In this episode, Jim and Tyson interview Daniel Decker founder and CEO of Spotlight Branding. They will go over Daniel’s business, marketing strategies, and a list of 5 marketing mistakes lawyers you should avoid.
http://spotlightbranding.com/: In a nutshell, Spotlight Branding helps lawyers get more referrals, keep business and position themselves as the highly visible and highly credible expert within their niche.
1. Not defining objectives. You have to have an idea of what you are trying to accomplish.
2. No analytics. We have to track our progress.
3. Missing out on low hanging fruit. Focus on the right things!
4. No systems.
5. The shiny object syndrome. Think. Is this a smart investment?
Hacking’s hack: Get up earlier! Getting up earlier you’ll have some extra time to think and reflect and start your day better.
Daniel’s tip: Boomerang for Gmail. Boomerang allows you to schedule messages to be sent or returned at a later date. Write a message now, send it whenever, even if you’re not online. Track messages to make sure you hear back, and schedule reminders right inside Gmail. Know whether your email got read with cross-platform read receipts. Free yourself from constant interruptions using Inbox Pause, while still getting notified about the emails that matter.
Tyson’s tip: A book. You Get What You Pitch For: Control Any Situation, Create Fierce Agreement, and Get What You Want In Life, by Anthony Sullivan (Author) and Tim Vandehey (Author)
Convincing people to give you what you want is an art form that takes charisma and confidence. But no great pitchman achieves success based on those qualities alone. The good ones make themselves great with practice and discipline, mastering a series of skills that Sullivan dubs the ten “Pitch Powers.” These are essential techniques he’s learned in more than twenty-five years “on the joint” (that’s pitchman-speak for the area where you’re selling).
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Transcripts: Daniel Decker: 5 Law Firm Marketing Mistakes To Avoid
Daniel Decker
If you’re spending money on Google AdWords, what are you getting out of it? How much? Is it costing you per click? More importantly, how much? Is it costing you per appointment set? And then what percentage of those appointments? Are you converting into new engagement?
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. Hey, Jimmy, we’ve got another awesome guest this week. And it’s someone you found you want to talk about how you found the gift?
Jim Hacking
Yeah, it’s great. Because you know, you and I spent so much time about email marketing, I signed up for an email from spotlight branding, which is a company that specializes in law firm marketing. And I’ve read a lot of their articles. And I found a lot of them to be engaging and smart. And so I started an email back and forth with Daniel Decker, who’s a Partner at spotlight and I thought we’d have him on the show. So Daniel, thanks so much for joining us.
Daniel Decker
Yeah, thank you guys. I’m excited to be on here. And I appreciate the opportunity.
Tyson Mutrux
Daniel, tell us a little bit just about yourself and what your company does. Yeah.
Daniel Decker
Okay. So I’ll start with with spotlight branding. So in a nutshell, what we do is help lawyers, earn more referrals, earn more repeat business, and position themselves as a highly visible, highly credible expert within their niche. Obviously, there’s a lot more to it than that, we can kind of dive into that as we go here. But in a nutshell, that’s what we do. We use the internet to accomplish that for our clients. As far as my story. So I’m kind of an exception to the entrepreneur, you know, mold, I guess, in that I didn’t know that I was wired to be an entrepreneur, you know, I don’t have family members that ran their own businesses or anything like that. And it wasn’t until I got out of college that I really kind of figured it out. And I did you know, the six or seven year college plan took a couple years off and figured out what I wanted to do dabble in restaurant management, did kind of a bunch of different things before finally getting my degree and then starting, you know, out of college, I graduated in 2009, with the intent of getting into finance, and 2009 is about the worst time in the world to try to find a job in finance, you know, the markets were melting down, and everybody was freaking out pulling your money out of the market. So, so that didn’t happen. And so what I ended up doing is joining a a small legal marketing company down in Miami, Florida. And I learned a lot in the process. And I discovered that I really liked marketing. But even more than that, I realized that man, like I want to do this, I want to run a business on my own. And so right around that time, I also read the book, E Myth, kind of coincidentally, I’m sure you guys are familiar with that. And that kind of lit the entrepreneurial fire for me. And I was like, Man, I want to build a business. And I was passionate about legal marketing. And at same time I met Mark cerniglia, who became my partner in this. And so the stars kind of aligned. And that was about six years ago. And we started spotlight branding and the rest kind of history.
Jim Hacking
Daniel Tyson and I are indeed big fans of the E Myth. Talk a little bit about what you think about the E Myth and how that’s impacted spotlight branding in the work you do with lawyers.
Daniel Decker
Man, it’s just foundational for us, the biggest thing, single thing I think that we took out at E Myth is, so I read it at a time when I was just trying to start my own business. And I was the consummate technician, right, I was spending almost 100% of my time doing work for clients. And in my mind, that was what running a business was, was, you know, you do the work for your clients. And I had no concept of building systems, and of scalability and of the idea of ultimately bringing other people in, you know, employees in to do the work freeing me up to, you know, move my time and energy into more high value tasks. So what we do at spotlight branding now is we have a task hierarchy for our entire company. So every single job that anybody in our company does, and there’s there’s 11 of us now, every job that anybody does exist on this hierarchy. And Mark and I and my partner have very, very few of those jobs on our plate, right, because we’ve hired strategically and assigned virtually all of the day to day tasks that go along with running spotlight branding, to our employees. And so that allows us to focus on marketing to focus on client service to focus on research and development and figuring out better ways to serve our clients. So it’s just been foundational. It’s been foundational for us.
Tyson Mutrux
So I was actually gonna go on another route, but I’m gonna continue down the route. You’re just talking. So like you all are really systems based a lot of tasks, things like that. And that’s, that’s very, very helpful, especially to lawyers. Can you talk about how you will develop those systems and I guess what you use to manage those systems?
Daniel Decker
Yeah. So the first thing to do is the first thing that we did anyways is to document our processes, right? So we had X amount of things that we do for our clients, you know, writing blog content for our clients posting on social media, managing their email newsletters, and each of those when you break them down. It’s just a series of steps, right? And so we the first step for us was just to document those things. And I was the one back, you know, seven years ago, when we started this thing that was writing blog content for our clients, and was was posting on social media. So I created step by step instructions. And we use Evernote at the time, and literally just created a manual. For every step of the process. Everything that we had to do to serve our clients became documented on Evernote. And now when we hire somebody, it’s like, Hey, guys, we got your instructions for you. This is what you got to do. It’s all straightforward. There’s no gray area, you know, it’s very clear what’s expected of them. And, and yeah, and it works great.
Jim Hacking
Do you know, this is great, you know, Tyson and I pound and stuff home, Tyson is a real master at systematizing. And I’m going through that process now at our office. And if you’ve grown to 11 people, you’ve definitely built in the systems to grow and develop. And I think that’s fantastic. I think our listeners know how much we believe in systems. And I think that you’re laying it out there for us was really helpful. How do you find new lawyers? What’s your marketing approach? How do you yourself your company, we’re going to dive into the law firm marketing mistakes in just a minute. But how does spotlight branding market itself?
Daniel Decker
Yeah, great question. So we do a lot of different things, kind of my philosophy when it comes to marketing is you want to have as many different sources of new business as possible, because you never know when when things are going to dry up, right. So we try hard not to be overly reliant on any one source of new business. That said, right now we’re getting a lot of business from Facebook. We do a lot of advertising on Facebook. We advertise on Google, we get out and speak my business partner, Mark was just at the law firm 500 conference down in Boca Raton this weekend. And he spoke there. We sponsor, you know, lawyer, nomics, we’ve been at kleos cloud conference, and we dabble in direct mail, we sponsored podcasts, we kind of do a lot. And what’s important for us is because we have so many different irons in the fire, so to speak, is to have good analytics, backing that all up so that we can figure out what’s working what’s not. So we have a great analytics system set up that allows us at any time to, to look at how many leads we generated in a given month, where they came from, how many of them converted into clients, and so on and so on. And it’s a big, big key for us. Jim, I think you mentioned that you subscribe to our email newsletter, it’s very common for us to have somebody land on our website, subscribe to our newsletter, maybe they download one of our special reports, but they’re not ready to make a hike, they’re not ready to hire us right away. And that’s just that’s just very common, right? They’re out there doing their research. But what happens is we do a lot of follow up through email, and through direct mail and on social media as well. And so whether it’s three months down the road, or like, I’ve even had people email us and be like, Hey, I’ve been getting your newsletter for three years, can we talk. And so that’s kind of a big thing for us is like, yeah, we have this initial contact with them. But it’s all about the follow up to keep us top of mind and be there when they’re ready to actually, you know, make a hire. So I’m a little afraid
Tyson Mutrux
that we went too far down the road, because you gave us your elevator pitch, which was really good. I think people can take a really chapter out of your book when it comes to elevator pitches. But I want to make sure people really know exactly what you will do. So can you give everyone just a brief overview of really what you all do? I know you’ve sort of talked about it, but just dig a little bit deeper, though.
Daniel Decker
Yeah, sure. So the core of it is website design, social media management, email marketing. And we do videos for our clients. And we do blog content. So we actually our team actually writes blog content for our clients. And basically, we call this the internet foundation. Right. And I hope we get a chance to talk more I know, we’re going to talk about some marketing mistakes in a little while. So you’ll notice I’m not mentioning SEO right now. And that is not something that we do. And we’ll talk in a little while about why that’s such a big deal and why I think that’s such a big mistake for law firms to spend so much time and effort on. But we put the foundation in place, right? We help lawyers capitalize on referrals. And as you guys probably know, an email newsletter and social media are just two really incredible tools to drive more referrals. And we’ve seen research that shows that the average lawyer is actually only receiving about 1/3 of the referrals that they could be getting from people that are already within their existing network. So we looked at that right there. And if that’s the only thing that our business does is helps our clients close that gap. That’s a huge deal. Right? The you know, you guys probably know most lawyers get a lot of their business through referral already. But what if you could double or triple that just by putting systems in place to educate your network and stay top of mind Okay, that’s probably at the core of what we do.
Jim Hacking
I’m looking at your website, and it says that there are 1,300,705 licensed attorneys in the United States. And it asks, How will your firm stand out? I think that’s just a great mindset. I think I’m looking at some of your client websites and some of the work you’ve done for people. Your own website looks fantastic. It’s very appealing to the eye. It’s got a nice color scheme. And it’s great. I mean, we talk on this show a lot about lawyer websites, and some of the mistakes that people made. And my favorite episode was one where Tyson and I just picked a random city and picked a random practice area and clicked on an attorney’s website. And I mean, the fact that most lawyer websites are pretty bad, if they even have one, you know, Steve Bartel mentioned a couple weeks ago on our show that, you know, he’ll look up another attorney to try to get their contact information. And it’s like, you got to dig around and find it. And it’s awful. So I think you guys have done a real nice job of helping yourself and your clients stand out.
Daniel Decker
Yeah. And that’s a really big deal what you just said, right? Because one thing I like to say is that lawyers, unfortunately, face something of a trust deficit, right? The general public is skeptical of attorneys. And when somebody and I’m especially taking consumers here, when they know that they need a lawyer and begin the hiring process, they are intimidated, they’re skeptical, they think that the lawyer is going to be overpriced is going to rip them off, that isn’t really going to give a crap about their about solving their actual problems. And given that, I think 76% of people of consumers use the internet when searching for a lawyer. That’s a huge opportunity, right to overcome that trust deficit. And that’s why it’s a really big deal for us that our clients shoot video. And we do just an FAQ style of video where it’s just kind of a library of them just answering common questions, right. And that gives consumers a chance to, to hear them speak, to read their body language to feel some sort of connection. And all of a sudden, it’s a lot less intimidating to pick up the phone and call this guy because now you feel like you’ve got some reporting. And so we do that with video. We do that with blog entries. But yeah, as you said, so many it’s incredible to me how many lawyers out there either don’t have a website or have a website that is just so bad, that it just it does not reassure somebody when they land on their site that hey, this guy wants to help me to position to help me it’s just a huge, huge missed opportunity.
Tyson Mutrux
All right, Dana, let’s go ahead and jump into it. I know there’s some other things you want to talk about till we can get to those at the end of this. But what we want to talk about is the five common law firm marketing mistakes to avoid you wrote this a couple of weeks ago, you want to talk about
Daniel Decker
number one? Yeah, sure. So the first thing here is not defining their objectives. Right. And this is true of anything in life. But for some reason lawyers seem to not get this when it comes to their marketing, you have to have an idea of what you’re trying to accomplish. Before you start anything, right? What what does success look like, for your marketing? Are you looking for more referrals? Are you looking for more cold leads? What what are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to build your brand? Are you trying to get speaking opportunities? Are you trying to get media exposure, get quoted in the newspaper? What the heck are you trying to accomplish? Right? What does success look like? And that’s number one is you have to define that. Because if you don’t define that you don’t know how to evaluate your efforts and figure out if you’re getting value out of your spend, and you just have no idea where you’re going. So I don’t know if you guys can identify with that. But But I talked to lawyers all the time. And it’s like, hey, what do you guys trying to accomplish with your marketing? And I thought, That’s a good question. And you can’t operate that way, you have to have a plan, you have to know where you’re going.
Tyson Mutrux
Well, it’s interesting that you, Jimmy, but we have a current goal of getting 15 Scar cases. So cases involving scars over the last, I guess, nine weeks of the of the year, which is part of our 12 week, goals. And so it really does focus your marketing quite a bit. So I’m big on the 12 a year. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, Daniel, but it’s a big deal for me. So every tool week, we’ll have a new round of goals. And I usually throw in one of the marketing goals as you know, something getting acquiring certain types of cases or doing something on the website, whatever it may be. But whenever you do that, you’re absolutely right, you have to have some sort of tracking and accountability. And I think does wonders for us. I think that’s a great idea. Jimmy, do you have any sort of tracking like that tracking as far as what Tyson not tracking but just I guess, define goals and that shows to the different lists some sort of defined goals when it comes to marketing?
Jim Hacking
Yeah, I think for marketing for sure. I mean, I set out to have 200 YouTube videos a while back and I’ve set certain goals that we have for cases to open and then we have smaller metrics, like you know, appointments, made, appointments kept and those kinds of things. So for sure, I think having defined objectives that are great, Daniel, number two, you have no analytics What’s that all about?
Daniel Decker
Yeah, so that really dovetails with with with number one which is by first we set our objectives, appointment set referrals Whatever it is. And then number two, we have to track our progress towards those goals. Right? So if you’re spending money on Google AdWords, what are you getting out of it? How much? Is it costing you per click? More importantly, how much? Is it costing you per appointment set? And then what percentage of those appointments are you converting into new engagement? same holds true with whether you’re spending money on Facebook, whether you’re spending money on the radio, it’s really simple. It’s you need to be able to account for every dollar spent. So that you know, you know, what’s working and what’s not, you know, I’ve heard that’s kind of a, like, I don’t know, a quote out there, people will say, you know, 50% of your marketing works, but you don’t know which 50% That is. And that’s kind of like a prevailing mindset that I’ve heard a lot of people say, and it’s just not true. And it’s, it’s very wasteful, you should if you’re working with marketing vendors who know what they’re doing, or if you’re doing it yourself, you just need to figure this out, you need to track the dollars that you’re spending, you need to track the time that you’re spending. And you need to, to demand accountability, and ask yourself what you’re getting from it. And the thing is, inevitably, you’re going to spend money on marketing campaigns, that won’t work. And that’s fine. As long as you know, it’s not working so that you can shift your spend elsewhere. So that’s really it. It’s just track what you’re spending so you know, what’s working and what’s not. And so you can invest resources into to campaigns that actually move the dial for
Tyson Mutrux
you. Sorry, Daniel, I really liked number three, I’m curious to hear you talked about this. It’s missing out on low hanging fruit. Yeah, so that’s the big one here.
Daniel Decker
So many lawyers, when we talk about internet marketing, all they want to think about is search engine optimization. And it’s like, how do I get to the top of Google, and this is going after the extremely high hanging fruit? Right, what I’m suggesting that that lawyers need to do is focus on referrals. First and foremost, because research out there shows the average lawyer is only getting 1/3 of the referrals that he or she could be getting referred clients, you guys probably know this are typically the best one, right? Number one, they’re usually cheaper to generate, than going out and generating cold leads. More importantly, they come in, they already know you, they already trust you, they already have an idea of what to expect in terms of your process and in terms of your rates. And to top it off, they’re more likely to go out and refer further work to you, you know, carrying on the cycle. So there’s no question that referred clients are the best type of new clients for almost every law practice. So there’s just some basic things that you can do to to increase those referrals. But instead of doing that, and a lot of this is the fault of my industry, lawyers go out there and they focus on search engine optimization, or they focus on pay per click campaigns, and they do these things that may or may not work, may or may not end up being just a giant waste of money. And they neglect the obvious opportunities right in front of them.
Jim Hacking
Daniel, I really like your message there. I mean, I think that we could spend a good chunk talking about this, I think that lawyers are so busy that they just think, oh, just throw some money at SEO. And that’ll be enough, I think that we ignore the bread and butter. You know, one thing that might be nice, would be a hierarchy. You know, if you made a chart some time of like the kinds of ways that clients come to you, because we’ve all gotten those yellow pages, or internet phone calls, where people are just like dialing the next number down the list. And you’re so right, when you talk about all the different ways that referred potential clients are better. And one of the ones that I find is that it’s just a lot easier to close the deal. When you’ve had someone referred to you, I mean, you’ll have people that will wait for weeks to see you, you’ll have people that are excited to see you, some other attorney or some other referral source has gone to the trouble of explaining why you’re the best at what you do. And it just is so much easier when you’re sitting across the table from them. They’re just like, they come in ready to go.
Daniel Decker
Yeah, yeah. And that would be my message to every attorney out there is, is start by doing everything you can to maximize those referrals for all the reasons we covered, referred clients are just the best in the business. And research shows that there are a lot of referrals out there for you that just aren’t happening. And it’s usually because you’re just not maintaining top of mind awareness. Or it’s because they don’t they don’t recognize a good opportunity to make a referral. So I say there’s really just two things you have to do. Big picture to drive more referrals is one is make sure your network is educated, right? Make sure that they recognize a good opportunity that they understand what it is that you do understand what an ideal client looks like. And then number two, you just got to maintain that top of mind awareness, right because we’re all busy. And I mean, it’s crazy. I just purchased a house about a year ago. And and I also had a will drawn up about a year ago and I worked with two different attorneys. They were both great, right? I really enjoyed working with them. I have not heard a word from either of them since we’ve not gotten a newsletter, not gotten an email newsletter, nothing and I would have been glad I still would be glad to refer work their way. But sooner or later, I’m going to forget their names. And it’s just it’s just that simple. You have to take proactive action to stay top of mind to in order to get those referrals. So yeah, that’s a really big
Tyson Mutrux
deal. All right, Daniel. So let’s jump into the next one, which is number four. No systems, we’ve already kind of talked about that a little bit, but dig a little deeper on it.
Daniel Decker
Yeah. So I think I think, especially for solo lawyers, right, or small practices, who the lawyer is so busy doing the legal work, doing the marketing, being the HR person, you know, there were a ton of different hats. And so what ends up happening is that marketing falls by the wayside, and, and it becomes inconsistent. And so you end up with these boom and bust cycles, right? Where you go through a period of time where you’ve got so much work lined up that you’re like, Oh, my God, how can I even get all this done. And then three weeks later, you get it done. There’s nothing in your pipeline, and now you’re twiddling your thumbs freaking out wondering about how you’re going to make payroll, right, and it’s this boom and bust cycle that’s really common. And the antidote to that is consistent marketing, right? It means you have to be doing things marketing wise, on a regular basis, whether you are busy or not. And the only way to make that happen is with system. And so it’s as simple as saying, Okay, it’s important to me, that I’m posting content on Facebook every day of the week. Okay, how am I going to do that? Am I going to hire somebody to do that? Or am I going to put somebody on my team in charge of doing that? What’s the criteria for doing that? So that is just right is somebody’s posting on Facebook, every single weekday. Another example is okay, we’re going to send out a weekly newsletter, or monthly newsletter or whatever it’s going to be. But it’s not enough to just think it and say, it sounds like a good idea. Everybody thinks that sounds like a good idea, you have to have a system in place to make sure it actually happens during those busy months, when you’ve got a lot of work on your plate, you or somebody needs to have a clear responsibility to do the 10 steps or whatever it is that are necessary to get that newsletter out. So that’s the bottom line here, that’s where I was going with systems is it you have to have systems to keep the marketing machinery moving, whether you’re busy or not. And that’s how you create kind of a consistent flow of clients and get rid of that boom and bust cycle.
Jim Hacking
We’re speaking with Daniel Decker of spotlight branding. And we’re coming on our last of the top five mistakes that lawyers make when it comes to marketing. And that is one for me, which is the shiny object syndrome. Daniel, can you talk a little bit about that?
Daniel Decker
Yeah. So lawyers love learning, right. And that’s one of the reasons that we enjoy working with attorneys, right, for the most part, very bright, highly educated, but it can come back to bite you sometimes because, you know, attorney will go to a conference, go to a lawyer Nomis conference in Las Vegas, or go to a Clio conference, and come back with all of these exciting new marketing ideas are all these exciting ideas, whether they’re marketing or not, doesn’t really matter. And it we call it the bright shiny object syndrome, because they see it sounds great, they want to jump into it, they do it. But because they’re busy people, and because they don’t have systems in place, like I just talked about, we end up dropping everything else in pursuit of this new exciting idea. And so what ends up happening is, is attorneys end up just jumping, you know, from month to month to all of these different cool ideas, any of which could work, but they’re not going to work if you don’t put in the time to, to understand what you’re doing. And to create a system to make it happen consistently. And, and then to stick with it. And so that’s the problem, right? As you might have, you might you might have, you know, an email newsletter in place, or social media marketing in place, or whatever you’re doing, and it’s working. But it’s not sexy, because it’s, it’s not new anymore. And then you see something new, you get excited about it. And so you drop what’s working, and you end up just jerking back and forth. And you never really invest the time and the effort to create consistency with any of those things. And so my encouragement is, I’m all about learning. And that’s great. And you should, you should look for opportunities to improve all of us should, right? But you you have to maintain some discipline and say, okay, is this thing? Is it a smart investment? Do I have the time for it? Do I have the money for it? Can I do it without compromising all of the other systems that I have in place? And so that’s it, it’s just just be a little bit critical and say, Alright, is what I’m doing working? If so, I don’t want to drop it. So how can I add some new things on top of it? It’s kind of what I’m getting at. That makes sense.
Tyson Mutrux
Daniel, I’m gonna put you on the spot for a second. So are there any Have you seen recently, any bright, shiny marketing trends out there that everyone’s going crazy for the people should just
Daniel Decker
avoid? Man, the thing that I just constantly come back to is search engine optimization. And that’s not exactly new. I understand that. But um, I just I can’t strongly encourage listeners enough to think critically about that. It’s just it’s so it’s so easy to waste. So much money in pursuit of Google rankings, right in pursuit of, you know, divorce attorney, Austin, Texas, or whatever it is. And people invest hundreds bow $1,000 Every month into it, and they don’t realize that there’s probably 100 other people or more competing for those same exact keywords. And it can only be one winner, right? It’s a zero sum game, unfortunately. So that is the thing that I always come back to is you guys probably get multiple emails every single week from SEO companies. And if you go to a legal conference, probably half of the vendors there are selling SEO. And that’s, that’s just my biggest pet peeve. It’s like there’s so much more that you can accomplish on the internet than search engine optimization. So so really, I’m not saying there’s not a place for it. I am saying there’s a lot of other things you should be doing. First, you should the whole low hanging fruit thing. Right, you should have systems in place to capitalize on referrals, you should have systems in place to build your brand, before you start chasing kind of the SEO rabbit hole. Daniel, tell
Jim Hacking
us a little bit about who your avatar client is. And then when you come across those people and you started onboarding them, what’s the process of working with spotlight branding? Like?
Daniel Decker
Yes, so our best clients are the clients that we seem to attract are the solo entrepreneurial minded attorneys. Right? When we first started spotlight branding, we weren’t necessarily focused just on small firms. What we quickly found was that working with the larger firms drove us nuts. Right? My partner and I are both entrepreneurial guys. And we’d send over a proposal and it would have to go through a committee and it would be six months before there was any movement. And any decision that we wanted made took months because every single partner has a weigh in on it. So we like working with the small, solo and small firms, right? And practice, it doesn’t really matter. We have clients all over the country in a wide range of practice areas. And yeah, our biggest, I think the biggest thing that we’re looking for is, is that attorney out there who understands that he’s building a business, right and and understands that marketing a law firm, or that running a law firm really is a business that requires marketing and and it requires systems in place. And yeah, so that would probably be our avatar client, as far as what the process looks like. So when a client signs on with us, they are assigned a dedicated, we call them a launch specialist, which is somebody who really worked closely with the client to understand their brand, understand their strategy, where they’re trying to go. And we work with them. And it typically takes 60 to 90 days to get a new website up. And then they are then passed over to our brand managers who work with them on their ongoing internet strategy, right. So helping them to create blog entries, helping them to create video getting their newsletter out. One of the things that we pride ourselves on is great communication and responsiveness. And we found that unfortunately, a lot of people in our industry don’t do the greatest job at this. But our team is always available. If clients have questions, they’re going to get an email response, typically within within half an hour, always within 24 hours.
Tyson Mutrux
That’s actually really good. I think just that segment of this podcast, people could could cut out and say, you know, I get a lot of value from that. Because just the onboarding, I don’t think attorneys think of onboarding the way most industries do. And I think they really think they should either. That’s actually a really good takeaway. Thank you, Daniel. So I guess the question I have for you is, is with regards to videos, and I’m of the thinking that, that’s how you’ll do quite a bit of videos, that your video should not be polished that many attorneys spend too much time polishing up these videos, making them perfect, takes them forever to get them out the door. But most videos that are washed are not very polished. Do you have an opinion on that? Yeah,
Daniel Decker
I think you’re completely on the right track with that. There are there’s a time in place for more polished kind of brand videos where you’ve got multiple camera takes and you’ve got, you know, the great footage of the lawyer walking through the city or whatever. But I think where everybody should start is with those more raw, FAQ style videos. So that’s, that’s what we encourage our clients to do is literally create a library of videos that are 30 to 60 seconds long, where they’re just answering a common question, right, that they that they get all the time. So it’s, you know, how is child custody determined in my state? You know, what are the consequences of a DUI, just common, common questions, simple stuff that their clients are asking. And we do exactly, we recommend exactly what what you touched on there. So you do need a certain amount of quality, right? Like I want there to be, you know, good lighting, a good frame, and it’s not HD close to HD video. But as far as the actual content, we highly encourage our clients not to script their answers and we get pushback sometimes because because people feel I guess feel more comfortable if they script things out and know exactly what they want to say. But But we think that the opposite is more effective. We think that when you just answer a question when you just be you and if you say all or if you stumble a little bit, that’s fine. It’s actually better in my opinion, because all of a sudden, you look like a real person instead of a robot and your clients, your potential clients that are watching those videos feel like they have a connection with you. And yeah, so So we’re all about that. That is that is I think you’re completely on the right track with that. I love it when
Jim Hacking
someone comes on the show and tells our listeners the same things that Tyson and I have been telling them for over a year now. And I’m a big believer in video taping loves to make fun of my videos and point out how they’re not exactly polished. And I stumbled the other day doing one and I just kept going. I think you’re absolutely right, that it just builds empathy and credibility. And I think that as long as you’re not making a complete fool of yourself, it’s all good.
Daniel Decker
Yeah. And people are looking for genuine at this point, right? Like, I think that it’s more important to appear as a genuine human being than it is to appear as like just perfect, polished professional. Yeah,
Jim Hacking
absolutely. Well, we’re coming up on the end of the show. And as Tyson often does, he encourages everyone to join our Facebook group, which is under the maximum lawyer, podcast banner. We’re really happy that we’ve had you on the show today. Make sure friends that you can leave us a review on iTunes, leave us a five star review. If you like this, Daniel, if people want to find you. How do they get to spotlight branding?
Daniel Decker
Yeah, best thing to do is visit our website at WWW dot spotlight branding.com. You can also connect with us on Facebook, facebook.com backslash spotlight branding. We’re also on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, we’re all over the place. But the best thing to do is visit our website, I encourage you guys to sign up for our newsletter, we try to we try to put out tips every single week that you guys can apply that are going to going to make a practical difference in your law firm marketing.
Tyson Mutrux
Fantastic. Well, Jimmy, do you want to get to your hack of the week,
Jim Hacking
my hack of the week comes from my own personal experience over the last 10 days. And that is to get up earlier, I’ve been getting up about 15 or 30 minutes earlier than before. And you know, so often we get caught up in running around like chickens with our heads cut off. And when you start your day like that it’s pretty rough and want to get up early before the kids I have some quiet time, some time to think and reflect and sort of get going on my day. And I my days go from where I feel like I’m leaning into it as opposed to just scrambling to react to whatever’s happening. So if you’re finding yourself sort of stressed out to the max and not being able to catch up, catch your breath. I think a great thing to do is to go to bed a little earlier and get up a little earlier and just see how that works. It’s a really
Tyson Mutrux
good tip. Jimmy the a lot of people I talked to my law partner, Chris Finney gets up at like 435 Every day, he swears by it. A mutual friend of ours Jim Manning. He’s a realtor in St. Louis. A lot of these people that are pretty successful they they all swear by getting up really early. I I’m a late worker, not really an early worker, so teach their own but everyone I talked to really, really swears by that. But hey, Daniel. So we asked all of our guests to give a tip of the week give a tip for us. Yeah, sure.
Daniel Decker
So one of the probably the most useful tools that we have is boomerang for Gmail. Not sure if you guys are familiar with that. But the issue is that email just takes over so many of our lives, right. And we end up spending so much time and getting so distracted responding to email messages when they come in, because we feel like they’re just so important. We have to respond right then and there. So Boomerang is this really cool tool that just kind of helps you take control of your inbox. And it obviously it works with Gmail, right. So if you guys are using Google Mail, or Gmail or anything like that it works. But basically, what it allows you to do is do different tools. First thing is if an email hits your inbox, and you don’t want to deal with it right then in there, you can just click on it and tell boomerang when you do want to deal with it. So maybe it’s a week later, maybe it’s the next morning, whatever, click the button, it disappears from your inbox, and boomerang automatically returned it at the time of your choosing, right. So that’s a that’s a great way to if you’re getting email throughout the day, and you just want to sit down and deal with it first thing the next morning, you just you just it’s just two clicks. And then that happens. The other big feature that it gives you is the ability to basically to boomerang an email back into your inbox. So what that means is, let’s say, you know, you’re sending me an email, trying to confirm what time we’re recording this podcast. And you can check the button that says boomerang this. In other words, bring it back to my inbox, if you haven’t heard from me by whatever your deadline is. So instead of just sending an email and forgetting about it, if I don’t respond, it’s going to come back in your inbox. And you’re going to have another reminder that oh, he never he never got back again. Let me follow up again. That’s a big one. And the third really cool thing that that I like boomerang for is it gives you the ability to just push a button and basically pause your inbox. sounds kind of silly, but literally what it’ll do is if you’re in Pause mode is you won’t get email until you unpause it. So it’s something where it’s like you should just be able to have the discipline to not check your email all the time, but for a while. out of a sense of struggle. So I pause it. And that means that as I’m working throughout the day, I’m not getting those notifications, I’m not seeing new email come in until I’m actually ready to sit down and dedicate half an hour to going through my email. I use it at night to I pause it and so it doesn’t come on my phone. So when I’m hanging out with my kids, I’m not constantly distracted by email coming in. So yeah, Boomerang for Gmail, it’s great. It really lets you take control of your email. Very, very good. Sounds like your spokesperson for that that’s
Tyson Mutrux
really know a lot about us. That’s, that’s really good. Man.
Daniel Decker
I we’ve used it for like four years, and it’s, it’s a game changer.
Tyson Mutrux
Alright, guys, I was going to recommend a SEO tool, but I cannot remember the name of it. So I’m going to pitch someone else. I’ll give you the SEO tool next week. But this is a book by Anthony Sullivan. He’s the guy that you’ll see on infomercials pitching products. And he’s the guy that does oxy clean stuff now. But his new book is called you get what you pitch for control any situation, create fierce agreement and get where you want in life. And I heard him on a podcast yesterday talking about the book. And it’s really cool, because he’s talking about how really any situation that you’re ever really in where you’re negotiating something, or you’re trying to sell something or do or really whatever you’re doing, if you’re trying to get a job, you’re really making a pitch. So whenever you get a client in the door, we’d like to think about what we’re doing the selling, but it it really is you’re making a pitch to them. And it’s really hard to shake her pitch. And we’re talking about videos a little bit ago, and he was talking about how using just phrases or words like stop or look here, or I’ve got something to tell you. Things like that are really, really eye catching, or they’ll really grab your attention. And so if you use things like that in your videos, it really will help you out and it’ll grab people’s attention. So suddenly, it’s a great read. But just that section right there, adding those to your videos will be the tip. So that’s my tip of the week. You guys anything else to add?
