In this episode, Jim and Tyson will talk about the importance of using plain language; everyday words and keeping it simple so your target understands you better. They will go over a list of 8 tips to help you do it and not sounding like a lawyer.
The List:
1. Not using tactical language.
2. Take notes in client meetings of things that you hear from them.
3. Put yourself in your client’s shoes and think about how they view things.
4. Read over the chat and emails that you get.
5. Show more of your personal life so you can relate better with your clients.
6. If you are struggling with content have somebody in your office read it over.
7. Speak about your journey as a lawyer and write a BIO.
8. Read what you write out loud.
Hacking’s hack: http://answerthepublic.com/. It allows you to put in search terms or things that you think your clients may be searching about and shows you the questions people are asking. http://answerthepublic.com/#about-us
Tyson’s tip: https://www.renderforest.com/. Free Tools for creating professional intros, animations, slideshows and music visualizations in minutes.
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Transcripts: Speak to Your Base in a Language They Can Understand
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.
Tyson Mutrux
And I’m tasting matrix HTML.
Jim Hacking
So today, Tyson, we’re going to talk about the importance of using plain language not talking like a lawyer. Using everyday words in our copies, this whole topic started because you and I had a little mini debate this week over some of my contents. And what do you tell people that complaint you lodged against me about my email that I send out and then we can go from there?
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, so I was reading your newsletter this week. And I noticed that it looked a lot like a sales letter. It was very choppy. It was very very salesy. To me, it looked like I was reading a Ben Glass sales letter. Now, I’m not criticizing that class B uses Dan Kennedy’s methods of writing a sales letter. But I instantly the moment I saw it, I was turned off by it, because it looked salesy to me. So they called you about it. And lets you know, hey, it looks like you’re using a sales letter. And you explained why you do that. So you want to explain why you actually did it the way you did it?
Jim Hacking
Well, first and foremost, I do it that way. Because I’m always trying to figure out ways to keep you from reviewing my content. And I don’t want any words, I don’t think anybody does. So it works perfectly. So really, the thing is that, you know, with my clientele in particular, as being an immigration attorney, English for most of my clients, or a lot of my clients is their second language. So I have to be really careful with how I write. And then that’s sort of what we’re going to talk about today. And sort of ways to keep our language simple. But the other thing is that I think that with American’s attention span these days, that when I’m confronted with a big, blocky paragraph, that it really makes it unappealing to me to read, and it makes me want to go read something else. I know that sounds lazy, but when I ask the other people in our office to write me a blog post or a Facebook post, they send it all to me, and they’ll send me like 300 words in two paragraphs. And that just drives me bonkers. So I think that you’re a more sophisticated reader and that you’re more familiar with sales copy. So that’s sort of what your mind went to when you see the way that I break out my senses. But I don’t think that’s really the case for most people.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, it was very nice of you to call me, what do you call me, it
Jim Hacking
was a wartime kind of reader in my last time, I repeated something nice about you, you recorded it and made it you refused to do it again. But it’s
Tyson Mutrux
a good idea. I will say, I took it day, it’s you. And you actually do have a very good reader base that actually does listen to your newsletter, or read your newsletter. So I take it back. But you’re right. Whenever you explain that, to me, I did make a lot more sense. And so I think that’s very smart. And I, I don’t think anybody really likes to read chunks of anything. So I think that was smart. But I do want to get to our first one, we’ve got eight. So it’s basically the eight ways of not sounding like a lawyer. And number one is sort of goes what you’re talking about. It’s not using technical language. And I talked about this, whenever I’m talking to people about jury selection and trying cases, everything else. Don’t use head billings, like like board iron, right? So people will stand up trial attorneys will stand up in court, and they’ll start talking to a jury and start talking about, it’s more dire Voir Dire board hire, they don’t know what the hell that means. So you need to break it down. It’s jury selection called jury selection. So when you are talking to your clients, and you’re explaining things to them, don’t say motions, eliminate, you know, say pretrial motions, and explain what those are. Don’t use these Latin phrases, use things that make sense to your clients. Because otherwise, they’re not gonna have any clue what you’re talking about. And if you start using technical language, they’re just gonna turn you off, and they’re gonna turn tune you out. And so you need to speak to them that over their heads.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, I think that’s really important. And for me, I was thinking about this the other day, because sometimes I have to have a translator meet with me, and potential new clients. And so there’s that extra level of an intermediary, a third person trying to translate into another language and some of the words just an immigration plan to explain an immigration concept to someone, you really have to break it down into as plain English as you can. And I just tried to translate that into my emails or my website to try to make that as digestible and as simple as possible. Because, you know, one thing I was thinking about, you know, I don’t want to get into a big political debate or anything about Donald Trump, but I think everyone agrees that he talks at a very simple level. He doesn’t use complex words, and I think that’s what makes him a unique communicator. I don’t know that we should all mimic him and his speech patterns, but I think that The way he talks resonates with a lot of people, because they can understand what he says. And he says it in a simple way that makes it digestible and understandable.
Tyson Mutrux
You don’t, you’re right, he speaks to his base, right. And so that’s what you have to do as a marketer, as an attorney, you need to speak to your base. And so you need to adopt some of those principles to have political principles. But definitely, you can take a lesson from from actually speaking to your base, you want to get into number two,
Jim Hacking
one way that I like to get aware of the language that my clients use, and to use their cadence and the rhythm is to sort of take notes and client meetings, I take notes on the case itself, but I usually have a separate set of notes for things that I hear, or things that people say I also do this in immigration interviews, where I’ll write down the questions that the interviewing officer asks, or I’ll write down the kinds of answers that my clients get. A good example of this is that we did a survey, I think I mentioned this on the show before, we did a survey of our clients a while back, and I think we got about 75 or 65 responses. And that one person used the word attorney, everyone used the word lawyer. So since that time I’ve on my videos and everything else. And then even on my business cards, it doesn’t say immigration attorney or attorney at law. It says immigration lawyer. And I think that really, if you’re in client meetings, and you’re taking notes, and you’re paying real close attention to the language, they use them, you’re going to identify their pain points are and identify what keeps them up at night. And you’re also going to understand in a better way, the words that they use to express their frustration and the ways that wasn’t to seek an attorney in the first place.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, I think that’s a really good idea, something I do, it’s a little different than what you do is I actually have a stack of index cards on my desk. And every time I get an interesting question, I will write it on an index card. And what I’ll do with that index card is I’ll either do a video on it, or I’ll write a blog post on it. And so that’s a really easy way of keeping track of the questions that you get, because then you have one card, so I can just take that one card in front of the video camera, read it, or like sort of think about what I’m going to do and then record the video, I also use some of those with my Monday q&a, where I’ll take a stack of those, and we’ll take three of them. And I’ll go and answer three of the questions for the Monday q&a. It’s an easy way of creating content. So as you’re speaking to your clients, because those are the questions your clients literally have, because they’re asking you those questions. So I think that’s taking notes is a great way of doing it. So for number three, I say that you need to think about it from their point of view. So and we’ve talked about this in previous podcasts, but you need to put yourself in your clients shoes and think about how they view things. And once you start thinking about from their point of view, you can then speak to them directly. And you can actually talk to them in their terms, you can understand their language, you can understand, you know, what their concerns are, what they’re worried about what their expectations are. So if you can think about it from their point of view, you can better speak to them.
Jim Hacking
I agree. And that goes to my next tip number four, which is to read over the chat and emails that you get. So a lot of our members have some version of chat on their website. Speaking of Google, my business is starting to roll out a chat feature. I don’t know if you saw that, but and also in the emails that people send us is that you can really sort of mimic their words mimic their language and their sentence structure in a way that sort of makes it so that you’re talking back to people in the way that they are used to talking being talked to. So I think that really helps.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, and then that leads us to number five, which this actually comes from I did, John Fisher did a webinar or three weeks ago, and he asked for someone to come on and have their website critiqued which you were originally supposed to be on it, but you had a you had a conflict. So I luckily got to go on there. And I get some really good advice. And one of those things was from Mitch Jackson. And he was talking about putting more personal photos on your website. And I thought that was a fantastic idea. So that’s something that Chris and I have done. I went to our Facebook page, and I pulled some photos off our Facebook page and on our lawyer BIOS underneath them are pictures of us and our families. And I thought that was a fantastic idea. He also said, take a camera with you and carry it around with you. And we all have cameras with us. We have our phones, right? So as you’re going around, have people take photographs of you or take photographs of other things, courthouses courtrooms, use your own photos on your website, use more personal photos, you’ll be able to relate to clients a lot better than if you have photographs of you on the website that are taken by the people they’re not, you know, professionally cut and done. You’re gonna be able to relate to your clients a lot more and they’re gonna, they’re gonna feel like they know you a little bit better and they get these more personal photographs of it.
Jim Hacking
I think the theme is emerging and what we’ve been talking about so far today with these tips on how to talk to our clients and the language they’re used to and the theme seems to me to be telling what you think that, you know, we really want Get away from ourselves as the lawyer, the lawyer has their role and the lawyer’s role is to get the benefit or the service provided. But when it comes to marketing and conveying who we are, that’s a lot more about being personable and accessible. And you know, that we’re to show that we’re regular human beings and to, you know, make our marketing, you know, in a way that people relate to us, and that, that we’re some standoffish attorney.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, I completely agree. And that’s really what marketing is right? Like, and we’ve talked about this before, but it’s, it’s this, that’s what marketing is, it’s understanding it from your clients perspective, always. That’s what marketing is marketing 101, you want to get into number six? Yeah, so
Jim Hacking
one of the great things that comes with working in a place with other people, especially people who aren’t lawyers, you know, when you have support staff or other people is that you can bounce things off of them or run things past him. So sometimes, if I’m struggling with a little bit of content, I’ll ask some people in the office to read it over, I have a new book coming out, I’m gonna have two different people in the office, one, a lawyer, and one not only read it over, to make sure that they understand the concepts and that, you know, we get sort of on this upper level thinking and upper level writing when we’re doing briefs, or whatever. And I think that when it comes to copy, it’s really helpful to run it past everyday people who can sort of read it and see if they understand it. Now that I have teenagers, I imagine that pretty soon I’m going to start having them read over things, because most Americans read it about a teenage level anyway. So I think that would be another benefit for me just to have a sounding board, you can find the gaps in what you’re writing. And I think that’s something that people
Tyson Mutrux
key into. Yeah, I think that’s a really good one, just because and I think a lot of people are afraid to let other people read their stuff before they put it out there. But I think it’s very important that you do that. And it’s it can be time consuming. But if you just add in your system, you just create another level of someone proofreading, I think just that will, will add a lot of value to it. Number seven, actually comes from something Lee Rosen had written an article about may have been actually a few months now. But he talks about creating a lawyer by that speaks a little different than a reasonable different than what are a lot different than what most attorneys do. Most attorneys will put up essentially their resume in written form, where it’s just paragraph after paragraph of their resume. And at the bottom of that, they’ll put an actual resume. And it’s really freaking boring, and no one cares about it, no one reads it. And so instead, something that, you know, Chris and I have done on our website is we talk about basically the journey, our journey of becoming an attorney of why we became attorneys. What I really did is I wrote out, when I speak when I speak to students, I speak to people actually talking about the process, the two moments that really led to me becoming an attorney, and or in your language lawyer using a lawyer or becoming a lawyer. And I talked about that in that blog post during that bio. And so I think that that is a way different way of doing it. And I think I’ll be able to connect the clients a lot better with a bio and Lee Rosen talks about that. So if you want to learn how to write your own bio a little different than most and look at Lee Rosen’s blog post on it, I don’t know the name of her, I don’t have it in front of me. But if you just look up Lee Rosen, and how to write a lawyer bio, you’ll be able to find it pretty easily. So
Jim Hacking
the universe is definitely talking to me. I was listening to Mitch Jackson’s podcast yesterday, and the guests that he had on there for this week’s show, we’re talking about the exact same thing as far as our BIOS, and that we don’t spend enough time on our BIOS and that you’re, like you said, most of attorneys have a cookie cutter bio. And so it’s funny now that I think about my bio, on my website, it’s two huge paragraphs of a bunch of text. So I probably need to break that down. But I think that, you know, bringing in more personality to it, making us more relatable making it easier to read. I think that and also making it interesting, you know, I mean, if we can stand out and be different by showing that our BIOS, not like everybody else, I think that sort of sets the tone for us doing things a little bit differently. And for people understanding that we’re not your everyday lawyer.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah. So I mean, now you have an assignment that you can go back today and actually go back and redo your bio, something that I was actually just thinking about when you were talking as mine, even though it is the actual content is way different. They’re big blocks of text. And so probably what I need to do is go back and add headings, sort of like a sales letter, sort of like your sales letter, maybe add some headings to it that lead them down that path. I think that would help quite a bit whenever they’re reading through our BIOS, something that we have recorded, but I have not put on our website yet, is we’re adding a video introduction at the top. So at the very top. If someone doesn’t want to read the text below it, it’s gonna be a video from me and Chris, talking about why we became lawyers. And so that’s something a little different. So sometimes clients don’t want to read all that crap. They just want to hear from you. And so we’re adding those videos. up to the top. And, you know, we do a video for everything now. So that’s it’s no big deal to do that. But you can shoot a video from your cell phone and easily put that on your website, especially if you have a WordPress site. So it’s something easy to do, it’s a little different.
Jim Hacking
On those lines, I have just heard the Facebook business pages are now going to be able to put a video right at the top of the page that sort of as a pinned post, and it looks sort of a nice and frame in your Facebook business page.
Tyson Mutrux
So you can actually you can pick which videos you want at the top,
Jim Hacking
you can pick one particular video and just make it sort of like a Facebook business landing page that has a
Tyson Mutrux
video on it. Oh, that’s great. I think it’s a great idea. All right, you want to get into our eighth way of not selling Oh, like a lawyer, Jimmy.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, one thing that’s also helpful when everything’s done, besides reading it over having someone else read it is just to read it out loud. I tell this to my son all the time when he’s writing his papers for school, but I started applying it for myself. And that is, when the copy is done. You’re right, it does take a little bit of extra time. But I think that the effort is worth it. Just read it out loud, you find things that sound clunky, or, you know, I’m always trying to write like I talk and to make my writing conversational. And so I think that taking that last step to read it over out loud, is another thing that you can do to really clean up your copy.
Tyson Mutrux
That’s a very basic thing. But I think it’s so important. And it’s something I didn’t learn until later about re I wish I would have learned a long time ago that reading what you write out loud, because you catch so many errors in your writing. And I think it’s so so important because as someone is reading your whatever you write, they’re going to be reading in a way where they’re expecting you to, it’s sort of like they’re sounding it out in their head. I know that sounds kind of odd, but that’s what they’re doing. And so that’s why it’s so important to actually speak it out loud and make sure it makes sense, because you want it to sound good to them as the reading it, then you’ll catch all those errors. If you actually say it out loud. That’s that’s really good. Jimmy, I’m gonna wrap it up. Before I get to our tips on our hacks for the week, I do want to remind everybody to if you like our podcast, it’s free, we don’t do advertising. If you would like us on Facebook, if you’d like us on Twitter, we have a Twitter and an Instagram account. Now, follow us there. Then also, if you will give us a five star review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts that will actually help us quite a bit in increasing our rankings. We’re definitely get the word out there. I’m pretty humbling to see what our numbers have been lately. It’s pretty incredible. And our base is growing and more and more people are joining the Facebook group. It’s really awesome. So get involved on the Facebook group. And Jimmy, do you want to give you a hack of the week?
Jim Hacking
Yeah, I think you’re gonna like this one a lot types. And so you know, we all know about Google autofill. You know how when you’re typing in on a search on a search, and sometimes filled it in? Well, there’s a website out there that I’ve come across, it’s called answer the public.com. And the answer the public.com allows you to put in search terms or things that you think your clients might be searching about. And then it collates, and organizes all the questions that people ask in Bing and Google related to that. So for instance, you could type in car accident insurance. And you could see all the questions that go go into Google or into being that when people are looking for that. And then that gives you the content that you need, or the titles of the content that you need the things you need to talk about or shoot videos
Tyson Mutrux
about. It’s a really good idea. We’re gonna make sure we put a link on that, could you put a link on the Facebook page with that? I sure will. Because that’s something where I think that’s really important. That’s really cool. My tip of the week is something you actually introduced to me yesterday that I needed right away. And it was render forest, render forest is incredible. It is a free or paid service, I use the free one free version, they put a watermark on your video if you do the free version. But honestly, you can barely see the watermark. It’s, it’s really not that bad. And it’s something that allows you to do these illustrated videos. It’s really cool. So they have all of the artwork there. All you do is you put in your tags, they give you the audio so you do video, you can do a voiceover with it. If you want to do a voiceover. It is super easy I put together is about a three minute video and it took me right around an hour to do with all the editing and everything. That was super simple. It was one of the easiest things I’ve seen, and I thought it was gonna be really complicated. But if you want to create an animated illustrated video, I highly recommend you use render forest and the web websites just render force.com r e n d e r forest fo r e ft.com. It is super simple to use.
