If one person is asking then more than one person is asking.
In this episode Jim and Tyson discuss how to get attention from the marketplace; how to differentiate yourself and let people know that you are not a typical lawyer.
Focus on the customer; what do they want? What does the client want from us?
It’s not only just about pounding your chest and showing in your website all the awards and diplomas you have. Create content, answer questions.
The more competitive your legal area is, the more important it is to have a greater quantity and quality of content (It doesn’t cost anything!). A good way to create content is to write down the questions people make you and answer them to all the ones having that same question.
You can do videos, podcasts, or even keep it simple and just do a blog. Just keep track of your topics and put a simple system in place.
Hacking’s Hack: An amazing book: “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World” by Gary Vaynerchuk, HarperBusiness; 1 edition (November 26, 2013). It goes through all the ways you can communicate in social media but most importantly it stands for the proposition that you have to give value and then ask for someone to hire you or buy you something.
Tyson’s Tip: A book: “Exploiting Chaos: 150 Ways to Spark Innovation During Times of Change“ by Jeremy Gutsche, Avery (September 1, 2009). It really simplifies how to exploit chaos in any environment, any economy.
The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. Partner up, and maximize your firm.
Resources:
- Join the Guild Membership
- Subscribe to the Maximum Lawyer YouTube Channel
- Follow us on Instagram
- Join the Facebook Group
- Follow the Facebook Page
- Follow us on LinkedIn
Transcript: Get Your Message Out There!
Tyson Mutrux
I guarantee you I can search St. Louis person, your turn right now I can go to the roadsides and it’s going to be them beating on their chest. So if you present something different to those clients, they’re going to hire you just because you got their best interests in mind. I’m not saying these attorneys don’t. But from a marketing perspective, as they see it, you’ve got their best interests in mind, because you’re answering their questions.
Unknown Speaker
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.
Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking,
Tyson Mutrux
and I’m tasting matrix A Jimmy, I’m pretty excited about this topic today. How you doing?
Jim Hacking
Yeah, you know, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. And this reminded me that we sort of skipped over some issues that you and I both consider to be very important. And I think first and foremost, that is, how do we get attention from the marketplace? How do we differentiate ourselves? How do we separate ourselves and let people know that we are not your typical lawyers and sort of how to frame ourselves and how to, you know, get our message out there? Yeah. And
Tyson Mutrux
I think it’s really easy to get lost in all that, because it’s marketing one on one really something I learned whenever I was at Mizzou, where you, you have to focus on the customer, right? From their perspective, you need to focus on them, what do they want? And I think we get so caught up in pounding our chest and throwing all these awards on our website and tell people how great we are, instead of taking a step back and saying, What does the client want from us? What are they looking for? And the attorneys that focus on that are the ones that really do stand out? Because only if you open the Yellow Pages, if you go to websites, if you go to wherever you go for lawyer advertising, billboards, it’s all about we’re the willingness we do this, we got all these awards were the best trial or whatever it is. And people don’t give a damn about that. They really don’t we oh, you’ve got 150 years of legal experience combined. Really? What the hell does that even mean? So we need to step back and take a look. Okay, what does the client want from us.
Jim Hacking
So I’ve gotten into a little habit of when I’m done with a consult, and someone looks like they’re going to be hiring us. That’s when I asked them how they found us, I don’t ask them right when they walk in the door. Because a lot of times, they just sort of jump to it, I want them to be comfortable with me and sort of to build some trust with them so that they’re willing to take the 30 seconds that it takes to walk through how they found me. And it’s been really interesting, I would say that about half the people type in some equivalent of best immigration lawyer in St. Louis, or top immigration lawyer or, and a lot of times that leads them to Avo, or to other sort of aggregator sites, as opposed to, you know, the front page of Google is really getting crowded out by these companies like avo and lawyer.com. That sort of, you know, are crowding out individual websites. But so that’s about 50% of the people, the other 50% of the people, especially the online, people that find me, do it through longtail search through, you know, just one off articles that I’ve written or blog posts or videos that we’ve done, and they’re really just looking for the answer to the question that they have. And so I think a lot of people just do definitely search for best, whatever type of lawyer it is, but I think a good good chunk of them. And based on my research for the last couple of months, it’s been 5050 really asked questions like, you know, a specific immigration question like something very granular, very remote that we happen to have written an article on
Tyson Mutrux
granular must be the word of the week, because I keep hearing people see us that and podcasts or maybe you and I are just listening to the same podcast, me what the issue is, you’re totally right. And something that you’re mentioning that we’ve talked about before is tracking, you’re doing something of tracking. And I think if I were to look at mine, I’d say mine probably would say my number one sources referral base from other attorneys. The next would be probably actually is mines long, I probably get more long tail than I get from just a straight search through Google. And I think the reason for that is my videos, my short videos, they’re all question based, I pick one topic, and then I go from there. And then we transcribe it. And we do the same thing you do. We transcribe the video, and then people find us that way. And they’re usually very narrow. And we usually get the same calls about many of the same topics. So it’s not like I mean, I don’t I don’t know how many videos we have now off the go look, but it’s not like we get them from every single video we shoot. You know, I’ve never gotten called from some of the videos I’ve shot but we get calls from the same ones that people watch over and over again. So that’s you did mention something though. Just tracking that’s how you’re able to know that is by tracking how that comes in. And what we do is and this is my advice to you, as the call comes in, get it right then train more, one, two. You asked the question early on as a part of the conversation, because the way we do it, you know, we just want to know some a thank you note to whoever referred you if that’s what it is. So can you tell us how you found us? And then I don’t usually ask Angie to ask about the keyword search, I usually try to get that from in the meeting. It’s very difficult. I don’t know if you found a trick on getting that information from them. Because last summer, they forget what they searched.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, they do they do. I tinker with the idea of having us ask that on the initial call. But frankly, I’m trying to get Marwan to get so much information from people when they call in the first time that that would just be another barrier, another hurdle for him to get over. And I feel more comfortable asking that myself. The other thing I was gonna say, based off, what you said is that, I think that I would put forth this theory that the more competitive your legal area is, like for you personal injury or criminal law, that the more competitive it is, the more important it is to have a greater quantity and quality of content that, you know, you’re probably not gonna be able to compete on the main SEO, you know, vanity searches, like, you know, best personal injury lawyer in St. Louis. And you know, there’s guys out there that are paying out the wazoo to get those clicks. And I think that where we play is a little bit more in the guerilla aspect of just answering people’s questions and creating content that people are going to want to know the answers to.
Tyson Mutrux
It’s exactly right. And there are personal injury attorneys paying 10s of 1000s of dollars a month to get your clients. And I’m not convinced that the return on investment is worth you spending that much. But the point is, is that it’s hard to compete in that arena. So you have to do things that are a little different. And I guarantee you, I can search St. Louis person’s return right? Now I can go to the websites, and it’s going to be them beating on their chest. So if you present something different to those clients, they’re going to hire you just because you’ve got their best interests in mind. I’m not saying these attorneys don’t. But from a marketing perspective, as they see it, you’ve got their best interests in mind, because you’re answering their questions. And part is the lead magnets, most of these websites don’t have lead magnets, where you’ve got the one of you got that book you wrote, I can’t read the name of the book denied, denied, right. So you get denied, which is a great title. And it gives it’s a free book that they can look through, and it gives them gives them information, I’ve got a couple that’s a variation of the same book, it’s the seventh largest criminal lawyers tell, just get your business. And then the seventh, then based on your advice, I changed it to the seven things you need to know before hire a criminal defense attorney, that’s just one of them. But those are both lead magnets that clients read. And I actually even send them to people that I turn away, if people call me and they say they can’t afford me for whatever reason. Or let’s say that they say, Well, I think I’m gonna hire such and such like, well, here, I’ll send you my free book, just so you can take a look at it and give you some questions to ask the attorney as you’re going through the process. And they really like it. And it also dumps them into a follow up campaign through Infusionsoft where they actually get more correspondence from me, postcards, birthday cards, things like that. So there’s, I’m getting I’m getting into multiple topics here. But the point is, we’re getting their information, because we’re giving them a lead magnet, and we’re giving them something of value that they can take away from it. And you’re you’re answering questions for them.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, and I think your mindset has to be right to I mean, I think it’s important to capture, contact information and those kinds of things. But I think you’ve got to give away a lot of free content in order to be able to even start the conversation that you don’t look at your content as having to do all the heavy lifting, you don’t have to get someone to decide to hire you based on one outstanding piece of content. It’s more just to demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about to help people answer their questions. And then there’s some people that are going to decide to do work with you, there’s some people that are going to decide not to do work with you. And you just have to be have the frame of mind to just give that stuff away and let the chips fall where they may, you know, you want to have systems in place to set up what happens when they contact you. But you’ve got to be willing to not try to expect your marketing to do too much.
Tyson Mutrux
Absolutely. And I think it’s got to be genuine, don’t just put on a front about everything, you’ve definitely got to be genuine in your marketing and your you’ve got to give away information and not really expect a whole lot wait for them to come to you.
Jim Hacking
So you and I are going to be speaking separately at a CLE with Gary Burger in December, probably by the time this podcast comes out, it’ll be right around the time that we’re speaking. And I’ve really been thinking about, you know, my topic, which is, you know, if I can do it, you can do it. And these are the kinds of things that we did. And so I thought that we could talk about those things on the podcast. And it doesn’t cost anything to write content. If you’re a new lawyer or just out on your own, you’ve got time to write content. And the best way to write content, I believe is to write down the questions that you get from people, people that come to see you or people that email you write down those questions. And instead of just answering for that one person, answer it for the world use it in a way that, you know, if you’re researching a topic that’s related to your field, and you write a little memo on it, you know, obviously you’re going to make it anonymous but put it out On the web, put that content because if one person’s asking more than one person’s asking, and so, you know, we adopted that strategy about three years ago, and we created a website that now has about 900 pieces of content, and it’s all been one day at a time, one post at a time, we didn’t pay anybody we didn’t, you know, sit down and write 30 blog posts in one day, this is just a matter of doing little by little each day. Yeah. And
Tyson Mutrux
you know, it’s funny. So we have gone away from our content calendar, which we had before. And there’s a reason for that, as a part of my 12 week plan, I’ve got so many videos I want to shoot next 12 weeks. And what we’ve done is we’ve created a spreadsheet, and there’s something you all may want to do, we use a Google Sheet, where, for example, ag and Kelsey, this week are going to add 10 ideas or 10 questions for each this week. That’s 20 additional questions. And so they put on the spreadsheet and then I go through and I answer those in a video and I do what’s day by day, like you’re saying you don’t do it in bulk, you don’t do it in a bunch at a time. Because I think if you think of it that way, it’s just too daunting until you’ll just never do it. So do a couple of videos a day and just knock it out. And if you have a system in place like that, whether it’s just you writing questions, as they come in to the firm, basically an FAQ page from your website, if you’ve got a bunch of questions on there, you can go through and answer those in a video, you can expand upon those in larger blog posts. There’s a bunch of content out there. And you’re right, just just little piece by piece in it. But my point is, though, if you can put them in a spreadsheet somewhere to track them, because something we were we had lost track of is, what videos have we already done, so we’re not duplicating those. So that’s why we did the spreadsheet, so we’re not duplicating those videos anymore. And so what we have is there, it’s the columns are the base of the video number, the topic, the date that it was, we listed the topic, and then whether or not it has been published through a video and when so we can track all that. And so that’s just a simple way, it’s a different way of creating a content calendar, cuz you’re not really scheduling it out. But what you are doing is you’re tracking what you’ve done and what you still need to do.
Jim Hacking
Sadly, I didn’t start tracking my videos until we had, we just did it in the last month, I had to have a VA go through YouTube and my website and link them all up and write you know, the description and everything. So that took a little bit of doing and so I
Tyson Mutrux
don’t think there’s anything wrong with the way you did it. Because here’s why you started shooting videos and you didn’t care, you start doing it. So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It’s, I think you were practicing what you preach is just do it and get them out there instead of and so what people do is they start, they try to set up all these other things. We in order to do that, and it prevents them from getting going. I’m okay with you doing that cuz you used your started shooting videos and get them on the internet. That was great. Yeah, I’m
Jim Hacking
just saying that if I were gonna give advice to someone who’s starting out, I would make sure to do that spreadsheet, like you said,
Tyson Mutrux
it’s super easy. I mean, it’s five or six columns. I mean, it’s it’s super easy to get things going
Jim Hacking
today, son, have you ever hired an attorney? I have. And if you’re gonna hire an attorney today, let’s say that you had an uncle that left you a bunch of money, and you were going to be in a fight with your cousin’s over the money that your uncle left you. I mean, what would you do to find an attorney right now? How would you go about finding, let’s say, an attorney, back in your hometown? What would you do?
Tyson Mutrux
I would call someone I knew there and ask who they recommended for that practice area?
Jim Hacking
Okay, but if you’re going to do search on the web, what whichever? Okay,
Tyson Mutrux
search on the web. So I guess I need a probate attorney. Is that is that the scenario gave me? Yeah, okay. I would go to Google probably. And I would search for probate lawyer in there. And I would search and I would look at the reviews first. And then I would guess I would go and see what information they had on their website, I would look for checklists, that’s something I would look for, I would look for, okay, here’s what I need to do to get ahead of the game. This is very hard, because I’m, I’m looking for a doctor right now. And so I’ve got a similar situation where you go to these websites, and they all look the same. And it’s it really frustrating because you don’t know who’s the good doctor who’s the bad doctor. So this is very similar to finding an attorney. So I would probably look for someone that can give me some sort of free information on whatever topic it is. And then if I liked the information that I read, I would probably call that attorney for how to do it. I will say this, it’s been so difficult to confer a doctor. Now I’ve asked around, some people know, it’s a very specific type of doctor, I guess I’ll go and say, I’m gonna get a vasectomy. So try to find a doctor. And so it has been extremely hard because I don’t know. I mean, I know people that are okay. I had a doctor but he’s like 20 years ago or at a doctor, he’s out of town. And so it’s very difficult finding someone. It’s hard to differentiate the people that I found online.
Jim Hacking
You got to call Dr. Baum. gau. He’s your man. He does like 20 a week. I think he takes special Glee in it. I don’t know what’s going on. He’s your man. Dr. GM Jia. You know,
Tyson Mutrux
I didn’t ask you but I haven’t but but it what it does, it sheds light on On the problem of going on the internet and finding someone, and that’s why you have to look at it from the clients perspective, you have to give them something when they come to your website that sets you apart from the rest. And if I had gone to a website where it says, the five things you need to know, before you get a vasectomy, I would probably clicked on that they’d have my information, I probably would have already called them. But there’s nothing that I’ve found on the internet and St. Louis like that. So
Jim Hacking
there are a lot of bad lawyer websites. And there a lot of lawyers who don’t do marketing very well. And we sort of mock the ones that use the at SBC global dotnet. website. But I can say this without equivocation, doctors, websites are even worse. They’re all these health grades and med MD, and all these are WebMD. And all these terrible websites, doctors have horrible websites. So you’re right. I mean, I think if a doctor had a basic checklist on the 10 questions men have after but what happens after they have their vasectomy? I mean, I think I think all kinds of people will log on to that.
Tyson Mutrux
Oh, for sure. I mean, I and you’re right about doctors that there’s money aggregators. So what you’ll find is, if you search for a doctor, you’ll find a bunch of aggregators, a much like fine law, to find an attorney only. They’re all terrible websites. They’re really bad they do. The doctors have the worst of the chiropractors, absolute worst websites,
Jim Hacking
and the information is usually bad on those websites. And it’s just, it’s just really ineffective. And so, but I think you’re right, I think the other thing that you said is that all the websites look alike. So, you know, Dan Kennedy would say that if you want to figure out the right thing to do see what everybody else is doing and do the opposite. And I think that really comes true with the marketing that we’re talking about.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah. And so it’s I’m gonna kind of circle back to what I was talking about earlier, it’s hard to get lost in all this, because everyone that calls you, when you start to get a little bit of traction on Google, what I mean by a little bit of traction, starting out, you’re in like page three through 10, you’re gonna start getting a bunch of phone calls, hey, we’ll get you on the first page, Google will get you on the first page of Google. And they do the same tricks, they do the exact same advertising as everyone else. And it’s a waste of your money, because you’re doing they’re they’re doing the things that we’re saying you look like everyone else. And it’s very easy to do that, because everyone’s doing and you’re like, oh, I need to do this, because everyone else is doing it. And you’ve got to find a way to really make yourself stand out from the crowd,
Jim Hacking
and you really can’t do it yourself. You can spend money to even the playing field, but you really can’t do it yourself. I mean, our videos have tons of views or blog posts, and our websites have tons of visitors. And I think in our next show, we should talk about what to do after we get the call and like sort of the follow up. But I think for right now, I think what we settled on is that a lot of the marketing is the same. A lot of the messaging is the same, you know, lawyer standing in front of law books, scales of justice, American flag, years of combined expertise, lots of different practice areas, I mean, all these websites sort of look alike. And if you took out the person’s picture and name and switched out, you know that the websites in and of themselves would be identical. Hey, changing topics just a little bit, I did want to mention that we got some nice messages from listeners to the show. And so we’re really excited about that we got a nice long email from a fellow that Gil you introduced to the podcast, and he really liked it. And then we got contacted from an attorney up in Canada who’s been listening to the show. So that’s been really exciting.
Tyson Mutrux
And we actually also did get contacted by an attorney that’s going to be moving to another state, I’m not going to mention his name. It’s an idea for a podcast I want to do in the future. He is moving. He’s uprooting his current practice. He’s moving it to a completely different state and a smaller city. And he was calling to just basically get feedback on what we thought he should maybe do. And I would like to, at some point, do a podcast kind of like almost like a case study about that move, or maybe some things we can do to help him out in that process. Because it is kind of interesting. He’s moving from a city about the size of St. Louis, to a city, probably a it’s a fraction of that. And I think the total size was right around 100,000. And I can’t remember the exact number. So it was it was significantly smaller. And how do you take an existing practice? From a state where he’s licensed to a state? He’s not currently licensed, where he’ll get reciprocity? And how do you restart your firm? So I thought it was a it’s an extremely interesting topic and extremely difficult task I think he’s gonna have ahead of him. But at some point, I’d like to, maybe you and I, we can kind of roundtable that on the podcast and see what information we can give him what input we can give him
Jim Hacking
anything we need for a great show. All right, let’s move on to our Tyson’s tip and hackings hack. And my hack feeds right off of the topic that we had today. And that is going back to one of our heroes Gary Vaynerchuk in one of his older books, which is Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook and Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook is an amazing book. It goes through all the ways that you can communicate on social media, but most of them importantly, it stands for the proposition that Gary Vaynerchuk is really big on. And that is that you’ve got to give value, you’ve got to give value, you’ve got to give value. And then you can ask, you can ask for someone to hire you or to buy something from you. And that really, you’ve got to establish your your credibility by giving away real things of value before you ever asked for the sale. And that too many people rushed to make the sale way too soon. And long before they’ve given anything of true value. They think they’ve given value, but really, it’s just them talking about themselves and how great they are, as opposed to helping people understand the contours of their problem. And so I love this book so much, that after this episode airs, if anybody leaves us a Apple iTunes review, and sends us an email, with that review in it, we’ll do a drawing of everybody who leaves a review for us and I will send a copy of that book to whomever lets us know that they gave us a good review or any kind of review on the podcast.
Tyson Mutrux
Nice. Nice. You didn’t tell me that. Can I do it too? Am I eligible? Hey, you haven’t read it. That easy. actually gave me a book. You gave me a copy of it. So I’m just teasing.
Jim Hacking
I think the only person who’s given us a review so far as your wife.
Tyson Mutrux
That’s not true. We got oh, here are five people right away as soon as the podcast launched stuff. All right. Okay. I don’t know how many we’ve gotten sense that I need to check it but I know we hit the fire run away. But so this one is one. It’s an oldie. It’s a book that I’ve had for years. And it’s by I think it’s Jeremy gushy. I don’t know how to say his last name. It’s GT s ch e at Trent hunter.com. And I was thinking about you with this book. It’s called exploiting chaos. With the recent election, your practice, I think, is going to see a huge boon, it’s going to be pretty amazing for you. And any immigration attorneys probably are gonna see something similar. It’s called exploiting chaos. Now, don’t make fun of me, because there’s a lot of pictures in this book. But what what they do is, he really says, yeah, he really simplifies, how to exploit chaos in any environment, any economy, whatever it is, you can exploit it. And I think it’s, it’s a book, I’ll let you borrow. I don’t even know where I got this book, to be completely honest with you. But as soon as the results came out, and I thought started thinking about your practice this, this book came to mind, so I’ll let you borrow. I’ll bring it to lunch today. That’d be
Jim Hacking
great. Thanks, buddy. And if you guys want to reach out to us and have questions about the show, you can find us on Twitter or at the maximum lawyer Facebook page. We’re getting that thing up and running. So be sure to reach out we’d be happy to talk to you either on air or off air.
Tyson Mutrux
Absolutely. Thanks, guys, and we’ll talk to you next week.
