Leadership In Law Podcast
Are you a Law Firm Owner who wants to grow, scale, and find the success you know is possible?
Welcome to the Leadership In Law Podcast with host, Marilyn Jenkins! Cut through the noise. Get actionable insights and inspiring stories delivered straight to your ears - your ultimate podcast for navigating the ever-changing world of law firm ownership.
In each episode, we dive deep into the critical topics that matter most to you, from unlocking explosive growth to building a thriving team. We connect you with successful law firm leaders and industry experts who share their proven strategies and hard-won wisdom.
So, whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting your journey as a law firm owner, the Leadership in Law Podcast is here to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to build a successful and fulfilling legal practice.
Your host, Marilyn Jenkins, is a Digital Marketing Strategist who helps Law Firms Grow and Scale using personalized digital marketing programs. She has helped law firms grow to multiple 7 figures in revenue using Law Marketing Zone® programs.
Powered by Law Marketing Zone®
https://lawmarketingzone.com
More Leads, More Cases, More Profit!
Leadership In Law Podcast
2025 Digital Marketing Planning Workshop for Law Firms - BONUS Episode
Have you started your business and marketing plan for 2025? Founder of Law Marketing Zone®, Marilyn Jenkins, hosts a planning session to help you write your first draft of your 2025 marketing plan, along with the best marketing strategies that should be included.
What you'll learn in this workshop:
-> A complete checklist of everything you need for a winning business and marketing plan
-> The lead generation strategies that will (and won’t) work in 2025
-> A simple formula to determine exactly how many leads you need to crush revenue goals
-> Actionable tips for developing your 2025 marketing calendar in just a few hours.
Download the workbook and follow along: https://lawmarketingzone.com/2025-plan
If you prefer to watch the video, go here: https://event.webinarjam.com/channel/LMZ-2025-Plan
Book your FREE strategy session with Marilyn at Law Marketing Zone®:
https://lawmarketingzone.com/bookacall
Join our new private community, Law Firm Growth Guild, Your Shortcut to Marketing Mastery and More Clients at https://checkout.lawmarketingzone.com
Join our private community, Law Firm Growth Guild, Your Shortcut to Marketing Mastery and More Clients at
https://checkout.lawmarketingzone.com
Ready to level up your law firm marketing? Book a FREE Discovery Call with Marilyn Here: https://lawmarketingzone.com/bookacall
Leadership In Law Podcast with host, Marilyn Jenkins
Powered by Law Marketing Zone®
https://lawmarketingzone.com
A full-service Digital Marketing Agency helping clients increase Leads, Cases, and Profit by getting their digital marketing right.
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Welcome to the Leadership in Law podcast with host Marilyn Jenkins. Cut through the noise, get actionable insights and inspiring stories delivered straight to your ears your ultimate podcast for navigating the ever-changing world of law firm ownership. In each episode, we dive deep into the critical topics that matter most to you, from unlocking explosive growth to building a thriving team. We connect you with successful firm leaders and industry experts who share their proven strategies and hard-won wisdom. So, whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting your journey as a law firm owner, the Leadership in Law podcast is here to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to build a successful and fulfilling legal practice.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone and thank you for joining me for today's workshop. I'm going to go ahead and jump into my screen. What we're doing today is we are going to be doing a marketing, a digital marketing plan for 2025. Just wanted to welcome you all. If you haven't done your 2025 marketing plan, today's the day we're going to walk through it. We've got some tools and everything for you, so let's jump into getting ready for 2025 and making it our best year yet.
Speaker 2:So the plan for the session is going to be we want to set some clear goals and our targets for the year. We want to realign any KPIs that are tracking to achieve those outcomes, map out our plan for our accomplishment. We want to look at our budget, the channels, as well as important trends that we want to look out for 2025. And we want to set up for massive success in 2025 and beyond. This is going to take looking back at what happened in 2024 and going forward in 2025 and beyond. My team and I do this on a quarterly basis and an annual basis, so if it's not something that you're doing, you might want to do that, just so you can get a handle, by a quarterly basis, of what's working and what's not, and ideas for new things you want to do. This is a good way and get started with that. So at Law Marketing Zone, we developed a program called the Case Model for Law Firm Growth Plan and it's clear. It's three pillars that are three clear steps to triple your sales by getting your internet marketing right. So we work with driving leads, maximizing conversion and optimizing results.
Speaker 2:So if you need help with your marketing, have questions that sort of thing, please reach out and let me know. I'd be happy to have a chat with you. And the question is who am I and why should you listen to me? I'm the founder of MG Media Group and Law Marketing Zone. I'm the author of the Google Business Profile Training Guide and Private Driven Digital Marketing how Law Firms Can Win Clients and Boost Revenue. I've worked at digital marketing since the late 90s and I've worked with over 150 law firms and local businesses. I've been exclusively working with law firms since 2018 and helped many of those grow to over seven figures in retainers using our programs. You can go to lawmarketingzonecom, as well as mjmediagroupco, to see some of the videos from our happy clients. So this is what we do. Our mission is to triple the revenue of 500 law firms the next three years. We are a full-service digital marketing agency for law firms. We have programs and plans for all sizes of firms and all budgets, so our team is here to support you every step of the way.
Speaker 2:So what are your biggest challenges when it comes to marketing? If you drop some notes in the chat, if you'd like, let's make this a bit interactive have you done a marketing plan in the past? Put a one in the chat. And have you done one for 2025? Put 2025 in the chat. Let's see who's up there and who's getting working on this. So what are your biggest challenges when it comes to marketing? Is it that you're not getting enough leads? Are the leads low quality? Do the leads cost too much? Are they giving you low ROI? What would it look like if you had a steady flow of leads and cases, week over week, month over month, year over year? What if you build an audience of raving fans and you could gain access to their network and build scalable and predictable ad campaigns? That's what we help you do with a well-executed strategy, so that people are standing in line to do business with you. So let's get started. Number one set clear goals. Okay. So who here has set goals for 2025? If you have goals for 2025, drop 2025 in the chat. Let's get together and kind of look at what we're doing and, you know, make a commitment to do this, because by building, setting forth goals, you're going to build and be where you want to be. And Brian Tracy says success is goals. All else is commentary.
Speaker 2:We do this my team and I do this on a quarterly basis so we can see what is going, what's going, what's going not going well, what we want to keep. So what we do is we sit down and we review our objectives and our priorities. We analyze the numbers. We look at our strengths, our weaknesses and any trends we're seeing in the market. We look at our current projects and think about new projects what's going well that we want to keep, what is not going well we want to stop. What are the new projects we want to start? And every quarter we look at the top one of the five that we're working with. So we always want to be looking at the numbers, follow the data and increase our marketing campaigns, outreach, inbound, any of those types of things that's working well and, again, that helps us to reduce our, increase our ROI and reduce our lead costs. So clear goals equals wind in your sails. So, as we get started today if you didn't see it in the show notes or in the in the workshop notes, we do have a work marketing plan for you. There's a workbook here so you can download your workbook for this workshop at lawnmarketingzonecom. Slash 2025-plan. There's also a spreadsheet that we're going to talk about and a checklist that we're going to go over. So I've got some tools there for you so you can analyze where you are and where you want to be.
Speaker 2:Okay, so what you want to look at is your current snapshot. Where are you now? What's your average monthly revenue? What's your typical number of cases you handle each month? And then average case value and average conversion. And also you might want to look at the capacity of your team. Are you at full capacity or 80% capacity? Because when you get to 80% capacity, you then need to be bringing on new people, because that gives you the other 20% capacity for the training time of the new people. So think of all the things, of what's happening now, and then look at our long-term vision for 2025 and 2026. What do you want your annual revenue to be. Do you have enough team members to support that? And what is your why? You know our why is super important to us attaining our goals, reaching our goals and then surpassing our goals. So keep that in mind as well. Write that down so you have those notes and refer back to them over the course of the next year.
Speaker 2:So in the 2025 plan folder you're going to see we have a lead generation target planner. In the spreadsheet there's a couple of sheets. The first one is your lead generation target planner. On this sheet you want to look at the white sales only. Those are the ones you want to fill in, and what you want to do is fill in your annual revenue goal with a target what you want to do for 2025. And the sheet will automatically divide it by 12. Now input your average case value and that's going to tell you how many signed clients you'd require to hit your monthly goal.
Speaker 2:Okay, so then we can go through. We can figure out, okay about how many leads do we get referral leads, how many do we convert? So we'll see how many cases we get from referrals. Then we want to go in to say, okay, now we've got 20 referral leads, so that leaves us 26 more that we need to get each month. So how many leads do I need to get to those new clients? Okay, so I need 26 cases.
Speaker 2:I think it said leads. I need 26 cases to hit my target. So what I need to do is to multiply that times four, so that'll give me a 25% close rate. If your close rate is higher, then that's fantastic. So then we can adjust that calculation there. But if you look at the, you need 103 leads in order to get 26 cases. Then your average cost per lead. You would look at your bat numbers to see and in this instance we said it's 32. Then our monthly ad budget would be $3,307 to get those 103 leads, which should give you the remaining 26 cases. So that way you've jumped down and figured out what your monthly budget is going to be to require to hit your target. Okay, so you can play with some numbers in there, based on what your current revenue is and your average case value.
Speaker 2:And one of the things you might want to think about is should you increase your retainers Is? And one of the things you might want to think about is should you increase your retainers, is that's going to allow you to have less cases and increase your revenue. So you can think of. So there's a few places here where you can make some adjustments in your goals. So give that some thought as well. So, if you have set your goals for 2025, please put that in, put in the chat goals and then we'll we'll just pat you on the back and bet you have done your goals, because so many companies have not. And if you know what your goals are, do you know how many leads it will take? You will need monthly to get there, okay, so clearly, by going through some of the numbers back, you know how, what your average cost per lead is, you know what your closing percentage is, that sort of thing. So definitely have those numbers and let's move into.
Speaker 2:Oh, here we go. This is super important. Harvard grad study said only 84% of businesses or no, 84% of businesses have no specific goals. They just go to work day in and day out. 13% have their goals written down, which is fantastic, but only 3% had clear written goals and plans to accomplish them. So that's something I want to challenge you to do is before the start of the year, obviously before December, so you have time to really buckle down on it. Write down your goals, write down your plans to accomplish them.
Speaker 2:Right now is the time to start building out and increasing your marketing. While some of your competition is pulling back and not doing marketing for Q4. This is not the time to sit on your laurels. You can actually overtake them in the rankings on their Google business profile, at the maps or in their SEO. If they're pulling back for December, you can actually be the one that can be found in Facebook ads or Google PPC, because some people are not marketing in December and, as you know, legal problems happen year round. They don't take a break because the holidays are here. Now there might be less divorces in the holidays, but there's still other issues out there. So you want to be available and make sure you're front of mind.
Speaker 2:So in the spreadsheet, in the workbook area page, you can get your marketing budget planner. Now, this is one of the tabs on the spreadsheet. What you would do is, at the top, put your annual projected revenue and then choose the percentage that you want to spend of that projected revenue. Okay, so the national law review says firms should spend between eight and 18% of projected revenue on marketing to reach their goal. Now, how much are you currently spending and how much should you be spending? Okay, if you're not spending enough, you're not going to grow to the point that you want to grow to. So if you look at this and say, okay, so you want 70%. So you can break that down and say, oh, I want 70%. Online marketing how much you want for offline and for repeat business, and this sheet will break it down by month for you. Okay, for each one of those, so you can see what you're spending and you can easily get an ROI on that. Okay.
Speaker 2:But keep in mind you need to be spending a percentage and when it comes to like the different practice areas, like estate planning should be something along the lines of 8 and 10 percent. Family law should be 10 to 12. Personal injury obviously 15 to 25, depending on the competition in your market. So keep in mind what you should be spending and then see what you are spending. If you're spending, if you should be spending 8 to 10 percent because you're at estate planning or family law and you're spending, if you look back on what you've been doing, you're at estate planning or family law and you're spending. If you look back on what you've been doing. You're spending one to three percent, which I've seen a lot of firms do.
Speaker 2:You need to realize you're not spending enough to grow to where your goal is Okay, and I'm not saying that as a marketer, I'm saying that as a business owner. I have to look at that as well. How much am I spending on marketing to hit my goals? You've got to think of it as what do you need to that to hit my goals? You've got to think of it as what do you need for that? So let's look at our marketing strategy. So here at Low Marketing Zone, we have created the case model. So I showed you this in words above and this is our circle of success that we have and these are our three pillars. It's driving leads, maximizing conversion and optimizing results.
Speaker 2:Okay, and the first thing we want to talk about is our organic SEO. So organic SEO is working with your Google business profile to show up on the maps. It's working on your website, where we make sure that you've got the right H1 tags and all those technical terms of making sure your pages. You have a page for each service, a page for each city and service that you service, and then adding blog posts, syndicating that through a signal service and leveraging signals. You know, making sure that you're listed on all the directories that you possibly can be. You know using fresh content periodically. So all of these different things to make sure that Google, bing, yahoo all the search engines know what you want, it's which searches you want to be relevant for. Okay, and with your Google business profile, is simply a way of getting more leads and more calls and more website visits. This particular client, in 60 days, increased their phone calls by 42.5%. So how would 42% increase in calls impact your profit monthly? Okay, so think about that. And their website visits went up 45%. So it does return investment working on your Google business profile.
Speaker 2:Now, looking at where you're showing up in the Google Maps. Now, google says 60 to 80% of traffic that searches on their phone. Click in the map pack, just like when you are a consumer and say you're out and you decide you want to go check on is this pizza place open or what's the closest pizza place near me? You're going to do a search on your phone. The maps come up and that's where you're going to look how close they are. You want to be on first page. That means one of the top three.
Speaker 2:So with this particular client we have a program called the Maps Power Boost, and on the left is where they were showing up, the twos anything that's green is page one, yellow is page two or more, and then red is beyond that. So the thing is, where's the best place to hide a dead body? And it's on page two of Google. Yeah, we've all heard that, right, because nobody goes to page two. But if you look on the right after working with us I believe this was after about 60 days you can see that in the direct vicinity of their office they are on page one. We still have a little bit of work to do on some of those, but over the course of the next few months they're going to be on page one in their whole service area. That's the goal with your Google business profile.
Speaker 2:So with this client this is a DUI attorney in Austin they were in space 20. So you can see a lot of red on the left and in four weeks we had a hundred percent improved pins. Okay. So we went from a average score of 20 to an average score of 2.4. And, like I said, there's three on the homepage. So we got their good pins in. We actually moved all of their pins into ranking better, so this service works. If you want to improve your Google powers, google Maps ranking, let me know. We'd love to chat with you about that.
Speaker 2:So now let's talk about paid search. Who here is running Google ads or meta ads? Put type ads in the chat if you are running ads, so paid ads are a really good place to be. So when we talk about paid ads, we want to look at our buyer's pyramid. Okay, I see some feedback. That's great. Okay. So some of you are running ads All right, great.
Speaker 2:So then you probably understand the buyer's pyramid. So what we're looking at here is the top 3% of the people that are most aware of their problem and they're looking at buying a solution right now. And the next step down are their product aware. They know they have a problem and they know there's a product to fix it, and they're comparing their options. So those two are the ones that we're going to be looking on Google, that we'll be searching on Google or the search engine in order to get a solution to their problem, where the bottom three stages are either unaware they have a problem or they're kind of thinking about it, or they know they have a problem and they're researching a solution, but they're not ready to buy it. So we split our buyer's pyramid in those two sections because when we look at our search and social media, we're looking at Google With Google is where you're going to get those top two areas. These people have a demand. We want to capture that demand. They're on Google search. They're looking at your Google business profile, display ads and YouTube, so we can target on search intent. Right, we know they're looking for us and then we can get reports and see the conversion attribution on that. Then, for the bottom part of the buyer's pyramid, then we're looking at social media.
Speaker 2:Now I'm not doing a lot on TikTok because if you're selling a service, I'm not seeing that that's coming back as a positive ROI at this point. Direct-to-consumer products is working so much better there, but that's just my experience. And on X, the same. I'm not seeing with the service-based business that it's helping. But on Netta, with Facebook and Instagram, it definitely is.
Speaker 2:Advertising does by getting with the demand generation on these platforms. What you're doing is you're building some audiences, you're building engagement, you're telling people who you are and getting that interest out there. Okay, we can get website visits, we can get video views, we can get social engagement, and then from every piece of engagement, we can build lookalike audiences which, in the long term, increases our audiences altogether. Engage with them, be creative. You're getting a cold audience that needs nurturing to bring them closer to you. Get them to know, like and trust you so they'll do business with you. And if you look on, this is from WordStream. This is showing that an average cost for a Facebook ad ranges from one to three dollars per click, with a click through rate of one point six one percent. So with the legal industry, that's literally the highest click-through rate of any of the industries that they track. Okay, so even if you secure only one client from these ads, it'd be worth the effort in the investment. This particular client we're doing immigration campaign for them. In the first 21 days of October, they received 59 leads, with an average cost per lead of $17.53. And they secured 30,000 in retainers. So that is, I believe, an 8x ROI. So that was pretty amazing, okay, so we've talked about where you can advertise and for what reasons.
Speaker 2:Now let's look at pay-per-click campaigns and why most campaigns fail. So with Google, it's a very complicated beast. Okay, there's a lot that can go wrong but a lot that can go right. But one of the biggest problems, or some of the biggest problems I find when we look at people's campaigns, is they're putting one ad group for all their services. So, like for a personal injury attorney, they have a car accident, truck accident and motorcycle accident all in the same ad group, where that's not correct. If I'm looking at, if I've had a motorcycle accident, I'm looking specifically for that. I'm not looking for a car accident or a truck accident. So the same for divorce, child custody, alimony, any of those things. You need to have those ad groups separated so that Google can put the correct ad in front of the correct person so that they can see the message and they'll resonate with that message.
Speaker 2:And then I see that people don't use specific text ads that go to the same landing page with the same group of keywords. So we've got to think about continuity of messaging. And with continuity of messaging, if I see an ad and I clicked on it and I go to a landing page that has a completely different message, I'm not going to trust ad and I clicked on it and I go to a landing page that has a completely different message. I'm not going to trust that and I'm going to go back to Google. So then you paid for a click that would never convert. So you want to make sure that your text, ads and the landing page have a continuity of messaging and branding so that people you're making that trust factor okay.
Speaker 2:One of the other problems is people aren't using negative keywords. With negative keywords, you can tell Google of searches you should not be found in that are not relevant. Okay, and no ongoing maintenance. Again, I said in the beginning, google is a beast. There are so many moving parts to it. You can't just set a campaign and let it run forever without doing some adjustments to it and never, ever accept all of Google's recommendations. Their automated recommendations are there to make you spend more money. Okay. And again, no strong call to action or offer on the landing page. If you've gotten a click from your ad into the landing page, you want to make sure that you tell them what to do, whether that's call now, start a live chat, fill out this form, book a call, give them a strong call to action of what they should be doing on your landing page. So, just as the power of Google PPC.
Speaker 2:This particular client, out of $9,000 spend, generated 224 leads. They were able to convert about 40% of them to booked appointments and ended up getting 45 cases at $2,500 average cost per case. It's $112,500. That's an 8X ROI over the course of three months. So 8X ROI. If you could get that every day of the week, how many times, how many dollars would you put in? Right, you're getting $8 back for every $1 investment. So it can be very good. It needs to be managed. Okay, this particular client we're looking at again 60 days of data on this one with 39 total cases and their average cost per click. Cost per acquisition was $54, and cost per click was 23. So it's very cost effective there.
Speaker 2:And looking at these total number of leads that's coming through whether it was our Facebook ads or Google ads it's really important to have a dashboard to manage the flow of these leads or Google ads. It's really important to have a dashboard to manage the flow of these leads. Leads need to be responded to quickly so that you can ensure they don't go cold, and a dashboard will help you do that. And if you guys have any case management software or something like that, make sure that that software, if possible, can connect with your ad campaigns so that you can set up automations and that sort of thing, and we're going to talk a little bit more about automations going forward, but it's super important that we do that because we don't want to lose a lead.
Speaker 2:Now let's talk about your database. When we talk about your database, we're talking about old clients that you haven't talked to in a while, but they're in your database, and old leads that never hired you. Right? If you have their information, because they contacted you, they came through any of your ads they're in your database, right? Again, another reason to have a CRM. If they're in your database, you should be communicating with them on a regular basis.
Speaker 2:Now, if you haven't, you need to set up some sort of email newsletter, which you see some examples on the right you can see. You need to call them, email or text message them. Only, of course, if you have permission to text them, and sometimes, if you haven't reached out to your database at all, you might want to send a message saying hey, I appreciate you speaking with us in the past or doing business with us. Is there anything that I can help you with? You know, do you know anybody that we can help with? And you never know what that's going to do. It could come out to be a very lucrative event, right? Like Jerry here was able to retain three clients from our reactivation campaign, that's a potential of 40,000 retainers before we even got our ad started. So down at the bottom you can see where we ran through database reactivation. We're using a CRM for that and it helps to make sure that no one is lost in the whole transition.
Speaker 2:Okay, but do be in touch with your database and you know, like I said, there's it's so simple to do an email newsletter on a monthly basis. If you if any, if you've been here is doing an email newsletter, a regular email newsletter drop in the chat newsletter so we can see who's actually doing that, because that's super helpful, super important, good, okay, great, I'm seeing a few newsletters. Great, I'm glad to see you guys are doing that, and that means that you are front of mind with your leads. When something does happen, they are going to reach out to you instead of going to Google and looking at somebody else. Okay, so let's jump to the Maximize Conversions and let's talk about how we help you make your website convert more and how you can make sure that your website is converting more leads and traffic that visit your website.
Speaker 2:But there's 12 critical elements. First, you want to make sure that your website is speaking to your target avatar. Okay, are there fears, frustrations? Why would they choose you? And be real, use authentic images of your team on the homepage and throughout the website, right, don't use stock images. And this one's really important Use video and multimedia elements to engage with them.
Speaker 2:Obviously, a lot of people are engaging with video these days, but the other reason to use video, especially on your homepage, is when someone does a search on Google and then they click to your site. If they turn around and immediately go back to Google, that tells Google your bounce rate is high. You're not relevant for that search, when you may have been relevant for that search, but the people left too quickly. But if you had a welcome video on your homepage 30, 60, 90 seconds talking about who you are, who you service, what you do and a call to action that they stayed long enough to watch that and then returned to Google without taking action, it told Google that you were relevant because they spent X amount of time on your site Okay, so try to give the type of content that would make people spend more time on your site, and it's a good idea, though, to do videos for each of your services, and I even suggest going one step further and doing videos of your FAQs. You answer those questions on video. These are less than 30 seconds and can be used as social media posts as well, so explain to people in a video why they should work with you as opposed to the competition right, and then, of course, leverage social proof. This is where you want to put your reviews on the website, on your homepage, but you can get a plugin that works with WordPress or whatever your site's made out of, that can pull them straight from Google and get, of course, the basics in order.
Speaker 2:Make sure your phone number's in the top right-hand corner. That's where we, as visitors, are used to seeing them. Make sure there's a form where people can fill out, and you can add credibility by using authority symbols like the Better Business Bureau, if you're registered with them, avo, lawyercom, and having clear call to action Again. Tell people what to do. They need to be told. Fill out this form. Put the column click now to call now, right, so make sure your website is mobile optimized and obviously go to it on your phone to look at it and see how it's flowing.
Speaker 2:Leverage live chat and start giving clients the option to book online. If you don't have a lead to your calendar on your website, do that, even if it means getting a Calendly link. Or you know the CRM. Our CRM has a calendar built into it that syncs with your Google Calendar, so there's those types of things too. And, of course, site speed and then engaging in your SMS and phone using not working automation is huge and we'll look at a couple of examples here. So this particular client has, you can see, they have their phone number in the top right corner. They have a live chat and a form, so they're taking advantage of several ways on their homepage to be able to people to reach them. So you can get some reports from your social media or your SEO services and your Google Tag Manager to see how much traffic is coming through your website, how many, what ratio clicks to call or book or anybody who takes action. So you can keep track of that and then, as you make improvements to your website, you can see that number change and get better.
Speaker 2:This particular client. You can see that they take advantage of a few things on their homepage. Obviously, they're talking to the people right in the middle. They've got a text us button, they've got a live chat, and what I didn't go and error to is, if you look in the bottom left-hand corner, they've got an accessibility option. So they are working, being able to be accessible to a lot of people. This particular client is obviously doing video That'll keep people on the site longer as they talk about what they're doing and and they're talking about what injury lawyers do see it's episode one, so you know there's more information coming and then, of course, show social proof, put this, whether you've got a widget on your website, any of that sort of thing like that see some.
Speaker 2:You can do more than one on a page. You can do one on a page. So different widgets allow different ways of seeing or displaying your reviews. And then getting your fundamentals right Again the key, the phone number in the top right, live chat, accessibility and a form all of these things on your page so that you give people more opportunities to contact you Again. And the one on the right here this is actually a little video of him talking in the live chat, so clearly very, very good to start a conversation there.
Speaker 2:So let's go to reputation. So we're all interested in reviews, right, we want to have lots and lots of reviews. So reviews are not the only thing that will make your Google business profile rank above your competition. It's obviously helpful, every review needs to be replied to. But you want to get reviews and you want to make sure that you get real reviews on a regular basis, right? So you want your frequency to be normal, and your way to do that is to make it part of your business process that every time you finish working with a client, that it is part of your SOPs to ask for a review. Now put in the chat review, if you are, if your team knows to ask for a review when you finish working with a client. Okay, there's a couple coming in, yeah, so some do, some don't, and they're uncomfortable asking for reviews, and let me just say you need to not be uncomfortable. We have to ask for reviews and let me just say you need to not be uncomfortable. We have to ask for reviews.
Speaker 2:Amazon has made us all understand the importance of reviews. So before you buy something on Amazon, you're probably reading the reviews, right? Well, that's what people are doing before they call you. So ask for reviews. Then reply to each of those reviews with thank yous or whatever you know. Just professionally. Reply to those reviews and you can automate your review request with your CRM. So our caseload AMP does that. Mycase, clio a lot of these have a way of automating that. So look at your tools that you're using and automate your review requests and then prominently display them on your website. Little widget on the left here actually rotates through the reviews in live time.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about automation. So I know we've touched on automation a little bit from time to time here. What we wanna do is to say is lead flow really the problem? So we're getting leads from all of these platforms referrals, your Google business profile, ads and the thing is, are we capturing all of those leads? Are we responding to all these leads? Is lead flow the problem, or is the problem that they're not converting? They're not getting answered. You know, 67% of inbound calls to small businesses go unanswered. How would your business grow if you actually answered every call or started a conversation from every missed call? Right? What if a web form? Someone comes to your website and we have a way of starting a conversation with them instead of them going away? 90 to 97% of inbound traffic leave unconverted.
Speaker 2:We have a program that will help us capture the name, email, phone number and home address of everyone that comes to your website that doesn't fill out a form. So reach out if that's something. If you're paying for seo, you know you're getting trapped into your website, but you're not capturing those. Reach out to me. I'm happy to show you how we can help you capture that data. So the reason we feel that lead flow is not the problem, it's because if leads are not followed up within 15 minutes, they go cold. Right? We all know that if you don't, if you're not speed to lead, you're going to lose them. The average customer also, or potential customer, needs to be followed up with five to nine times before they book.
Speaker 2:Okay, marketing messages are. We are just constantly bombarded with marketing messages and so that makes us have a short-term attention span, right. So when we work with a client, we have automations built in that, when a lead comes through, we immediately notify the lead so that they feel acknowledged. We notify the client so they can get on the phone with the lead. Then we put them into a five-day email and text message sequence and the client calls the very name for five days or until they reach them. So you need to have this messaging process and automate it as much as possible to make it easier on your team, and today's consumers prefers to interact, being text messages most of the time, phone calls or emails as well, but we find that a lot of people want to do text or phone calls.
Speaker 2:So the solution is to leverage marketing automation, right. So, again, if you're using Clio or MyCase or any of those, look and see what automation are in there. We offer a CRM that does that. We automate the follow-ups. We even automate a missed call text back. So if you miss a call, we automatically send a text message that starts a conversation with them hey sorry, we missed your call that kind of thing, so that they will reply immediately and it saves that inbound call. So, instead of missing 67% of the inbound calls, we're going to try to save those by starting text messaging conversations with those incoming calls.
Speaker 2:This is our caseload app. It looks like a lot here, but basically, when a lead comes in, these are the processes that we put in place to make sure they're not lost, right. To make sure that we're putting every effort possible to reach them and start a conversation. And this is where we're going to do red, yellow and green right. This is super important. To save you time, save your team time and make your ROIs maximized is by being able to automate these things and make sure your reputation is good, so that it's already going right. The outreach is there. It's easier for you to be able to close more cases because more leads are being worked with. More leads are being brought to the front by automation instead of people's time in your office.
Speaker 2:Okay, so let's talk about spend. So when we talk about spend, again we're going to go back to what the National Law Review is saying you should be spending between 8% and 18% of your projected revenue on marketing to reach your goal, right? So how much are you currently spending? How much did you spend in 2024? And what are you projected to spend in 2025? And if you're spending less than 8 percent, you're not doing yourself a service if you want to grow your firm. You're not doing yourself a service if you want to grow your firm.
Speaker 2:So again, this sheet is in the spreadsheet that you can find for free at lawmarketingzonecom slash 2025 hyphen plan and you put in your projected annual revenue up there, what your marketing percentage is going to be. So you're going to do that and it'll break it down by month and you just tell it what percentage of online marketing, offline marketing, repeat business you'd like to do that and it'll break it down by month and you just tell it what percentage of online marketing, offline marketing, repeat business you'd like to do, and that'll figure out what you should be spending your money on. So if it's white, you can actually put some information in there. But think, if you spend less than 8%, you're looking to remain static in your revenue. Okay, if you're going 10 to 15%, you're looking at moderate growth, and if you're looking at 15 or more percentage. Then you're looking at accelerated growth. If you have the profit margin to spend more to reach your goal, spend more to reach your goal. As you grow, you'll have more profit, you can bring on more team members, you'll grow your firm and then you also get to the point where the critical mass. You'll start bringing in more clients and then more referrals.
Speaker 2:So let's look at our average cost per lead. So your average cost per lead is going to be based on how much you spend, obviously and we track this on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis and you can get this information from your ads team or your ads account and you can see like pay-per-click is typically more local service ads than than meta ads. And then whatever you spend to get referrals and then find a blended average no-transcript. This particular client spent almost $12,000 and got 1,119 leads. Now these were calls, ppc calls, google Maps calls and then web forms and chat. So this is all of the type of calls that came from this and their average cost per lead was $10.85. So that was pretty impressive. This is over, I believe, a four month period of time. $10.85 a lead is pretty incredible. You should be able to get those numbers again on your ad platforms.
Speaker 2:Okay, so now the final piece to our puzzle is your ROI. So what we want to do is help you get a better ROI for what you're spending. So, again, our solution is our caseload AMP that has so much automation built into it. If you're using automation, that's fantastic. I would challenge you to see what more you can automate. That still sounds normal because we don't want to sound robotic with what we're doing.
Speaker 2:This particular client, in the course of October, in less than one month of meta ads, had booked consultations. She's closed six cases by the time I did this slide and has over 30 booked consultations, but six cases for $30,000. In one month she spent $4,000. So she's at 8.5x ROI. That's a pretty incredible ROI and that's what we want to look for is proper outreach and follow-up to every lead to make sure that we get the highest ROI possible, and using a dashboard is a way to do that. As the funny saying is is, half my advertising spend is wasted. I just don't know which half. If we keep track of your ROI, if we watch the reports that come through use our reports with that come through for your Google ads. That track everything. The Google tag manager, all of those things. We can see where the money is, where the traffic's coming from, what needs to be adjusted and what needs to be. You want to look at ROI as another stoplight event? Okay, so it's super important that you have a handle on this and that your marketing team or yourself can make sure what's working and what's not working and how to improve those numbers. And using a dashboard is very helpful. And, of course, I mean I have to say it outsourcing you guys are attorneys, you guys are handling cases is what you do. You should have someone that handles your marketing for you, if at all possible.
Speaker 2:Quick question for you. We're coming up to step three here. So quick question is what kind of takeaways have you got so far Put in a chat? What area you need to focus on most? Is it going to be like an email newsletter? Is it automation? Do you need to do database reactivation? And what is the lowest hanging fruit that you can take advantage of? Okay, I'm seeing a. I'm seeing a database, a newsletter. Right, I see a newsletter in there. Great, yeah, exactly, I mean just that is so, so simple. And, of course, yeah, definitely some automations. I'm seeing that come through. So, and and better, better, follow up with the leads that are coming through, and that's where you're going to save so much money is you're paying for leads you're not following up with.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about planning your focus. Now we're getting to the meeting phase. We've talked about all the different things. Now let's talk about how to plan your focus. Let's talk about your, say, social media planning or marketing planning. Is your firm, is your practice area one that you can make a different message each month for the course of the year? If not, it's fine to promote your main service year round, but think seasonally, with your seasonal imagery and creatives, right, so you can actually break down your marketing by pay per click, any specific thing we can talk about. You know, if it's more rainy, would you get more accidents. Snow do you need to talk about that? I mean, you know any of those types of things. And then an email would you do a different? You know what would you say in email marketing? And it could be that you'd use the same main service all the time. On social media, maybe you'll just change up and put some fall pictures in the autumn, something like that. So think about that. Is there a way that you can change up your messaging.
Speaker 2:We want to make sure we keep our audience fresh by keeping our creatives up to date. We don't want to fatigue our audience, so we want to give them new stuff periodically. Okay, like this is Peter in California. Just in 2023 alone, he has generated 159 cases with a minimum of $794,000 in revenue, and that's a 14X ROI. Working with our program, it's very successful, being able to get him the types of cases that he wants. It's workers comp, so he actually makes a lot more than $794,000, but 14X ROI is one of our best that we've been able to achieve with our plans. Edward is getting 190 average Spanish immigration leads each month. He hired extra paralegals to help with his case loan. He's consistently closing five cases a week. Roi can be good. What would it mean to you to have this type of lead flow? If you have the processes in place to manage this lead flow, you could see the ROI we're talking about.
Speaker 2:What I want to ask you now is how are you doing? We have a free checklist at lawmarketingzonecom slash 2025 plan. So that's the the website you've already looked at for the workbook. I have a checklist there that you can go through and look at each of these different pieces and check off what you're doing and seeing what you're missing, right. So have a look at that, get that document and then see where you are, see what you need to work on and, if you have questions or need help, reach out. And if you'd like a free SEO review to see where you're ranking, where's your Google business profile, what's going on and how you can improve, I would be happy to do this free SEO review for you. And again, we give you your analysis. We'll do the custom keywords, we'll do all of these reports for you. It takes a few hours to put everything together, but we'll certainly get that ready for you. You can book a time with me at lawmarketingzonecom bookwithmaryland and that'll be a one-hour meeting that we'll take a deep dive into your reports and talk about how we can help you and or just what you need to do. And, of course, you can do it on your own. And again, this is our law marketing zone, our case model, this is our three pillows that we've walked through, all the nine steps to help you get your internet marketing right and grow your firm.
Speaker 2:Think about what we've talked about and moving forward to 2025. What are your top action items? If you're comfortable sharing them in the chat, what would be your top action items moving forward and going into the 2025, into 2025? And you can again get your workbook. There's the link to a workbook again. If you don't have it, get the workbook there. But what are your top action items? Okay, I can see email. Faster response to leads, of course, yeah, so you're getting. You're getting that point Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And what we want to talk about is is prioritizing. You know, getting your website squared away. Yeah, I see live chat. Yeah, live chat is such a great thing to put on your website. Technical and local SEO. Google ads Absolutely. The GA format measurement is what we get. All the stats for the Google marketing, retargeting and social media Absolutely. Reviews and reputation these are all the things you need to look at and prioritize those. What do you have in place and what do you need to put in place, okay. Okay, I see another one coming in. Yeah, get more reviews, absolutely. So you need to definitely work on that.
Speaker 2:What's next? I think you have three options. You can. You can just do nothing and go on the way you are, hope your referral sources keep sending you leads and assume that you're going to make the same next year as you are this year, or maybe less, depending on how it goes. You can do it yourself. Take all the information we've had here the checklist, the spreadsheet, the workbook and do it yourself. Get a process in place to get your SEO, get your ads, get everything in order to increase your lead flow and your automation to increase your lead flow. So you increase your caseload, okay, or you can schedule a 15 minute discovery call with me to see if we're a good fit LawMarketingZonecom. Book a call. We'll chat for a few minutes, see what your goals are, how we can help you and if it makes sense to spend some more time. Meet for a longer period of time on Zoom Again, schedule a call with me for this free digital marketing or SEO review and see where you are, and you know we can certainly help you do that, help you develop a roadmap and a plan that's best for your firm. So you can book some time with me at wallmarketingzonecom slash. Book a call and I'm excited.
Speaker 2:Just to recap, what we talked about today is setting clear goals and targets for your year, realign your KPIs and tracking. Map out your plan with your budget, the channels and the important trends and set you up for massive success. If you work your way through, you know our nine steps, the different processes that we've provided in the tools. Here you should see where you need, where you want to go and then a clear picture of how to get there. That's what I have for you today. I hope this has been helpful.
Speaker 2:If you want to chat or if you have any questions, please let me know. Okay, the question about the CRM. Okay, yes, the CRM. You can. A lot of you guys use Clio. There's my case. Our CRM is called Caseload AMP and you can always reach out to me and we can talk about that, how we can help you use the automations there. And yes, you should be the live chat, and I'm not sure where the video chat got. I'll have to look that up. Okay, yeah, but yeah, you want to put a form, do videos on your website?
Speaker 2:Go through what we've talked about here today. I know there's a lot of information and you can absolutely see to review this. Again. If you have any questions, please book a call with me. This is a 15 minute phone call. We can. I can answer any of your questions or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn as well. I want to thank you all you guys again. Again, my name is Marilyn Jenkins with Law Marketing Zone. Reach out if I can be of assistance and I want to thank you so much for your time today and here is to a fantastic 2025 and beyond. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Leadership in Law podcast. Remember you're not alone on this journey. There's a whole community of law firm owners out there facing similar challenges and striving for the same success. Head over to our website at lawmarketingzonecom. From there, connect with other listeners, access valuable resources and stay up to date on the latest episodes. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Until next time, keep leading with vision and keep growing your firm.
