In today’s episode, we sit down with Tanner Jones, VP of Business Development at Consultwebs. Consultwebs focuses on everything from web design and SEO to PPC advertising and marketing strategies for lawyers and law firms. Tanner not only works at Consultwebs but is also a frequent speaker on the topic of law firm marketing, including co-hosting webinars with Google and LawMarketing.com.
“Marketing is like the elephant that’s in the room,” says Tanner. Most lawyers don’t want to talk about it. Simply put, it can sometimes feel overwhelming– but, that’s exactly what we’re going to tackle in this episode to help you get some clarity surrounding the process.
We’ll chat with Tanner about how to identify your uniqueness to the market (and why it matters), how to battle the public’s preconceived notions about your work, as well as…
- Developing brand identity and communicating who you are through your marketing
- What areas of your website people commonly focus on
- Telling your story in marketing
- Measuring ROI on your marketing
- The best piece of advice from Tanner
- And more
Listen now…
Mentioned in this episode:
- Tanner’s Website
- Connect with Tanner 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 Tanner Jones, VP of business development for Consultwebs and frequent speaker on the topic of law firm marketing, including co-hosting webinars with Google, Avo and LawMarketing.com.
Consultwebs is a digital marketing company for lawyers and law firms and they offer website SEO and online advertising services. Tanner, I’m so happy you’re here today on the Solo to CEO, I’m sorry, the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. I’m still saying the old name. Welcome.
Tanner Jones: Thank you so much, Davina, I’m very pleased to be here and excited to be able to have this discussion with you.
Davina: Oh, great, great. So why don’t you start out by, I just gave a very brief highlight about who you are. And what you do. Why don’t you start off by telling us a little bit more about yourself and your area of expertise and how you got here.
Natural Born Entrepreneur
Tanner: Certainly, yeah, so I, you know, I’m an entrepreneur by heart. You know, I started at an early age running a small landscaping business and went through business school and had a couple stints, had some HR work and worked in the insurance industry for a little bit. But about 11 years ago, ended up getting connected with a group, Consultwebs, that focused exclusively on helping law firms sign clients from the internet. So for me, it was completely new. You know, I’ve never been involved in the legal profession. In fact, I’d never had hired a lawyer. I’d never dealt with the legal system, thankfully.
Probably should have, but, you know, it was just a totally new world for me. And, you know, for me, I’d seen, I think we’ve all grown up over the years seeing lawyers, TV lawyers, if you will. And so, you know, I had my own perception of what law was about, or what practicing law was about or what it was like to be a lawyer. And so, it was a completely new world and I got into that. But I’ve, you know, going back to kind of drawing on prior experiences, I knew the value of entrepreneurship.
I knew the value of marketing, of needing new clientele constantly getting your brand out there. And so I fit right in even though I didn’t necessarily know the legal profession as well 11 years ago, I knew the power of marketing and business. And so I’ve, you know, I was able to marry some of those talents that I’ve grown in over time, but also just the understanding of marketing and apply that to legal marketing and the profession of helping lawyers find new clients. And so that’s what led me to Consultwebs. And so as you noted in the intro, we do all things digital. We certainly help with design.
At Consultwebs we have over 90 full-time people working exclusively on helping firms. And so we’ve learned because the internet is so fragmented, and you’ve probably seen that yourself in your career and marketing and helping lawyers, that there’s so many places. In fact, it seems overwhelming, convoluted on where to even try to apply your message. And we really work to simplify that for firms. We take the keys and we’d run with it and help them really just focus on practicing law and running a business.
Davina: Yeah, that is a big challenge with, for law firm owners to deal with this sort of marketing elephant in the room. We know, we just, as attorneys, we just want to tame lawyers, because we want to be lawyers. But then when we start our own businesses, we also have to be business people. And there’s so much learn about running a business.
When you’re running a business there’s all the different facets. There’s money management, and there’s building the right, you know, your top team and all of these things. So marketing is, that’s one of the areas that I advise my clients to definitely find some trusted resources to help them with that because it’s a whole education in and of itself, isn’t it?
Tanner: It sure is. And, you know, if only there were a silver bullet. That’s what every lawyer running a business wants. It’s what we all want. But the reality is that every market’s different and hopefully we’ll have the chance to kind of dive into this topic because it’s near and dear to my heart on the value of uniqueness, of identifying really what your unique value is to the market. And believing in that and really pushing that message out to the public and being confident in it and realizing that it may not resonate with everyone.
But ideally, it’s resonating with your ideal client. And it speaks to your whole concept. I love the message that you are pushing to your network and to the legal profession of, there is more to life than just getting lost in day to day business. It’s so easy as a business owner to just constantly fight fires and go from one fire to the next and pay these bills and hire these people, fire these people and it’s just, it can be so overwhelming.
And your message which I totally buy into, is that there’s something more to life than just that. You can have that you can run a very, very successful business and help a lot of people but you can also start with helping yourself. And appreciating, you know, the valuable time we have here on this earth. And so to me it is it’s a matter of finding your groove and staying in that groove and really just pushing that message out to as many people as possible.
Davina: Right, right. And it’s just, it’s critical to have a team to help you whether you’re outsourcing which a lot of attorneys are doing now. We’re doing a lot more with virtual firms and remote practices that, you know, working remotely. And regardless of that, or whether you have a traditional law firm, you know, you really need resources and to partner up with other people to help you and that’s kind of a huge part of what I teach.
Even for people who just want to, like I said, work virtually they still need people and resources to help them because we simply cannot be an, will never be the expert in everything. area of life and running our businesses. We have had people in other areas of expertise. I do want to go back to something you said earlier, because before we get too far away from it because I thought it was very interesting. You said that you had never had any dealings with attorneys before. You, you know, started doing this work, ff course, you’ve been doing this work for almost a dozen years now.
But and so you had a certain perception of what lawyers are, and I’m not gonna ask what that perception was but we’ll keep you out of hot water there. But, you know, we do take our, the general public and I mean, I did it before I went to law school and became an attorney. We have in our minds that, you know, we’re going to be like the attorneys of whatever the latest legal show is or the attorneys that we, the TV attorneys we admired as we were growing up as kids or whatever.
And then we get out, you know, we start practicing. And it’s different. It’s very different. I mean, what are some of the differences that you realized in working with attorneys? You know, I can tell you, for me working day to day as an attorney was, it’s a lot less glamorous than what they show on, but through the years La Law Allie McBeal, even Matlock or whatever, you know, whatever TV shows.
Tanner: Yeah, it’s a great question. And I have, like I’ve learned in this time and working with firms that, just like in the industry, there are multiple, or there are so many different personalities. And even in the areas of law, you know, we’ve gravitated in legal primarily to business to consumer. So we deal a lot with plaintiff’s personal injury firms. We deal with domestic family law firms, criminal law attorneys, bankruptcy, estate planning, those are some of the key areas we’ve really invested in and focused and so really, that’s my perspective.
And to that point, I’ve seen so many incredible personalities, just in terms of tremendous hearted individuals that really got in the industry to legitimately help people, whether it was because of their story, you know, maybe they’ve lived through a divorce of their own, whether personally or whether they’ve experienced that of their parents. And they’ve seen kind of the hurdles, the challenges of that process.
And ultimately, it’s inspired them to give back to the world in an effort to hopefully prevent maybe some of those negative experiences they went through in helping some of their clients. You know, or maybe it’s a personal injury law firm, that similarly, maybe they’ve experienced something that where they’ve gone through a devastating time and now their life’s mission is to help people through those challenges. Again, like in all industries, certainly there are bad apples out there, you know, and you can’t hide that fact.
But like, hopefully most business owners, everyone’s trying hopefully to partner with the right clients, the right fit. And I’ve seen across the board that while there is without a doubt, in some instances, a negative connotation around particularly personal injury law firms. I’ve seen the complete opposite for a large portion of the industry itself. And that, to me, is a mission in of itself to work to try to change that persona or to change that connotation when in fact, it’s entirely not true for the most part. And so that’s such a big piece that unfortunately, the world itself has been just totally swayed in one direction and they really don’t have the whole story.
Davina: Right, right. Well, and you know, TV really does inform us ant It’s amazing how like culturally, it informs our experiences with doctors, lawyers, whatever we think. Of course then when you’re actually needing a doctor or you’re needing a lawyer, it’s a different experience. Not everybody looks like a model and sexy, you know, or whatever. But what is interesting to me about that, you know, so you go, the public, the general public has certain ideas and perceptions about attorneys, whether it’s negative or, you know, glamorous, or whatever it is.
So that really, when you’re taking on and you’re tackling your marketing and you’re getting your message out there about how you are, you’re kind of going up against these preconceived notions about what it is like to hire an attorney. And so how do you guys help your clients sort of develop their own brand and identity and communicate who they are and what their firm stands for through their marketing, through their online marketing?
Who Are You Reaching?
Tanner: That’s a great question. And, you know, there are multiple steps to that. But it always starts with really understanding who are you reaching, first and foremost. Who is, what’s the ideal target, the ideal clientele? And ultimately, what are you doing in their lives? How are you changing their lives or improving their lives through your services?
Because at the end of the day, in most instances, and this is not just specific to legal, this is all of life, we often tend to see first me. Look at it through our own lens. And all too often, there are law firms out there that just try to throw out here’s why we’re different. Here’s why we’re unique. And it’s rarely packaged around why that uniqueness is a value to the client. How does it impact your prospective client?
Davina: Oh, that’s huge.
Tanner: But it’s a major miss across the board. In fact, I see I probably shouldn’t even be sharing it in all these conversations because hopefully eventually many other law firms will pick that up. But that’s where it starts. Because ultimately, every individual case is unique to that potential client.
And because of what we’ve just talked about, because of this, we’ve been informed, and in many instances, falsely informed about who lawyers truly are and how they help. People are coming in with walls. There are, there’s this natural friction. And in fact, a lot of people who go online to search for lawyers, this is the first time they’ve ever searched for this particular lawyer, or, you know, or this type of lawyer in their lives. So there’s an intimidation factor.
And so what we try to do, once we truly understand the clientele, once we truly understand the unique value of the firm, now it’s a matter of being able to drop those walls, remove those walls. And a few practical things that we do for that one, we tell the story of the firm. We showcase, we love candid custom photography. Now, that’s not just cheesy headshots, right? It’s not just a bio photo. These are Day in the Life photos, ideally giving the impression of what it would be like if that prospective client walks into your office today and sits down with you, what are they going to experience?
What are the walls look like in the office? What are the, what’s the staff look like? And so being able to provide that photography brings the site to life, makes the firm more personable and approachable and allows us to drop those guards knowing that that’s the case for the majority of the site visitors that are coming into your website. And then we make it extremely easy to contact the firm.
There are some people that are in the moment where maybe they’re at work, they can’t just pick up the phone and call and so nice, convenient, easy to use, contact forms, you’ve probably seen live chat across the board. Another great tool to drive a conversion while they’re there on your website if they’re not in a position to call, but also, particularly for mobile, you know, making it really intuitive to just simply tap a button and call the firm. Some of these,
Davina: Yeah, that’s my pet peeve is when I’m looking at something, and then I just, it’s not easy for me to figure out how to get in touch with them, you know? It’s like, Okay, next, I’m going on to the next thing. I’m not gonna
Tanner: It’s so much easier just to click the back button and find another website that does offer that.
Davina: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I love what you said about the photography because I’m a huge believer in that and really showing your personality in your photography and the personality of your firm and all of, you know, giving that because you’re really trying to communicate feel, and feel is a difficult thing to communicate. Your feeling. You know, you’re looking at how can I be In, you know, get this prospect to feel a certain way about what it would be like to work with me. And visuals are a great way to do that.
Tanner: Visuals are huge. Obviously video, you know with video allows you to combine audio with imagery which takes it to another level. And we’re, you know humans are, we’re not always practical in how we interpret things. And so we have to embrace that. You want to cater to emotion and driving the emotion and asking questions, using messaging on the website that speaks to that emotional moment that they’re going through, whether it’s a family law or divorce case or a personal injury lawsuit or whatever is going through their mind, being able to relate to them through strategic messaging.
And one other point just to slightly change gears in terms of those first impressions, we find That the attorney bio, or attorney bios are the most visited, consistently the most visited page on a legal website aside from the home page, obviously the homepage is going to be that kind of first entry page in most instances, but the majority of visitors will immediately navigate right into that attorney bio. And so for your listeners, you know, when’s the last time you checked out that bio and what message are you telling the audience?
And what we try to encourage is incorporate definitely want custom imagery, candid photos there, of course, but use that as an opportunity to tell your story instead of just listing a bullet list of where you went to law school and, you know, prior awards or accolades, whatever that may be. Those are good but ideally, it’s more of a narrative style and it reads as if, you know, they’re reading a journal or something where it’s entertaining, it shows a little bit more personality because that is going to be the biggest anchor that most prospective clients lead to. And in most instances, could be your best conversion page if you really treat it intentionally.
Davina: Oh, yeah. And that, we’re in such a culture now where we just, we share, you know, we see things, we share them, we see them, we share them. And there’s such a difference when you comment on what you share than when you just share it like on social media, and it’s the same kind of thing you’re talking about for the bio page.
We’re leaving it up to the prospect to interpret and get from that list, what we want them to, instead of telling them a story that shares what we think is important that they should be paying attention to about our qualifications, right? Because you just have a list of stuff there. I might look at one thing and go, Oh, well, I like that, you know that she speaks on this topic and you might look at another one Well, I like that he’s got, you know, 30 years experience or whatever.
But we’re leaving it up for this subjective sort of analysis. Whereas if we control the narrative and tell the story, then we can share with them, hey, look, this is what you need to be paying attention to. That this is why I can solve the problems that keep you up at three in the morning, right? This is why I’m the best person to help you do that. And it’s kind of a waste just to list that. Just put your resume on there, right?
Tanner: Spot on. Yeah. Well said. And there are so many other elements to that, you know, going along with just the copy alongside the narrative, being able to showcase, you know, are you involved in the community? You know, being able to find opportunities to relate to the public, to relate to your potential clients, incorporating testimonials, so reviews alongside those bios so that you have those third party credentials, if you will.
Davina: Yeah, that’s powerful. So, going on to when you were talking about the most visited pages for the homepage and the bio page, let’s talk about measuring the ROI on your marketing because there are activities that are measurable and then there are those that are harder to measure. And what’s so wonderful about digital marketing is that there are so many tools now for measuring and getting clear on what the other, what the other party is searching for, what you’re looking for, right? The data is there to help us. So can you talk to me about that a little bit?
Cost Per Lead and Cost Per Case
Tanner: Sure. Sure. This is such a big topic and in fact, I mean, this is what has allowed Consultwebs, in my opinion, to truly separate ourselves and rise to the top in the legal online marketing world, because we focus on the end result. So what we look at in terms of defining success or failure with a campaign, we look at cost per lead, and cost per case. Cost per lead is something we obviously have the most influence and control over. Cost per case begins to have more of a coupled partnership effort.
And that obviously, we’re responsible for driving the lead but the law firm is ultimately responsible for converting that contact and building trust and signing them up. But if you’re monitoring those two metrics, in particular, you can have your finger on the pulse of marketing from month to month and monitor trends. And naturally, it’s never going to stay the same. We often say like, you know, trying to keep up with Google and running search engine optimization campaigns is often like painting a moving train. It’s constantly changing.
And but that’s exciting for us. There’s opportunity there. And but at the end of the day, you can monitor a lot of stuff, in fact, because I mean, just to the point you said, unlike all other traditional advertising that’s ever been available to business owners, digital provides almost an unlimited amount of data to wade through. And in many instances, a lot of law firms will, you know, as vendors are reporting data they’re reporting on right here your site speed score.
Here are your rankings performance and your fluctuations. Here are these metrics and these metrics and these metrics and at the end of the day, the attorney just throws their hands up. Like I have no idea what this means, it sounds good. I’m just gonna keep at it. But they’re not monitoring what’s ultimately impacting the bottom line. And that’s a real problem. In fact, I think there are a lot of vendors out there that will actually use all this other data, that access at their fingertips, to almost try to change the focus or sway the emphasis away from those bottom dollar metrics.
And I think that’s why it’s so important ultimately to have, yes, it’s important to watch out some of these other metrics but really, at the end of the day, what matters? It’s the cost per lead and the cost per case. Now, once you attract, once you’re able to establish processes for tracking that, and I can, I’m more than happy to go into detail on that, but once you do that, now, it’s really important to start to try to gain a sense of values of clientele. Especially if your clientele have swings of values, depending on your fees and how you structure them.
Ideally, you can then go the next step and really start to articulate true return on investment. And that’s where you can determine, in our opinion, a five to one ROI, meaning every dollar you put in the digital you get at least $5 back. That is kind of the golden standard. That’s minimum on what you really need to be targeting for online marketing. And you’re really never going to get to that metric until you can first establish cost per lead, cost per case because lead source will play a big role in that.
And I’ll take just a moment to talk through, you know, lead source. A lot of law firms have depended solely on their intake, the person answering the phone to ask, how did you hear about us? And, you know, as lawyers, we know, eyewitness testimony is often flawed. You know, we have so many distractions in this life. And we’ve heard so many times we have clients that have never invested in television advertising and the history of their firm and still have people telling them they found them on TV.
Davina: And the answer a lot of people give is, oh, I found you on the internet. And maybe what really happened is a friend told them about you and then they went and googled you and then they, you know, connected with you on LinkedIn and then they followed you for a little while on Facebook. And then they had a pressing need and they called you, you know? And you’re sitting here and saying well that wasn’t, finding me on the internet, what does that mean? What does it all mean? I mean, you know, they don’t really
Know How Your Client Discovered You
Tanner: That’s it. That’s spot on. And so yeah, you have to even drill down deeper than that. And certainly it doesn’t hurt to ask your prospective client how did you hear about us? What are you looking at right now when you dialed our number? You know, that’s another good question. But because it’ll drill them down a little bit deeper and you’re right. We live in a, I call it an Amazon shopping society. So people feel comfortable now going online and vetting businesses purely based on complete strangers’ analysis of their business so they gravitate directly to the Google My Business listing.
They read the reviews, they look at the rating and they make a determination off of that. Well, by calling directly from your Google My Business listing, even though you were personally referred by a cousin, in most instances, the analytics are going to point to that Google My Business listing or the internet driving that call. And so I cannot sit here and say that tracking is 100% accurate. I don’t believe that’ll ever happen. Even if, you know, the technology is incredible. And just think about where it’s going to be in the next five years. I still don’t believe in five years, we’re going to have a perfect attribution concept.
Because just as you said, there are multiple attributions across the whole lifecycle of the journey of that person ultimately landing on your website and calling you. It’s just a matter of being able to utilize Google Analytics, evaluating how they’re coming to the site, what pages they’re visiting, and do your best to begin to find what those main funnels are. And once you identify those main funnels or sources that are driving contacts, that’s when you actually have the data to start reinvesting more aggressively in those particular areas to double down and really start to, you know, magnify the success.
Davina: Yeah, it’s not gonna be a perfect system until you take human beings and human nature out of it. I mean, right, because we are, human beings are complex, and we make decisions, you know, based on a lot of factors and the timing of what we do and all that kind of stuff.
And we can’t, you know, until we can get into their brain, I mean, I think that’s why it’s so important. You mentioned earlier about the ideal client, it’s so important to really understand, you know, who is my ideal client, and because you should know as much about your ideal client as you can. And then that way you can sort of assess the things a little bit better because then you start to really understand who these type of people are that are contacting you that may, that are a good fit for you as the client, right?
Tanner: That’s right. That’s right. And it’s also important to, you know, I mentioned tracking cost per lead, that’s great. But, you know, you could be using a particular Facebook advertising effort that’s driving an abundance of leads, you know, so much so that you can’t even keep up with them. But, you know, less than 1% are signing up. And so if you’re not tracking that cost per case, and purely going off of lead volume, you may be missing the boat entirely and trying to keep your own audience.
Davina: And you may want to know an audience Yeah, you may have of all, there’s reaching the wrong audience and then also, you have to look at are, you know, what’s happening once that lead comes in the firm and the are my people skilled enough closers, you know? So maybe they’re getting a ton of leads, but and maybe they’re, maybe they would be good qualified leads, but you don’t have closers who are there talking on the phone, you know, you don’t have a process and a system in place to gently, you know, nurture that lead through your process.
Tanner: That’s so important. And we stress that so often. It’s an area that Consultwebs, we don’t service the intake side, but you better believe we are red-flagging when, because we have a general understanding. You know, obviously different practice areas are going to fluctuate but 10% conversion rate on internet leads, is pretty much industry norm. And so, you know, for those listening, the first thing I would do is go back and look at all the volume of leads that came through last month and calculate how many cases were signed based on that. And if you’re sitting around 10% or higher, you’re doing as good or better than most law firms in the country.
If you see that dipping below 10%, to me, that’s an immediate opportunity that you have holes in the bucket. You’re potentially allowing qualified leads to slip through. And one of the biggest things we see with this if you’ve lived off of a referral business, and let’s be honest, a lot of law firms depend heavily on referrals, whether that’s attorney referrals or word of mouth referrals, those individuals, if they send in a contact form or they call the office and they’re not able to reach someone immediately, in most instances, they’re going to wait around for a phone call even if it takes 24 hours to get back to them.
However, for those who are actively seeking legal help and they come across your website, there is no personal connection. There’s no loyalty at that point. And so they submit a contact form or they call the office and they’re not able to reach a human being and be wowed by a customer experience, what are they doing?
They’re immediately turning right around and calling a competitor next door. And by the time you decide to call them back two hours, three hours later, they’ve likely already been signed up by another firm that truly gets the importance of spectacular intake. And that alone literally can mean millions of dollars in fees for a law firm in just treating the intake seriously, and responding to these calls within three to five minutes, ideally.
Davina: Oh, wow. You know, I think one things you’ve highlighted in this, what we’ve highlighted in this discussion, and this is a tip that kind of comes out of here, is it’s so critical, you look at as an attorney, you don’t need to know how to do SEO You don’t need to know how to do a pay per click ad.
You don’t need to spend your time on Google AdWords trying to do a pay per click ad because I’m here to tell you unless you’re Google certified, there’s a whole lot of information you don’t know when you start doing that, right? But what you do need to be doing as the person who owns or runs the firm, operates the firm, is you need to be really paying attention and understanding the metrics and paying attention.
And then communicating with your service provider, because like you said, if you’re not an attorney, or even if it’s just not your area of expertise or your business, you don’t know, you might not know exactly the kind of client that they’re looking for. So they may be getting a lot of leads for a, you know, family law and maybe their family lawyers, but maybe your mind your ideal client is at a certain income level in a certain neighborhood and a certain, you know, they, for you to make the money you want to make, you may need to focus on a certain market, right?
And if you’re not communicating that to your service provider who’s helping you drive those digital leads to you, then they don’t know. You’re just, you know, you’re making kind of an assumption that okay, well they, one client, you know, a family law clients will sort it out when they come in. But you guys may be able to help with that more if you have the more detailed information you have about what, who their ideal client is.
Success Breeds Success
Tanner: Such a good concept. Oh, that’s right on and I see, yeah, I often hear, I’ll call it an objection, but I often hear the response of I don’t want to turn anyone away. Yeah, I want to be the one I want to have a shot at first. So I certainly don’t want to focus a message that potentially doesn’t necessarily resonate with everyone. And I think that’s such a flawed mindset because success builds on success.
You know, it breeds, success breeds success. And the more that you can go back, you know, looking back to the last several months, or even the last year’s worth of client demographic information and truly understanding who is the audience that’s resonating with our firm? And why are they doing that? And what, you know, demographically, male or female, age, locations.
You know, if you’re in a big Metro or there’s certain pockets in that Metro where the majority of clients are coming from, occupation. All of those factors can ultimately help to refine and be hyper-focused with both marketing messaging and marketing placement, advertising placement, and that’s where you really start to see higher returns on investment and much less friction in terms of being able to get the message in front of the right people.
Davina: Right. When you speak to everyone you speak to no one, you know? That, it’s that old saying when you speak to everyone you speak to no one. And people, I think it comes from a scarcity mindset or a mindset of lack. If I don’t, you know, just try to throw a net out and catch whatever is in my net, you know, then, somehow if I niche down, there’s not going to be enough clients in that demographic, right?
Or, you know, demographics, psychographics whatever, right? There’s not going to be enough clients for me in that pool if we narrow down the focus. But that’s the beautiful thing about, you know, these types of, this type of marketing is that the more you can get, you know, pinpoint who that is, the better you guys can help, right?
Tanner: That’s exactly right. And, you know, on the opposite side of that, just as a disclaimer, not be naive to it, yes, there has to be a big enough pool for it to work but at the end of the day, you know, that’s part of you never going to know that until you truly start identifying the demographics that you have. been signing up, and then doing a market analysis of how large is this pool. And you may determine in doing that research, that maybe it isn’t large enough, but you’ll never get to that decision and you’ll never make an educated decision until you actually do the homework and gather that yourself.
Davina: Right. So shifting gears a little bit, I just wanted to talk with you about you, you know, this podcast is for women, and I know that you’re for women law firm owners, and I know that your firm has worked with a number of woman-owned law firms. And I was curious if there’s anything that has jumped out at you that is different when it comes to your experience and working with law firm owners who are women versus men in the way that they approach their digital marketing. It’s a tough question.
Tanner: It’s a tough question. I would say that but there are definitely some things that have stood out to me. And we work with a number of women-owned law firms that are just tremendously successful. They’re successful online. But that’s also largely because they’ve been so successful in running a business and helping a lot of firms, or rather clients and because of that they’ve grown a tremendous reputation online and offline.
But what I would say, I think that the big difference or the thing to understand, what we find, we watch a lot, we monitor a lot of data, conversion data. We find that the initiators, the proactive individuals going online and seeking legal help are the majority females. It’s the wives, it’s the mother, it’s the daughter of the injured victim or the person who needs legal help. They are the warrior for the family, right? And they’re the ones taking initiative. But I’m now happily married for over 10 years and I can confidently tell you, my wife is the one that drives us. Like she is the one who keeps us organized.
And when there’s a, when there’s research, or there’s information to, you know, or a decision to be made, she’s often the first one to push us toward that. And that’s, I’ve found in the data has proven this, that that’s the case globally, or at least throughout the country. And I think that’s an opportunity to embrace as a woman-owned law firm, take pride in that because there’s a huge opportunity. I mean, going back to our earlier discussion, Davina, on how there’s this natural wall and the more we can break those barriers and remove that intimidation factor, the more we’re going to relate, the higher conversion rates we’re going to experience on a design.
And so the biggest thing that I could say to your audience is embrace that. That is a tremendous unique value proposition in and of itself that absolutely should be leveraged. Leveraged through photography, leveraged through messaging. I found that the women-owned law firms that we work with very organized, very focused on data, very consistent. And obviously, that’s not the case for across the board, but from my personal experience, that couldn’t be any more true.
And because of that, that in and of itself is a huge value add to the market. That story should be told. And I think all too often, I mean, if we’re real here and being candid, this is a, this is the majority of the competition in any given market is going to be male-ran. And so I think in some instances, it from what I’ve experienced, there has been a maybe not even intimidation factor, but there’s been this sense of hesitancy to really try to push against that, or at least sell yourself as something different, something unique, instead of just trying to what we say rip off and repeat.
You know, using the same messaging and the same thing that everybody else is doing because they’re perceivably successful, instead of kind of paving your own road. And for our women-owned law firms, they’ve been so extraordinarily successful because they’re willing, in some instances, to step outside, well outside a comfort zone, and really speak to those differences and that unique value to their clientele, and it has consistently resonated with their market.
Davina: Yeah, that’s wonderful, wonderful advice. Speaking of advice, before we wrap up here, which we’re going to need to do in a minute or two, I just wanted to ask you if you could leave us with kind of some top tips or advice that we can, takeaways that we can take when it comes to our digital marketing. Our websites, SEO, online advertising, what, you know, what is your number one, number two piece of advice that you have for your market for our audience.
Tanner: Number one advice, and this is something we’ve touched on already, but that would be find your voice and your unique value. If you don’t already have that as a law firm owner, to me, that’s step one. In turn, it will drive all marketing efforts. And if you don’t have that, some practical tips would be going back through your client list. You know, pick some of your ideal clients and have a, have coffee with them. Have breakfast.
Go to breakfast and just dig. Better understand what was it that appealed to you when you first considered us. What drove you to hire us? Understand what’s in their mind and the emotions behind that and what ultimately caused them to pick up the phone and call the office and look for commonalities. You have to talk with a number of clients to be able to get that, or at least start to be confident in those main drivers. And that’s a tremendous way to start being confident.
And that’s one of the things too, is that a lot of law firm owners tend to be hesitant to say, yes, this is the perfect unique value proposition that’s going to resonate with the market. But it’s just purely been drummed up by a marketer, instead of actually tapping the collective intelligence of prior clients who have had that confidence.
There’s a reason they’ve had that level of confidence. What is it? And take that message and ideally, you know, if you don’t feel like you have the expertise or the desire to craft that, hire a unique value proposition writer. Hire somebody who has experience in key messaging and that ultimately is going to be a blueprint for what to push out to the market. And to me, that needs to be spoken on your website very clearly. It needs to be ideally represented on business cards and any and all other marketing or advertising that you’re putting out there to the public.
Davina: That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful advice. And I so appreciate that because, you know, as someone who has looked at innumerable law firm websites, it, you know, it’s rare to find somebody who really is able to hone in and distinguish that thing that makes them different and unique. And I think a lot of attorneys struggle with it. They say, Well, you know, we do a good job in a timely manner or we are, you know, collaborative or we are aggressive litigators. You know, it seems to be the same sort of themes over and over again.
And none of them really reveal the personality of your firm and your culture of your firm, your core values, those kinds of things, right? Yeah. So that’s great advice to dig into that. And I love, we recommended about talking with your ideal clients that you’ve had because you will be shocked probably at the words they used to, you know, to express how they came to the decision to hire you versus what you thought it was or what do you think it is.
Tanner: That’s right. And for my experience, in most instances, there are going to be commonalities that are just repeated from one conversation to the next and it will become very obvious to you what the main driver is.
Davina: Yeah. Yeah. And you’ll also, and if you ask less than ideal clients, I mean, you also may start and say, you know, is this how I want people to perceive me? Like if the word affordable keeps coming up over and over again you might say, Well, you know, maybe I don’t want to be, you know, known as the affordable attorney.
Maybe what I want to be known as is the attorney who fights, you know, we’ll fight for you. We’ll get in the trenches and alongside with you and fight for you, you know, or whatever, right? And so it’s important to ask those questions because it might be surprising. Well, I have really enjoyed our conversation today. Why don’t you tell us where we can find out more about Consultwebs?
Tanner: Sure. I think the easiest thing to do would just be to go to our website, consultwebs.com. And, you know, feel welcome. So you can call us directly there, submit a contact form. You can also reach me on LinkedIn. And just search Tanner Jones and you’ll see it tied to Consultwebs. Send me a message there. I’d love that have the opportunity to dive into, you know, deeper into any of these topics we’ve discussed. I know we’ve really just scratched the surface. So more than happy to be a resource to anyone where this information is resonated with.
Davina: Great. Thank you so much, Tanner. I really appreciate it. I’ve enjoyed our conversation a lot. I wish we had another hour.
Tanner: Great. Thanks so much, Davina. I’ve enjoyed it myself and I’m grateful for the opportunity.
