, checking out your credentials online and making that decision to call you and then, once they call you for the initial consultation all the way through them retaining you. We're going to go over strategies, tips and techniques on how to improve all these three areas. This will get you more clients and the reason being is you'll be perceived as the top person to hire. This podcast is first, we're going to go into the first of the third. When people are searching the web, first of all, will they find you, and when they do, what will they find.

Let's talk first about places you want to be found. There are millions of legal directories out there, there are many sites where you can get reviews. I've found that there's really only four places that are really important for online reviews. AVVO, your website, Yelp, and Google Maps or Google+. Those are the four places. The great thing is you can pretty much ignore all the other areas to get reviews and focus on these four because these are the four spots that commend top ranking in Google search, and Google search is the majority of all search. Yelp is used heavily by many people; AVVO is actually pretty huge and used by many people as well, and of course on your website. These are the four places where you want reviews.

Why is your review important? Because they are a third-party proof that you are a good attorney to hire. The best thing is reviews can come from past clients, they can come from current clients whose cases are not over yet. They also can come from fellow attorneys, so there's nothing wrong with an attorney writing a review for you saying, "I'm not a client of John Smith but I know John Smith professionally. We practiced in the same courts. I've known him for 10 years. He is a zealous advocate for his clients and he does a great job, he's very thorough. He tends to get good results from what I can see because he spends so much time on his cases", that's a great powerful review. It's an honest one and it builds up what people think of you.

People search, whether they're looking to eat Chinese foods or to hire a lawyer, they look at reviews and they want to make sure that you have good ones. The nice thing is that the threshold is not so high. I'm just Googling now "Los Angeles Divorce Lawyer", and the top three people that appear at Google Maps have anywhere from 10 to 12 reviews, that's not a lot. Restaurants have hundreds, hotels have thousands; you only need, in many cases, 5, 10, maybe 15 reviews on Google Maps. Sure, it takes time to get them but once you get to the 5 review threshold on Google Maps, Google+, you'll get gold stars next to your name. If you get 5 or 6 gold stars, that'll make your listing really stand out and it's a sign of prestige to have this because a lot of firms don't have any reviews.

The nice thing is if you have multiple locations, you want to get reviews for all of them. Your initial threshold, is to get 5 reviews. That'll give you these gold stars and it'll make your listing standout and it'll help people's image of you. A big question people have about reviews is that "Oh, what if I get a negative review, what if I get a bad one?" It happens. It's far better to ask for reviews and to have 5 good reviews and 1 bad one than to have 1 bad one and no good reviews because now, it's in context. Almost everybody runs into problems with clients, some of them are just mean and nasty and no matter what you did for them, no matter how much money you won for them, no matter how well their case was or it got totally dismissed, some of them just are thankless and they'll write bad reviews, it happens.

The answer is not to live in fear and not ask anyone for reviews; the answer is to ask everyone for reviews because you're going to get bad ones every once in a while, it happens; even rip off report, that happens. But I know attorneys that still succeed in spite of that because that bad review is in context with many other good reviews. Always ask and don't be afraid of bad ones because you will get good ones. Another fear attorneys have is, "I do criminal defense or I do divorce and people are embarrassed and they don't want to put reviews online". Actually it's not true. If you Google criminal defense or DUI in any city in the US, you're going to see reviews from people.

Those people aren't embarrassed or afraid to post reviews; why would your clients be embarrassed? Some of them will, sure, but a lot of them won't and they'll post for you. It's not a problem. You got to ask them. If you don't ask them, you won't get. You've got to be in it to win it. Some attorneys seem to have unassailable positions because they have 20, 30, 40 reviews. I've talked to some of these guys and girls and asked them how do they do it, the surprising answer was "Hard work, consistently over a year's time or two years' time", they ask everybody, all their past clients, attorneys and friends and they slowly build up reviews.

The nice thing is if you do this, if you stick with it and you get to that 5 to 10 mark, maybe 10 on Google Maps, 10 on Yelp, 10 on your website, 10 on AVVO, if you got a high AVVO rating, you're covered. You'll show up in all these areas that are important, you've got a good amount of reviews, don't stop but at that point, it's really going to kick in and start to get you a lot more clients. So you definitely want to work in this process. If it takes two years, so what? Are you going to be an attorney for two more years unless you're at the very end of your career? Yes. Once you're an attorney, a lot of attorneys stick with it for life. Life is long, this process doesn't have to take that long.

About a year or two is definitely worth your time and attention to build this stuff up for you. Now that we've covered reviews, we are going to talk about what else shows up when people Google you. A good thing to have is videos of yourself, not just commercials but question and answer videos. On YouTube, you can post them and you're picked up by Google search because Google owns YouTube. I don't know if you knew that. YouTube is searched alone billions of times a month; Google of course is tens of billions of times a month and Google actually shows YouTube results in some of its listing.

If you do videos on yourself and you answer legal questions, short and sweet, those videos may show up when somebody Googles your name. "John Smith, Houston Divorce Lawyer", when they Google that, either nothing can show up or your website can show up or your website and your maps listing or your website and your maps listing and your pay-per-click ad and pictures of you and videos of you, it can look quite impressive if you have all these elements going for you. The full display that you'll see on Google is called the knowledge graph. If there is a picture of you on the right and there are reviews and there is maps listings and there are videos, you have what's called the Knowledge Graph. You put enough of the stuff about yourself online, Google will recognize you as an authority.

If you want an example of this, type in Albert Einstein. If you do that, you'll see the entire page is about him, he's got tons of information on him and he's got this knowledge graph on the right side, images and everything. It's not too hard to get that but you got to work on it a little bit, so you need some photos of yourself on your website so they can get indexed, some YouTube videos, just a few is fine, photos on all your profiles like AVVO and Yelp and Google Maps and all of that stuff. Then you'll appear in the knowledge graph, which is great. It makes you look a lot more preeminent, a lot more respectable because you have all this information about you on the website, you seem to dominate for your name and that's what you want. If your name is common, I understand it's harder to do that but let's say your name is so common that someone else eclipses you because they are a movie star or something.

If someone clicks on your listing or hovers over your listing, a knowledge graph will appear for your specific listing, it'll still work even though you may not be the top one on the page. So, don't be discouraged if your name is John Smith or something very common. I know one of the DUI attorneys Lawrence Taylor, there's the football player but if you still put him in, he shows up and he has the knowledge graph and all of that stuff, so that's doable. Don't give up on it. What else can people run into before they even come to your website? So there is media publicity. Have you written any articles for local magazines or news? Have you been interviewed? Do you have any media publicity? Have you done press releases? All that stuff helps because it shows up in Google search, sometimes it shows up above everything else.

If you can get any of that done, and the secret sauce is to consistently ask local news outlets if they need an opinion on divorce, let's say a celebrity divorce, or a famous person that gets a DUI, or someone famous dies and they have a big estate, so whether you are estate planning or injury law, family law, it doesn't matter your practice area. There are always opportunities to get into the media, even immigration. There are tons of immigration stuff going on nowadays, business litigation, whatever it is. There is always legal stuff going about you should keep your eye on the news periodically and how do you capitalize on it, editorialize on it, make comments. If you're tied to the news, if you're tied to any of these media outlets or press releases, that's very, very prestigious and that'll help you show up.

Clients really like to see that. It gives them a great feeling that you're the person that they want to hire above anyone else. That's just a "me too" that just offers the same free consultation. Where else can you show up before if people even get to your website? There are other third-party sites, not a lot but some. Many of my clients, we've helped them writing a book, "Surviving divorce in Minnesota", "What to do if you're arrested for DUI/DWI in New York", "How to plan your estate so that the relatives you don't like take all of your assets in California", we've done these books. We get them self-published on Amazon and on Kindle and sometimes on Audible. Amazon listings show up.

If you've done a book, not only can people find that information on Amazon and that's a great thing to become pre-eminent and respected is to write a book for the layperson in your industry, not just for other attorneys, but both are good. But they see on Amazon, Amazon is a platform that has a lot of credibility, very important and Kindle too, so that's yet another way that even before people get to your website, you can appear and show up and get a lot of notoriety. One last way before I beat this to death is AVVO. AVVO is a really great place to answer questions that people have online, you want to have a good profile, good rating there. This is all free, so you can work on this for free.

They'll go crazy answering questions everyday but one a day, even one a week is fine on AVVO. People will see that you answered questions, people will see that you have a profile there, not just reviews but a profile, and that'll help you as well. I hope you keep all this in mind and this is a very important part of the process because if people don't see you, you don't stand out before they even decide to click on your website. Your website may not get clicked on, it may not even show up in the search results, so it's very important to have all that stuff going. One thing I forgot that's actually pretty obvious, ranking in Google, getting to the top of Google.

I am not going to go too deep into this because this is a whole huge Pandora's Box of stuff but what I will say is you do obviously want to be at the top of Google, but here is the twist. There are a few commercial keywords that everyone thinks, "If I was just at the top of Google for those keywords, my life would be beautiful and that's it". Things like New York DWI Lawyer, Houston Divorce Attorney, San Diego Estate Planning Lawyer, Seattle Injury Lawyer and that kind of stuff. Yes, it is good to be at the top of Google for those keywords and that shows prestige, which is great. But before people will type in those commercial keywords, I call them, they type in what I call question keywords.

Let's say for DUI. "Got pulled over in Lakewood, blew at 0.12, will I go to jail", they'll ask questions like that. "Officers said I failed the breath test but I tried to blow, will I go to jail", "Second DUI, how long is the jail time", they'll ask those questions before they'll type in "San Francisco DUI attorney". That's what people tend to do. Google themselves show that people take a path. They'll go up from questions and they'll refine their search queries until they get to the point where they're ready to make a decision. So what they'll do is they'll type in something in Google, they'll go to one or more websites, they'll read about it, they'll research, then they may or may not find what they want, and then they'll type in something else.

They'll go from question to question until they get to this point where they're ready to "Buy". You're not ecommerce but buy means call and engage the services of an attorney. So if you are there only for the last keyword they'll type in, which could be, "Minneapolis Bankruptcy Attorney", you're missing out on all these question keywords that they are typing in. Again, this is verified by Google who is overseeing trillions of searches now. Do you want to be there for just a last thing they may type in and to show up then or do you want to show up for all the different questions they have? Imagine if someone's searching and they type in 4 or 5 different things. And every time they do it, your website is there.

They start to get the opinion, "This attorney Sara Smith, she's there for all the questions I'm looking at. I'm going to give her a call because she's shown up every time I've typed something in, this lady is everywhere. She is all over Google, she's got good reviews, let me Google her name, she's got videos, she's got reviews, she's got articles. I'm going to go check out this lady's website and go deeper. I think I'm going to call her", that's the effect you want. That's when people have respect when they are less likely to price shop, when they call you and they're a better qualified person to talk to. That's what you want. Your first job, out of these three stages, is to create that image and prestige and these are a lot of the ways that you can do it.

In next podcast, we're going to get to when people actually come to your website, what else can you do to further that image to really cement it so you get them to pick up the phone and call, or to touch that number that appears on their Smartphone and call because believe it or not, that's a really big stuff. It's not like just a minor thing, it's a really big stuff for people to do that, they're scared, they don't know about the law. Before I get more into this, let me end this podcast. But this is one of three, I hope you find this valuable, I trust that you will. But if you master these three areas, you're going to just grow your law firm like crazy.

You're going to get better clients and you're going to do phenomenally well. If you want help with any of these three stages of the process, call me at 888-225-8594, or email [email protected]. Look forward to talking with you or you hearing from me.

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Share as much information as you can with your potential clients and they will retain you far more often. I've seen this phenomenon work for me as well as for hundreds of attorneys I've worked with over the past 6 years.

Never fear that your clients will go and represent themselves in court or use your information to hire a different attorney – they almost never do. Listen to the audio below where I've explained in great detail how this phenomenon works.

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It goes without saying, the better you know your clients, the easier it becomes for you to create marketing messages that get them to hire you more often. But how can you figure out who your best clients are, what their concerns are, and what makes them buy your services? I've answered all these questions in my latest podcast. Listen below or download it for free.

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The better you understand your clients in what motivates them, who they are, where they live, how much money they have, how they feel about the court system, no matter the practice area, what's their ethnicity, their gender, where do they shop, the better it is. The more you know about your potential clients, the better you will be able to find them and target them. Are they religious, do they speak English as their first language, who are they going to vote for in the next presidential elections? These things are actually important because the better you can create a profile of your ideal clients, the better you can look for them and use your marketing to look for them. This can be called 'stacking biases.'

When you think about it, there are slight biases that will help you to target people better. Taking the case of a client in Los Angeles who does Criminal defense, particularly DUI. When asked, 'What kinds of clients do you get?' he answered, 'I don't know, I get everybody when it comes to DUI.

When asked, 'Do you get more men or women?' he's like 'I tend to get more women.'

Alright. What ages?

They are usually mothers and older.

When asked again, 'Is the age group 35 years and up?', he's like, 'Yeah okay. 35 and up.'

What about an upper limit?

Really above 50, I don't get many.

Okay, so how many more do you get?

He's like maybe 60 – 40.

Based on the questions and their response, so far you've got 60% women, 40% men, where these women are between ages 35 to 50. Not really younger than 35, not older than 50. As you get some targeting going on, you can move on to more questions.

'What is the reason that they get arrested for DUI?'

They may have traumatic events in their lives. They are getting divorced. They may be unhappy with their spouse and they act out. They go drinking with friends and they act out and then they get pulled over. Most of these people have never had a brush with the law.

All these questions give a pretty good picture of who your ideal client is.

The next question to ask is 'What do they say when they call?'

Usually, they are very worried about what's going to happen. Will their family, kids and others find out?

Are they worried about their jobs?

No, not so much but they are worried about being able to take their kids to school and school activities.

By asking similar questions, you can get a really concise picture of one big segments of your clients. For example, using Facebook, you are able to target these people a lot better and can get leads. Similarly, on the website, you can target to people of that demographic and age etc. Same goes for a personal injury attorney. They want to know who their demographic is.

Possible Questions To Ask When Identifying Your Clients

You would think how are you going to target for an auto accident or a personal injury? Some of the possible questions in these cases are 'What is the age, gender? What kind of accidents do these people get in to? What's the average age? Do they have insurance when they get in to accidents with other people? Rear ends or what? Do they drive nice cars or low-end cars? Do they have comprehensive coverage or just basic coverage? What are the makes and models? Are there any common ones? Where do they get in to accidents – at intersections, in school zones, on the east side of the town or the west side of the town? When they call you what is the most important thing that they want? Do they want to have their car fixed? Are they worried more about medical bills? Are they willing to go see doctors? Are they willing to go see chiropractors or they just believe in traditional doctors? Will they spend money? Are they good patients? Do they get treatment? What kind of jobs do they have? Are they driving a work or family car when they get in to an accident? How do they differ from other ethnicities, if there is a difference? Do they complain about the third or the forty percent take that you get on the backend? Are they good or bad clients? Do they comply with what you want? Do they tend to an attorney shop? Do they go with family friend referrals or do they stick with the first attorney they talk to?'

These are some of the things for personal injury for instance that you could think about to get a much better profile of your clients. This information is necessary for you to be more effective as an attorney in your marketing. Again, the more specific you can be on who you are targeting, the better. That's extremely important. It makes all your marketing more effective, and your money far better spent. There is going to be a temptation when you do this, and you'll think that all your clients are different and there is nothing special, but you have to ask all these questions in order to identify them.

You don't have to look for huge differences, say 90% of your clients are male. You have to look for minor identifications, say 5% of them are this way or 3% of them are that way. Are 10% more of them this way? Basically, you start stacking those biases. 5%, 3%, 8% on top of each other. Eventually, you will get to very specific and lopsided customer avatar. That's what you want, because now you are really getting a range where your targeting could be effective.

All this is going to help you identify your clients. However, this is not easy. Call 888-225-8594 and get the help you need to do this. We have got an interview process where we can ask you these questions and get this information out of you and help you and your firm. You can also email at [email protected].

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I recently did a webinar with American Bar Association – The Young Lawyers Division and it taught me a great lesson. I've shared it with you in this short audio below go ahead listen to it or download.

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In this episode I have talked about international politics and some lessons that I've learned and like always some lessons for you to grow your law practice. Go ahead and listen to the audio or download it.

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In today's episode you'll learn:

• How to determine if an attorney is your competitor or not?
• How to analyze what your competitor is doing to get cases?
• How to implement the concrete strategies to overcome competition?

Listen to the audio below or download it to understand your attorney competition.

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In this episode I've continued the direct mail topic and have interviewed an expert Mark Primak. He has shared some great insights & strategies and covered most of the misconceptions that you might have about direct mail. You can listen or download the complete interview below.

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States – Kind of Direct Mailing

• All States – Bankruptcy, Foreclosure, Notice of Defaults, Sherriff Sales
• NJ – Criminal, Traffic, DUI, Landlord/Tenant, Lis Pendens, Special Civil
• NY (5 boroughs) – Criminal & DUI
• PA – Criminal, Traffic, DUI, Civil
• MD – Criminal, Traffic and DUI
• OH, 10 Counties currently. More added monthly. – Criminal, Traffic and OVI. Civil and Crash Reports for PI coming soon
• FL – Criminal, traffic and DUI
• VA – Criminal, Traffic and DUI coming soon
• Texas – Criminal, traffic and DUI
• Illinois – Criminal, Traffic and DUI in most counties)
• WI – Criminal, Traffic and DUI
• MO – Coming Soon
• AZ, Maricopa County- Felony info

Richard: This is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Marketing and today, I have a guest that I wanted to have for actually several years now, Mark Primak. He works with innovative attorney solutions or innovative legal solutions. They do marketing for attorneys but what we're going to focus on today is direct mail, physical paper mail that's sent out to, for instance, people arrested for a DUI and that kind of thing. So how are you doing, Mark?

Mark Primak: Great, how are you?

Richard: So I want to focus on direct mail today because there are a lot of a hubbub about it. Some people love it, some people hate it, and some people think it's unethical, some people think it's great. So we're going to get into all those details but personally, I've built a lot of my business on it, direct mailing some of my mail pieces and I know a lot of attorneys that have done really well with it. So that's why we're going to talk about it today. So Mark, tell me again the name of your company I might have messed it up.

Mark Primak: The name of the company is Innovative Attorney Marketing. We've been in business for about 16 years now.

Richard: Have you been providing direct mail for attorneys for all that time?

Mark Primak: Yes, about 15 years ago, we started, we incorporated in New Jersey, there was no attorney direct mail marketing, it didn't exist, and the industry didn't exist. We saw an opportunity and timing and skill built direct mail marketing company. Thus, I've been dealing with thousand plus attorneys over that span of time.

Richard: When you first started it, did you have to go to war with these state bar associations like how hard was it to get this started?

Mark Primak: It was pretty easy to get it started. However, over time, there were senators that were trying to pass bills to limit attorney direct mail marketing, it mostly revolved around personal injury mailing, which is kind of a grey area that we aren't so much after, DUI, criminal, traffic, bankruptcy type mailings but we fought each time, maybe 4 or 5 times and won every time, you can't shut down attorneys from sending marketing pieces to try business and help to send and to navigate the system.

Richard: Why was the direct mail being attacked, what was the reasoning?

Mark Primak: It was mostly behind personal injury with ambulance chasing, it was senators trying to make a name for themselves by sponsoring a bill, it really had no basis at all to shut that down but politics is politics and they never got anyway with it.

Richard: From my understanding, each state has different rules on what's allowed in direct mail but so far, I haven't found many of the state's rules to be too difficult to overcome. What do you see out there? Are there any states that just won't allow it?

Mark Primak: Yes. There is definitely a criteria that varies from state to state. There are attorney guidelines in most states that allow direct mail marketing. Other states don't allow the use of data for direct mail marketing for commercial purposes, for advertising purposes. There are many states that don't have integrated state systems or an avenue by which to collect data that works for attorney direct mail marketing, which needs to go up very quickly from an arrest or a ticket occurrence.

Richard: What states do you guys offer a direct mail in right now?

Mark Primak: Right now, it's probably about 10 states that we have comprehensive data. They are New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, Florida, Texas, Maricopa, Arizona, Illinois, Wisconsin, Connecticut, we're about to open in Virginia.

Richard: When you said "Maricopa", is that the Maricopa County in Arizona?

Mark Primak: Yes. So in certain states like Arizona, they don't have comprehensive systems that speak to each other, so Maricopa County is a very large county and it represents a significant percentage of the population and we're able to acquire DUI, misdemeanors and felonies; for attorney direct mail marketing, just the felonies are really timely enough. At the moment, it's probably like 3,100 of those in a given month, the DUIs and the misdemeanors are not as timely but they are very useful for other types of mailings.

Richard: Did you do New York and New Jersey?

Mark Primak: New York, I don't think I mentioned but in New York, we do have the Five Boroughs of New York to the extent of criminal, DUI and just some serious traffic.

Richard: What practice areas; you mentioned DUI/DWI traffic, criminal, what other ones do you have data for?

Mark Primak: In every state, the core data that we acquire is a criminal traffic DUI type of stuff. In all of 50 states, I pick up notice of default and sheriff's sales which can be used for a bankruptcy type mailings. That's catch-as-catch-can depending on what counties you're looking for, some counties have more data than others. In New Jersey, for example, which is our core state, we have a lot of other things. We have special civil, there is a lis pendens, there is landlord/tenant, there is bankruptcy foreclosure type mailing if that could be done.

In Pennsylvania, we just started doing civil, divorce, child custody, we're getting into a little bit of the personal injury side of things by starting to collect the accident reports and certain municipalities in New Jersey and soon, it'll be the whole state of Ohio that I'll have crash reports for. So we're always looking to expand into areas that can benefit and help a law firm generate and drive business to their practice. Virginia should be live around the fourth quarter of this year, I would say.

Richard: Any other states that are coming in the next 6 months or a year or less?

Mark Primak: We're actually always looking at states coming live and some of these states that we already data are not permissible to use the data for marketing purposes. There are two or three other states that I wouldn't mention at this time but we're always looking to expand and we're not going to promote a state until we're confident that we have comprehensive data that's going to be timely enough for a defendant to respond, for an attorney to retain and send a letter up and make it happen.

Richard: How much does it cost to actually send the mail? What would each element cost?

Mark Primak: There are basically two components of the pricing; there's a name charge and a mailing charge. In most states, you can just pay name charge and mail your own. Most attorneys want us to do turnkey and do the whole thing for them, so name charge and mailing charge, and that'll vary depending on the state. For example, in Pennsylvania, we have a physical army on the ground that goes into each DJ, as they call them, District Justice, which is a court, on a weekly basis collecting all the criminal complaints. This is a very expensive proposition to send live bodies and collecting data as opposed to an integrated state system that we can access a mainframe and pull down data. So basically name charges on the low end could be as low as 25 cents a record, and in some cases, like in New York, as high as $3 a record. So it just depends on the state. Most states are probably around 40 cents a record.

Richard: How much for the fulfillment part, the licking, stamping, printing and all that stuff?

Mark Primak: So fulfillment generally runs at like 79 cents a letter, and that includes the first class postage, the printing of the letters, the personalized envelope, importing a variable data, collation and fulfillment on a daily or weekly basis or as needed, and then there are some upgrades to that 79 cents like if you want to upgrade to bond the paper, add 7 cents, or if you want to print color, it adds 15 cents. There are upgrades and you can go from there depending on volume and what your targeted market is.

Richard: So it sounds like attorneys are looking at a $1.25 to $1.50 out the door per name as a ballpark, is that fair?

Mark Primak: Yes. I would say it's more like a $1 to a $1.29 turnkey, all in, for the most part if you're hitting Pennsylvania or New York, which has a higher name charge.

Richard: Right. There, it could be $4 or something but okay.

Mark Primak: Three dollars or 4.

Richard: You have clients that are doing well in New York and Pennsylvania, so even though the cost is higher, they are still profiting, right?

Mark Primak: Absolutely, yes. I mean the ROI has to be there or we wouldn't pursue a given state. And typically when it's more expensive, it's better because it's variables of entry. Companies just can't acquire the data, you got to send somebody in, they charge exorbitant amounts of money at the county level to acquire the data, and then you have to process the data. But at the end of the day, there are less attorneys doing it and all we care about is our lives. So if you're spending a dollar and you're generating 3, our clients are pretty happy and that return on investment will vary depending on how mature a market is or immature a market is. I'm comfortable 2 to 3 times returns on investment is what I expect. I think attorneys are getting 3 to 5 times in most states.

Richard: Have you had any superstars that reported back to you that they were just blowing ahead of the water?

Mark Primak: I have friends along the years that report back good information but most attorneys hold back. They don't want you to know that they've spent $1,000 and generated $25,000 probably for fear that I'll raise my rates or something, which I wouldn't. I'll be thrilled. That would just be great information to hear but I just look at a minimum ROI that I would expect given what I do know, and that's really, for the most part, 2 to 4 times what you spent over an 8-week period.

Richard: A lot of attorneys are gun-shy about spending money, they feel like are they going to get a return, but that's what I like about direct mail is that you're not stuck for a year. I mean what's your minimum engagement period?

Mark Primak: I don't lock any attorneys into long term contracts because it's a partnership mentality. If you're not making money, I don't need to take your money because contractually, you're obligated to keep mailing, doing something that's not working. Generally speaking, if you're mailing enough letters, this is a numbers game type of marketing, direct mailers. So if you're mailing enough letters, by the end of week 8, you should see the return on investment, whatever that's going to be is what you can expect. We have call tracking numbers we put on letters, we are able to track the campaign who is calling from the letters, and even sending text messages when you miss a call with that person's number. We do a lot of cool things to ensure that you capture that call.

Richard: When you say you provide data, what is the data? Is it just name and the address of the person and the offense or what are the fields?

Mark Primak: It'll vary depending on what the state will put out but for most states, it could be first name, middle, last name, city, state, zip, issue date of the ticket or arrest, any applicable court date, statute number, description of the offense, birth date in many cases, and then some ancillary information, male/female, Hispanic/non-Hispanic and that kind of information. Everything you would need to import into a letter to be very descript, so when that defendant receives it, they understand you're fully aware of what's going on in that defendant's life as it pertains to their arrest or ticket.

Richard: Who writes the letters?

Mark Primak: Well, you do, Richard.

Richard: I've written some pretty good ones but I mean when I am not involved…

Mark Primak: When you're not involved, I have samples that I send out that attorney prospects can use as a guide in writing their own. So the attorney writes the letter. The messaging is important. You could spend 20/30 minutes on the messaging and I help them with the letter, so we go back and forth. I know this business inside out; I created the industry for the most part in the northeast. So I've dealt with thousands of letters and I know how to format them, I know the attorney ethics and guidelines, what needs to be said and not said, and I help them and hold their hand in creating the best possible letter that we can. That is, of course, if you don't.

Richard: I've seen some other companies out there that say they do direct mail. They're pretty restrictive, by the way. Are there any companies, without naming names that are out there that are mailing the places they're not allowed to mail and could an attorney have problems if they're working with one of these companies that does this?

Mark Primak: There is definitely that going on. I'm aware of some states where I get calls asking me for data and looking into the prospect of acquiring the data, learn that it's not permissible for a commercial use or marketing. So we stop at that point. However, there are a lot of companies out there that are acquiring it one way or another and re-selling it and there are attorneys that are buying it and sending letters but we do everything up and up. If it's restricted, there are contracts involved and acquisition of data and all of that stuff, we won't break that or going to a state that an attorney will have any issues with, which is why if any of your attorney clients are interested in doing direct mail and then they engage with us, they can feel secure that we're a company that takes that very seriously.

Richard: It's very important to know and I know that worries a lot of attorneys. They're going to make sure their license is good, there's no bar complaints and all that. So that's good.

Mark Primak: It's really straightforward what you can and cannot do, A lot of attorneys are nervous about it but it's basically X, Y and Z and you're good and the X is maybe putting advertisement on the letter, it's not saying you're going to jail for a speeding ticket and it may be putting a disclaimer at the bottom, it's very straight forward. So we have all the guidelines and rules for each state to make sure that our attorney-client partners are covered.

Richard: When your letters go out, how fast do they go out? The reason I'm asking this is I have my beliefs about it from my experience but I know a lot of attorneys believe "If you don't mail them right away, then they're going to hire someone else".

Mark Primak: Yes. They go out right away. So as soon as an arrest or a ticket hits the state system or picking it up or whatever the acquisition process is, it comes in and gets distributed to whomever is purchasing those types of lists and those courts or in those counties and the letter goes out right away. In some cases, there are re-mail programs where there are court date polls, so a week from today, which is Wednesday, people have an upcoming court date, and this is from New Jersey in particular, and we will look and see who has a court date next Wednesday that has not yet retained an attorney and we pull them again sending that letter out.

It's very interesting because about 65 to 70% of defendants receive that second letter wind up calling at that point because they say, "Man, I have court on Tuesday, I got to deal with this matter", and they pick up the phone and they retain an attorney. So getting back to the question do you get them out right away or does it matter if you get it out 3 days after. There is a case to be made and especially for; criminal, there is a DUI, those defendants tend to wait till the last minute to lawyer up. Is it a mature market where you have a lot of letters on top of each other hitting a mailbox? Do you want to spread yours out? It's all good for the most part, it's always best to get out into the mailbox as quickly as possible. However, that's not the end-all by any means.

Richard: Is the best practice for attorneys to typically mail twice a week apart?

Mark Primak: In certain states, you have that ability to do that based on court date polls and the type of information that we can disseminate like is there an attorney attached to that record already; if there is, we are not going to pull it again clearly. In other states, it's basically a one and done approach. We get the data, we send the letter. However, I've done approaches where I'll just reach back two weeks later and grab that prior week's file from two weeks ago and just re-mail it all at once. So it's like you're hitting them early in the process and then you're hitting them late in the game where they have court date that's approaching, and that's been very effective too. So there are lots of different nuances, lots of different ways to skin this cat and generate our ally and drive business.

Richard: Okay. You mentioned heavier paper, I think we talked once about stamping the outside envelope with various things like "Important (open immediately)". Any other things you've seen done that will boost response?

Mark Primak: I believe that the use of color definitely boosts response. There's been some studies that through the post office picking the variety of companies that are involved in direct mail that that show that printing in color drives the eye. It improves open-ability rate. As it relates to upgrading paper or not, if you're mailing a lot of letters, probably it doesn't pay to upgrade the paper because it absorbs too much cost but if you're mailing criminal or DUI stuff, that generates a high fee and you're only sending out 100 or 300 of these things a week to add 15 cents is not going to break the bank and probably worthwhile to differentiate yourself from the next letter. But if you're mailing 2,000 traffic letters where you can make 300 bucks or 200 bucks for a traffic event doesn't pay at 2,000 times 15 cents, another $350 a week.

Richard: The conversion rates, like you said, you've seen 2 to 1 and higher and sometimes 3 to 5 to 1.

Mark Primak: I look for minimum 2 to 3 time return on investment in most states; some states, it's 4 to 5. It depends on the state, it depends on how long marketing, direct mail marketing has been going on in that state. How many attorneys are sending letters. There are only so many people that are retaining attorneys so clearly if you have 10 attorneys sending letters in a given state, they are going to share in all of that and then when you add 30 more on top of them, you can have attrition. So 2 to 3 times is what my expectation is. Depending on the state, it'll vary but 2 to 3 times at a minimum is my expectation.

Richard: Are there any states or metros that you feel are just really tough or saturated or is there always opportunity?

Mark Primak: I can pick New Jersey which is I think a mature market. I still expect a 2 to 3 time return there. So it doesn't matter how many letters are going, defendants are going to make calls and if they like the attorney, they feel that they know what they're talking about and they offer a competitive fee quote, they're going to get retained. At the end of the day, I do still think or see a 2 to 3 time return in New Jersey. In places like Ohio, that potential for 4 to 6 to 10 time return's there. I am not sure exactly but we just started in Ohio a few months back maybe 6 months ago and I have one particular that said he drive 70% of his overall business from the mailer and he could be happier. So again, I don't get exact feedback but I extrapolate what I can based on conversations. I relate that information to other prospects, other attorneys that are calling to inquire about the service.

Richard: I have some attorneys that tell me, "I wouldn't do direct mail, it attracts crappie clients. I have clients that come in and say, 'Look at these letters I got, I would never hire these people'." I hear other attorneys that are doing direct mail and loving it. So do you feel like it attracts low quality clients or is that just really a myth in the mind of the person?

Mark Primak: You definitely are talking about criminal and DUI, you probably get the lower class of people. You and I are not necessarily committing crimes that we're getting busted for. However, we could certainly and you could certainly pick up a client that's maybe upper middle class that has money and he just wants you to take care of them, that's the best possible client you could have. But most clients are what they are and what small practitioners, with small 1 to 3 attorney law firms, if you're in the game of reaching out and helping defendants, you're going to have a whole array most or many of which are on the lower scale. It's a very relative term. But they have money and at the end of the day, it's all about return on investment, driving business to the firm.

Richard: What about other languages? Do you do any mail in Spanish or other languages?

Mark Primak: Yes. In certain states where we have Spanish surname tables, for example, we have the ability to deliver Spanish surnames to match up with the Spanish letter. So if you are a lawyer that speaks Spanish and you are going after that population, we can tailor a campaign to target a Spanish surname, so it's more directed towards what the attorney is looking for in that regard. That'll expand even more so in the near future when we launch our next adoration of our admin site as we call it, which is our delivery mechanism.

Richard: What have you seen that makes an attorney successful versus not in doing direct mail?

Mark Primak: There are a few things that separate success with failure and direct mail is a numbers game. It's understanding that throwing enough letters out there, because what you're looking for is consistency with regard to the incoming call volume. Once you've achieved that, you're going to close 40% of those, I think 40% is a percentage that I'd come up with after questioning 20 attorneys with the close rates are the average of 40%. So if you're getting 20 calls in a week and you're consistent with that, you know you're going to close your fair share of them.

Richard: How about a call rate? I mean all this can vary but do you have a ballpark call rate; out of every 100 letters, how many calls do you get?

Mark Primak: Yes. We started putting call tracking numbers on the letters. So a call tracking number would be an area code, a local area code to you and any number that we pull from the call tracker and we have a private number on the letter so anybody that gets a letter and calls that number, it'll forward to your office or your cell phone, wherever you direct that's devoted to and that allows us to track those calls. So until recently, we really didn't have great data to kind of go back on. However, we have more and more data and in that regard, I can throw some numbers at you but I'd be pulling stuff out of the air.

At the end of the day, we're still looking at ROI more so than anything else. I think direct mail in general is a 1% response rate across the board and all industries. I think what we do, the synergies are so high between putting your message in the hands of a defendant that needs help at the time they need it, so it's going to be higher than the 1%. At the end of the day, if you're spending $1,000 a week over 8 weeks, 8 grands, you should generate $16 to $24,000 from that 8,000 spent. It's all about ROI to me, it's all I really care about at this point.

Richard: Yes, it makes sense. The reason I asked is that how many letters are enough, that's what I was going to ask you. So if an attorney does 100 letters a week, that's probably a low volume with you I guess, and they should expect 4, maybe 6 or 8 calls but no more than that. So they shouldn't say, "I am not getting a lot of calls, you don't worry about the calls you do get", but I just want to have the feel for the expectation of the numbers.

Mark Primak: On the numbers, you separate it into traffic, criminal, and DUI. When it comes to traffic, you need to send out a lot more letters. For example, I would say 700 letters a week is the right number if you're doing traffic. If you are doing criminal, it might be 150 to 200 letters a week. If you're doing DUI, the same, 150 to 200 letters. That's because of the fees that you can generate with the traffic. So it does vary depending on what you're targeting, what the state is, how much competition, and we could have that conversation should anybody want to reach out to me.

Richard: I hear from attorneys, "We tried direct mail and it worked but then it stopped working". What a lot of attorneys experience that do it is some of them will do it for a while, it works well, maybe other competitors come in and their response may drop. Do you have people that come to you and say, "Help! Our ROI's going away, we're using someone else and their list seems to change and now we're not getting clients.", Do you have any diagnoses and repair in what you do?

Mark Primak: Yes. I say that all the time actually and there are a lot of factors that can cause that. One is you get into a market that's immature and then over time it matures, so there are more attorneys sending letters on top of you so your ROI just naturally kind of diminishes. At that point, you need to employ the best practices for maybe upgrading to color, upgrading the paper, changing the messaging, call tracking. Of course online and offline marketing work hand-in-hand. So if you're working on all cylinders, you are going to maximize the effectiveness of any campaign.

Richard: For attorneys that want to contact you, which I highly recommend they do on the qualifying states, how do they get in touch with you? What's the best way, by email or phone and all that?

Mark Primak: My direct line is 609 254 3750. They can just call me and mention your name, Richard Jacobs, and I'll take special care of them.

Richard: I appreciate it.

Mark Primak: And of course, they can also contact me on the website.

Richard: Okay. Tell me the website and email too so they have three different ways to contact you.

Mark Primak: So they can contact me at [email protected], or they can go on the website www.innovativeattorneymarketing.com and just fill out a short form and I'll reach out to them.

Richard: Anything else that you want to ask that I should have asked you that we missed out on?

Mark Primak: No, I think you covered most of it. There are always additional questions that an attorney may have and I'm happy to answer it, and frankly I probably have most every answer because I've been doing this for so long and I've dealt with so many attorneys in generating ROI for the last 15 years. So feel free to reach out.

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Now, I've covered this subject before but today in this special episode I've shared some real time stories of how poor handling of incoming prospect calls costs thousands. Plus, at the end of the podcast I have a special offer for you. Go ahead listen to the audio or download it below.

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