2017 Annual Florida Bar Convention: Leveraging Your Homepage

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Transcript

The Florida Bar Podcast

2017 Annual Florida Bar Convention: Leveraging Your Homepage

06/22/17

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Intro: Welcome to The Florida Bar Podcast, where we highlight the latest trends in law office and law practice management to help you run your law firm, brought to you by The Florida Bar’s Practice Resource Institute. You are listening to Legal Talk Network.

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Christine Bilbrey: Hello and welcome to The Florida Bar Podcast, brought to you by The Practice Resource Institute on Legal Talk Network. This is Christine Bilbrey, recording from the 2017 Annual Florida Bar Convention in the Boca Raton Resort in Boca Raton, Florida.

Jonathon Israel: I am Jonathon Israel, Director of The Florida Bar’s Practice Resource Institute. Thank you for joining us today.

Christine Bilbrey: So right now we have Wayne Bell, who was one of our speakers earlier at our CLE here on technology in Boca Raton. And Wayne, you spoke on Leveraging Technology to Boost Marketing Efforts and Productivity. It’s a big title. But tell our listeners, what you do and where you work.

Wayne Bell: Well, thank you, thank you for welcoming me here today. Basically what I talked about today was covering the personal side of branding and marketing. A lot of times people forget that there’s a personal side to it, so this presentation I wanted to be able to cover how you can bring the personal side back into marketing again, as well as being able to leverage the time load and get more done in less time.

Christine Bilbrey: So what were the most important points, what did you start with when the CLE attendees were there?

Wayne Bell: Actually, what I did, I went back in time. I wanted to go back and show people and talk about how things used to be. Back when you used to walk into the local store and they happened to know your name and know what you want and know what your family wanted and everything else, so I started there.

And then I took it forward by actually talking about how you secure the little baskets of food back home, and you only had just enough for that couple of days or whatever else, and I used that to relate it back over to the Internet and marketing today, because when you go to a website you actually go in there to actually say hello and meet and that kind of thing. So whenever you go to a website, it has a lot of information about you when you come to the website already, so that company or the person who owns that website gets information from you.

And then they deliver the aspects of the website to you, like the little baskets of goods and food, in only little bits at a time, and it’s called packets. And so I wanted to cover that today so each one of the attorneys understood that whenever they talk about SEO and then get into SEO later on, really what we need to think about is truly representing a brand properly online and in a way that people can take the little nuggets of baskets away from it to be able to use later on.

Christine Bilbrey: And so nowadays everyone has a website, so what do you think is the important thing to grab someone’s attention, because if they are trying to find an attorney, you can click through all the glossy photos and the little bios, but what’s going to stand out?

Wayne Bell: 100% it’s personal. It’s really showing what are you into and why do you matter. A lot of times we ask the attorneys and say, who are you, you have a firm name and your name and who you are, and we will say, why do you matter, why do you matter to the person who just took their time to come to your website to see what you are about. So respect someone else’s time when they come to your website by presenting to them what they may want to hear.

A lot of times you get the information by knowing where they came from, so they just came from a surfing site then maybe you may want to show the personal side that you actually are a surfer and you are into surfing and you may relate that to your area of law.

Or if you happen to be into old cars or motorcycles or bike or yoga, you actually speak along those lines so that way people can relate to you, and if they can relate to you and it’s relatable, and that’s what the key is now, differentiate yourself.

Christine Bilbrey: So it’s about a human connection.

Wayne Bell: It really is. It’s really bringing the human aspect back to the web and then back to people, and that’s the reason why we came to The Florida Bar with this to actually say, we are committed to actually help the attorney to bring their personal side out on the web, because truly a lot of times if they are selected, they would be able to shake someone’s hand in person. We want them to try to make it to when they hit that homepage, it’s like shaking your hand, and by the time they finish they understand a little bit about you, and because I can relate to you, yeah, I want you to represent me now.

Christine Bilbrey: Yeah, because it’s scary, hiring an attorney can be — it’s a big step for some people if they have never been in contact with the legal world, so if you feel like you can trust them or you have some common bond, like you are talking about. So what does your company do, if someone comes to you, where do you start, is it an interview process so that you are getting to know them?

Wayne Bell: No, what happens is that because we are using technology what happens is a lot of times it’s all about the mathematics that are taking place on the website. So even though all — everything we see is actually driven by codes, hexadecimal codes, the coding design and that kind of thing.

So what we do is, the first thing we want to do is go out and see, who are you now? What is your present understanding and how do people relate to you today? So the very first thing we do is go out and say, how is your brand in your local area, in your area of practice how are you doing in relationship to those other attorneys and other people who may be in your area?

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And we do a direct one for one relationship comparison of the two, and then we devise a plan, an actual roadmap on how we can actually be able to get people to understand your brand better. So it isn’t necessarily about us trying to beat another competitor out or beat another law firm out, no, we just want your ideal client to relate to you and be relatable and then therefore then that’s going to give you that type of client.

Christine Bilbrey: Okay. Interesting. So can you give us some examples of an attorney that you were able to do that very successfully for, like what did you put out there that differentiated them from their competitors?

Wayne Bell: That’s a good point. Actually one of the individuals I just started working with a few months ago, we found out that he was really into Harley-Davidsons, and so actually the Harley-Davidson was kind of like a joke. He showed a picture of him on the Harley-Davidson, I was like, wait a minute, let’s do something about this.

So what we ended up doing is we ended up looking to see how many actual websites that Harley-Davidson riders were going to, to buy their products, to buy their tools, replacements, bags, and things like that. What we started doing is we started placing his articles on those websites. So we had him speak about, if you happen to have an accident in the State of Florida on your motorcycle, this is what I would do, because I have my own motorcycle, so everything was talking from an aspect of him understanding, if he had an accident on his motorcycle, what he would do.

Then what happened, they went to the website, the very first picture we have on the website is him on his motorcycle, so now automatically they relate to him and say, oh, this is someone who not only practices law, he looks hard, like he is hardcore, he can represent me pretty well, and then he rides a Harley-Davidson, so we probably bond.

So that’s bringing that aspect, that’s about understanding him as a client, understanding the type of people who may come to the website and then going to a niche market that his competition can’t go to, because they are not Harley riders. So it’s not really like they are competing against me, I am just going and attracting those clients that they know if they have a personal injury situation, that they are going to come to you first.

Christine Bilbrey: Okay, that makes a lot of sense, because at first I was just picturing like I am searching divorce attorneys and I have a guy on a motorcycle. So I understand what you are saying, is it an algorithm or you just —

Wayne Bell: Yes, it is. So what happens is once we understand that he is a motorcycle rider, each one of those words motorcycle rider and everything related to Harley, it actually is understood by Google through mathematics, analytics and binary numbers and has a decimal codes and all this math stuff. So what we do is we try our best to help the robots understand what the website is saying. So the words may be written in English, we do a conversion behind the scene to ensure that the robots fully understand what this attorney is about, everything about them through using meta tags and other things like that to be able to communicate and understand that Google, when they show a snippet of that particular person’s website, it’s going to actually say, a Harley rider here to represent you in the State of Florida, so it’s going to be a little bit more than just the normal one.

And so even with the same attorney who say that — the same attorneys also needed to surfing, on the same website, then we go after the surfing aspect. So then what happens — and now you are going to see in Google an attorney in Florida who understands surfing and you can’t get hurt in surfing, so you may want to contact, so using it that way.

Christine Bilbrey: And so is this a long-term relationship you have with your clients? Do they sign up for like — is it a contract or is it month-to-month, how does it work?

Wayne Bell: Yeah, so what we do is that we want to be able to — we understand that SEO is very, very expensive, and we also understand that there is a lot of firms out there that are taking advantage of attorneys and taking advantage of companies. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to bring our 25 years of experience and say, look, we not only know that we can do the job and do it right, we are going to give it at a very substantial discount, so like 25% of what the market bears, the first six months of someone working with us, and we feel like during that six month timeframe we are going to show you — we are going to bring you customers and we are going to make it to a point to where if you receive one new client a month or two new clients a month after six months, you are going to want to stay with us.

And then at that point of time it’s a month-to-month contract, so we don’t hold anyone in. We don’t try to force them to stay in, but we are definitely, definitely looking at five years, six years kind of plans when we work with someone. It’s all about long-term for us, for sure.

Jonathon Israel: And you guys just became an official member benefit of the Florida Bar.

Wayne Bell: Yes, yes, that was a blessing right there. We came in and we were able to present ourselves and we were able to talk about the mathematical aspect of actually the SEO thing, and not only just — and also bringing in the personalization of it as well, and we were given the opportunity to be able to present and offer the service to all the bar members, so that is nice.

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Jonathon Israel: I think another neat thing is that you are taking a lot of the burden off of the attorneys to try and figure this stuff out and try and stay up on it, because I mean, every single day you see in the news that Google is changing something with the way they work and you guys will just go out and handle that for them.

Wayne Bell: That is a really good point, that’s a really good point. That’s what we did with a little article that we put on The Florida Bar’s website, we said there are over 600 changes happening in Google, so therefore that means there is probably two happening in a day. So there’s no way you are going out there and doing your law practice and you are doing things like that, you are not going to be able to keep up with what’s happening.

So that’s what we are here for, to be able to look out for attorneys and be able to offer that service for them. And then through that aspect what happens, as a byproduct of it, which we are kind of starting to see this coming up is that by our robots going in and checking to see how the website is performing, we also are spotting leaking opportunities where people can come in and maybe breach a website as well.

So as a part of what we are doing, we are plugging up holes to actually stop people from coming in and taking information and sharing with other people. So that’s been like a little bit of a bonus for some of the attorneys to say, wow, this is great, because this is a hot topic right now, this whole breach aspect.

Christine Bilbrey: Absolutely, that’s a very nice extra.

Wayne Bell: Yeah, it’s nice.

Jonathon Israel: Very cool.

Christine Bilbrey: Well, so tell our listeners the name of your company, how they can find you on the Internet?

Wayne Bell: All right, yes. Our company is 360 BizVue and we created that because we really believe that every company, the brand, who you are, there should be a 360 view of it. And that 360 view should be one that is consistent. So every time someone comes to your website, they need to have a consistent experience than one who came beforehand. So that means the operating system needs to be operating fast enough where they get the same experience on speed. They get the same experience as far as the technology is concerned; phone call, they make a phone call, they call your office, they get greeted, it’s that same way, they say the same thing, so it’s all about consistency.

So we created 360 BizVue to help attorneys to be able to see how their brand looks offline as well as online and ensure those two things match together. We can be reached at 360 BizVue; it’s going to be 360bizvue.com. We can be reached there as well.

Christine Bilbrey: Okay, that’s great. This has been another edition of The Florida Bar Podcast, brought to you by The Practice Resource Institute on Legal Talk Network.

I want to thank Wayne Bell for joining us and sharing with us this information. Also, you will be able to see Wayne in our CLEs that will be available on The Florida Bar website through the Young Lawyers Division, so we look forward to that as well.

If you liked what you heard today, please rate us on iTunes. I am Christine Bilbrey.

Jonathon Israel: And I am Jonathon Israel. Until next time, thank you for listening.

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