EP080: Hockey Stick Growth Curve! Meet Attorney Darron Stewart and Director of Marketing Kevin Moran & Learn How They Achieved a 237% Increase in Leads and Cases

You'd be surprised how much people will watch your videos and then make a decision. They get to know your personality and use it as an opportunity to let them get to know you and who you are. Because, you know, a lot of times as we know, as attorneys, clients will make a decision based on the salesmanship of the attorney, whether they like the attorney or not, whether they feel comfortable with the attorney. So that's one thing we try and do as well.

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, hello, everyone and welcome to this month's Webinar. My name is Jay Berkowitz, and I'm so pleased to be here with my friends Darren Stewart and Kevin Moran, from Stewart and Stewart. So today, we're gonna do an awesome case study. I think it's awesome. So I'm proud of it because it's, it's a hockey stick. A hockey stick in business terms means your growth chart looks like this chart here on the left. And a hockey stick is obviously shaped with the blade and the shaft in such a manner that you want your business results going up into the right. So today we're going to do that and I'm going to introduce my friends. First of all, Darren Stewart is a partner of Stewart and Stewart. And he was born in Louisville, and lived in Indy since 1970. And he's a partner in the firm and he represents families during tough times when when they have accidents, and handles wrongful death, automobile crashes, truck crashes, product liability, construction, injuries, injuries and other severe injury cases. And he's a dad and husband to Giselle who I've met who's awesome. And I think one of the coolest things he rides a motorcycle and a firetruck. And he participates in many local parades and events. And there's lots of great other things that know Darren pretty well now for five or six years. So without further ado, let's meet Kevin Moran is the director of operations. And he joined Stewart and Stewart in 2017. And he oversees the firm's intake department. And his bio says he leverages data gathered from every single lead to accurately assess and improve the firm's marketing. But you're going to see that this guy is awesome with data. And really, that's been a big part of the hockey stick. You know, even though I'm a former Canadian hockey player, I can't take all the credit for this hockey stick. These guys have been a big part of it. He has a fascination with numbers and metrics and a love for daily scrambled eggs. And he recently completed the Chicago Marathon so Oh, golf clap for that.

Thank you. That was not on the stuff I provided for you. So thanks. Behind.

And we have one small surprise Kevin, if you don't mind, opening your box. Who is

it? Who is who's responsible for this? It's there's gonna be one of those like things that blows up and it's like glitter all over. Okay.

All right. So for for a long time now we've been saying Kevin is the client of the month, the 10 Golden Rules client of the month. And I will tell were more about that later on. But we've officially given him the 12 month consecutive client of the month award because he's been challenged by a couple other clients lately. The packaging is nice, not a unanimous winner anymore.

Holy cow.

So congratulations to Kevin Moran the 12 month.

This is really cool. He deserves

to see why in a minute. All righty. Well, we're good. You know, we're gonna talk about the website and SEO and local service ads Google screen, we're going to cover you know, all kinds of marketing that contribute to the hockey stick. And we're also going to talk about what makes a great client and what makes a great agency and then we'll wrap up so a little bit about me I'm author and speaker and worked for Coca Cola, McDonald's and sprint and got my marketing chops early working for some big Fortune five hundreds. And then I wrote the 10 Golden Rules of online marketing, one of the first real books about internet marketing in 2003 and launched my company 10 Golden Rules back then. Now I have my credibility as a hockey player. That's it's either me or my buddy Dan, in Gaul for the University of Winnipeg Westman. And I couldn't remember exactly the helmet that might be my helmet, or his helmet, but I definitely earned my chops. And now I play a lot more tennis. And this is my tennis team with Yvonne Lendl, Yvonne Lendl is not on our tennis team, but we got to hit with him one night and we moved from Canada to Boca Raton. There's my wife, honey and my dog Parker. And early in my career I mentioned I work for McDonald's. I literally had an office next to this guy, Ronald McDonald. And this guy, George Kohan, was down the hall, the CEO. And then I moved my career to get into technology. And I worked at Sprint, getting people their first emails and getting companies their first websites. And then I moved down to eat diets.com, which was a startup.com. And we got a business up to $60 million in revenue. And I learned through $40 million a year of advertising, what works and what doesn't work and internet marketing back in 2002. And I wrote the 10 Golden Rules of online marketing. So that was the genesis of our company name 10 golden rules. And my new book, advanced Internet Marketing for law firms comes up this summer, we work with a range of firms all across the country, about 50 different locations across the country. And without further ado, let's get into the case study and talk about hockey sticks goes over. So the first section, we call he shoots he scores. And that's what we call the webinar, as a, you know, example of a hockey stick. And that's a hockey term. And each month, we present a dashboard, a performance dashboard to our clients. And Stewart and Stewart has been achieving the hockey, the famed hockey stick status. And we see here that they had 5100, users up 132%, year over year, organic. So just coming from free Google SEO was actually up 289%. Phone calls are up organic phone calls are up formfields are up and chats are up. So this is the graphic that represents the chart that represents the organic users. So these are all free users coming to the website, free organic searches, not paid for, although we are doing some paid stuff you'll see. And these are conversions. So we went from, you know, 90 or 100 leads a month, to 150 to 12 and 373. Leads. This is that coveted hockey stick shape that we want to see in all business performance. Now let's throw my Winnipeg Jets logo in there as well. Now, step one is getting leads. And step two is converting those leads to clients. And this is where I'm going to segue to Kevin to talk about some technology and some systems they've developed to take the leads and follow up on leads and convert the leads. So Kevin, please go ahead.

Yeah, in terms of our CRM, we use lead docket in order to work leads more efficiently and certainly establish a lay a level of accountability. This is our home screen, if you will, every time we log in every morning, this is what we see. And ultimately, what this allows us to do is to give each give each single lead basically a status, every single lead has a different status that allows us to prioritize how we're going to work that lead, you know, every case category has a certain value to and we assign that value to the leads as well. As you can see, we kind of have a homescreen that allows us to see how many leads we have gotten in that day, in the month, and how those compared to the month prior. From there, we kind of divide them and you know, the categories that I mentioned, and you know, as you can see, we have 41 leads that we want. And out of that we decided to approach them and turn them into signups and out of the 41. So far, we have 13 signups on the homescreen, we see the different statuses in terms of you know, chasing people, you know, under review, meaning that we're currently waiting on some information to make a final determination on the lead. And ultimately, we established tests, the importance of the homescreen to is that we can see what everyone is actually working on. And that actually segues into the second slide. And essentially, in real time, as you have the lead docket open, you see who's working on what and when. So as you can see on the Recently Updated leads, you can see that, you know, there's updates constantly happening. And if we don't see those updates, that means that somebody is actually not doing their work. So assigning each lead a certain status is super important in order to prioritize, you know, in a game of, you know, receiving 250 to 300 leads a month, it's hard to remember things. So lead docket allows us to prioritize and you know, establish you know what our tests are. And that way, nothing falls through the cracks, thinking that goes to the segue into the second. And third. Yeah, there we go. From that dashboard, you can click on individual leads, this is a particular one that we have selected. From here. This is where we actually add the notes. And as you can see at the bottom, you can see the timestamp of every update we that we have made on the notes and it's not just about the phone number and the practice area that that actual number actually pertains to, you know, we updated and you know, if we don't hear back from the lead and we can send the messages, we can send them emails, we can send them links to our videos and we can put them on a chase kind of status thing that's Next one. Yeah, as you can see here, you know, there has been involved in this one, this client is an auto accident client there and talk to this client, I took talk to this guy. And you can see that one of frantic folks here was actually sending sending them emails. The goal here is to always, you know, be in contact with them and ultimately pursue a sign of if it's a practice area that we really want to sign up, you know, in this case is an auto accident. From there, we can actually establish you know, where our metrics are, on the month, this is a sample that I pulled up in terms of the marketing report. And then we can do, we can do all sorts of filters that allows us to gather the specific metrics that we're looking to fine tune, this is basically the signups that we have gotten in terms of a year, and for the years this year, and one marketing source they correspond to. And on the next one, I think you can see, that's the actual conversion, not just deletes, but how they're actually broken down via conversion. On the whole, web search is pretty high, we have a lead gen vendor that is also pretty high. And this allows us to actually provide that direct feedback to Jay in terms of what's working and what isn't. And at the end of the day, we have a tally, which is a real time conversion table, if everything that we're signing up on the month, you know, via practice area, where it came from and how we're actually ranking it in our system. Not all leads are created equal. Some are more profitable than others. And we like to gauge our performance not just on the number of signups but the quality of the signups. And this allows us to kind of gauge that and leverage that in terms of feedback per day.

Awesome. So now you'll see why are you starting to see why Kevin's the multiple time client of the month, because he's involved, he's doing things and he's converting our leads into sign cases. And like the agency can't succeed, if we just send over leads, there's a lot of work to be done to have great intake and great conversion. And then then obviously, the program works because, you know, web web listings and web leads don't make anybody any money. So next up is the new website. And I guess the website's been up for about 18 months, we worked on it for about six months. And I will show you some of the great components of winning websites. Here's the website and the design. And you can meet Phil, Dan's dad, and that's the other Stewart and Stewart and Stewart. And first and foremost, you know, we often make the mistake of designing, you know, a website on a Big Mac screen in some designers office. But really critical in personal injury. And, and frankly, any business today is your website's got to work in mobile, it's got to be responsive, meaning it shrinks to different size, digital and mobile devices. And it's got to be super highly optimized. So it works really well in mobile, we start out with a project brief, and a project timeline. That's how we manage the website projects, we build an SEO site architecture. So that's a pretty sophisticated back end architectural structure for the website and all the pages and, and in particularly the SEO, the search engine optimization, great websites have to have great brand positioning, and we did some work on positioning sort of repositioning with some of the terminology that the Stewart's had before. And also authentic images are very, very important in a local market. And so you see the cityscape in the background, and the Stewart's very important to sort of have that personality in that authenticity when people come to the website. Equally important are conversion elements. So you've got to have the phone number prominently at the top of the website, actually prefer the right hand side. But in this design, it's on the left side. And what's called the sticky header. So you see here, we've actually scrolled down the website from that image we saw at the top. And no matter how far you scroll down the website, all of the key calls to action. This is on what we call a sticky header, meaning it sticks to the top as you scroll down. And we also have the chat functionality. Chats really important about 1020 30% of your leads are going to come through chat by adding this chat function to your website. And then if we scroll down here on cases we handle, we see all the different practice areas. Also really important and importantly, build out those pages for SEO. We've got all the trust elements. So you want to have affiliations, awards, large verdicts are here as well. And then we have client reviews here. Also on the website. So you're giving social proof, authenticity, credibility through all of those things. And so with that, I'd like to open up Darren to comment on the website and the process and and some of the feedback or results you got from the new site.

Thanks, Jay. We really needed a website redesign when when Jay got involved had to redesign it. Speed of loading on the pages was too slow. We wanted more video, the video was slow, so they completely rewrote our website. I don't know how that works. It's too technical for me. But it's it's what was important to us is the speed of loading the pages, the smartphone accessibility, and making the website very clean, very simple. I see a lot of real wordy web pages out there, where they've got huge paragraphs, we do that, but it's in the blog pages in those places. But just wanted a very clean, easy to navigate website that was always always asking for the case, always asking for the call always asking for it, click here for more information, constantly doing that in the website, almost it's almost annoying, I would think. But it works. The feedback we've gotten from a lot of people is just that they really enjoyed the cleanness of the website, how easy it is to use, which is important to us. The video aspect of it was huge as well linking it to different videos, because we had so many videos produced and we didn't have them out there. So Jay completely redesigned how we get those out there, how you get to them is easier based on topic, and having them all available for people to watch. You'd be surprised how much people will watch your videos and then make a decision. They get to know your personality and use it as an opportunity. Let them get to know you and who you are. Because, you know, a lot of times as we know, as attorneys, clients will make a decision based on the salesmanship of the attorney, whether they like the attorney or not, whether they feel comfortable with the attorney. So that's one thing we try and do as well.

By the way, we're in for the rest of this hour, whenever Darren says J, he means j and team because I didn't do a single design or write a single line of code for this website. And we've got an awesome team that works very passionately on on our client accounts. Kevin anything to

like Darren said, it does have a lot of call to actions. And I think it does percent, the brand element that we strive for, which is personal. A lot of the you know, other competitors that we have here in this in this market, it's just like a website, and it looks like corporate, you know, you know, as you can see on these ones, we have videos everywhere, and they're all about Darren, you know, and Philip and family, that kind of thing. So I I do think that makes it stand out. And like you said, you know, it is mobile friendly can go wrong with that. I think if I'm not mistaken, like 82% of our visitors and ultimately the conversions that we do get come from mobile. So if that's you, we are not doing well. So I'm glad we were able to do that. And ultimately, you know, it is responsive. So we're always, you know, working on it and making sure that it's available to basically every single device just the other day. And I think this speaks to our working relationship, there is always you know, in the middle of night, just randomly testing it, and some iPad or whatever I mentioned it to me the other night is through this true story. And like 9:10pm is like what is going on here, you know, and that's how we keep it fresh. You know, and you guys are good sports about it. And you we work together to make it work. And I think that's

gonna monitor your website more passionately than you. Yeah.

So now we're very pleased with that, you know, and it has made a difference.

Awesome. Thanks, guys. So the next section, I wanted to just tap into Golden Rule Number 10. And Golden Rule Number 10 of the 10 Golden Rules is lead the trends. And the sort of genesis of that was popups. That came up in 2002 and 2003. And if you guys remember the pop up, would pop up over your website with an ad for another website. And at first, they were doing great, they were getting 30% Click through rates. And banners normally get 1% Click through rates. And after a while, we would start getting two pop ups and three pop ups and 10 pop ups. And we started getting sick of them as consumers and we asked our internet service providers and our virus checkers to get rid of the pop ups and within like six months pop ups went from 30% success rate to really being you know, the most negative thing in the world. We all hated popups. So lead the trends says that the opportunity in that first two or three months, when we're getting 30% Click through rates. You can't miss that window. Sometimes we have a three to six month window to take advantage of a new marketing technology or a new marketing opportunity. And the pop up of 2021 was Google screen. The lead to trends opportunity of 2021. And we uncovered this that it was rolling out across the country for lawyers market by market and practice area by practice area. And as soon as it was available for personal injury, Darren and Kevin hopped on it on our advice and got screened or approved by Google and are very quickly, they appeared in the top three locations in all the searches in Indiana. And why is this so important? Well, it's so important because if you weren't one of the first three, or if you weren't one of the first 10, or one of the first 30, very quickly, you know, maybe a couple 100 People got screened or approved in your practice area in your marketplace. And Kevin, in particular, really got on this and learned as much as he could, working with us about how to get, you know, in that top three, and took advantage of that window. So for like the first three, four or five, six months, Stewart Stewart is getting a huge disproportionate share of the opportunity in the marketplace. You know, now we're in that competitive set, like a year or 14 months later, where everybody's fighting to get in those top three positions. And I will share what we call our secret algorithm to be in the top three. But just let me outline what search looks like today. So why is this a lead to trends opportunity, because it's right at the top of a search. And if you do it on a mobile phone, there's only two results. And it basically takes up the majority of your phone. So if you're not screened, if you're not approved, you're missing out, we believe on 30 to 40% of the clicks. And these clicks now are pay per lead. So you only pay Google if it's a lead in your practice area. And down below is the pay per click the the old paid ads used to be on the right hand side now they're below these pay per call leads, if you will. And then the maps super important, we do a lot of work. And we'll spend some time in a minute talking about how you optimize for the Google Maps. It's the first free SEO area. And then down below is the traditional SEO, we'll talk about that in a minute as well. So here's Stewart and Stewart in the top position. If I click here on more personal injury lawyers, we see Stuart Stewart's the first one and this would might scroll down there might be 20 3050 folks who have that checkmark as being screened or approved by Google. Kevin, you want to want to comment on, you know how you guys attack this and what you do.

Keep an eye on it, pretend it's your friend, and it's a friend that you want. You want him he she she to like you a lot and always talk to your friend, no seriously, though, don't allow a lead to just sit there without are responding to it. And you know, an hour is too long, you know, we're on it, you know, within minutes, really minute is too long, minutes too long. And I and we probably should, you know, get more sleep. But we're really keep an eye on this very, very closely. And it's not just because we need to call it but because we need to give Google screen feedback right away. And I have noticed that, you know, when we don't do it, we get less leads, you know, some something in the algorithm makes it happen, like that kind of thing, you know, and the faster we are, the more feedback we give them the dashboard, the more leads we get, and the quality is far superior to I don't know, if you you know from the graph I provided to you guys, Google screen already has given us better not just leads but actual signups than PPC has in the past three years. And you know, it's relatively new still. So it is a lot of work. But it's it's a good investment for sure. The feedback is so critical. It's so critical. Who

what their and and Kevin are referring to in terms of the feedback, Google screened, or what Google calls local service ads. LSAS is run on artificial intelligence algorithm. So there's no one sitting around Google saying, oh, let's put Stuart number one today, or let's put kitten, num none. Number one today, the algorithm is mathematically based. And so you've got to feed the algorithm with as much data and information that it wants in order to get to the top of the algorithm. So we've tried to sort of reverse engineer this secret algorithm. And we also share what we believe today to be the most six important factors. But um, we start with the red phone. And this was an an example. I don't know if it was real or not. But it was an urban myth that there was a red telephone in the Reagan White House during the Cold War. And if the Kremlin called if Russia called, you know, you picked up the phone, and it was like a direct line from the Kremlin to the White House. But today, the red phone that you got to pick up is that LSA phone, if you will, the local service ads, so you've got to answer all calls within 15 seconds. You can't have any missed calls. And if you do, you got to immediately call them back. That's what Darren was talking about within one minute. And you want to have 24/7 availability. And that's so important because this algorithm is now sort of rewarding us for that. You know, answering the phone and it Think about it like Google's not penalizing you for anything, necessarily. They're just trying to develop a system that works well for the consumer. So basically, the way to think of it is, if you answer the phone quickly, professionally, and handle the calls properly, and then you give Google feedback on whether it was a good call or a bad call, then the system is going to send you more calls. Because basically what Google wants to do, they want happy customers using Google. So if you are good at answering the phone, you're gonna get more calls, it's that simple. You also need one to two new reviews per week. Now, this is a new thing in that algorithm. If we go back here, you see Stewart has 236, reviews, can none has 241, this guy has three, I don't know how he got in there. But typically, you need lots of reviews. But what we found is a new location, like if you add a new location, outside of your main location, if you get one to two reviews per week in that new location, it can shoot up very quickly against people who might have 200 reviews. So the algorithm rewards you for the currency or the recency of the reviews, the five star and four star reviews, by your customers, Kevin talked a lot about this feeding data into the algorithm. He called it treating it as your friend. And basically, if you put a lot of information in there, like this was a call from Mr. Smith, and he was in an accident, he was rear ended, and he's going to the doctor, and we're gonna meet with Mr. Smith, tomorrow, he's coming into our office to sign up as a client. If you put data into the system, you're giving data to that algorithm to an artificial intelligence algorithm. So it's very, very important to interact with the system. And you want to designate all those leads immediately as booked or archived. That's the Google terminology book means we booked a meeting archived means this wasn't a fit for us, this is not in our category. And you can also dispute a lead and not pay for it, Google's asked you to pay for it, you want to select high proximity locations. So if you're you are looking at a new location, you want to get a location that is going to work for this algorithm, we can talk more about that. And finally, you've got to ensure your credit card limit works for the ping. And what that means is like you can put a super high amount on your budget, you're probably not gonna be able to spend it. But you could say, well, we're willing to spend $10,000 per week in three different locations. Well, that's 30,000, a week in four locations, oh, sorry, in three locations, four weeks, that's $120,000 a month. So your credit card has to be able to meet that silent ping, meaning if Google says, Okay, if we gave them $120,000 In clicks, which I've never seen anyone come anywhere close to that in any market. But if I gave them $120,000, in clicks, their credit cards got to be able to accept that. So you really needed like a black card in order to set your budgets at high. The next section is Google Maps. And Google Maps in the local service ads are joined at the hip, both in terms of how they work, how they're set up, and also how the algorithms perform. Now we see here that Stewart and Stewart are number two, in this local map search on a phone. And here they are number two, on the same search for car accident lawyer. And you know, that's obviously an excellent result, not quite as good as number one. But on average, we'll show you the report, they're performing exceptionally well in Maps. And that, like the local service, Ed has a secret algorithm. There is a mathematical algorithm, and like SEO itself has an algorithm, there's a bunch of factors that are gonna get you higher in the maps results. So reviews we're going to talk about in a minute, super important. But also properly setting up your Google what used to be called Google My Business, they now called Google business profile, setting up your GBP and updating your GBP, adding content to it, adding reviews, adding questions and answers, adding updates, events, etc, etc. So we do a ton of work on about a dozen different factors to improve our clients, Google Maps, SEO. And frankly, we're now starting to realize the maps SEO is more important than the traditional SEO. I mean, look at this screenshot. You got to be in the LSAS. You got to be in the maps. I mean, the SEO and the Pay Per Click isn't even on the screenshot. So it's super important that we're focused on LSA algorithm, LSA performance, the Google screen, and maps performance as well. So Kevin did an awesome job getting Stewart and Stewart up to 237 reviews and get even getting the star rating up because they really hadn't focused on it as a firm and he used this tool called BirdEye. So let him talk about how he improve both the number of reviews, and the rating, the star rating

per day is an online reputation management tool. I think that's what they call it, right. And ultimately, it's a software platform that allows you to expedite the process of obtaining feedback from clients by making it easier for them to do. So. A lot of the times what we encounter is that when you know, clients were ready, you know, to take the settlement check and run, you know, and when we're asking for the feedback, the easiest answer they could give us like, well, I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to log into, you know, whatever profile, whatever website, you're on, bla, bla, bla bla, ultimately, what BirdEye does is essentially you can enter their information, their phone number, their email, you know, their name, obviously, and you can send them a direct link that actually takes them to the page where you want them to go. And all they have to do, I think, by my kind of just press three buttons, and leave the review at that point in time, you know, you kind of take away the factor of making it complicated, so they can actually do it. Literally in minutes. You know, Berta actually has evolved in the past couple of years, now, it kind of becomes a lead docket of sorts, where you can actually pursue the review II kind of thing, you know, so once you send the link, you can send the messages in order to follow up, you know, answer any questions that they might have. And ultimately, you know, it's a numbers game, right. So they do also have a dashboard that allows you to establish goals, and assign certain amounts of, you know, objectives to certain team members. So that, you know, at the end of the day, if you have like a quarterly goal and service reviews, you can actually match them the numbers in terms of the performance. So it has been great. I think, when we started, you know, we were at less than 100 reviews, I think, maybe 50 or so, with BirdEye, we've gotten over, you know, 150 with that alone, so that has been great. And I do recall, Jay, if I'm not mistaken, that when this first came out, you're kind of like on the fence about it. And I'm like, I was like, I think I'm just gonna do it and see what happens at the time, I do believe there was some ethical concerns where you know, you the platform when it was first launched, it could only ask for positive feedback. That was somehow against ethical standards, or whatever. But now, it's Google's Terms of Service. Yeah, yeah. So now they do include at the bottom, hey, you can leave other kinds of feedback, you know, so it's fair game. And it has helped us greatly. So you know, it pays for itself, I highly recommend it for anyone, Jay, I

jump in real quick and just say you got to ask for it. If you want positive five star Google feedback, you have to ask for it. You don't have to ask for the negative, obviously. But if you want that positive feedback, have to ask when I talk to my folks all the time, my my team members that when the client comes in to sign off on their settlement, usually they're in a great mood, they're getting their money, and you send them that link while you're talking to him and ask them for the feedback. I often say to him, the best thank you I can get is a referral and five star review. And most clients will give it to, they're happy to, but you don't get it if you don't ask for it. And you got to be assertive with it.

You Yeah, exactly. And, you know, just suffice to say that Kevin's and Darren and team have done an awesome job moving the needle, because, you know, when you look at 237 reviews, you see it's in among the top in their marketplace, and folks are gonna see you on the Google Maps. And they're going to look at your reviews. I mean, we all do it as consumers, whether you're looking at a restaurant or a shoe repair, or Car Accident Lawyer, you're going to look at those results. And you're going to make a judgement based on the reviews. So it's a critical part of the marketing. And it's something that we as the agency haven't been able to touch. It's one of these things that we need the client involved and one of the other reasons why Kevin's a 12 time, consecutive agency client of the month 10 golden rules, because he gets his stuff done. And another reason why the guys are, you know, one of our favorite clients is because they take our crazy suggestions and put them in the marketplace and everything you'll see from videos and, and bird eyes and hockey sticks. We're also launching the beta program for what we call our VIP referral and review program. And so a kit that looks a little bit like this is going to go out to summer Stewart's past customers, and we're going to call them up and explain that they're a VIP and part of our extended family. We really appreciate them. And we're sending them a Starbucks gift card and some VIP cards. Starbucks gift card is a little thank you and the VIP cards are to recognize their friends and family. If they ever have an accident. They can give it make it easy for them to give a referral to Stewart Stewart. And then the final piece of the puzzle. We're gonna ask them for a review and Darren said it before, you've got to ask so you can't give people a gift card in exchange for a review. But you can make them a part of your VIP club and ask them for review. So more to come on that great program. And as I mentioned, and we've really sort of improved the positioning. And so this is a tool that we're able to see how they track in a market. And if anyone's interested to see how you're performing in your market, we can show you because when you do the search at your office, you better be in the first position, right? Like you're literally on the maps, right exactly where you're sitting. But this is position one, this is position two, this is position three, and maps. And so this tool tells us that at Stewart and Stuart's office, they're number one exactly in that position. And if you go out to the West, they're also number one and south to north or number one. But we have a little bit of opportunity for improvement if you go off here to the east a little bit. So this tool not only allows us to see how we're performing geographically, but it allows us to address a number of areas of improvement. So this tool helped us create consistent nap and build local links and local citations. And this is all part of the technical SEO we do around Google Maps. But we see that net net Stewart and Stewart, in this geographic area we've defined here are on average position 1.6 in maps, and then the number one position here in their marketplace. Next up, we're going to talk about SEO or Search Engine Optimization. And I often try to simplify a very complex topic by calling it the ABCs of SEO, because search engine optimization or that natural SEO algorithm has about 600 Different factors in and Stewart Stewart's doing phenomenally well. And we see that they're up to about 2000 search terms on the first whatever 100 listings of Google. So we have 2015 listings and ABCs of SEO to simplify how you, you know, mathematically deal with Google's 600 factors. Simplifying it down is the architecture of the site. And I talked earlier about that Sitemap that we we figured out the mapping of the site and how we're going to make it easy for Google spiders to navigate the website. And then the speed of the website. The guys talked a couple times about how important it is the mobile site and how quickly and easily the mobile device can navigate the website. And this is a tool called Google's PageSpeed Insights. And the websites passing the criteria they're on multiple different criteria is architecture. So it's things like the speed and the design of the website, B is backlinks now often confused, these are not links on your site. These are not something you can control on your site. This is other sites linking to you. And Stuart's almost going across the 2000 backlink barrier. And you see the growth we've had over the last several years and the number of links to the site. Now this is a superstar link that Darren got himself. We often use the term Reddit check get a link. Darren, you want to talk about the police academy program.

Love to in fact it's going on this week. This is the second week of it sorry, in the summer. It's a teen Academy program that the local police department, Carmel police department puts on for kids to go through a little mini basic training that police officers go through with like shoot guns with simulation. Simunition, I think is what they call it. But they learn a lot. They go the jail they do. They look at the drones, they see the motorcycle police officers, they learn how to do a traffic stop things like that, and the kids really love it. But we've been a big fan of the police in general and different programs that they have. This isn't the only one we support. But this one we've been supporting for probably 12 years. I think we buy their T shirts and give awards and things like that. And it wasn't until Jay got on board. And we started working with J and his team that I got the whole write a check, get a link attitude, and talk to him about getting a link back to our site from their page. And it was actually easier than I thought it would be to get them to do it. Sometimes it's I think it can be challenging with.gov sites, because if they don't like to do that, for whatever reason. But anyway, as Jay pointed out, getting that.gov site, it's my understanding that it gives us credibility with Google, and therefore bumps us up in the algorithm in the rankings. But so that's how we got that, you know, in the

early days, the back backlinks algorithm, you know, folks like ourselves, web web developers and SEO companies, we would just build 50 of our own websites. And then we would link to all our clients from the 50 websites. After a while Google figured that game out and then you had to go out to get, you know, 50 or 100 other websites to link to your clients site. And then people started paying for links and then Google said that was not cool. So when you can get a link from a.gov Obviously you can't pay for it. a.edu a university is extremely value Double. And then important websites, highly valuable highly ranked websites, the higher rank the site and the harder link to get essentially, Google gives you more weighting in their mathematical algorithm, just want to take a minute to touch on some of Stuart's other community activity, including safe and sober, national pet day and testimonials and Mother's Day. And we didn't spend a lot of time in this presentation talking about social media. But together working very closely with the Store team, and our team, we have a steady stream of social media to really, really to talk about what Stuart does in the community and talk about the credibility for the company. Because social media is not a great lead generator, we do the job. We laid a baseline we talk about the community activity, but it's not that you didn't see it high on on Kevin's lead generator list. So you're not like we ignore it. But you know, I don't know, Kevin, what do we call it maintenance mode? Yeah,

done, buddy. You know, it gets your name out there is Randy helps us with a good branding, establish a good feel about the brand, really. And you know, it's a good way to engage with the audience, you already do have, you know, who knows, maybe one day they'll have a friend, that they actually do need our services, that kind of thing. So, and in terms of ROI, you know, marketing is not cheap, you know, especially with LSAs, all that kind of thing. This is just our time kind of thing. So I think it's great. Yeah,

I think if if I could maybe put it in more practical terms, like, when you're searching for a car accident lawyer, you go to Google, you don't go to Facebook, but the branding that you've done on TV, Facebook, billboards, when someone does that Google search, if they recognize your brand, you got a much better chance of getting that click and getting that client. So ABC of SEO, A is architecture, the site got to be fast and easy for the spiders to read. B is backlinks, other sites linking to your site, and C is content. So we write a ton of great content with the Stewart team and add it to the site. This was an example of the break check section of the website. And Stuart's number one in the world for break checking tailgaters. And then if you go to the website, there's a long article and then several sub articles talking about break checking. And then it's just one of guests about 10 examples of content because we I think we do about 10 pieces of content every month for the website. So ABCs, as architecture websites can be fast and easy. B is backlinks, other site linking to your site, make it more important and see you've got to add the content, both in terms of words, and also pictures and video. And so we do a lot of research, using a number of different tools to find the keyword phrases, and how frequently they're searched. We use some different suggestion tools like this one's called also asked, we put in car accident claims, and it gives us a bunch of questions that people are asking, because if you think of it a Google search is essentially just a question. This is another tool called Answer the public, which gives you questions based on the term car accident. And then we take those questions, we hand them over to Darren and the rest of the team at Stuart. And they produce videos, or we together produce videos that answer the questions. So the next section is about video. And I'm going to try and play a video here.

It's Seinfeld fans out there. You remember the episode were George's mom or someone was they stopped short. They stopped short on him. And he put his hand out there and touched my mom something like that nature. I'm always reminded of that episode of when I hear about brake checking people in front of you slam on the brakes, because that episode was about I think Kramer was claiming that the vehicle in front of him stop shorter or break check them and that's why he had to slam on his brakes. At any rate, brake checking is a real thing. Surprisingly, there are people that break check semis and happens there are people that break check you and I have clients come to me and just recently had someone say, Hey, I rear ended somebody and I'm like, wow, that's probably your fault. And they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. They're women. They there was nothing in front of they slammed on the brakes right in front of me. It almost seemed like they meant to do it. There was nothing in front of a one like a squirrel ran from there was no cars in front of them. They just hit their brakes Roy right in front of me is is still my fault. Now that changes things doesn't it? Because that may mean it's not your fault for rear ending. They have a duty and you have the right to believe that they are going to obey the rules or oh, they're not going to slam on their brakes and stop and an unreasonable manner. They aren't going to put their turn signal on when they're ready to make a turn all of those things. Allow the person following them my client to know that than what they're doing and to drive accordingly. They're not necessarily allowed to just slam on their brakes to whip it into a parking lot. or driveway without signaling, and aggressively stopping, and expect the car behind them to be able to read their mind and anticipate that. So that is a scenario where we may be able to recover from them, they're the at fault driver, things that are very important in that scenario or evidence, any video evidence, if you have a dashcam, if there was someone traveling behind you, or the opposite direction that stopped and said, hey, it's on my dashcam video, if you got things like that, that's very helpful to hold them down or lock in the at fault driver for what they really did. And it also keeps him from saying after the fact that, oh, no, I didn't stop fast. And I even put my signal on when it may not be necessarily the truth. Now, you do have a duty to follow, and drive in a reasonable manner. So that doesn't excuse you. If, for example, you're in traffic, and the traffic comes to a quick stop or a quick slow down, you know, rush hour on the interstate or a busy road here we travel with, and traffic comes to an abrupt stop for whatever reason, it just does when traffic is heavy, you have a duty to anticipate that fall in a safe distance be in keep your car traveling in a manner that you're able to stop under those circumstances. And that wouldn't apply. But like I said, when this client called me and said, there was nothing in front of him, it wasn't a card site in front of him. There were no score, they just decided at the last second Oh, they wanted make this turn slammed on the brakes and turn. And that's what caused an error that changes everything. And we should talk about that that may be something we'd like to talk about.

This video strategy is particularly effective. And what we do is get Darren in the studio. It's really just that the Stewart and Stewart boardroom, we bring a videographer in and we attend by zoom. And we go through about a dozen questions every quarter, meaning 12. So we're trying to get one question and answer every week. And the reason for questions I mentioned before, if somebody does a Google search, essentially asking a question. And if you do a great job like Darren just did, answering the question, you're positioning your website for Google search, your search engine optimizing your website, we put the videos on YouTube, because YouTube is owned by Google. And it's part of the SEO algorithm. And then those videos also go on the website. So this is a concept we've had for many years called cascading content. So essentially, the videos optimized search engine optimized on YouTube, then it's added to a blog on the website, then we add it to Google Maps, we talked earlier about the importance of search engine optimizing. So lots of updates and videos go on Google Maps. And then we also use it throughout social media. So essentially, we're, you know, asking and answering questions that folks have top of mind. And we try and cover as many new questions as we can. Like, can I recover damages, if I'm involved in an Uber or Lyft? Car accident? So guys, what kind of feedback have you had from the video and optimization program? Kevin, it's good feedback.

I think it's relevant. And you know, a lot of the times, Darren does, you know, kind of like work closely with brief, not myself necessarily, you know, and coming up with questions that he legitimately has been asked in recent times. And a lot of the times, that's how he opens up the video, you know, I had a client just the other day, they were involved in a bus accident or something like that. And sometimes there are questions that, you know, you might not just find, right, quick, you know, that it, it does point to the fact that sometimes you do need an attorney, you know, in order to navigate situations that are actually a little bit more complicated just than a fender bender or something like that. So I think that the question is being relevant is a key component and you need do you do need somebody who knows the law for that kind of thing. So,

you know, we're also tweaking them a little bit toward the entertainment side. As as attorneys, we tend to be very dry. Matter of fact, here's the law, and generally speaking, the public is, it's boring. And if you just focus on that, you're going to lose them after a few seconds. So that that was a good example of it with the Seinfeld lead in talking about that a little bit. It's entertaining. It gets people's attention, and they listened to it. So we were trying to do a better job of that. So we're working on that grab factor at the beginning. The

other thing I love about this cascading content concept is we get extremely high value from Darren in the team without taking a ton of his time. In about an hour he can shoot those dozen videos. And then we've got this great content for an entire quarter for three months, where we put one video up every week, but For SEO, and also for Google Maps, and social media, all this goes on a social media calendar. And Kevin's awesome at working with us to review and approve the calendar. And you know, you need a map, to know where you're going in life, you need a checklist to make sure you get everything done. And a calendar is one of those things that if we put everything on a calendar, then we get it done. We know what we're doing for the month. So that's an awesome new strategy that we've come up with over the years. So with that, it brings us to sort of our conclusion. And I wanted to talk about my section is what makes a great client and you know, what qualifies Darren and Kevin for the 10, golden rules client of the month. And then I'm going to ask them to talk about selecting an agency and working with an agency partner. And then we'll just review and we'll be happy to take some questions. So, you know, the first thing from our perspective that makes a great client is approving stuff. And I know that's relatively straightforward. But you know, many of our clients say, oh, you know, I'll review the copy. And then a week goes by, and two weeks go by and a month goes by, I mean, if the client doesn't approve the SEO, copy that content that goes on the website, if a client doesn't improve the social media, it just doesn't get on the website. And you know, 10 years ago, before we came up with these videos, we sometimes waited 3456 months to get copy on a website. And you know, you're not going to improve SEO, if you're not adding content to the website, as simple as that. So clients gotta be responsive and approve stuff. The second thing I would say is really important is trust. You know, make sure you hire an agency, that's, you know, that you've vetted well, and we know what we're doing. But trust us, and we recently had a client go in and change all their LSA settings, the local service ads settings, about a week, after we, you know, gone through a full review of the account made a number of changes, one of the things we know about that the Google screen, the local service ads algorithm, is you've got to try and wait, you know, 30 days, but maybe even 60 or 90 days, after you make big changes in the account, the algorithm just as not like Pay Per Click, like you can't turn the bids up and down. And this client went in and changed everything. And, you know, basically set us back, probably at least a week, but probably several weeks. So you've got to trust and don't, you know, sort of get in there and, and do stuff without talking to the agency, because the Google the Facebook, the website is not simple anymore. Making a simple change on your website could, you know, mess a lot of things up. So you really need to trust the professional, get the right professionals, and trust the professionals. The other thing is pretty simple. It's just like show up and show up on time and be engaged in being you know, we do all our meetings on a Zoom meeting. And I know it's a simple request from the agency. But you know, you got to think it's also a two way street, right? You're, even though you're dealing with an agency, you're dealing with people, and people have time and schedules and busy lives. And if the client shows up late and not on Zoom, and not with good audio and stuff like that, we can't do our job, but it's you know, think of the individuals on my team, you know, it's frustrating for them, and the clients who show up and, and they're enthusiastic, and they're thankful for the work that the team did, like, forget the fact that you're paying an agency, the people working on your team are individuals. So showing up and on time, and also paying your bills on time might sound like a request from the agency owner, but the team knows when clients engaged and thankful and, and giving the positive energy back. And then the final thing, and this is something I learned the hard way early in my agency life is give positive feedback before you give negative feedback. Like if we show you a new landing page, a new website, a new, you know, plan for something or a new recommendation. You know, try very hard, even even if you don't love the idea to find two or three good things, and thank the agency for being creative. Because if you always just point out the negatives, it's going to be going to be giving negative energy. And after a while you're not going to get new ideas, you're not going to get a new creative from the agency. Because if everything's always, you know, the wet blanket, you're not going to get that positivity. So there's some thoughts from my side about how you can be a great client and when the client of the month and just, you know, part of you know what Kevin does a great job. He's super quick with approvals. He's super responsive. He's always there, you know, always 24 hour turnaround on any requests or technical things we need or passwords or logins. And, you know, he does trust us and he does jump on some of those new technologies like whether it's a lead docket or the BirdEye or LSAS are and now our VIP program. Both Darren and Kevin and the rest of the Stewart team are willing to innovate with us and And you know, we can't move the needle on new things if nobody will try and with us, we often try things out on 10 golden rules, and then we roll it out to our clients. So guys, with that, oh, I have a slide for you too. I'd love your feedback on, you know, what makes a great agency. And when you picking, you know, partners like us or your TV agency, what's important in picking a great partner on the agency side,

I think, first of all, you gotta be comfortable with them. But I think another important aspect is you can't just pick any agency who has a broad spectrum, maybe they'll work out, but my preference is picking an agency that is that caters to your profession. Not and sometimes it's not only your legal profession, but specifically case type. Because the clients, I'm going after online, I want them to know how to go get them, I want to know that I want them to know that demographic. And what they do, then they may be different, and likely are different from what a large law firm would be looking for in a client and their website. So it's not just an attorney website, those specifically someone who does that kind of thing, which is what brought us to Jay led us to Jay his knowledge, and not only his general knowledge, but his focus in this area. Thank you,

Kevin, what do you think about your agency partners? Yeah,

what I would say actually is choose them, just like you would a team member who works with you day to day here in the office, you see what I'm saying? We have taken the time, and Darren actually has taken the time to delineate what our company's core values are, you know, one by one, and really describe what each point means, you know, taking ownership, you know, being consistent, that kind of thing. And, you know, the way I look at Bree and the work relationship that we have, you know, she has taken ownership in terms of like, you know, if something wasn't working on a Saturday, you know, she actually went in herself and did it instead of like delegating that kind of thing. You know, so I would definitely say that choose them based on how you would want to choose somebody who works with you here on the office on the day today. I think that's huge. And

Jay, I would just say that if anybody has specific questions, after the webinar, they're free to reach out to me on my email, be happy to respond.

Awesome. And by the way, you know, this might be two years from now, Darren, so you can go to get stewart.com and find Darren are 10, Golden rules.com. And we'll be happy to connect you with the guys. So with that I just had, you know, one last thought and then we'll take a few questions. And I just kind of want to sum up how you win, how do you get a hockey stick? You know, so first of all, is we talked about designing the website, you know, and it's got to be mobile friendly, it's got to be fast, it's got to be Google SEO friendly. And then it's got to be consumer conversion friendly. And it also helps to have a powerful branding and positioning and authentic images. And then we talked about innovation and jumping on things 10 golden rules, Golden Rule Number 10 is lead the trends, taking advantage of those things. So like when you hear when I hear about something two or three times, I mean, and I'm testing it immediately, if I can test it for 10 golden rules, if it's specific to my clients, I try and get a couple clients on a beta test. So those local service ads were fantastic. When you were the first three to five to 10 people approve, you are getting, you know, 100% or 30% of all exposures. You know, now it's more, it's a more competitive game. But we've also staying on top of the leading edge of what's working in the local service ads, testing new things like BirdEye, Kevin, Kevin took the leap and did an amazing job with that. And then we get into things like Google Maps, getting reviews, shared the secret algorithm, you need one to two reviews per week, I got to answer the phone. And if Google is tracking how quickly you answer the phone for local service ads, I'm betting that they're also applying that to the maps algorithm, and the SEO algorithm and the Pay Per Click algorithm. So you better make sure that you've got a system to answer the phone and to the phone 24/7 take calls 24/7 as well. Then we talked about our content program, answering questions and also using video videos like amplifying your SEO. So your search engine optimization, if you answer questions in the form of a blog, that's good. But if you've got a video blog, that's awesome. And the great job that Darren and the team are doing by answering those questions. We're optimizing them on YouTube. We're using them on the blog on the website. And then we're also using them for great social media content. So with that, we're going to take some questions, guys, that's okay. Unless you have anything you wanted to add or sum up. No. Okay. And the first question comes from Aaron says, Sorry, Jay, but a tricky question for Stuart. How hard is it to do business with a marketing agency online and not meet in person? You know, I

hadn't even thought of that. It's not a problem at all. I met Jay in person. A couple times. He was a presenter at some of the seminars that I go to the one in particular that I attend every six months. That's that's market exclusive a group of attorneys that share information, and he presented there. But honestly, I've never I've never really thought of that's never been a problem. I don't need him sitting across the table from me to do what we're doing. We we do it all by video. If he can't do it by video and make it work that way. How's it gonna make my digital work? But it doesn't, I guess it doesn't bother me. I'm not making light of your question. It just doesn't. That doesn't occur to me as a problem. As an issue. It

actually we've been doing this for years, because we used to meet on GoTo Meeting with you all and we were GoTo Meeting partners. I don't know. 1011 12 years ago.

They said well, why doesn't it? That's when we started. Yep. They sponsor

my podcast, go to meetings. We've been zooming before zoom question from Tiffany, also for the Stuart team. Did you see an improvement in your business? After doing the video marketing?

Yes, is the short answer. But I'll hand that over to Kevin because he's my numbers guy. I

would say yes. And you know, when it comes down to branding, there's a certain effect that you really cannot attribute just to like hard numbers. You know, and I think we have done a lot of things right, all at once. But I think that it has been part of it. You know, and if not the direct lead generation, I think that the kind of reputation that we have online has improved, too, you know what I mean? So, you know, we used to get, you know, a lot of hate comments, you know, from unhappy people all the time. I want to say like a lot. But you know, nowadays we really don't have that, you know, and I think changing what the brand stands for a lot has got a lot to do with that. So I would say yes, the impact has been good. And you know, once again, you know, when you're doing videos, just like you would TV, you're you're not just for the long, the short term is about the long haul. You know what I mean? So I think we're trying to diversify our bets. Right. You know, we have short term with DPC. LSAs, that kind of thing. And we're continuing to build the brand, you know, for the long term, that kind of, so I do think it's important.

No, that's an interesting question. Because the question was, did video improve the marketing? You know, I was trying to figure out when the hockey stick really started to hit that steep incline. And there was two things you know, it was the new website, and the introduction video seemed to give us like, supercharged turbo booster.

I think it's a huge thing on your website, when you're doing a blog having a video that goes with it, I like to do things that I want to see when I look at something I'm shopping for, I want to see a video, I guess I'm a visual learner. So I think having the video wherever possible, even if it's 30 seconds, or really short video, on your website on different topics is I just think makes a huge difference. Because people like that.

By the way, the opposite is true, too. Because there's some people sitting there saying, Well, I never would watch a video. Why not. And that's true. Because there's different types of web users. Like there's video, people who look for videos and want to see a video. And sometimes we do want to see a video. Like if you're trying to unclog your drain or something, you might go to YouTube, and specifically, search for video. And then there's other times where you don't want video, there's I'm a clicker, I try and click around and find the quickest answer. And my VP used to be a reader. And we'd go meet a client and she she'd know more about the client than the client. That's, uh, how do you know that? Well, I read the website. Like, when did you read the website? Oh, last night, you read the entire website. So, you know, just keep in mind that, you know, if you're not a video person, you're not a content person, or you're not a clicker. There are different types of web users. I'm gonna sneak in a question that I had there. And I had watched, I guess, the first minute of that video, but I had never watched the entire three minutes, the break check video. Should everybody have a dash cam today?

That, you know, I think we we've already done a video on that or getting ready to do a video on that. Absolutely. It's so inexpensive. They're so cheap. That's what I was going to talk about in the video. I mean, certainly less than 20 bucks, you can have a decent dashcam that and they record over the tape. And when you're in an impact, they'll record it. I think it's I think it's very important. Now, I suppose if the wrecks your fault, you know, maybe it's not a great thing. But man, I wish all my clients had especially those cases where they're the at fault drivers trying to wiggle out of it or trying to shift some of the liability over to him for one thing or another

question from Amy J A question about the reviews box. How much should a law firm be involved in this? Is the law firm, the one that keeps the boxes and delivers them? Can you talk more about this? Oh, so this is our VIP review program? Well, Kevin actually started the program himself with mailing out some promotional merchandise they had in the office, and then now we're formalizing it where I think five are going to go out every week. We're going to call the folks and follow up to reminds me, Kevin, we're going to need some names and addresses. And so we're using prefer So fulfillment houses were built. And it's designed to scale. So we can do this for all our clients. And we believe it's going to be a tremendous success, both in generating more referrals. Because we used in the industry, we used to do VIP parties, and the law firm would host folks at a buffet or Golden Corral, or a pizza buffet. And with COVID, in the last two or three years, we haven't been able to do any of these VIP parties. So this is an evolution of the VIP party, the VIP box, to build that relationship with your past customers and remind them you there and give them the VIP card and give them a bunch of your promotional swag. So you're top of mind if a friend or family member is injured. And then obviously the review piece is a cherry on top of referrals. Because no business, our business and your business can't survive without referrals, referrals as are the golden tickets that the web leads are built on top of it,

you know, then we got the hot sauce issue, we just got contacted. additive. So my you know, we, at the beginning, Jay kind of teased me a little bit about the fire truck, I have a fire truck, and we put it in crazed Fourth of July, we just did it. And when people have special events, we sponsor things with kids and things like that some churches will take the firetruck there so they can look at a book. But we have a little table and we'll give out some of our swag one of one of the things we have is for different kinds of hot sauces that are private label with our what we think is funny labeling, though, but anyway, we were recently and someone's called Kevin and said I'm all out of the Do you have any more of this stuff? I'll pay for it. I'll pay for it.

So let's be good. Build not too late to get the hot sauce in the box.

I think we had good feedback from him to

question from Lee. Thanks, Lee, if you were to break down how much time you spent on LSA feedback data, and the BirdEye review platform, how much time on a daily weekly basis do you spend on these necessities? Monday

through Friday, one hour today, minimum. And if you have an intake department, Google screen, it's actually really helpful for intake purposes too. Because you record the call. So I double dip and you know, while we're listening to the calls, and you know, providing the feedback we use in for training purposes, you know, especially if it's an auto accident, for instance, you know, clear liability, that kind of thing that we teach in the intake department, you know, injuries, treatment, insurance coverage, maybe there's a you know, commercial policy, something like that, all that we dissect a call. And you know, we provide the feedback as we go along. So yeah, probably an hour a day, and we incorporate Google spirit. And really, it's one of our KPIs in terms of our intake department, we send a summary each day to a email distribution list, you know, the partners are on it. Other key members of the firm are on it. And you know, one of the KPIs at the very top as the Google screen maintenance. So before we send that out, it has to be completed. It's really useful. So I would integrate it with intake purposes a lot, you know, because it does help.

So awesome. You know, you touch on intake. We don't have a section, specifically on intake. But we had a great session, I guess a couple of years ago now with Chris Mullins, who's one of the world's leading intake specialists, she wrote a great book on on law firm intake. And when we talked about intake, we're talking about the phone, the folks who answered the phone, and there's a really important role or webinar in September Coming up, we'll be covering the intake topic, and Chris Mullins is agreed to be our guest. That guys, what are some of the things that you you coach, your intake department on, everything

is a negotiation, you know, everything that you do 24/7 It's a negotiation. And it's not a negotiation in which there's always a winner and a loser. I think the ultimate goal of any good intake department, any good intake team member is to come up with a scenario in which everyone wins. You know, we're here trying to help people, and we need to convince them were that were the right, you know, the right team to do so, you know, in thinking of every leader sales with a sales mindset, that should be the goal, you know, don't have just some regular paralegal do your intake. I don't think that's a mistake. You know, I think

and here's why I'm starting up the here's why. If you're like me, your paralegals already think they have too many files are already overworked. They don't want another file. So that's the last person in the world do you want to take on a new client call?

You need to have a go getter, you know, somebody who wants to get the sale done, you know, and somebody who's system oriented and detail oriented, and then you will be all said and I think you know a lot of firms look down on intake like departments as a whole and they're vital to and you know, if we don't get the people in the door, no one has cases to work. So I would invest a lot of time and resources on intake as a whole because there they will get you the cases you want to I

want scrappy, hungry people and all those words in the best sense of the words that are just very assertive, if not aggressive, but in a professional good way that helpful way with people that that just don't want to take no for an answer because they want that He's so bad, they won't open it so bad. And we celebrate the last thing Kevin's talking about your intake department. You're right. And I, we used to be that way, just like intake, you know, it was the that it wasn't open, it wasn't something you consciously thought about. But you know, you kind of focus on your attorney and your paralegals, who's making the money? Well, guess what, they're not gonna make any money if your intake isn't working. So we really do celebrate our intake almost daily, but certainly weekly doesn't have anything crazy. You're just complimenting go back a great job on this one that they love that, that makes a big difference. And talking about them in front of the rest of the office, the way I just said, look, the rest of us wouldn't have a job. If it weren't for these people going after these cases.

And it's a tough job. It is a tough job. You know, what was the statistic, you know, for every, yes, you get in your life, you're gonna get six noes. Same thing here, you know, statistically speaking in sales, you have to pursue something five times in order to get the sale. You know, and you have to take no for an answer a lot, you know, and people are upset. So it's a tough job. And you know, the

last, the last thing is, if you can have an in house, that you you control, and you nurture and develop, I think, in my opinion is much better than a service. Not it's not that having a service is bad. But there's, there's a lot to the quality control. If you have it in house,

I realize we touched on something but I didn't necessarily clearly explain it. And that was that concept of Reddit check, get a link. And there is a question coming. But that's something that Darren mentioned, that I perhaps harassed him about. Because we can go out and get a lot of great links for our clients. And the example of the.gov Link is the one I'm going to ask you about in a minute there. But the concept is, you know, if you work with a court reporter, and your law firm, and they come back and they say, Hey, you know, our rates are going up this year, can we just we need to talk to you about our rates, and you're doing your annual negotiation with the court reporter. The term write a check get a link is, you know, this is a business vendor, they're in the legal community, meaning that Google knows that your website is illegal website. And maybe they're in your local market. And so use that concept to write a check, get a link, you know, ask them say, hey, yeah, you know, I understand your prices have to go up a little bit, you've got some additional expenses, and you negotiate the contract, but you one thing you negotiate is, we want a permanent link, on your website, from your website to our website, made if we have to, we'll write you a little blog post that you can put on your blogs about, you know, strategies, to seven things to do after a car accident. And then you link to us as the author of that blog post. But whether it's a local baseball team, or the charities you get involved with, and in this case, I'm gonna ask you the question about came in also from Lee, how did you get the donation to the kids training? How'd you get the.gov link? Ask your partners, when you write a check, or when you do something in the community, ask them for a link to website. But Darren, how did you make that up?

I just asked for it. I mean, I obviously over the years, we've been with him for 12 years, he developed a lot of good relationships, and in fact, have friends with a lot of the officers over there and get deep bring cases to us. They bring their personal cases to us. So we've gotten a lot of good cases out of it. It's really a give back to the community. That's really what it's about. But, you know, we all are in business to try and help people and run a business to make money. So that's part of it, too. But no, I just asked him I just said, Hey, we've got to have this on there. And I guess I approached person that I knew the best and that I knew that I thought would be the best person to run it up the chain of command to get a yes. And that's what happened.

Awesome. Well, the last question comes from Jared. Jay, how important is social media for law firm? And for the Stuart team, do you think this brings you a lot of business? So yes, they asked me first, how important is social media for law firm? You know, I think the guys answered that question earlier. And they said it's really part of branding. And I think that's the best answer. Because I said that, you know, particularly in single incident in law, in things like car accidents, and slip and falls and things like that, you generally would not go to Facebook to search through all your feed, to look for a law firm. You search through Facebook to see what your you know, your friends and family in high school, people who went to high school with are up to so you go to Google and you search for car accident lawyer or slip and fall attorney, your best attorney near me. So Google is really where we focus most of our effort on client conversion opportunities. As we said, it's the LSAS it's the maps. It's the pay per click. It's the SEO it's really all about Google. But social media. I kind of say it's like the checkoff if you will, because a lot of people might come to the law firms website or the agency's website, and if their Facebook people are Instagram people or LinkedIn people, they might check you out on their social media of choice. So I say it's like a deal breaker. And it's like, a social validator, if you will. A lot of people will go to Facebook just to see like, you know, do these guys have any updated posts? Do they do anything in the community? And they might not even know that consciously what they're doing is just like a quality check. But I believe social media has a function of branding and quality checking, but it's not a direct case generator. Guys, what do you think in terms of how much business you get from social

media, I'll just quickly jump in on that one. As we speak here during this this webinar, the teen Academy is happening and one of my attorneys Nick Wagner is actually down there with a videographer videoing some of these things that are going on the they were doing an awesome motorcycle ride, police officer motorcycle demonstration and their drone demonstration, which I wish I could have gone to apparently they have a $50,000 drone, that they use special events anyway. So he's getting to do that. And we're gonna put together some short things for social media. But up front, when I talked about doing this, I was talking to the chief and I said, you know, we'll share this with you guys put on your website if you want. So they're gonna put it on their website. Some of these videos and their social media remains to be seen what it will do for us, but it sure as heck isn't gonna hurt you.

Absolutely. Well, guys, I can't thank you enough. I mean, this was a lot of fun for me. And it's a fresh, new way to share some of our strategies. So thank you so much for your time and your partnership and your friendship. Thanks, you. And Kevin, congratulations again on your show that award again. Yes, congrats.

Yeah, who got me this. Did you get this?

We did. We did.

Really nice. Didn't.

I know. That's great. Thank

you so much glue. Enjoy. Thanks, guys. Have a great day. Bye, everyone. Bye, everyone.

Thank you for listening to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. Please send questions and comments to podcast at 10 Golden rules.com. That is podcast at t e n Golden rules.com.