Bringing Your Marketing In House

After outsourcing her SEO and digital marketing for seven years, Billie Tarascio, founder of My Modern Law, decided — never again, it wasn’t working for her law firm and her numbers proved it.

It’s really hard to know if what you’re paying for digital marketing is actually bringing you business. You’ll get impressions, you’ll get page rank, you’ll get subscribers. You can look at it to see how your social media is doing. You might see which keywords you’re ranking for, but being able to say that your marketing is working for you is two different things.

As in Billie’s case — while her social following number was climbing — her lead numbers were going down. That’s when she decided to bring her marketing in house and really focus on 5 key areas to move that lead number.

Listen in!

Episode Highlights:

01:39 Look at your leads

04:25 The 5 new marketing areas that Billie is focusing on

TikTok – cons you need to post 4-6 videos a day

Pro Bono Day – con getting lawyers to show up

Free Facebook Group – con harder to grow, pay to manage

Meetups – con

Online events –

Podcast – build referral network

11:58 Branding photo – think of your visuals is a key strategy

14:18 What are your KPI’s?!

Watch the full video on YouTube here.

Connect with Billie:

• • Website
  • Podcast
  • TikTok
  • Instagram
  • Facebook
  • Youtube

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Transcript:

Becca Eberhart
In today’s episode, we’re sharing a presentation from Max law con 2020. To keep listening to hear Billy tercio as we share her talk, bringing your marketing in house, you can also head to the maximum lawyer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Now to the episode.

Speaker 2
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum liar podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson nutrix. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Billie Tarascio
First, before I get started, don’t go fire your SEO company. I love SEO companies. A lot of this was my fault, okay. But after outsourcing our SEO and digital marketing for about seven years, we decided never again, it wasn’t working for us, we wanted to bring it in house. And again, remember, a lot of this is because I am a problem client. One of the hardest things about digital marketing is figuring out whether or not it’s working. It’s just really hard to know if what you’re paying for is actually bringing you business. So many times you’ll get impressions, you’ll get PageRank, you’ll get maybe subscribers, you can look at to see how your social media is doing, you might see which keywords you’re ranking for. But being able to say, and that’s working is two different things. For me, there was a disconnect between the reports I was getting, and whether or not it was working. So in Quantique, one T one, January 2021, is when we decided no more. And here’s how I decided I looked at my leads, and I hadn’t been looking at my leads I had been spending many of you know, I had been spending a lot of time looking at my intake numbers, my conversion numbers, and my leads didn’t matter, because I was optimizing my conversion numbers. And that worked really well. So even though my leads numbers were doing this, my profit numbers were doing this. So it did not matter. So wherever you’re at in your journey, you may not be exactly where I’m at, you may not be ready to focus on getting more leads if you have not already optimized your intake and conversions. But this is what I found when I got to the end of 2020. And I was like what? How is it that we’ve grown 30% This year, and our leaves are down like that’s, I think that’s it, I think that’s what I need to do. I think I know my digital marketing is not working. That’s what it was. For me. That was my aha moment for I’m not outsourcing this anymore. But this is what happened to my consultations, which is why I couldn’t tell my consultations looked good. And this is what happened to my number of clients. Oh, they cut off. So you can’t Oh, no, there, they didn’t. So it was 170, then 200, then 231, then 220. And I wasn’t even that concerned about these things because the revenue in the portal was going up. But this is when I decided okay, I’m done. I’m done with digital marketing. I’m done with paying for leads. I’m done with SEO, I’m done with AdWords, I’ve tried it off and on for seven years, it’s never really been my jam, I’ve done paying for leads, I want to invest money in a brand. And in products that create value for my potential clients, and in referrals and in relationships. Because I know that when I spend $5,000 on that stuff this month, it’s going to have value in a year versus me spending $5,000 This month on SEO or leads or AdWords, which won’t provide me value in a year. So I decided it was time for us to focus on brand, community and content, creating value. So today’s talk in 20 minutes, here’s what we’re going to go over hold me to it. We’re going to talk about five new marketing initiatives that we’ve done that we launched since 21. We’re going to talk about branding, and we’re going to talk about our marketing team. And then we’re going to talk about our KPIs that we use for our marketing team. How are we holding ourselves accountable? And what have those results been? First tick tock, oh my gosh, I wish I could spend 20 minutes talking to you about tick tock tick tock is different. You guys tick tock is different. Here’s why. Tick tock puts you in front of your potential clients, not your family and friends. Not the people you already know. That is why tick tock is different. We are getting clients every single month from tick tock tick tock is the most engaged social media platform I’ve ever seen. The other thing that happened I don’t know if you guys know but in 2020 Tic tock went from the seventh most popular website in terms of minutes to number one, bypassing Google. Okay, so tick tock is having a moment that was Facebook in 2003 So if you’re not on Tik Tok truly consider it and I’m gonna go all in I haven’t done paid advertising yet with tick tock and I’m going to you know why tiktoks algorithm is so brilliant. They will put my ads in front of Arizona The divorce clients, I know. So and those numbers are old those numbers are from when I made the presentation. So we have even more followers. And it’s just, it’s amazing. So if you do one thing, consider tick tock cons, you have to post a lot, a lot. Frequency matters. You can’t do a great ad and then expect it to do well, forever. You have to keep feeding tick tock new content. So on my best days are when I really want to grow fast, I have to be posting four to six times a day. And whenever I go on vacation or do something like this, it’s not working. Now I know your mouth is open for 1015 seconds. So I just did one because I hadn’t done one. And I did one for 15 seconds that said, you know mediation tip, create a memo because then you’ll have an outline like you know, that’s it. Okay. So results in engagement is insane. Pro bono day, pro bono days like the opposite, right? If, if tick tock is online, pro bono day is hyperlocal. But I post on tick tock about our pro bono day and we get people from tick tock coming to our pro bowler day, pro bono day is once every two months. And it’s an event we have and it’s free consultation day. So what do we get out of pro bono day? We get clients every single time we get reviews, because that’s the real exchange we asked for. After we’re done meeting with you and giving you free advice or looking at your documents or whatever on your way out. And it’s fun. We’ve got an event, we’ve got something for the kids to be entertained. Like it’s a good time, the energies vibe in the marketing team decorates like it’s a good time. And we always walk away with clients goodwill, and reviews. So in April was the last one we did we had 33 people attend, we had five immediate hires, and we got 22 reviews, the negatives, I’ll tell you right now we’re getting lawyers to show up. That’s the con, it takes lawyers time. But I’ve decided that this is something that’s worth it. And that is mandatory in my office because it creates goodwill, it creates an event we can talk about on all of our social, that is not just me throwing garbage information at people or hey, look at me, look at me, this is an event this is a service. So I get to feel really good about offering it. Facebook group, we have a Facebook group, and Tiktok and pro bono day feed this Facebook group. So we’re creating a community. And the Facebook group is rather new. And it’s got right now how many members there 550. It’s growing, it’s growing a lot. And these are local people who are on there talking about their divorce. We’re trying to provide resources to grow the group, and then invite them to different events, get them engaged, get them to be our promoters. What are the pros, cons and results, it’s been harder to grow than tick tock. It’s not like Facebook puts the group in front of everybody who’s interested in my topic like tick tock does. So the algorithm on tick tock makes things easier than the algorithm on Facebook, which really makes you work. So that way I say is the con also takes time. It takes a lot of time in the Facebook group. And it’s not time that I spend. So that’s another con. And I don’t know that the results are quite as hot as Tiktok or pro bono day in terms of actual clients. So I think it’s a longer term investment. It’s not a quick thing, like the other two things I just talked about. The first two things are quick, hot ways to get clients. We also started a meetup. And the thing is we’re trying to make these things grow and be connected. But this was our very first meetup that we ever did. And it was at the bar downstairs from our office. And oh, there was a white circle around this lady on the outside. Oh, here I have a thing. You see her. She found me on Tik Tok came to pro bono day, did not hire me. But took the strategy went on and got the results she wanted. left a review for us came on my podcast as a guest, and is the biggest fan of modern law. She literally thinks that she won her case and got her outcome because of a half an hour with me a pro bono day. She’s great. She hangs out in the Facebook group talking about how great we are like it’s amazing. So she came these three people, our clients, the street circle people, our clients, and they left connected to each other and more connected to modern law, which is pretty cool. Because people want FaceTime with their lawyer. They like their lawyer, they like our law office a lot. But we’re expensive. So engaging with us is hard and expensive. And if they get to come to a meet up, it gets to be cash and fun. So really great for relationship building for getting those deep promoters. Let’s see, pros cons results. What did I say last online event had 130 registrants Oh, we’ve we’re also doing some online events that are just educational. So reaching out to lawyers and offering free sale lead by offering courses to lawyers and offering courses online to people who just want to know how to represent themselves because a lot of people represent themselves or a lot of people represent themselves for a little while and then stop and then come hire us. So anytime we can offer value. We’re trying to do that. The last of the five is a podcast. We started this podcast, September 2020. And the goal here was to build referral connections. I wanted a reason to To get to know people and connect with people, and I really didn’t want to have start going out for coffees, which I did a lot when I was brand new lawyer like pounding pavement to make network connections, and that’s incredibly effective. But now I’m 41. And I have a little less energy and enthusiasm to do that. So but if you reach out to someone, and you ask them, will you be a guest on my show? They’re gonna say yes. And now you are investing in them. You are creating content for your website and for social media, and you’re creating the ability to have a referral connection. So that was the main point of the podcast, I just checked, we’ve now had over 16,000 downloads, we get about 1000 downloads a month, our clients listen to it, our potential clients listen to it. It’s a way to build brand and expertise. It’s not that simple. It’s not that hard. So the marketing team definitely helps with finding people to be interviewed. I don’t do a lot of prep in the morning, I get a, you know, a blurb from my marketing team about the person that I’m interviewing. And then we just have a chat. I put it on YouTube. It gets edited, it gets uploaded to the podcast, it then becomes social media content and all those things. So I think they’re all worth considering. The first two are really the ones that I would highly recommend you think about

Becca Eberhart
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Billie Tarascio
All right, let’s talk about branding. We’re gonna move to branding. This was a picture that was taken in at Christmas time, this last year at my house. And this is our team at that time might be missing a couple of people but like what is this picture, say to anyone? Oh, that’s nice of you. She says it’s awesome. I said, it kind of looks like we’re big and hodgepodge. And I was not that impressed. But in March 2022, we did a rebrand. And this is the brand. That’s what I want to convey not that. I mean, you don’t I’m saying, Please tell me you’re with me. It’s just too big. It’s too many people for group shot. This is like, oh my gosh, those are our lawyers. They happen to be all women. I mean, sort of fortuitously, the last male attorney got another job right before we took the picture. And I’m digging it like I’ve never been an all woman firm. And I’m digging it. It’s a cool vibe. And I think that it is the vibe that it is the authentic vibe. So at least talked about being your authentic self, and she’s warm and fuzzy and cuddly. And she does low conflict divorces that protect the children. And I’m not, I’m not, I’m Italian. And this is my vibe. And this is the authentic self that I am. And the law firm is a litigation firm. And we’re sort of badass like, that’s the truth. So I put this quote on there because it came in from one of our clients during an NPS collection feedback. And this person said, I love how it’s Italian family mafia style, because I’m Italian, and my grandma’s family’s from Italy. And I just feel confident when I have modern law on my side. And that’s the branding I want. So taking a minute to think about your visuals in this very visual society is probably a good idea and to look at your headshots and your photos and say is my brand onpoint is it now connecting with my target audience. This is our marketing team. These are the full time people on our marketing team sort of we have another intake person. And then we have other contractors that help. But it’s a digital marketing person, its events and referral coordinator, and then a client advocate. So I told you last year that we call our intake team now client advocates, and their job has to do with a few things basically start to finish on that client journey. Sarah is here. She’s our marketing director now. Hey, and that’s kind of what it takes to pull off all of these different initiatives. What are our KPIs? We are looking at the number of leads we’re getting each month. Honestly, marketing is about creating leads, we define leads as people with a problem in Arizona, that is family law. So as long as they’re in our jurisdiction, and they have our area of law, their leads, and we so we’re looking at that we’re looking at how many people attended consultations paid consultations, because the marketing team and the client advocates can’t really be responsible for the conversion rates of the lawyers, or the capacity of the lawyers to take on new clients. That’s why we pick that KPI and the number of reviews that we get. It’s really the job of the marketing team to get reviews in all these different in our five different locations, which you guys will remember probably from last year, so what have the results been? So this is just 2021 and 2022. The red is liens, the light blue is the scheduled concentrations. So that has gone up a lot, even more so than just the lead. So our intake team you can see from this is just rocking, the attended is the blue, and that was about the same. And then the yellow on the top is reviews. So we’ve really gotten quite a few more reviews. And the other thing that we do is we have a group bonus system. So when our marketing team hits these KPIs as a group, everybody in that group bonuses, so we’re all working towards getting the same things. And the team that bonuses is not just these people, it’s also well, it’s probably a total of five or six different people in the firm who all do just different things that touch marketing. So that’s what I did it in, like 15 minutes. Do you guys have any questions? Yeah. Yes, I would love to. So pro bono day is set up. We do have people register in advance, but we don’t take appointments, because people don’t show up. You can register in advance, you show up, you then wait until the next lawyer is available to meet with you. There’s usually six lawyers in all in different rooms. And it’s just such a good time. Like there’s a lot of people there. People are chatting with each other. There’s a lot of people from our team there. They’ve got, you know, they’re just it’s really festive, and it’s really fun. And then they come in and they have about a half an hour with somebody and then they leave and on their way out. They are asked to leave a review. And they do and that’s how we do it. Yes.

Speaker 4
Are you mostly or exclusively doing like legal videos? Are

Unknown Speaker
you also doing kind of like the trending?

Billie Tarascio
I so glad you asked that. Okay, so if I didn’t say this already, the one of the awesomest things about tick tock is because the engagement is so high, you get to test and you get feedback immediately. So when I started tick tock, I took my most popular YouTube video, cut it down and put it on tick tock. And like within 24 hours, there were more comments and more likes than I’ve ever gotten on YouTube. So you can test it and I have trends don’t work for me. I’ve tried some of them. They don’t work. That is not what my audience likes. My audience wants content and you know what they really want. They want high conflict, divorce custody, case content, and my audience on Tik Tok is more female than in any other area. So it every other areas closer to equal and on tick tock. It’s basically women who are in custody battles with narcissists, but those are great cases. So we’re not sad, and we keep making content that they like, yes.

Speaker 5
Like what you evaluated when you implemented it, maybe a brief roadmap on how you

Billie Tarascio
process them. Okay, so that might be difficult. I have been talking about KPIs on stages like this since 2015. What are the main KPIs for law firms in general? So in each area, how did we start? We started with revenue, certainly intake, what’s our conversion rate look like? How many leads are we getting? Are we converting the right number? We measure it from whatever system is. So first, you identify the KPI you want, you know, what is your biggest problem in your firm? And how will you measure whether or not you’ll move that forward? Let’s talk more because this is new. Yeah. Any other Yes?

Unknown Speaker
Facebook page? Yes.

Billie Tarascio
Great question. Yes, they’re very different. So the page is like a business card. Really, you know, you post updates. Nobody cares anymore. Nobody cares. I’m going to stop doing what nobody cares about. That’s another thing that I’ve committed to doing. It’s like, why are we feeding machines that don’t that aren’t feeding us back? So the group is totally different groups are now I think, where people are spending time on Facebook, and maybe your partisan groups like there’s a go Gilbert group, and there’s a buy and sell group. And there’s groups where people hang out and they’re they can be private or public and they talk to one another and their communities. And that’s not like our pages at all. So our facebook group page is set up as a private page. How did we attract people we asked our law firm to invite people we posted about it on Tik Tok and in our newsletter, Sarah is our community events person and she just promotes it. But there is an expert here that we’re hoping to talk to that. What’s her name? Liz, Liz, we’re going to talk to Liz so you should probably talk to Liz to any other questions. Yeah. Advice. Oh, that’s a really hard question. Everybody’s giving legal advice on the Facebook group. Everybody’s giving legal advice everywhere. All of the ladies on Tik Tok, that are telling people what the law says and what it means and like that’s the real world we live in. So So, what’s the line between advice and information? What do I do? I try to say, hey, you should consider or have you thought about or we might talk about blah, blah, blah. So I don’t know, an ethics attorney would probably say across the line, but this is the world we live in, like, so I’m interacting with people. I’m answering their questions. I’m giving them the content they want, and that is why they’re hiring us and the content that they want include specific information, and it’s not specific to their case, but it’s specific to their scenario. So people will ask you questions on Tik Tok, like, my baby daddy lives out of state and I have a one year old is a judge going to make my one year old fly to go see the baby daddy. So that’s a very, like a good example of the question that I’ll get on Tiktok and I’ll answer it hey, here’s what I see judges do in Maricopa County, and I’m specific also about Maricopa County. So I’m talking about, you know, some family law attorneys talking about things very, very broad. I’m answering specific questions about what I see happening in Maricopa County with judges in Maricopa County. Thank you all very much.

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