Lost In Translation? Marketing To Spanish Speaking Communities

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Intro: Managing your law practice can be challenging. Marketing, time management, attracting clients, and all the things besides the cases that you need to do that aren’t billable. Welcome to this edition of The Un-Billable Hour, the law practice advisory podcast. This is where you’ll get the information you need from expert guests and host Christopher Anderson here on Legal Talk Network.

Christopher T. Anderson: Welcome to The Un-Billable Hour. I am your host, Christopher Anderson. And today’s episode is about marketing. Everybody is like, yeah, marketing, we love it. We took a break from marketing for a couple of episodes, but we’re back.

But this is marketing with a multicultural twist. You will recall that in the mean triangle of what it is that a law firm business must do, we’ve all got to acquire new clients. We call that acquisition. We’ve got to then produce the results that we promised; production. And we’ve got to achieve the business and professional results for the owners, otherwise, why are they investing in the business, that’s you, the owners, our listeners. Of course in that center of the triangle that is you and you are driving it all for better or worse.

In today’s episode we’re going to discuss multicultural marketing and how that can help you to grow your business, and for that today my guest is Hugo Gomez. He is the Founder of Abogados NOW. And we’re going to call today’s episode of The Un-Billable Hour, first I have to understand you.

So I am pleased to introduce my guest, Hugo Gomez. Again, he is the Founder of Abogados NOW. It’s a national Spanish marketing agency which helps attorneys to advertise to underrepresented communities. Hugo is on a mission to forge greater awareness of Spanish-speaking communities. He empowers law firms with high performing and cost-effective Spanish digital marketing campaigns.

Hugo’s passion for empowering underrepresented communities began early in his career where he noticed a gap in the legal industry and set out to create a solution. Hugo developed a custom Spanish marketing plan that helps attorneys to reach a market that quite honestly other firms are missing. And that’s been something that I’m personally aware of, it’s something we’ve been working on. So I’m really excited to welcome Hugo to the show. Welcome.

Hugo Gomez: Thanks so much Christopher.

Christopher T. Anderson: My absolute pleasure. So my introductions are notoriously bad. I think that one wasn’t so bad, but it was still a little bit lacking. So let’s get a little bit more background there before we get into the sort of the meat and potatoes of multicultural marketing. What made you get started in this business? Why are you helping firms advertise across cultures?

Hugo Gomez: Prior to starting Abogados NOW, around 2018 or so, I had been working at another legal lead generation company that simply sold leads. It just sold data to attorneys. And I noticed that a lot of the attorneys there had a really strong appetite for a competitive edge, namely through this firm’s particular Spanish leads offering. What I noticed is that a lot of attorneys knew that there were limitations in buying data. There was only so much data that you could buy from a third-party company. And as the demographics are changing in the United States, attorneys are aware that they need to branch out to different markets and they recognize that they needed their own Spanish brands. So as opposed to buying data from third-party companies, they recognized that they needed to build their own Spanish brands to market to.

And so we decided to do that. I started Abogados NOW with the intent of helping attorneys brand themselves in Spanish so that they could have this competitive edge and not entirely rely on third-party data companies for their ability to grow.

Christopher T. Anderson: Right, because it’s not — I mean I’m going to presume, hopefully not incorrectly, that this isn’t just about translating your website, like hiring somebody to go, translate it to, in this case Spanish, but to whatever language the community I want to market to. There’s something a little bit deeper than that?

Hugo Gomez: Much deeper. The way we describe our program is it’s not a translation exercise. Abogados NOW is a cultural exercise. It’s a cultural commitment. What we oftentimes see attorneys do is they’ll add a Google Translate button to their website in the hopes of attracting Spanish speaking audiences. Ultimately it doesn’t work. And what we’ve identified is that what works in English won’t work in Spanish and vice versa.

Christopher T. Anderson: Yeah, and that’s not unique to Spanish, right, I mean that’s every language, like things get funny. If anybody wants to do it — my son actually has showed me this. He is on this kick, if anybody has got teenagers, they’ll know this one, where the Burger King ad right now is like being translated into multiple languages.

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But then what they do is they are taking the new language where Burger King has used someone like you probably to help them be culturally aware and relevant, but then they’re translating it back to English, and it’s very funny. And so translations don’t work because they miss a lot, right?

Hugo Gomez: They do, yeah. And in Spanish, there are so many different communities that speak Spanish. The dialects, if you will, change from Cuban-Americans, to those in Mexico, to those in Guatemala and Ecuador, and we recognize that. So what we want to do when we help an attorney is identify what are the local markets that they’re really trying to grow in, what is the general immigrant makeup of that local market and build a strategy around these markets specifically.

Christopher T. Anderson: Got it. So what kind of Spanish is being spoken because that can be quite different, yeah?

Hugo Gomez: It’s the type of Spanish for sure and also the value sets. What we find is that immigrants, their values oftentimes are defined by how they came into the country, with or without documentation, those are the most obvious traits of where their values are defined. So we take all that into consideration; immigrant makeup, type of language, type of Spanish that we’re to employ, it’s a real commitment to going beyond translations.

Christopher T. Anderson: Yeah, no, that is fascinating, and I think that is a piece that many missed. But so before we kind of dive into how and how it works, because I’m going to presume it does otherwise you probably wouldn’t be in business, I think we need to explain a little bit more about why law firms should be thinking about this. So whether you’re a family law firm, criminal defense law firm, estate planning law firm, business law firm, why should this be an attractive opportunity to reach into, we’ll talk, because you’re my guest to Spanish speaking, because yours is called Abogados NOW, not whatever the Chinese translation of that would be. Why is this an opportunity that law firms should be paying attention to?

Hugo Gomez: I like to first start with just the population numbers. Spanish speaking markets in the country are the fastest growing market segment in the United States. Nearly one in five people in the United States are of Hispanic or Latino descent. So it’s a massive opportunity, just as defined by the numbers.

Secondly, it’s just harder to grow. This is the conversation that I have all the time with attorneys. They oftentimes say, Hugo, I’ve been trying to go for the last five years, three years, two years. I just feel like I’m paying more and I’m getting a lot less. And we believe that this is because the bar of entry has been lowered in marketing. Almost anyone can get into the space to market right against some of the largest market players.

Christopher T. Anderson: Right. So most of those entry people are going after the easy stuff, right, the low hanging fruit, which is getting very expensive?

Hugo Gomez: Yeah. And more often than not it’s like pay-per-click search, Google, Facebook ads, advertisements of that nature are just like low hanging fruit and as a result the demand goes up, thus the price to advertise goes up, thus the acquisition cost goes up. So it all funnels right down to slimmer margins.

And we’ve seen that in these English speaking markets, in English speaking advertising. So as it gets more crowded and as it gets easier for even solo practitioners to run their own marketing campaigns without agencies or any other consultants, we’re going to see even tighter margins and a growing need for a competitive edge to grow your practice.

So there are a lot of different competitive edges out there for attorneys right now. I think Spanish is obviously the one we promote. That’s what our business is built on. But there’s personal branding, there’s public relations, television spots. There are still quite a number of opportunities out there to corner a competitive edge. We just recognize that as defined by the numbers, Spanish marketing is the next wave of that competitive edge for attorneys across the United States.

Christopher T. Anderson: So you’ve outlined very carefully and very well I think. Listen, 20%, you said one out of five people in the United States are from a Hispanic descent of some sort. Aren’t there enough professionals, enough law firms that can cater to Spanish speakers as Spanish speakers themselves, so immigrants themselves or descendants of immigrants who are already saturating that market? Does it make sense for law firm owners, let’s say like me, who might feel a little bit inauthentic going to that market space?

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Hugo Gomez: Yeah. Authenticity is key here. We want to do right by these communities. So the way we address authenticity is by qualifying an attorney who is interested in our program. The most important aspect of joining our program is to ensure that you already have an established intake process in Spanish. So if this is entirely new, meaning if your firm has never dabbled, if you will, with Spanish marketing or attracted Spanish speakers in the past, it’s probably going to be very difficult to break out into any marketing without the proper resources.

So we’ve taken that into account. We provide supplemental intake in Spanish processes, so that attorneys who have never built out these processes can on day one have an established Spanish intake process built out for them by us. So it is entirely possible to do this even if there isn’t a track record or an experience there and our goal is to make sure that we can connect those dots appropriately. We want to make sure that we can promote the firm authentically as being truly bilingual friendly.

Christopher T. Anderson: Okay. Well, that certainly makes sense. So let’s ask the flip side of the question then and as we now get closer to kind of the core of this, which is, all right, you’re out there, you’ve identified this need and you’ve built a business around it, why do you feel that attorneys currently and legal marketers currently are tending to ignore the needs of Spanish speaking communities? Why has this not been a focus up until now?

Hugo Gomez: I think generally speaking, there’s just not much of an awareness about the numbers and how the numbers relate to the market opportunity.

Secondly, we’ve seen a lot of the largest players in digital marketing “try out” Spanish marketing and it hasn’t panned out for them. We’ve seen that. And generally speaking, we just think that they did it the wrong way. This is a very — we’ve had to do autopsies, if you will, on prior firms’ approaches in Spanish marketing and we’ve always found that they use the Google Translate features, they use technology to try to connect to these communities and ultimately they treated this exercise as a translation exercise, not as the cultural commitment that I discussed earlier.

So I think generally speaking, there’s just not much of an awareness which is what we’re trying to change. But secondly, those that have attempted this at scale, I think generally speaking, from our understanding, just hasn’t been done the right way.

Christopher T. Anderson: Okay. Well, that makes total sense. We’re going to take a break here to hear from our sponsors and then we’ll come back. Hugo, we’re going to talk about cultural knowledge and sensitivity and like really what needs to go into the content to keep it real. But first, a word from our sponsors and we’ll be right back.

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Christopher T. Anderson: And we’re back with Hugo Gomez. Hugo, again, has founded a business called Abogados NOW which helps law firms to market to Spanish speaking communities.

And so we talked a little bit about the why in the earlier conversation here and so I want to turn now a little bit to how. And the first how here again is, this is me in my imposter syndrome, right, and I am going to bet a lot of listeners are feeling the same way. What role do you feel that actual knowledge of the cultural system and sensitivity, what role do those have in multicultural marketing? How can law firms that work with you kind of get over that feeling of being an imposter in that space?

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Hugo Gomez: Yeah, it’s going back to authenticity. What we found is that these programs, these campaigns that we run in Spanish are mostly successful when we honestly promote the firm’s bilingual staff or again the ability to call the firm through Spanish intake, so it’s either one or the other.

So the most important thing is to be honest to set expectations with this market because the last thing that we want to do is promote the idea that a non-Spanish speaking attorney is all of a sudden going to speak to the market in Spanish. That’s not what we want. And in fact, we shy away from strategies where an attorney is forced to speak in Spanish on camera if they’re not fluent. It’s really key. And so we see this mistake made all the time, especially on television, on radio, where a clearly non-fluent Spanish speaker, an attorney is trying to fit into the market, it never works.

Christopher T. Anderson: No, I’ve seen — I am thinking about it now. It’s like they are cringeworthy moments a lot of the time.

Hugo Gomez: They are, yeah. And we recognize that, the market recognizes that. I think because we’re so focused on digital marketing, we know that markets online, audiences online generally recognize inauthenticity very quickly and so what we try to do in Spanish marketing strategies is really trying to put other Spanish speaking attorneys in front of cameras or paralegals or receptionists or other Spanish speaking staff to be that representative voice of the firm. And that’s what we promote on digital. That’s where we feel the authenticity really shows itself rather than us trying to wedge in a Spanish speaking strategy for a firm that’s not really bilingual friendly.

Christopher T. Anderson: Speaking of that, so then going to that point, do you feel it’s essential or necessary that a firm be completely vertically integrated; in other words, have Spanish speaking attorneys and Spanish speaking paralegals and Spanish speaking intake team in order to be able to do this successfully?

Hugo Gomez: Not necessarily. We found that the majority of the members in our program don’t speak Spanish and have arguably pretty limited Spanish speaking staff, but it’s ample enough for us to promote that authenticity, that bilingual friendliness. So for anyone that’s considering advertising in Spanish, they could just start with the bilingual virtual professional in order for us to promote their bilingual friendliness. So it doesn’t have to be a fully built out strategy or fully built out team, if you will. So we just want to be honest about what that level of access is.

Christopher T. Anderson: Yeah, I would think the honesty is important and obviously any team members that you can bring to bear would be helpful.

All right, so let’s then focus — that’s sort of a little bit more of the how — well, I actually have another question about the how, like what’s the best medium for this? What do you find is the most successful? So we both talked about low hanging fruit being paid search, pay-per-click, Google AdWords I can imagine. Where are you finding the most success for your customers in Spanish language advertising Spanish language marketing? Is it also paid search or is it other avenues?

Hugo Gomez: Yeah, so it’s a combination of a few efforts, namely paid search, video marketing, so through YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and for some markets Hulu has some Spanish ad offerings based on their network relationships with some other Spanish networks. That’s what we see is the critical marketing channels to go after.

Now, there’s one asterisk to that. It needs to be on mobile. It’s not that we’re ignoring desktop or laptop traffic; it’s the fact that the majority of the Spanish speaking market is making life decisions through their mobile phones, at a higher clip, at a higher index rate than the general market.

The Pew Research Center has done numerous studies on mobile behavior through multicultural segments and they found and concluded that Spanish speakers in the United States overwhelmingly over-index mobile usage than the general market. So these channels are critical, but you need to advertise to these markets on mobile phones.

Christopher T. Anderson: I think it’s a trend we’ve seen across the board, but you’re saying it’s even more accentuated in the communities that you’re trying to serve.

Hugo Gomez: Definitely. And so it’s surprising to hear the amount of attorneys that we have spoken to that have tried Spanish marketing and have not really factored in the mobile factor. It does make a huge difference in terms of your market reach.

Christopher T. Anderson: All right, we’re going to take another break here. We’re going to come back and I just want to get a little bit deeper here into this question, because I think listen, the listeners here are mostly attorneys, many of whom are making these kinds of decisions so I want to drill a little bit deeper about what your recommendations are when the attorney doesn’t speak Spanish, but like you mentioned, you just need a couple of team members who do. But how do you continue that authenticity and meet the promises that you made in that marketing? But first, a word from our sponsors.

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Christopher T. Anderson: All right, we are back once again with Hugo Gomez, Founder of Abogados NOW. We’ve been talking about marketing and tapping into really the Spanish speaking communities. And I think first of all, I wanted to ask Hugo, whether what we’re talking about here, though you are Abogados NOW, whether some of these principles would probably work for other languages?

Hugo Gomez: Definitely, and it just comes down to studying the markets. So we see a huge opportunity in Chinese markets, Filipino markets, African-American markets. As long as there is a dedicated focus and as long as the practitioners are truly experts in understanding these markets and applying them to your business needs, there’s always going to be an opportunity there.

So yeah, right now we are currently focused in Spanish. I do anticipate a version of our organization where we branch out into these other growing communities.

Christopher T. Anderson: Yeah, avocat, that was French; poor French, but French. So let’s drill down a little bit because I just know people wanted — I think you probably piqued people’s interests but like they’re hesitant, I can feel it out there right now. I can feel people going like yeah, but I know you said, we could have a virtual system, but that doesn’t feel very authentic. And these are attorneys primarily who I am thinking of who don’t speak Spanish or not well, right, the people you don’t want to put on television with some — I was thinking about like trying to pretend to speak Spanish poorly, but I am not even good enough to speak Spanish poorly so I’m not going to do it.

But like who just won’t feel authentic and know it won’t come off as aesthetic. The attorneys don’t speak Spanish and then are going to market to the Spanish speaking community. I think you’ve shown that you can effectively do that. But then how about servicing that business? Like what are they going to — because at the end of the day the real lifeblood of all these firms is not who they win through marketing, it’s that those clients will then refer other clients? What do they need to do when they don’t speak Spanish themselves to make sure that these clients feel served by an organization that cares?

Hugo Gomez: Yeah, it’s about setting out expectations in the beginning. It starts with proper advertising language and making that flow to proper intake. For instance, we don’t advertise oftentimes that the attorney speaks Spanish; what we do often advertise is that there is a friendly bilingual staff ready to speak to you in Spanish when you call them. Meaning, the call line is going to go directly to an intake person that speaks Spanish directly and to walk them through the entire process should that client be retained.

Now, what will more often than not happen, especially with an adult who is Spanish dominant, meaning they don’t speak any English, more often than not they’re going to bring a loved one with them to their next meeting, Zoom meeting or in person, it could be a neighbor, it could be a relative, it could be a friend down the street, this is what we find as what happens organically after a client signs up. So even with the — you can have the most bilingual friendly firm, more often than not though that client, that Spanish speaking dominant will more often than not bring a loved one who speaks English with them on these calls. So the pressure is not really there. The most pressure really is in qualified Spanish intake; those processes need to be built out, processing the client thereafter is just like any other client that speaks in any other language.

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Christopher T. Anderson: Let’s put on our future goggles and look a little bit forward. What do you see as the changing landscape in legal marketing over the coming three to five years?

Hugo Gomez: I see a focus happening right now and I think it will be the permanent change moving forward in firms not promoting their brands, but promoting personal brands. So I am seeing with dentists, I am seeing this with cardiologists, I am seeing this in the legal profession, folks are branding their own personas in front of these markets, in front of English and Spanish speaking markets, and I think with the advent of AI, we’re already seeing technology, effective technology today where an English speaking attorney can speak on camera and it will naturally translate that content in Spanish, down to the mouth movements and down to the vocal tonality of that attorney to authentically speaking Spanish. So there are semi-direct translations which we’re not all in for, but I think these technologies are going to make it such where personal branding in any language is going to be possible and I think it’s going to be required for a firm to grow.

Christopher T. Anderson: And I imagine you’re keeping close touch with that as well.

Hugo Gomez: We are already running experiments on this and it’s pretty surprising what we’re seeing.

Christopher T. Anderson: What’s one of the biggest surprises?

Hugo Gomez: So we oftentimes look at click-through rates through video ads, we’re seeing the highest level of click-through rates from video ads that are employing this AI software.

Christopher T. Anderson: Really?

Hugo Gomez: Yeah. So it may highlight, we are not concluding this yet, but it may highlight that Spanish speaking attorneys might have an edge in the greater Spanish marketing landscape for attorneys.

Christopher T. Anderson: Yeah, that would certainly make sense if that were true. We will have to continue to watch this and maybe update this with you in a little while.

So as we come towards the close of the show, what would you say would be a key takeaway for our listeners that they should take away from the show if they don’t remember anything else?

Hugo Gomez: It’s only going to get more difficult to grow through English marketing and so you need a competitive edge.

Christopher T. Anderson: Yeah, because the demographics are changing, right?

Hugo Gomez: Demographics are changing, the technology is changing, the devices are changing, the adoption of these devices. I know everyone is talking about AI, but it really is the biggest shift in how we’re all thinking about advertising.

I want to speak a little more on the personal branding side. I don’t know if Google Search is here to stay in the way that we know Google Search is today. And it’s time to start redesigning what we envision for our marketing stacks moving forward for the next decade or so. And so it’s not just language, it’s technology, it’s ad units, it’s anything that sets you apart from what all of your competitors are doing right now.

Christopher T. Anderson: Yeah, definitely, definitely. I mean I feel that and I want to continue to watch that, so thanks for bringing that to us.

That does bring us to the end. So we’re going to wrap up this edition of The Un-Billable Hour. I want to thank our listeners for being with us and to remind them that our guest today has been and is Hugo Gomez, the Founder of Abogados NOW.

Hugo, we only got to spend a half hour here together, if folks want to learn more, if there’s questions that — I know we’ve answered some, but I’m sure there are some that we haven’t, how can they get in touch with you and learn more?

Hugo Gomez: Feel free to email me at [email protected]. That’s my direct inbox, happy to answer any questions there. If you would like to meet with one of our team members about how we can help you out, you can book an appointment through the calendar at abogadosnow.com. You can select the date and time and we’ll meet you over Zoom to talk about your growth goals.

Christopher T. Anderson: That A-B-O-G-A-D-O-S N-O-W.com. Thank you so much Hugo. It’s really been a pleasure having you on.

Hugo Gomez: Thanks so much Christopher

Christopher T. Anderson: You bet. And of course this is Christopher T. Anderson and I look forward to being with you all next month with another great guest as we learn more about topics that help us build the law firm business that works for you.

And don’t forget on the third Thursday of every month at 3:00 p.m. Eastern, 12:00 p.m. Pacific, that’s 2:00 p.m. Central and 1:00 p.m. Mountain, if anybody is counting, but on the third Thursday of every month at 3:00 Eastern we have the Community Table where you can sign in, the notes are here on the website, so you can take a look, but you can sign in and join us as The Un-Billable Hour hosts the Community Table every single month and your questions get answered and you get to be a part of the show.

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