#536: UNVEILED: Law Firm Marketing Secrets!, with RizeUp Media

Episode Notes

Transcript

Zack Glaser (00:12): 

Hey y’all, it’s Zack, the legal tech advisor here at Lawyerist, and I’m here with another sponsored episode of the Lawyers Podcast. Today I have Travis Hoechlin, the co-founder and CEO of RizeUp Media with me, and you guessed it. We are talking law firm marketing. Travis, thanks for being with me. 

  

Travis Hoechlin (00:29): 

Appreciate you having me, Zack. Glad to be here. 

  

Zack Glaser (00:32): 

So Travis, you have a firm, a marketing firm, a digital media firm that specializes obviously in specifically lawyers, law firms, getting their names out there on the websites and digital ads and all that stuff. I would think a little bit about law firm marketing here because it’s a specialty, right? 

  

Travis Hoechlin (00:59): 

Just a tad. Yeah. I’ve been in this industry coming up on just over 15 years. So got into this crazy business about 15 years ago and we opened up RizeUp Media about six years ago, just focusing on marketing for lawyers and law firms. 

  

Zack Glaser (01:16): 

Firms Okay, firms. Okay. So let’s jump right into that then. Law firms are going to be a little bit different than if I’m selling honey online or t-shirts or something like that. It’s going to be a little bit different challenges. What are some of the different challenges that law firms face in the marketing area today? 

  

Travis Hoechlin (01:41): 

Well, I think number one is my dad’s a doctor and he always told me that he never had one class about marketing or business going through medical school and many of our firms we work with close to 500 different law firms across the country, and I’ve worked with thousands of them over the last decade and a half. And they have a common statement in regards to that, that they don’t know this end of the business. So I, number one is lawyers run into, there’s a lot of options out there and how to pick the best one for them. I think where to start is pick an agency that knows the law and knows legal marketing so they can speak your language and attract the type of clients that you want. And I think the second thing is many of the firms that we work with are solo practitioners. 

  

(02:39): 

I would say 90% of the firms that we work with are solo practitioners up to about five attorneys. And many of the lawyers, they’re doing everything right. They’re the chef, they’re the waiter, they’re the bartender, they’re the host, they’re the manager, the whole thing. And so trying to figure out first on which agency to choose, but once you have it up and running, how do you make sure you’re converting and getting the best return on investment on that marketing? And a lot of that, the big hurdle that a lot of folks stumble on is how do I make sure I’m answering the phone consistently? It’s funny as that may sound, I’ve never had one law firm come to me and go, Hey, I’m terrible at answering the phone, will you help me? Most folks don’t know they have that symptom or that issue, 

  

(03:25): 

And so we have to help them with that and make sure that, because no matter how good we are at marketing, if you’re not going to answer the phone in today’s world, you’re not going to have good success. People are just not going to leave messages. And it’s funny as that may sound, we’re just in that instant gratification world that we live in. People want to talk to somebody right now. So helping them convert, not only get up and running and marketing, getting the right people calling their office or emailing their office, but make sure we’re helping them convert those clients as well. 

  

Zack Glaser (03:58): 

Yeah, we can throw clients against the wall all day if you’re not going to answer the phone, if you’re not going to bring them actually in to the office. So how is it in that scenario, and I consider that the intake to pre intake sort of area, what do you suggest people do in that kind of area of their marketing? 

  

Travis Hoechlin (04:24): 

Well, like all of us business owners, you got to figure out that piece and how do you hire it within or a lot of times it’s cost effective to outsource that. There are many call services that you can hire. There are many chat services that you can hire just so you can be can’t in all places at all times. We work with many, many successful attorneys and a lot of times they’re in court or in meetings with clients or whatever it may be. So they need to delegate that. And whether it’s hiring somebody within or hiring a service, I highly recommend doing that. 

  

Zack Glaser (05:07): 

Yeah, okay. So just a challenge of even answering the phone and picking up the phone and I guess closing the sale in a sense, if you want to say it in how lawyers won’t necessarily want to say it, but it is, it’s closing the sale there. Well, are there any different challenges or distinct challenges that lawyers are facing in that getting people to call them in getting their name out there, getting their website out there and things of that nature? 

  

Travis Hoechlin (05:41): 

The great thing about being an attorney is a lot of folks get a lot of referrals, and so they’re able to survive at some level by just working off of referrals. Most attorneys I talk to say a majority of the best business I get comes from word of mouth, other referrals, 

  

(05:58): 

And there’s no question about that. But what I typically pose to folks is saying, can you scale your business just off referrals? Very few folks are self included, can say, Hey, I’m going to scale my business 50% in the next two months off of referrals. A lot of times you need to supplement that with some type of marketing. So just putting their toes in the water of marketing, whatever that may be, whether it’s optimizing your website to show up on the first page of Google or taking advantage of some different Google ads, whether it’s local service ads or paperclip ads or Facebook ads. Those are all things that we do. I tell people we do five things really well. We make custom websites. Whatever you can do, whatever you can dream up, we can make once those websites are live, we do optimization, do content and backlinks to get it to show up on the first page of Google. We do social media, we manage pay-per-click campaigns, and we manage the local service ad campaigns, relatively new, three years or so, old pay per call program. 

  

Zack Glaser (07:11): 

Okay. So let’s talk LSAs specifically. I think a lot of attorneys want to throw that acronym around or want to dig into that. They know it’s important, they know it’s something that is important kind of specifically to attorneys. But what I guess, what issues or unique strategies do attorneys have in kind of that LSA sort of area? 

  

Travis Hoechlin (07:39): 

So LSAs are local service ads, and for folks who don’t know what those are, if you were to Google, you pick the practice area and city. For example, if you’re going to pick DUI lawyer Memphis or Memphis DUI lawyer, the two faces that you see at the top of the result are Google’s local service ads. And what those are is their pay per call program. 

  

(08:04): 

And so you only pay when the phone rings, and on top of that, if calls come in that aren’t in the right practice area or geography, you can dispute those calls and get your money back. And those revolve around three things. Location, budget, certainly the Google’s, shocker, Google’s in the business of making money, they’re trying to make money, right? And reviews. And so from a strategy standpoint, having different offices is helpful. Certainly it’s not the end all be all by any stretch of imagination, but it is helpful. But if you have one office, certainly it works off of your Google My Business page or your Google Business page, depending on what they call it this week, change every other week. But getting reviews, and that’s the big one, is make sure you’re getting reviews and you’re getting frequent reviews and make sure you’re answering those reviews. A couple other quick tips is they allow you to receive text messages, so make sure you enable that ability to take text messages. It’ll enhance the amount of leads that you get certainly, and make sure you’re answering the phone back to back 

  

Zack Glaser (09:21): 

To rule number one again, 

  

Travis Hoechlin (09:24): 

Because listen, it’s a bad look on Google and they’ll stop serving up your ad if they’re putting you at the top and it’s hitting, no one’s answering the phone. They can only charge you when they deliver a phone call. So they’re going to start delivering your competitors if you’re not answering the phone. 

  

Zack Glaser (09:41): 

Okay, so my phone call is actually going through or being tracked. If I’m the person looking for an attorney, my phone call is going through or being tracked by Google, they’ve called straight out of that LSA and well, I don’t pick up Google knows. And then they go, well, we’re going to stop putting them towards the top soon, no matter how good their reviews are. 

  

Travis Hoechlin (10:06): 

Yeah, I mean, listen, I have a love hate relationship with Google. They certainly feed us, but at the same point in their necessary evil in some regards, but to give them some credit, if you and I own Google and we knew we were going to be able to deliver 10 phone calls and charge for those, are we going to continue to deliver to Joe Schmo if he’s not answering the phone calls, we’re going to deliver to somebody who is going to answer the phone and we can charge him that whatever we’re charging for that call. 

  

Zack Glaser (10:41): 

And at the very least, even if it’s not charging for the call, at the very least they’re able to say, we got our user who was using our service to a solution to a place that they wanted to go. And so this person is more likely to come back and use our service. The LSAs again. Correct. So talk to me real quick about you were saying having multiple locations potentially. I run into attorneys all the time and I think we forget that the majority of attorneys in the country are rural or majority of practices, kind of individual practices, especially when we think about smaller solos or just a couple of attorneys and they’re trying to service. So in my case, I service the entire state of Tennessee, but if you’re looking for DUI attorney Memphis and I am located, although I would service Memphis, but I’m located in Nashville, they’re not necessarily going to find me. Is that right? I kind of would need to have a location in that near where somebody is searching for me, right? 

  

Travis Hoechlin (11:52): 

Yeah. So there’s a few different things depending on how you’re marketing, like pay-per-click marketing or PPC, Google AdWords. Location is not a factor. So you can market wherever you want and your ads going to show up. SEO if done right, you can write location pages. I can write a Nashville DUI page and I can write a Memphis DUI page and have the ability to get them both to show up in those locations. Now, where an office comes into play is in the local map pack, the three pack or however you want to call it, the maps if you will. So you have to have a location because it works off of your GMB page to show up in that three pack. 

  

(12:43): 

Also with now how it factors in with LSAs is one of the things that matters is location. They try to keep it as local as possible. So if all things being equal, budget reviews, answering the phone, all those different things, all those different variables were the same. If someone was standing outside of your office in Memphis and I was in Nashville and you were a DUI lawyer and they Google DUI lawyer, theoretically you should show up before I do because of your location. Now where multiple locations or offices would come into play there is that you could set up two different accounts, one in Memphis for example, and one in Nashville. So that variable is now playing in your favor. You are more centrally located to somebody who would be searching for a DUI lawyer in Nashville, or if they were searching for somebody else was searching for a DUI lawyer in Memphis. Now in very rural areas or uncompetitive areas, that may not matter as much, right? Okay. If you are early on it doesn’t happen so much anymore, but early on when folks were just figuring out about local service ads or they do a very niche, niche type of law, they would show up all throughout the state. And so you don’t need that. Now, a caveat to that is you have to have an actual office. A lot of times people try to use virtual offices 

  

(14:16): 

And Google will not approve those. 

  

Zack Glaser (14:18): 

Okay, so if I’m using the local Pony Express virtual mailbox or something like that, that’s not going to come up because you can’t physically stand outside my office actually. 

  

Travis Hoechlin (14:30): 

Correct. And there’s exceptions to that. I’m sure some of your listeners will be like, Hey, no, no, no, I did that and it worked and I get it. It’s kind of like cops and robbers. You’re just a step ahead of Google. At some point they’re going to catch you. If you have that working for you right now, ride it toast you, bucks you and keep going. But other than that, you need an actual 

  

Zack Glaser (14:51): 

Office. If I’m an attorney trying to show up on Google, and I say show up on Google in all of these different ways, one is kind of the natural S-E-O-S-E-R-P sort of way of coming up in the organic search. Another is to do pay-per-click, and then another is the LSAs. And then we also have maps that we can come up on that feed off of our Google My Business page. But the answer to a lot of these marketing questions of should I have another office, should I have another location? Should I be kind of comes down to what type of advertising you want to do even, doesn’t it? 

  

Travis Hoechlin (15:34): 

Yeah. Not only that comes what my best advice to firms out there is, what is your budget? 

  

(15:42): 

What type of law do you practice, and how quickly do you need to get a return on investment? And that may sound like a silly question, but we get folks that come in all the time and they may be brand new and they do personal injury, and I tell them, listen, let’s take a look at your competition. What does that look like? And I can give you a really good idea of how long it’s going to take to get your website to show up. Because a website or showing up in the maps is not an instant gratification type of marketing. It takes time. It’s more of a longer term strategy. It would be the best analogy I could give people is we tell people, it’s like buying a home. Zack, if you and I went and bought a house or a piece of property today, our friends and family could argue tomorrow that it was not a good investment based on the equity outside of the money we put down. 

  

(16:39): 

There’s probably no equity there tomorrow or a month from now. But we would like to point out that, hey, a year from now or two years from now, or 10 years from now, that’s hopefully one of the better investments we chose to do. That’s like building out a website. Do you have the ability to stomach building that up and taking time and then you put on top of that if you’re a contingency lawyer, pi employment law, things of that nature, are you factoring that in? I tell folks that call us all the time, even if I showed up on this phone call with five car accidents over my shoulder cases and handed them to you, you’re not getting paid for six or 12 month best case scenario, right? Right. So have you factored that in? Have you thought about that in your marketing and make sure you have the appropriate budget to go after these things. Now, if you’re a divorce lawyer or a family law lawyer or a criminal lawyer or things of that nature can scale much quicker. You can get cashflow into the business much quicker. So those are different things. So the maps and websites, that’s more of a longer term strategy. 

  

Zack Glaser (17:47): 

Okay, 

  

Travis Hoechlin (17:48): 

Now you go with pay-per-click ads or LSA ads, that’s more instant gratification. It’s like buying a move in ready apartment oceanfront, move in ready apartment. You have all the bells and whistles, you’re get all the benefits right away. And so is that a step you should take prior to building out your website? So sometimes if budget’s not appropriate, we would build out ads first, get business coming in the door, and I tell people, use some of the money we’re making you to then go back and invest in your website if that needs to happen that way some folks come to us and then we’ve been doing this for a long time and they tell me some type of story like, Hey, I’ve been practicing law for 20, 30 years. Business is great, but I know some of these young we snappers down the road are taking some of the cases that I should be getting, and I know they’re doing it from their website, so I don’t need to see business coming the door tomorrow as long as I’m cashflow positive in the next six to 12 months. Let’s go ahead and put our resources toward that 

  

(18:49): 

Because that’s going to exponentially, A website ranking is going to pay you exponentially as time goes on. Do you have the budget and the patience for that to get there or do you need to supplement some more instant gratification, a more instant gratification type of strategy prior? Or do you have the budget to do both? Which is obviously the best of both worlds, 

  

Zack Glaser (19:11): 

I guess they’re not mutually exclusive, but at the end of the day though, again, getting back to your first piece of advice, you got to answer the phone, all of that stuff, the benefit of having the ability to answer the phone and bring in, even if you go with an instant gratification mechanism, the PPC ads, you still have to be able to answer the phone calls and intake those files as well. 

  

Travis Hoechlin (19:40): 

And it also piggybacks on what you asked me, making sure you’re picking the right agency. If someone’s not asking you these questions, they potentially are leading you, maybe even on the right road, but the wrong way to get there. Because if they don’t know the law and listen, if they don’t know the law and they don’t understand contingency and how you get paid and they’re putting you in a strategy that is going to take you six or 12 months to get there, and then there’s another six or 12 months if they’re putting you on a path to where it takes six to 12 months to move the needle, 

  

(20:20): 

Now calls are coming in and it’s going to take you another six or 12 months even when the cases are in the door to get paid on it, are you able to weather the storm of a 24 month period before you see money coming into the business? I think a lot of people don’t take that into account. And certainly if a marketing agency, they’re used to marketing for a landscaper or a dentist or something like that, where how you get paid and how the business works is completely different, in my opinion, is something that you need to take. If you’re an attorney, you need to make sure they understand how that works. 

  

Zack Glaser (20:55): 

That’s a great point. That’s a great point. Well, Travis wrap up here. I could probably pick your brain about this for a long time, but let me finish up with what would be, I guess, the one first step that an attorney should take if they haven’t thought about marketing. They’re just going on referrals, word of mouth, referrals. They haven’t started thinking about marketing or they’re just about to, what’s the first step that they can take to jump into that? 

  

Travis Hoechlin (21:29): 

I think what I tell every firm or attorney that calls us is that before I bring you one new person or one stranger that hasn’t heard of you already, let’s take care of the referrals. Let’s make sure the fish that are trying to jump in the boat are actually able to do so cleaning up your website and giving you that, that’s your storefront, that’s your virtual storefront to the world at this point. Make sure you get a website put up, grab your Google My Business page where people can leave reviews. I think 80 some odd percent of people look at reviews before they hire an attorney. 

  

Zack Glaser (22:07): 

Oh yeah. 

  

Travis Hoechlin (22:08): 

So make sure that your storefront to the world in today’s day and age, it is your website. Make sure that’s up and running and make sure it’s clearly put what you do. So when the folks, because referrals typically comes in twos and threes, and so they get your name and two other people’s names, and at that point it’s a beauty contest who wins. So make sure you’re converting the folks that are already trying to find you because you’ve worked most likely worked long and hard to get people to get referred to you and make sure you’re converting those because that’s going to be your lowest hanging fruit. 

  

Zack Glaser (22:45): 

I like it. I like it. Well, Travis, thanks for talking with me about law firm marketing here. If people want to learn more about you and Rise Up Media, I know they can go to rise up media.com, R-I-Z-E-U-P-M-E-D-I a.com. Is there anywhere else that they can catch you guys? 

  

Travis Hoechlin (23:04): 

Yeah, you can touch base with me on LinkedIn. It’s Travis, last name is H-O-E-C-H-L-I-N, It’s a specialty, right? . Feel free to reach out to me and through LinkedIn or on the internet or on our website. 

  

Zack Glaser (23:21): 

Awesome. Thanks Travis.  

  

Travis Hoechlin (23:24): 

Appreciate it, Zack. Thank you. 

 

 

Continue Reading