Boomtime specializes in helping law firms make the most of their online marketing. Founder and CEO Bill Bice believes that lawyers have untapped resources they could take advantage of to grow the business – if only they knew where to find those resources and how to leverage them.
For Bill, it’s all about data – understanding what’s important (especially about your prospects and customers) and then using that to market more effectively and efficiently. That’s a path to growth but also a huge obstacle to lawyers, who are good at what they do but aren’t necessarily equipped to tackle the intricacies of digital marketing.
We talk about how small firms can step up their marketing game, including…
- The 3 main marketing channels you should focus on
- Why the 90/10 rule is so important (and how to stick to it)
- How to automate your marketing for more leads and new clients
- The biggest mistakes small firms make with marketing – especially their websites
- And more
Listen now…
Mentioned in this episode:
- Boomtime’s Website
- Connect with Bill on LinkedIn
Transcript
Davina Frederick: Hello, and welcome to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. Our mission is to provide thought-provoking powerful and practical information to help you in creating your own sustainable wealth-generating law firm without overwork or overwhelm so you can live your best life. I’m your host, Davina Frederick, and I’m here today with Bill Bice, CEO of Boomtime.
Boomtime is a marketing company that helps law firms grow their businesses in an increasingly competitive market. And they do this through the use of their proprietary fuse automation platform. So really excited to start learning about that. And we’re going to welcome Bill. Bill, we’re so pleased to have you here today on the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast.
Bill Bice: It’s great to be here. Thanks.
Davina: Did I pronounce your last name correctly? Is it Bice? Or is it
Bill: You did an awesome job. There’s an Italian restaurant called Bice but that’s the wrong one.
Davina: Okay, okay, well we could do that if we want to get fancy. Alright, so tell me, let’s just start out telling me a little bit about Boomtime. Kind of give me the brief abbreviated version of that and then we’re going to dig deeper into what you guys do. But tell me how long has it been around? How big is it and how do you serve your clients?
How Boomtime Serves Clients
Bill: Yeah, so Boomtime is really the cross-section of sort of two paths in my career. So I started my first software company when I was 18. That was in the legal market called Pro Law Software that we sold to Thomson Reuters after becoming the largest in our niche of mid-sized law firms and so I spent a long time in the legal market, built another company that I sold to Bloomberg Law, and that gave me a great opportunity to build and invest in a lot of companies.
And marketing was always the biggest challenge in those companies. So Boomtime is, really comes out of my frustration with getting great marketing for my own companies. And I’ve just put those two things together, learning how to do really good marketing for b2b businesses and now applying that specifically to law firms.
Davina: That’s great. So you are a programmer, that’s really where this where, at heart, that’s where it comes from, right? Is you’re a programmer. You’re somebody who can create software to, so you can solve those problems. You have, you can do something that others of us can’t do. And that’s when you see a problem like that, you can solve it by just creating your own tools.
Bill: Yeah, or maybe you don’t want to do but I love doing that stuff. You know, I wrote the first version of Pro Law, wrote a lot of code in the early days for this company. And because of that, I have this sort of natural way of looking at marketing from the standpoint of the data. And we’re in that age now where, you know, marketing really means digital marketing. That means we have, we actually have too much data and we need to turn that into information that we can iterate on and constantly get better. And so if you do that, you really figure out how to get scale and efficiency in your marketing in a way that’s very effective.
Davina: So, one of the big challenges for, you know, that I’ve seen is that a lot of times people, there’s data and they know that there’s this data out there, right? That they could find out, you know, who’s looking at their website, where they’re coming from. They hear things like bounce rate, you know, and all this kind of this terminology, keywords, but if you’re a lawyer or law firm, owner, you’re looking at that and going, you know, like, I’ve tried to be a good lawyer and be a good business owner.
And now I have to understand this whole other language out there. And there’s data that I know that we can collect, but how do you actually know where all the data is and what it all means, right? You know, people will tell you, you know, a bounce rate, Okay, great. What does that mean?
Bill: Yeah, and how is it even relevant to your firm? And it’s, you know, it’s actually, so it’s way too complicated for small firms because it’s really even worse than that because what you really need to do is get the analytics across multiple channels. I mean, the beautiful part about so particularly if your practice area is business-oriented, and we really only have three channels, we need to worry about LinkedIn, email and your website.
And if you can paint an analytic picture across all those channels, then we can really understand what’s working, we can see the customer journey of how do we initially contact a prospective client, how do they learn about our firm, how do we get micro-commitments along the way that turns into them becoming a client. But we actually have to pull all that together in order to get the real picture. So just looking at the website, or just looking at the stats for your email doesn’t get us there. You learn so much more by getting the full picture of combining that across all the channels.
Davina: And how do you guys help do that? How do you help your clients do that? I know you have this software that’s been created, this fuse automation platform. Tell me what that does. Because I’m assuming that what this does is not only does it help you collect data, but it also has some automation for driving content, pushing content out.
Bill: It does. It really gets at the heart of the problem, particularly for smaller firms. If you have a large firm and a dedicated marketing department, you can afford the tools that do all this work and all of the deep complexity that comes with that. But we just don’t have those advantages in a smaller firm and really the, you know, the hardest part of the problem is the content. Like, I always talk about 90% of your effort in marketing for your firm needs to be about great content.
Because it doesn’t matter what the strategy or tactics that you’re implementing are if you don’t have really great content and most of the marketing that most firms do is all about them, you know? The partner they hired, the client that got, the case they won. And the problem with that is your prospective clients don’t, they don’t care. What they want to hear about is your expertise that’s going to help them solve the problems that they have in their business and their career.
And if you change that orientation and make your marketing about that, about how you can help them, about sharing your expertise, it suddenly becomes so much more effective. It’s the 90/10 rule again. That stuff that is 90% of most firms marketing today should really be 10%. It’s not that we don’t want to tell people about the awards that we won and so on. But 90% of it needs to be this insight, perspective-driven content that really attracts the right clients to you. Because they understand now that you can really help them and you’ve got deep expertise to put to work for them.
Davina: And does your team then help with creating content or guiding, or do you guide clients in creating content and then they’re using your system to push it out? Or how does that work?
Boomtime’s Methods For Achieving Client Success
Bill: Yeah, so our approach is all the ideas come from the attorneys in the firm. You know what kind of challenges your clients are having, you know what you need to talk to them about. The hard part is when you’re staring at a blank screen and you need to write an email, you need to write a LinkedIn post to talk about that. And frankly, it’s just not the best use of your time. So, you know, we can have a marketing strategy, sit down with the, with an attorney at your firm, and then half an hour get enough great ideas for three months or six months worth of editorial.
And what we’ve done is developed a network across all different content so that we have a really great flow on target. If you look at that end result, make sure that this and what it says and that’s really the hardest part. But once you get that working well, then you just have, you know, great marketing that’s always going.
Davina: One of the, you know, challenges with small firm owners is that they, you know, they know that these marketing channels are out there and available. And first of all, there’s confusion about, you know, where should I be and which one, you know, there’s so many different social media options out there, plus email us your website, not all this. And so where should I be focusing?
And then they, you know, telling your story, like you said, a lot of times people talk about, you know, their talk about themselves, the lawyers in the firm and that kind of thing, as opposed to focus on the problem-solving. But even if you are, if you were a good writer in English, or you were a good writer in law school, doesn’t mean that you are good at writing, sales copy, or writing content that’s going to drive prospects to action, right?
Bill: Well, absolutely. And you, as an attorney, you probably are a great writer because you’re doing it all the time. But it’s different when you need to turn that into insight that you’re sharing to a larger audience as opposed to trying to, you know, put an agreement together or convince, you know, an audience of one, the judge, about your perspective. And so it’s difficult to make that jump and to sort of switch back and forth between those modes. And I just, I’ve never seen a firm do that successfully, internally, consistently, you know, week after week unless you have full-time staff dedicated to it, which is great when you have a firm large enough for that.
But if you’re a smaller firm, and you really want to compete, you need to do the same things that others are doing that are really successful. And you actually have some real advantages as a smaller firm. You can be much more nimble, your clients get to actually work with the partners in the firm there. You know, there’s a lot of things we can do to get you exposure much more quickly, that the large firms aren’t willing to do.
So a, you know, a really great example is one of the best things that you can do in your firm. If you have a little bit larger firm we have multiple practice areas and several attorneys, then cross-pollinating those practice areas is the easiest way to get more business. Just tell all of the clients and prospective clients and everybody in your network the firm because so often the clients view what they do with the one attorney they’re working within your firm. And it’s really difficult for a large firm to get the cohesion around doing that.
They can’t get all their partners to buy into the idea of having a central database of everybody’s contacts. They don’t want to share them. I think there’s a huge advantage that small firms have because you can get everybody on the same page and behind the firm’s marketing effort. And so just a really simple idea of having a central Rolodex of every attorney in the firm, their network, so that you have consistent marketing going out and staying in front of that audience.
That’s a very difficult thing for larger firms to do. The different practice heads don’t want to share the, they don’t want to share their clients with other practice areas. They certainly don’t want to share the contacts and their network. And yet, if you do that, if you build that central database, and then you do this really simple thing of just cross-pollinating your practice areas, it’s amazing how effective that is at generating more business.
Davina: Right, right. And I want to talk about what you said earlier because I want to dive into these three elements. You were talking about, really the trifecta of using LinkedIn well, using email marketing, well, having a good website. And those three pieces and parts together will really create a successful marketing funnel, you know, for getting a steady flow of clients. And I want to ask you about that. I’m going to challenge you a little bit here on so without because, you know, I hear women attorneys talking with me, women law firm owners and their different perspectives on these different marketing channels.
One, we’ll just start with email because I’m sure you hear this a lot, people will tell you that email is dead or I get so many emails, I don’t read them all, and I don’t look and I’m always looking for ways to eliminate emails and I don’t want spam and you know, whatnot. But then you’ll hear internet marketers will still tell you that email is still the number one way that they get clients and get business. What are your thoughts on that?
Bill: Both of those things are absolutely true. And what we see and the law firms that we work with is that email marketing is the most effective thing that our firms do. And so how do you resolve the conflict between those two things? Because this is a really tough area for attorneys because they, you know, tend to be hesitant to email clients in the first place.
So we’ve got a, we’ve got to get past that and really, the only way to do it is to just to show the experience of other attorneys and how well it works, and sort of ease our way into it. And then you get to the really scary part, which is the fact that we all get too much email. The way that you solve that problem for your firm is to send more email.
And every attorney I talk to you hates it when I say that, but I’ve got the data to prove that it works. And the way that you get around the core problem, which is well, you know, I don’t want to annoy my clients. I don’t want to annoy the people in my network. Well, if the emails you’re sending now are insight and perspective driven that are providing them with valuable expertise, then they’re going to look forward to your emails.
They’re going to want your emails, that’s what makes it work. And you’re going to completely flip around this issue. You’re not annoyed by emails that are beneficial to you. It’s all the salesy, you know, coupon discount-driven stuff that you get all the time that drives you nuts. The things that are actually helpful and we all get emails that we pay attention to because they’re really valuable to us. Well, that’s what your marketing has to be if it’s going to be effective.
Davina: I once had a conversation with a copywriter friend of mine. And he was saying, you know, I was talking about long-form copy versus short copy. And, you know, everybody seems to want quick sound bites these days. And he said, let me ask you this. If I wrote an article that said every report, that said everything I love and hate about to being hot, would you read it? And I said, Well, of course I would.
And he said that is the difference in your content. If you’re creating, people who love cross country skiing are going to subscribe to Cross Country Ski Magazine. They’re going to look at all the websites on cross country skiing. They’re going to, they’re not going to be able to get enough information there. That’s why their magazine that are, you know, so niche for people and that’s really the key with the content, don’t you think? Like when you’re doing those emails, you’re talking about these high-value content and you’re providing in the emails you’re not talking about, oh, our firm had a firm party today in the email.
Bill: Exactly. I just love your example because it hits it right at the heart of the issue. And, you know, you know, your clients in your practice area, you have a level of perspective that comes from working with so many clients with the same kinds of problems. And now you just look at that as this is the source of inspiration from our market. How can I help more people? And if that’s the attitude that you have, then that’s what you’re doing. You’re creating great content for that very specific audience and they are going to appreciate what you’re doing.
Davina: Yeah, yeah. I think attorneys get so kind of caught up in their heads about, you know, I get so many emails a day as an attorney that, you know, my email inbox is my nemesis. But, you know, we’re not our clients, right? And we can’t think, Okay, well, because I have this feeling or that feeling that they’re going to have, they’re going to be the same, think the same way, you know?
Let’s talk about website next because I have seen some law firm owners who don’t even have websites anymore. And they’re doing, they’re using, you know, they have a Facebook page or they have an Instagram or they have whatever, and they kind of are like, I don’t know that I need a website. Tell me what your thoughts are on that.
Take Control of Your Customer’s Journey
Bill: So I’ve got a couple of things to challenge that with so one, we’re going to learn a lot more if we have the data and we control the customer journey. And we can really only do that if it’s your own website. And it’s not that you can’t be, you know, if you’ve got a consumer practice area and you’re driving everybody the Facebook page. Yeah, that can work.
But I would much prefer to have them come to my website, and I’d much prefer to be capturing their email address because I really don’t want another company whose only goal in life, by the way, is optimize their revenue. So if your firm is dependent on Facebook and Google ads in order to bring in new clients, the long-term outlook for that’s not great, because those are two massive optimization machines and they only optimize in one direction which is money from you to them. That does not create sustainable advantage for you.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t advertise but it means you’ve got to have the marketing foundation in place. And I always want to be sending prospective clients for your firm back to your website so you can see what they’re interested in so that you can capture their information and be talking to them directly from this point forward. And it’s amazing what you learn and seeing how people use your website.
Davina: Right, right. I liken it to it being your virtual office. It’s your office that’s open 24 seven, where all the social media is inviting, or like these pathways that are inviting people to come into your office and come into your lobby and go in and see what you’re all about, right. So and it’s open 24 seven for anybody who’s looking and for information about what you provide, right? And the only real estate that you own on the internet.
Bill: Absolutely. And when you get a referral which is, you know, the bread and butter of most attorneys. In fact, our goal is how do we take that word of mouth and really amplify it. You know, the days of when someone recommends you, and they just pick up the phone and call you, those days are gone. They’re going to search for you first. And so you need to make sure that you control that process and when they search for you, they find you. And so it’s so easy to make sure that your website and your LinkedIn profile are the first and second search results when somebody is doing that.
And you want to do that for every attorney in the firm so that when I search for one of your attorneys, I’m going to find their bio page on your website. So this means you really want a separate bio page for each attorney. It’s really one of the most common mistakes that I see in law firm websites, which is the second most visited page on your site is your bio page. Whichever attorneys generate the most referrals, that’s who people are coming to on the site.
And when they come to your homepage, the second page they go to is that bio page. So that’s an extremely important page on the site. And yet, it tends to be the most boring page on your website. And you really need to treat each attorney’s homepage, each attorney’s bio has its own homepage. And, you know, the other problem is that you scroll down to the bottom of this really boring bio page it’s just, you know, where you went to law school.
The awards you won, the clients you work with. Really no concrete reason why I would want to work with your firm. And then to the bottom and there’s nothing there. And, but what we really want to do is control the customer journey, take them to the next natural part of the story that we want to tell them that that’s why it’s so important that you have a website so that you can tell the story of your firm the way you want to.
Davina: Right, right. For the website, too, I think it’s one of those things where you’re also able to share fully what you do, right? You know, I don’t know how many times I’ve had people look at my social pages and I think I’ve been very clear with what I do and how I serve my clients, you know, my social pages, but my website just contains a lot more information. And it’s just such a deeper experience for people to get to know my business and they get to know, you know, they see all the content that I created there, and it’s all kind of in one place for people to go.
And I think people probably underestimate and you mentioned this earlier about it used to be people who just pick up the phone. How often do you, when you get a recommendation, do you go to the Google and start searching and doing a little bit of investigative work on that person and try and find him? So you definitely want them to have your website as part of that because that’s where you really control the narrative.
Bill: You want to control those search results, you want individual bio pages for each attorney so that your ranking for every attorney, when you say you get a recommendation for a restaurant, the first thing you do is go Google it. And then if the Yelp reviews you see don’t match the recommendation, you’re probably not going to go. And so if what somebody finds when they search for you after getting that referral, if it doesn’t match with what they heard from their peer, it’s pretty unlikely that you’re going to end up with that initial consultation.
Davina: Now, here’s my big question. What is, you recommend LinkedIn and that’s controversial because, now I know that a lot of people think, okay, people do business on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a platform for conducting business and that kind of thing. But, you know, I know I have heard a lot of women law firm owners say they hate LinkedIn.
They don’t like LinkedIn. If they find it, you know, I guess because there aren’t the social groups, or they have groups, but they’re not the same as what you’d find on something like that on Facebook. And then, of course, a lot of them like Instagram because and they do well on Instagram. I get clients on Instagram and, you know, it’s just doing stories and things like that. Why is it that you like LinkedIn, prefer it over some of the other platforms?
Why Does Bill Have a Preference For LinkedIn?
Bill: Well, it has a lot to do with what you’re practicing. And so if your prospective clients are businesses versus consumers, that’s really going to change where our focus is. And we really want to be on all social platforms. But if you have a, you know, business-oriented practice area, then you want to whatever level of effort you’re putting into LinkedIn, I recommend that you put 10 times more. And there’s several reasons for that. One is not enough attorneys are doing that today, which means if you start, you have a real advantage relative to your competition.
And because in business practice areas, one of the best ways to show off your expertise is to build your network on LinkedIn with the right kinds of prospective clients and your referral sources. So if you, you know, if you have a corporate representation practice and get a lot of referrals from other attorneys, CPAs, wealth advisors, you want to add them to your network. And then if we’re doing that content that we worked, talked about before and we were getting a steady flow of really great content and posts on LinkedIn then you’re constantly staying in front of that audience.
And what it does is takes this really wonderful thing of getting a referral, and it puts it on steroids because the best way to create more referrals is show off your expertise and stay in front of the people who know you. And then when, you know, when you’re having lunch with a peer and an issue comes up that you’re the right solution for that, then, you know, you’re top of mind and the referral comes to you.
Davina: LinkedIn and also has Sales Navigator. And I’m sure you guys incorporate that into your process. It’s been a wonderful addition to LinkedIn that they’ve actually, you know, helped create this sort of way of sorting this database and really connecting with people you want to connect with.
Bill: Yeah, I just wrote an article about it, Is Sales Navigator worth It? And the short answer is yes. If you’re serious about building your network on LinkedIn, you’re going to run out of the search capabilities of basic LinkedIn very quickly. And so what we’ll do for an attorney is run a connection campaign where we’re sending out a steady flow of connections to the kind of folks that they want in their network.
So new connections going out every day. And this is a, you know, my philosophy on LinkedIn, this is not salesy at all which is really perfect for the vast majority of attorneys. It’s the best approach on LinkedIn is treat it just like you would a networking event. You’re not going to meet somebody new at a networking event and immediately start pitching them on your law firm.
You’re gonna develop a relationship first. And we need to do that same thing on LinkedIn. We need to develop your network, develop that relationship and then demonstrate your expertise over time which will create new opportunities for new clients. It’s something that takes a little time to develop.
Davina: What are your thoughts on video content? Do you guys help with video content as well?
Bill: We do. It can be really effective for law firms because so many attorneys are unwilling to do it. So the really one of the best things you can do is take the same articles that we’re writing, and be willing to do just a 60 or 90-second video where you’re talking about that same issue. And the article can be sort of the deeper version that they use as a great way to pull people in. You know, different people learn in different ways.
So some would really love to watch the video and then they might dive into the article for more depth. Others just want to get right to the text because they’re, you know, that’s how they are most effective at learning. So it can really expand your audience if you’re willing to put the effort into the video. And it doesn’t have to be super high production value. In fact, we find the really high production value stuff doesn’t work that well because it just doesn’t come across as authentic.
Davina: Right. Isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that interesting? I think people are so used to now just seeing those, you know, moms walking across the grocery store parking lot talking to the camera that they love that feeling that they’re getting, that they know you personally, you know? That they’re getting this sort of insight into your private life. So if you’re just sitting at your, if you’re sitting at your desk just being sincere and talking about what you know, they’re going to find that to be much more warm than some high production sort of commercial, right?
Bill: Exactly. And the problem with the high production stuff is it tends to end up with, you know, all these intros and, you know, just other stuff around it, when really what you want us to just dive right into the subject at hand. Get to the point. And if you’re there to help someone and that’s what you’re talking about, then it’s going to be effective.
Davina: Right. So it’s not about again, it’s not about you, it’s about them.
Bill: Exactly.
Davina: You’re, I want to talk a little bit about the data part of this because I think that’s something that, you know, probably sets Boomtime apart from other, let’s say social media, you know, gurus or whatever right? Is because you’re helping clients make decisions based on data and that includes conversion. Like, if people is not enough, you know that you were looking at, okay, are people engaging with content? Likes are nice but phone calls and retainers are better, right?
Bill: I think they’re a lot better than likes, actually.
Davina: Yeah, even the heart. They’re even better than the little hearts.
Bill: You can have a lot more heart if you have some money in the bank account and it’s easier to take care of your clients that way too. So yeah, you know, I love having call tracking numbers on the firm’s website, on their email so we can actually see when we’re getting through to people and causing the phone to ring.
You know, we’re really big on the first thing we want is to just get the email address from a prospective client. And that’s a very tough thing to do today. Like, we, you know, this isn’t the 90s anymore. We don’t just hand out our email address because it’s really fun. So you’re only going to be successful doing that, and in some practices, this works much better than others.
So if you have really valuable information that you can share with a prospective client that helps them understand the decisions that they’re facing, you know, packaging that up and exchanging that for somebody email, giving them something really valuable for something very valuable from them, that’s a great way to build your audience and capture prospective clients that you can then follow up with. So one of the things that we always do is build a nurturing campaign for your prospective clients.
And so that’s emails that come in on the website, it’s new contacts that you make, that anybody in the firm makes. What we want to do is send them a series of emails over time that tell them that story of your firm and how you can help them. So one of the techniques that I love is that there’s this really great database of contacts that is underutilized in every phone, and it’s your email system. Because everybody you talked to is happening via email. So what we do is go through and mine that and use it to build that central Rolodex that we were talking about before.
And if you do that, if you get everybody’s contacts and put it in a central database, that’s what makes your marketing really powerful. And then the way we use the data is to constantly iterate let’s see what’s working. Let’s understand what’s creating engagement. What content is most helpful to our audience? Let’s do more of that. Let’s do less of the things that don’t work. And if you constantly iterate like that, then over time, you really understand what’s working. And you hit the mark and your marketing just starts to take off.
Davina: I think that’s really interesting that you mentioned mining emails because I have had conversations with women law firm owners, women lawyers, who have said, Yeah, I’ve got, you know, I’ve got a whole bunch of emails, they’re in my inbox. They’re in my email over years of, you know, emailing people back and forth and stuff. And it’s a challenge for, you know, to get that data out and then append a place that you can use it in a way that you can use it, you know, so that’s something that you guys help with. That’s fantastic.
Bill: Another thing that large firms do, right? They implement CRM systems, they have staff whose whole goal is to collect that information. So we’ve got to find ways to automate that so the smaller firm can do the same thing without, you know, without taking up attorney time.
Davina: Yeah, because this is one of the problems that smaller firms have is that they don’t have, or solos don’t have the, they can’t prioritize this kind of stuff. They don’t, they simply don’t have enough hours in their day to do it because, you know, they’re more fundamental sort of things. And so to be able to have a team, help them with this process, it’s very powerful.
Tell me about, so working with you guys I noticed you have these prices right on your website. I thought that was interesting that you kind of have some almost like subscription services, option packages, you know, for people where they, you know, it’s this amount for these different kinds of services and stuff. How did you, how do you put that together?
Because I think that’s another thing that’s as opposed to say, Okay, I need this done and then we’re giving you a proposal for all these things you want done. And then here you are sitting with a, you know, okay, it’s going to be $15,000 for us to set this whole thing up for you. So tell me about how you work with your clients with regard to that.
Bill: It really comes from my frustration with marketing not being a transparent activity where you can really understand what’s going on. And, the only way that we can really help more small firms be great at their marketing is to make it something that’s more cost-effective to do. And if you, you know, if you have to hire an agency that’s going to be, you know, just thousands and thousands of dollars It, chances are good it’ll work if you hire good agency. But for a smaller firm, it’s just, you know, it’s almost impossible to make that kind of commitment.
But this is where I think putting scale on the market is so crucial. And so our goal is just to make it a lot easier to understand what you’re getting and what it costs. And so we do it on a subscription model. One of, you know, one of our biggest things is that there just isn’t a shortcut in marketing, you need to make a longer-term commitment. So you need to understand the strategies that, you need to commit to a strategy in your firm.
And if you’re not willing to put a year commitment into it then I recommend you don’t even start because you’d be better off, you know, just burning that money videoing it and hoping it goes viral. Because it’s just not going to work. You’ve got to make a long-term commitment. And the reason I love the data is because we see that it works.
Davina: Right, right. And you can tweak things. You can look at data and say, Okay, we’re still using the same strategy and we’re still using the same tactics, but maybe we need to tweak this a little bit or tweak that a little bit based on what we’re seeing from the data.
Follow the Data
Bill: Yeah, and you really have to always do that. So there’s never this point where you can just put your marketing on autopilot. We can automate it, we can make it efficient, but we always have to be following it because what works today, it’s going to be different a year from now. And we’re going to have to be making changes along the way in order to match what’s going to make our marketing most effective.
Davina: So you, kind of if you could sum up for me sort of the way that you describe your services and what you can provide for small firms.
Bill: I really look at it as the, this is the foundation that every firm needs to do in their marketing. So you need that steady flow really great content is the core. That drives everything. So first, we’ve got to get really good at creating that content, getting the voice of the attorney on target. And then we’re going to take that content and we’re going to use it everywhere. We’re going to put it on your website. That’s going to be great for SEO, it’s going to build this depth that you were talking about of really letting people understand what you do because it’s going to create all kinds of great information over time.
We’re going to use that, we’re going to take that same content and send it out via email. We’re going to repost it on LinkedIn and other social media over and over again. And we’re going to evaluate what’s happening across all those channels to see what’s really working the best. And just keep iterating and making it better and better as we go. And the thing that makes it so much easier is that we put it all into one platform where we manage the workflow around creating that content around, distributing it and analyzing it. It’s just so tough to do if you’re managing all those pieces individually.
Davina: Well, that, it just sounds fantastic. And I’m glad that you were here today to share it with us and talk with us about it so that we’ll know that that resource is available because I know it can feel very overwhelming when you have a service business that you’re growing and then you feel like you have to go learn this whole other, you know, industry of like marketing.
And so it’s nice to know that there are the technologies making it possible to have folks out there like you to help us expand our team and take that on so that, you know, we don’t feel like we’re having to sit there and recreate the wheel over and over again. Because if you sit there, if you’re the one constantly coming up with stuff and posting it on social by yourself, it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. And you could be out there meeting with clients and servicing clients.
Bill: Exactly. I’m sure it’s something you see all the time, which is, you know, if you practice is a little slow, you put more effort and your marketing sort of picks up but then you start marketing so it slows down again. You know, the only solution is you’ve got to keep the focus and consistency on your marketing.
Davina: Right right. I love it. So tell us where we can find out more about your company and you on the interwebs.
Bill: That’s all right. I obviously love talking about marketing. You can reach me at CEO@boomtime.com. You can go find me on LinkedIn and see exactly what I’m talking about. And of course our website at boomtime.com.
Davina: Yeah, I know that you have a website and the LinkedIn page after that. And probably a good way for people to get on your email list as well. So I have looked at all of them and there’s a lot of good information there and I’m really glad you’re here today to share it. It was a great conversation. I will definitely be, you know, keeping tabs on you and seeing what’s happening.
Bill: Well, I appreciate it. It’s been a lot of fun. Thanks.
