EP069: Build Your 2024 Business and Marketing Plan for Law Firms

Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast, featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now, here's the founder and CEO of 10. Golden Rules, Jay Berkowitz.

Well, good morning, good afternoon. Good evening. Whatever time you're listening to this podcast. Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of online marketing podcast for law firms. I'm joined today by Alisa and Ike. And we call this our post webinar content. Every month, we do a workshop, a webinar, an interactive training session. And yesterday we did our 2024 planning session. So if you haven't started your 2024 planning yet, whether you're listening to this and the end of 23, or the start of 24, we're gonna give you a bunch of great tools to write your business and marketing plan for 2024. And we'll also give you a link to a page where you can download a couple interactive workbooks. So one of them is the planning workbook. The other one is a calculator. And we'll talk about how you set your business target. So the example we worked through, the firm wanted to 3.5 wanted to get to $3.5 million in revenue. And we have a simple worksheet where we calculated how many new cases they needed to sign every month and what their marketing costs would be minus the referral cases and things like that. So we'll go through all of that today. But without further ado, Alyssa ,Ike, how's it gone?

Doing good. I'm excited for this webinar definitely put out a lot of great information on the webinar, where you know, we're going back and you know, putting it all together for the people. So let's do it.

Second that was a very informational episode. So good one to tune into. Awesome.

Well, I'll let you guys take the lead, hit me with a couple of questions, and then we can talk through some of the content. All

right, I guess I'll take it off. So why do you think planning is so important? And another caveat? What does one do if things don't go according to plan?

Good, good. Part two question. So look, planning is so important because like we used to, in our business, like we just used to kind of work along and, of course, we had a plan in our head. But, you know, you really didn't know if you were getting where you want it to get to, and why you didn't get where you want it to get until we really had some business planning and some numbers and some real specific action plans that we could evaluate, why weren't things working? What was broken? What do we need to fix? So like, I'll give you an example from our business. You know, we set a goal and we said, look, here's where we want to get to, like, here's where we want to get to as a business, and we set our financial target. And then I'll just use a round number, like we wanted to add a million dollars worth of business. And so in order to do that, you can, you know, very easily divide that into 12 months and figure out, you know, how many new accounts do we need to sign every month? So to get a million dollars in business is 83,000 a month? Okay, that's a number I can understand now, right? And then let's say every client, you know, whether you're an agency or whether you're a law firm, let's say every client's worth $5,000. Okay, great. Now I got at 3000 a month, is my revenue, new revenue target 5000 A month is, you know, what, you're gonna make off a case or a client, you know, depending whether it's business to business, or you do single incident kind of stuff for family law. And then you divide that, so you divide at 3000 by 5000. I need 17 clients a month, new clients in order above my current clients and above my run rate, to add a million dollars worth of business. Okay, great. You know, so now you can do a simple calculation, you can say, what percentage of the calls that I get from like Google advertising, SEO, social media? What percentage of the calls do I get turned into clients? You know, and let's say it's 10%. Okay, so that's, that's pretty easy. Now, I know I need 170 leads a month, because 10% are going to turn into clients of those 17 clients. So I'm going to have to get 170 clicks, and conversions, or I'm going to have to get calls from Google screened, I'm going to have to up my game in terms of my referral game, etc, etc. So it becomes relatively easy to develop plans. If you know my target is I said, 70 that's what I need every month. So you know, that's where Having the plan makes it a lot more achievable. And then, like, let's say we break that 17 down a little bit further, okay? You know, the best leads for everybody are referrals. So when a past client says, Hey, Cole, Berkowitz and Berkowitz Law Firm, I'm not a lawyer, I only play one. In these examples. Let's say we call Burke woods and Burke Woods law firm. And these guys were great, you know, they, they did a fantastic job for me and my family, you got to call these guys. They're the ones to call? Well, when you get those calls, you know, I don't know, three quarters of them, turn into clients, those are the best. So now our number just got a lot easier. Because if we can get 10 more referrals, we know we're going to sign five more clients. And our number was 17 a month. Now five of those are going to come from referrals. Okay, how are we going to get more referrals? Well, we're going to proactively go out, and we're going to meet with other attorneys, because referring attorneys is the best place to start. Because, you know, a lot of people call the lawyer who did the real estate transaction when they get in a car accident, or a lot of people call, you know, they're the attorney who did their employment contract, when they're considering divorce, and they're gonna get referred out to the family attorney. So meeting with other attorneys is a great place to start meeting with other professionals, CPAs, things like that. And so you set a plan, like, I'm gonna have two meetings a week is a great place to start. Matter of fact, listen to the podcast with Charlie man on the $500,000 Referral Engine. And that's what he recommended two meetings a week with referral partners. So now you set your business plan in each of these categories, you know, I know how many I'm gonna get from Google screen local service ads, I know what my target is for social media, and SEO, and I know what I'm going to do to build my Referral Engine. And you've got a monthly plan. And it'd become very clear, you know, if you have a couple of soft months where you didn't get that many referrals, guess what, you know, go back and have a look, did you do your two networking meetings every week? So I think that's a long answer to your first question. I, your second question was, what happens? What goes out there?

Exactly when things don't go according to plan?

Yeah. Yeah, I think I just started tapping into that, because for us, you know, it's similar for us as it is, for a law firm. You know, we know we need a certain number of meetings a month to get a certain number of qualified clients. And it's pretty simple for us, like, you know, we're looking for folks who are not happy with their digital agency, they're not happy with their SEO guys. And a lot of times, we get a lot of meetings with law firms. And it's awesome, we'd love to talk to them, we'd love to get to know you. But they might be happy with their SEO guys. So that's not a qualified lead. For us. It's a great meeting, and we get to know them. And maybe one day, they're not going to be happy with their guys. But we know we need you know, somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 meetings, to get 15 qualified meetings to meet 15 folks who are not happy with their guys. In order, you know, from that we might write X number of proposals and sign y number of new clients. So it's very easy for us to look back. How many first meetings did we get? How many qualified meetings did we get? How many proposals do we prepare for our client for prospects? And if those numbers don't hit the target number, guess what? We don't sign the target number of clients. And it's very similar for the law firm. Right? You know, if you don't, if you don't get referrals from past clients, if you don't get referrals from those referral partners from the the other attorneys and the professionals that are the your great referral partners, it's very easy to see that you're not going to hit your numbers, because the clients don't come from magic.

I agree. I agree. Appreciate it.

Let's see, want to take the next trick question.

I do. So you mentioned in the webinar, the benefits of competitive analysis in the early stages of planning. Could you elaborate and talk about the importance of competitive analysis?

Yeah, for sure. So we do a planning meeting every quarter for ourselves. And you guys have sat in those, we also do, you know, facilitate planning meetings for our clients. And we always start the meeting out with the numbers. So let's set a nice baseline for where we all the numbers. So, you know, I talked about some of the numbers earlier, like let's look back over the last year or two years on, you know, how many new clients do we signed? What was the average value of a client? Where did those leads come from? Try and get as much data to break that down. Then we're going to broaden out a little bit. Okay. You know, we got 10 new clients from the internet. How many website visitors did it take to get 10 new clients? Is there a link between the number of website visitors the number of folks who filled out a form or did a chatter called us from the website and signed on as a new client? So we try and get as much of that data together and make as much of it smart, intelligent business data as possible, you know, IT guy was talking about not just looking at, oh, how many keywords did we rank for? We look at that, too. But we want to see how does it correspond to actual leads, and actual signed clients and linked that stuff as much as possible? And then you asked about the competitive analysis. So the next step is we want to see how are we looking versus competitors. So like, when we do this with our law firm partners, you know, let's say, you know, they went from 500 keywords to 700 keywords on the first page of Google. Okay, great. So now we rank for 700 keywords? How about the competitors? So when we first meet our clients, we look at their competitors, we tell them how they're ranking in the marketplace. So the guy you know, let's say, you know, they've got a big competitor in their market. Anyone other than Morgan Morgan, we don't count them because they're the big guy. But let's say, you know, they've got the biggest competitor in their market had 3000 keywords. So did that guy go from 3000 to 3500? Or did he go from 3000 to 2500. And we look at where they are versus the competitive set, so that we might be looking at five or six firms. We'll look at their keyword ranking, we'll look at how many links they have a look at how many Facebook fans they have, how many LinkedIn is how many installs and stuff like that, we'll look at the marketplace. And, you know, if we're going up, and typically, obviously, if we're working on our clients, they're going up, you know, 99 out of 100 cases. And we'll look at, you know, where are we grabbing a little bit of market share from who else is slipping down a little bit. If we're grabbing some of those coveted spots in the LSAs, the paper clicks in the SEOs. So the competitive analysis is like, we generally it's good to do that on a quarterly baseline, or at a very minimum, you want to do that on an annual template. And you want to, you know, grab all those numbers for yourself, get them in a spreadsheet, and then look at all your competitors through the external tools that we have.

Hey, I do have a follow up question. I listen to you. So I'm gonna say, No, go ahead. Oh, wait. Yeah. Okay. So what would you say? is the number one competitive advantage that law firms have? In today's age? Like, what is the number one thing if they have this, they are likely to win? Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah,

I mean, you know, I think that the number one thing, you want to try and achieve as as many local service add calls as you can get, but I think, you know, and I'll answer that question second. But, you know, technically, I would say the number one thing is your website, you know, I've always said Your website is your home base. And so, you know, you've got to have, you know, a new contemporary website that looks fresh, when folks show up, it can't look, you know, four or five years old, and a little bit outdated. But you know, as long as you have a new, clean, contemporary website that represents your brand and represents what you stand for, you kind of got that right. And then it's got to work really well in mobile. And then the next components is you've got to work hard on your SEO, search engine optimization, you know, updating the website. And our SEO strategy. We've been talking about this for seven years, is to answer questions and help people out. And last two or three years, Google's shown us that algorithm that we had suspected was coming, which Google calls it that helpful update algorithm. And on the on the homepage of almost any search, like if you search, what do I do, if I get hit by an Uber? There's going to be, you know, some paid ads, some LSAS. But then there's going to be a section called people also ask, and those are questions that people ask and the best answer shows up right at the top of that people also ask section. So if your website is helpful, if it answers questions, if you have videos and blog posts on your website that help people answer the questions they have about divorce, about bankruptcy, about car accidents about motorcycle truck accidents. So we do a lot of video content and a lot of question and answer content. That becomes the heart of the SEO strategy. And frankly, we also roll that out into the social media strategy goes on Google Maps goes out in your monthly newsletter. So that the Question and Answer approach the helpful approach is kind of the heart of building that super successful website. Both you know, both successful and Google the Google SEO loves it. And you know, obviously the consumer comes to website and if you can answer their questions and look him in the eye on V You know, and you seem like a trustworthy solution, you're gonna get those phone calls. So, you know, I guess your question was like, What's the number one asset, you need to have as a law firm, you know, you need to have that that home base, that website that, you know, checks off all those boxes, I talked about looks contemporary, easy for people to navigate, very, very good, mobile, easy to, for people to call and get in touch with you, you know, most people want to call and you're going to convert calls much better. And then it's super helpful, you know, that you've got blogs and videos that answer people's questions. And that's, that's really the win. And then, you know, it's, it's hard, you know, you said, What's the number one asset? Well, great. Performing local service ads is definitely the best way to get leads today. And in my opinion, and also the data backs me up. Because when someone calls you from the local service ads, that's a phone call. And we typically find phone calls, convert one and four, one and five. So the best thing you can do is optimize for the local service ads right at the top of the page, because then you're gonna get those phone calls. And, as opposed to clicks to your website, which are great, too, you know, you also need that some people want to go to the organic, and they want to click over to your website. But typically, if your website's doing a great job, one in 10, people go to your website will call you, or will fill out your form. But the local service ads, one in four, you know, everybody calls you like they click you and they call you. So one in four people are going to convert to a client. So the math with the local service ads is great. So we have what we call our secret algorithm. If you haven't heard it, definitely go to our YouTube channel, and check out our secret algorithm to get ranked in the top three for the local service ads. And we also have a great training session called help I fallen and I can't get back in the top three. And it's like that old commercial helped by fallen I can't get back up. But this is if you've fallen out of the top of the local service ads, we have a several strategies you can use to get back in the top three. And we've done it recently for two new clients who had fallen out of the top three. And one of them. I mean, how many calls did they get the Florida guys just got like $6,000 worth of calls, they got about 40 calls, right? And signed eight or 10 clients. So we definitely have a strategy to get you back in the top three.

God bless. Well, I would encourage anyone to watch their webinar if not solely for the grainy that's on those pictures. Because those words.

So you speak very highly of the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And you mentioned the advantages of implementing it. In your marketing plan. Can you touch on what that is? And how to utilize the EOS scorecard?

Yeah, so that's a great question. Thank you. I love love EOS. And I guess I got the book traction eight or nine years ago. And I guarantee you, there's a few attorneys who are gonna listen to this. And they're gonna be exactly the same as me. And they're gonna say, you know, everybody kept talking about this book, traction, who's a best best seller, and I kept, you know, all these consultants kept giving me this book traction, and everyone's talking about traction. And I tried to read it, and it just, you know, I just couldn't get through it. And I was that I was that person, right. So what I found out with Eos, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, and this is a system was developed by Gino Wickman, about 20 years ago. And I guess the book traction has been around for 10 or 12 years. And 200,000 companies are now using EOS as their operating system for their business. And so what helped for me is that Gino wrote another book called Get a grip. You know, if everyone has been telling you, you got to get traction. And I, I go to a lot of, you know, conferences and seminars, as you guys know. And always the people who are the most successful, the attorneys I meet who are really doing great, are running on Eos, or, you know, or they have a great business coach or they have another maybe they're on scaling up or something, but they're using a business operating system. And the most valuable thing is everybody's on the same page at the company. So with Eos, you're able to have a common set of terminology, a scorecard, as you mentioned, which is awesome. I'll touch on that in a sec. And everybody has a measurable that they're responsible for. And everybody has a very common set of language. So you put the right people in the right seats. There's a whole organizational structure that EOS helps you develop and then you develop very clear job descriptions. So everybody knows what they're responsible for. And then Everybody has a number. And every department has a number. So for example, we went through an EOS scorecard that a law firm could look at every single week in what's called a level 10 meeting. And that's another EOS terminology a level 10 meeting, where you go through five or six agenda items, every single week with the with the management team. So you're gonna look at your numbers. So this law firm, the target was 1000 website visits every week. 70 new calls every week, when he six website chats, so leads from the chat box on the website, 20 forms, 15 Professional referrals, 15 past customer referrals, 21 new sign clients per week, so but at month, three new Google reviews, and we track their their goal is a 4.8 google star rating. So each of these responsibilities, you know, getting 20 form leads that was assigned to Eloise and getting 21 signed clients that was assigned to Jerry, who's the head of the intake department. So each of these numbers is assigned to a person, and every person has one or two numbers that they're responsible for in their job. So, you know, again, we talked earlier on about, like, what's the difference between having a plan and not having a plan? You know, and it's kind of like, successful firms all have an operating system, they have structure, they have standard operating procedures, you know, they have systems, and they're all super numbers oriented, the successful firms, the bigger firms are all looking at the numbers, managing to the numbers, and we've kind of beat that one up here today.

Thank you, that was a very thorough answer.

And by the way, go right now to Amazon and buy Get a grip it or traction. But if you've you know, if you've had traction hanging around, trust me, you buy Get a grip, it's told in the form of a parable, like a story. And it's fantastic. And then you, you know, for what's in Eos, there's two managers or two partners, in the really successful companies. There's the visionary and the integrator. The integrator loves traction, the visionary, typically a lot of people probably listening to this, that, you know, the person who, you know, founded the business and has lots of the ideas. And he's always bringing new ideas back to the firm, and everybody rolls their eyes, because everybody's too busy to do all the new ideas, right? And that person is what's called the visionary. And then when you when you go through Eos, you divide the tasks. So the visionary can go out and be a visionary. And the integrator is going to make things happen.

Hey, I got a really tough one for you. Now, let's see if you're gonna be able to answer this. Let's say you're a law firm, you're at the bottom of the punch bottom of the pack. And you're looking to figure out what's the first step you can take to start a way back, and your budget is low? Because of course, you had the bomb attack, and I've given them flights. What would you say? That was?

You know, that's a good question. And we've definitely seen some of those scenarios. And I guess I'm going to default back, you know, and since our theme today is planning, you know, I presented some statistics in this webinar. And we have two very similar firms. One firm has signs about 80 cases a month, and one firm signs about 20 or 25 cases. Both of them get about 5000 visits to the website, both of them get about 200 phone calls, both of them get about 50 chats and 50 web form leads, what's the difference between one firm and the other firm. And I basically said, you know, one firms got their shit together. And the other firm can't get out of their own way. And excuse the language. The slide, I said the firm's got their act together. But basically, like the one firm is a business plan. They have a COO, the COO shows up in our meeting, the marketing director shows up in our meeting, there, they have an attorney who shows up at our meeting who's responsible for intake and reporting in the Google Local Service ads Google screen. And and you know, it's a business that runs like a business. The other firm, you know, might might show up on our meeting, they might not their Google stars is like 3.4, something like that, you know, they are disorganized business, right. Like they don't get back to people when they call, they missed phone calls. They're, you know, obviously the legal side of the house is not run that smoothly. And that's their customers are always calling them like, where's my case at where's my case? And all of those things mean that they're not going to get the Google reviews, they're not going to get referrals, you know? So that's one of the biggest differences, right? Like the firm that's got their act together. They get a lot of referrals. Because the past customers are very happy. You know, this firm kept me informed. They got me a really great settlement. They call me indicated to me all the time, if they had to go to court, they went to court, they were super organized, they were largely in charge. They want my case, right, like people know, you know, and then obviously, the firm that was, you know, the customers were always calling them, where's my case at where's my case that, you know, they're going to not give them the five star Google reviews. And they're not going to give them the referrals. So you know, both firms had about the same web traffic, and both firms had about the same number of calls. But there's a huge difference in those calls when someone's calling from a referral. And, you know, someone's like, like, one of our clients is a criminal attorney. And he's really, really good. And a lot of the police actually refer criminals to him. They're like, Hey, you seem like a nice guy, but you messed up here in this bar fight, give Michael White a call. Because, you know, Michaels going to bail your butt out of trouble. So, you know, that's the difference between getting your act together, not having your act together? And then, you know, specifically answer your question, it was a good question, you know, how do you change things? Well, all of the things we talked about, right? You know, you've got to have, I would immediately read, get a grip and traction and look at having an operating system, I would immediately start a weekly management meeting, I'd immediately put a scorecard in place of all your numbers, and then, you know, slowly start working at projects that are gonna improve your business, like we do a brainstorming every quarter, and come up with the new projects that are going to change the trajectory of our business, you know, and every couple of years to three years, the team says, hey, you know, our websites looking a little out of date. So we assign a project, and someone's in charge of getting the new website built. Or we look at our numbers, and our maybe our SEO slipped a little bit for us. And, you know, so we assigned, you know, maybe change the person who's focused on SEO, or maybe everybody's been too busy focusing on our clients. So we haven't focused on our own stuff. And then we assign these quarterly projects, we call them rocks, in EOS are mastering the Rockefeller habits, they use the term rocks, and our company sets five major rocks for the quarter. And someone in the companies responsible for each of those rocks. And then everybody in the company has five rocks, that's their own personal rocks. So it could be something like, you know, hey, I want to update my Google certifications. You know, I have Google AdWords, but I don't have Google Analytics certification, you know, for an agency, or, you know, somebody might want to learn, you know, we've got a couple people working on AI doing AI projects, artificial intelligence. So we set those rocks as a company, and we set the rocks for the individuals. So if you put these relatively simple business, planning, and business operating principles in place, you know, it's not going to happen overnight. But this, one of the other firms we deal with, you know, took two or three years, and I think their Google, their Google stars went from, like 3.4. To they're now 4.8, just by getting their act together, they hired a good agency, I can't speak highly enough about 10 golden rules. But you know, we they got a lot of the right pieces in place, and they turned their business around.

Beautiful storage, man, beautiful story. I appreciate it.

I have one more question. If you have time for it, Jay. Yeah, let's hit it. So tgr, we utilize an internet marketing model, kind of acts as a funnel for marketing efforts. What are some of the initiatives we recommend incorporating in an internet marketing funnel? I know you mentioned SEO, and LSA.

Great question. So in terms of setting up your marketing plan, we often in our industry, talk about a funnel. And the funnel is like when you pour water into a funnel, like say you want to get it into a canister or something, use a funnel or if you're pouring gas into a gas tank, use a funnel, right? So we think of marketing, like all the different marketing sources out there as a funnel that funnels customers prospects into your website. So we talked about your SEO, your local service ads, your pay per click your social media, YouTube videos, different feeds. And, you know, we have webinars and a podcast that all feed traffic and opportunity into our 10 Golden Rules website. And then on the website itself, you want to track all the numbers, and you want to have different conversion points. So like a law firm, you want to have the phone number at the top right hand corner. You want to have a forum people can fill out if they're foreign people, and you want to have a live chat that they could chat on the website. And so you want to measure how much traffic comes to the website? What's your conversion rate, what percentage of the people who come to the website become a lead and then you might want to do some testing within that. So some landing page testing and different offer testing on your website. On the internet marketing model. We also have link building so we have you know many websites in the model. Link to the major your main website. See link. Backlinks are very important for SEO, search engine optimization, other sites linking to your site. And then on the back end of the internet marketing model, you've got opportunity for the folks who don't convert. So, you know, everybody will film fills out a form, you want to make sure they go on your newsletter list. Or you might even have a follow on email program, where if somebody you know, comes to your website, they fill out a form, they don't sign on to become a client. And then you send them a series of six or eight emails over the next four to six weeks, where you send them some customer testimonials. You send them a personal note from the founder CEO, you maybe talk about some community activities, you show some videos, and you send a series of fixed emails over four to six weeks, to the folks who haven't signed on as well. And then the final piece on the back end, is remarketing. When people come to our clients websites, and they don't, you know, they don't fill out a form and they don't call, we show them banner ads on other websites to remind them because, you know, look, a lot of times when you're looking for a flight, or sneakers or law firm, we've all had the experience where those you look at a pair of sneakers and those Nikes follow you on every website you go to for the next two weeks. And that's called remarketing. So that's also on the back end of what we call the Internet marketing model. Well, I think we've, you know, we've we've nailed this one. Thank you guys so much for, you know, for showing up on the webinar. And give me the great questions. And anyone has any questions, definitely head over to 10 Golden rules.com, spelled te n 10, Golden rules.com. Or check out our YouTube channel to see the workshop we actually recorded this workshop. Oh, and Alyssa, do you have the link to get those workbook downloads?

Yes, I will include them in the podcast show notes. Yeah,

so just down below in the notes, click the link and you can get that workbook I talked about to figure out how many cases you have and how many referrals and how many leads and how many cases you need to hit your number. Guys, thank you so much. I always give you the last word buddy.

Thank you for joining us on The 10 Golden Rule podcast. Save less and never stress.

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