Maximum Lawyer

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Are you a law firm owner looking to strengthen your marketing strategy? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Danny Decker from Spotlight Branding shares expert marketing strategies for law firms, focusing on attracting higher-quality clients instead of just more leads. Drawing from 15 years of experience, he explains how to define your ideal client based on real data, craft client-focused messaging, and advertise in the right channels. 

As a law firm owner, marketing strategies are the key to getting more clients and attracting the right clients. Danny shares how to build client-focused messaging for your firm. The first thing to ensure is that your messaging needs to be all about them. In order to do that, your messaging needs to tell a story and follow the stereotypical story format. You have the hero (the client), where the hero wants to go or wants to do, the problem they have in getting there (their issue or case) and a guide to help the hero solve the problem (the lawyer). If you accomplish this in your messaging, you will get every client that comes your way.

Once you get your messaging in order, you need to advertise where your clients are located. You need to think about where your best clients hang out. Are they on a certain social media site, listen to a certain type of podcast or read a specific newspaper? If you know these things, you know where to market your firm. If your typical client uses Instagram or LinkedIn, create a profile and begin marketing your firm there.

Listen in to learn more!


  • 3:07 The Cost of Bad Clients
  • 8:18 Build Client-Focused Messaging 
  • 13:01 Understanding Client Motivation 
  • 15:03 Advertise Where Ideal Clients Are
  • 17:47 The Power of Referral Marketing 


Tune in to today’s episode and checkout the full show notes here.


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Creators and Guests

Host
Tyson Mutrux
Tyson is the founder of Mutrux Firm Injury Lawyers and the co-founder of Maximum Lawyer.

What is Maximum Lawyer?

Maximum Lawyer is the podcast for law firm owners who want to scale with intention and build a business that works for their life.

Hosted by Tyson Mutrux, each weekly episode features candid conversations with law firm owners, business experts, and industry leaders sharing real strategies and lessons learned in the trenches.

If you're ready to grow your firm with less stress and more support, this is your next must listen. Subscribe today.

Danny Decker 00:00:08 All right, so I'm here to talk to you guys today about how to create a marketing message that attracts better clients to your law firm. So show of hands, if you would like to attract A+ clients to your law firm. All right. Perfect. You're in the right place. All right, so I have been in this space for about 15 years working with law firms. And, you know, 15 years in marketing time is like I always say, it's like dog years, right? So I've been doing this for like 100 years. And in that period of time, we've learned a few things, right? Number one is that most law firms, even when you have a conversation and they think the number one priority is more leads, okay, raise your hand if you've ever been in the spot where you're like, I just need more leads, okay? A lot of hands, right? What most law firms actually need. And you guys have learned this, I'm sure is better clients. Okay.

Danny Decker 00:01:07 You are not working with a marketing person or a marketing firm because you want more leads. You need better clients. Okay, so conversation today is how to make that happen. Good news is I'm going to share a formula. Pretty simple. It can be used no matter what your marketing looks like today right? If you are doing your own marketing it's someone on your team is handling your marketing. If you're working with a vendor, I am going to share a formula. Really simple. Help you create a message that is going to make your marketing work better. All right, who's familiar with bad lead syndrome? Symptoms of bad lead syndrome include having to call leads over and over and over again. Call them five times ten times before they ever pick up the phone. Right. Raise your hand if you've ever experienced that? I like to go for a little audience participation here, mainly because I just want to understand. I want to know where you guys are. I want to make sure this this land.

Danny Decker 00:02:08 So let me ask this question too. Can I see a show of hands if you have someone else on your team, not you. Who is responsible for intake? So raise your hands if somebody else is responsible for intake. And let me see your hands if you are doing your own intake. All right. Cool. Okay, so for most of you, this could be your intake team, right? So symptoms of bad lead syndrome include having to call leads 510 times to even get them to pick up the phone. If they do pick up the phone, they are looking for something that you don't offer. You are a divorce firm and they want estate planning. You are a criminal defense firm and they need something else, right? Not good leads for your law firm. You finally do find somebody who's a right fit and turns out they can't afford you, right? Discouraging. Right. So you burn a lot of money. You burn a lot of time. You create these landing pages, you create these ad campaigns, you drive traffic, you drive leads, and at the end of the day, they do not hire you.

Danny Decker 00:03:07 Okay. Disappointing. You know what's even worse, though? By the way of then spending a bunch of money to drive leads that don't end up hiring you is when you spend bunches of money. Bunches of effort to drive. Client opportunities aren't a good fit, and they do end up hiring you. Okay, that is how you blow your firm up, right? Bad leads turn into bad clients. Create all sorts of operational problems. Morale problems, sales problems. Not a good thing. Okay, most of us have been there. Raise your hand if you've been there. Right. That lead got through the system that shouldn't have and created all sorts of havoc. All right. Awesome. When your leads get better, everything in your law firm gets better. And I get it. I'm a marketing guy, so maybe I'm a little biased, but I really believe that when you have a marketing system in place that drives a predictable flow of quality leads. You can solve just about every other problem in your business.

Danny Decker 00:04:08 Right? You can dial your marketing up. You can dial your marketing down. As long as you've got the ability to create cash flow, you can solve just about every other problem in your business. So this is a really big deal. Today I am going to share three pretty simple steps to make this happen. So show of hands if you if you want this. If you're ready to jump into this with me sweet. Let's go. All right. Number one, you need to define what your ideal clients look like. Show of hands. If you are investing something into marketing, whether that is paying a vendor, whether that's doing it yourself, whether that is somebody on your team, like every hand should be up, right? We're all investing something into marketing. Okay. How many of you have a pretty good idea of what a good client looks like for your law firm? Again, show of hands. All right. Awesome. How many of you have that written down on paper? Cool.

Danny Decker 00:05:10 About half the room. How many of you have taken that piece of paper, made sure it's up to date, and shared it with your marketing team. Whether that's a vendor, whether that's your internal team? Okay. And how many of you, when you are reviewing your marketing progress, whether that's every quarter, every month, every year. Pull that out and have a conversation with the people who are in charge of your marketing to make sure that they are bringing you the right types of clients. All right. One person. Okay. So huge opportunity. Good news here is good news for everybody that didn't raise your hands. You can make massive progress if you make this part of your normal marketing operating process. Okay. You need to, on paper, define what your ideal clients look like. But here is where people go wrong with this exercise and ask me how I know. I've done this many times. When you sit down with somebody in a conference room and have a conversation about what is your best client look like, what are your ideal clients look like? We get great answers, right? And we all love to have these conversations.

Danny Decker 00:06:14 These are fun conversations to have. The problem ends up and again ask me how I know that the profile that we sketch up in terms of your ideal clients doesn't actually exist in the real world, right? And so we we create this, this, this unicorn that we're going to build this marketing campaign and go find them. But like those people don't exist. Okay. And so you put all this money into a hypothesis that just isn't real. So here's how you fix that. And here's part one of the homework assignment. Here's what I want you to do. I promise this will make a huge impact in your business when you get back to the office next week. Print out your client roster the last 2 or 3 years, and I want you to go one by one by one. And I want you to highlight or circle, or put a checkmark next to the ten best clients that you've worked with over the past couple of years. Okay. Identify the ten best clients. These are the people where if you could snap your fingers and clone them and bring them back over and over and over again, you would be really, really happy.

Danny Decker 00:07:16 These are your client avatars. And this is reality based. Right. Because these are people that you've actually worked with. You know, they exist. You know they're not a unicorn. You just need to now build a message that's going to go pull them in. Okay. So that's part one. Then do the opposite as well. So run down that list and I want you to put take out your red highlighter or your big X right. And mark the ten worst clients that you've worked with over the past few years. Okay. And then what I want you to do with both sets of clients is sit down and look at the patterns. Okay. What do your top ten best clients have in common. Sometimes it's going to be obvious things, right? Like, maybe they live in a certain zip code. you know, have kids. They don't have kids. They own a house. They rent a house. Other times it's less obvious. Connections, right? But what are the connections that your ideal clients have in common? And then what makes up the not great clients, right.

Danny Decker 00:08:18 The folks that you do not want to attract. I always tell people marketing has two jobs. It's to bring the right types of clients to your law firm. What's the second job? Anyone? Just throw it out there. Keep the bad ones away, okay? Bring the right clients to your law firm. Keep the bad ones away. You got to have this on paper in order to make it happen. All right, so you've identified what your top clients look like. Awesome. Step two. Your messaging needs to be all about them. Okay? Not you, not us. Let's talk about a few things that your clients probably don't care about. Probably don't care about where you went to law school. Okay. They probably don't care about what your GPA was, right? They probably don't even care about the years experience, the awards you won. Like, that's not what they are thinking about when they are trying to determine who to hire. It's not what they're thinking about. Here's what they definitely, definitely aren't thinking about.

Danny Decker 00:09:23 They are not thinking about how the sausage gets made. They do not care about how the sausage gets made. A lot of lawyers, because you guys are really well trained in this stuff and you're really smart. You want to talk about how the sausage gets made. It's not what they're interested in. It actually scares them. Let me tell you about the handyman, that every time he comes to our house, I have to hide. And here's the deal. I'm not a handy person. I'm okay with that. Like I'm okay admitting that I'm not good at building things. It's not my strength. Fortunately, my wife is really good at that. She loves building things, doing home improvement projects, all that stuff. She does that I don't. I'm fine with that. It's 2020. I've got no problems admitting that. But every once in a while, like there's a project that she doesn't want to do. And so we have this handyman. Like, twice a year he comes to our house, we've got, like, this long list of projects, and this guy is like, a super nice guy.

Danny Decker 00:10:16 Okay? He's former military. He teaches, like a woodworking class for for, like, ten year olds. Just a great guy, really good communicator. But, like, every time he's at our house doing a project and I'm not doing it and paying him to do it, it's like he feels bad for me. He's like, man, I just I feel like you want to be doing this, but you're hiring me because you don't know how. And he just feels bad for me. He literally invites me. He's like, hey, man, if you want to come with me on my next job, I'll show you how to do this. And I'm like, dude. Like, with all due respect, like I'm paying you to do it. Like, I want the TV on the wall and like, I don't want to see the wiring. And that's the extent of my involvement here. And it's like, again, great person, great heart. But like, I don't care. I don't care how the sausage is made.

Danny Decker 00:11:04 I just want me to do it. And frankly, I don't even want to have a conversation about it. Okay. So but listen, that is a trap that we all fall into, okay? We all think that the people we work with want to know all of the details, and that by telling them we show off how smart we are. Okay, this is just not how it works. There is a book story brand. Show of hands. If you read a story brand Donald Miller okay, if you haven't, I highly recommend you check it out. It is a really smart framework to sort of rethink your messaging. But here's the big idea one. The human mind absorbs information best when it is presented in story format, right? For thousands of years. That's just how we're wired. Every story has some basic elements. You've got a hero. The hero wants to go somewhere or wants to do something. There's a problem that's keeping him from getting there. And then there is a guide that helps the hero solve the problem.

Danny Decker 00:11:59 Accomplish his mission. Okay. Think Luke Skywalker and Star Wars, right? And and ObiWan Kenobi is the guide. As a law firm, where do you think you fit in this framework? The guy. Right. And that's the big concept of story brand. Is that your customer? Your client is the hero. You're the guide, okay. Your job is to and and the number one job of your marketing is to position you and your firm as the guide that can help your law, your your clients get to where they want to be. Okay. That's the job. You're not the hero of your marketing. Your client needs to be the hero of your marketing. And you have to understand they are facing something pretty significant in their life, right? Anytime someone hires a law firm for most people. And it's not normal for you guys because this is your world. But most people, hiring a lawyer is intimidating. It's something most people don't do very often. It's a big investment, and it's usually around something that's pretty significant in their life.

Danny Decker 00:13:01 And so when you figure out how to let me put it this way, if you want to be persuasive with your messaging and pull in the right types of clients, you need to understand what motivates them. You need to understand what they care about. Again, it's not law school. It's not your years of experience. It's how are you going to help them have a better life. Here's the best way to do it super low technology. Remember that list of ten ideal clients that I just asked you to make as part of your homework? Part two of the homework. When you get back to the office, have a conversation with them. That's it. That's the assignment. Have a conversation. Email them and say, hey, I really enjoyed working with you. Thank you so much for, you know, your business over the years. can I ask you a favor? We want to figure out how to attract more people like you, because we really love working with you. Would you mind spending 15 minutes with me on the phone next week? I would just love to ask you some questions.

Danny Decker 00:14:02 And by the way, I'm not going to bill you for the call. They're going to say yes, you're going to get eight of the ten are going to say yes, and then you're just going to have a conversation. I loved Jim Hawking's framework yesterday where he said, you have to ask why five times because the conversation goes something like this. Think back to when you were deciding to hire a law firm. What was going on in your life? What was motivating you? What drove your decision? Right. And then you keep asking why. And eventually what you uncover is the surface problem is never really the problem that's driving them to move forwards, right? It's not hey, I know I need to have an estate plan. It's man, I feel guilty and I lie awake at night wondering what happens if I pass away, right? All my friends have estate plans for their kids. I don't have one yet. Right. Those are the types of things you unearth. So, Yeah, if you want, we put together a questionnaire, scan the QR code, or you can just email me.

Danny Decker 00:15:03 I'll share my email at the at the end. But simple interview script. The idea is call your clients, ask them what motivates them, what they care about, what their priorities are when they're looking for a law firm. Again, these are the types of clients you want to attract to your law firm. This information very important okay. So that's step two. Step three this is the easy part okay. Now that you know who your best clients are and you know what motivates them, marketing is pretty easy. You just need to advertise where they're hanging out okay. And best way to do that figure that out is to ask them. Right. That's one of the questions. What social media sites do you spend your time on? What podcasts do you listen to? Do you subscribe to the local newspaper? Right. You just need to have an idea where your best clients hang out, and that's where you mark it. It's really not that complicated. There's there's a there's three M's that go into every successful marketing campaign.

Danny Decker 00:15:59 It's the market. Like, who is your ideal client? It's the message. What are you going to say to persuade them to take action? And then it's the media, which is just what channel do you want to reach them through? Networking is a marketing channel. Word of mouth is a marketing channel, Facebook ads, SEO, all marketing channels. You just need to be advertising in the spots where your best clients are hanging out. All right. I'm going to give you a tactical step here, okay. This is one of the biggest opportunities for for a lot of law firms, right, when it comes to advertising. Right. So you figured out where your best clients are. Maybe let's say you decided that you can get really good clients from Google. All right. I want you to move upstream every opportunity that you get. Here's what I mean by that. Most law firms, when they are advertising, they're all hanging out in the same spot on the river, right? The point where the fish are super, super hungry.

Danny Decker 00:16:54 Okay. This is. Think about your buyer's journey, right? There's always a process for a potential client where they become interested in your in your service. They start doing some research. Maybe it's a few weeks, maybe it's a few months, maybe it's a few years. Eventually they get to the point where they're ready to move forward. They go on Google and they search for personal injury attorney. Right? Problem is, everybody else is advertising there too. So what you want to do is move upstream, gets to them before everybody else is going after them. We use something called lead magnets. I know there was some conversation about this yesterday. Raise your hand if you know what a lead magnet is. All right. It's just some free value that you're giving away in exchange for somebody contact information. Right. We see this work really well in divorce. For example, rather than spending your entire Google Ads budget on a divorce search where it's going to be really expensive and you're going to have a lot of competition.

Danny Decker 00:17:47 We've used a lead magnet. This one in particular works really well. Eight steps to prepare for divorce. Instead of advertising it on Google where your cost per click is really high. Run a Facebook ad campaign. You can get leads like $8 per lead. Using lead magnets that way. So move up stream. All right. Last point here, right. Remember this is all about how to attract better clients to your law firm. Please do not lose sight of the fact your best clients are always going to come from referrals. They're always going to come from referrals. Referral marketing, digital marketing are not two different things. Okay, smart digital marketing helps you get more referrals. We see it in the data. Referrals close about 65% of the time. Other lead channels more like 28 to 30% of the time. You want more clients. You want the right type of clients. Use smart referral marketing. I think it was Charlie Man yesterday had a three step system to drive more referrals. Awesome. Really really good.

Danny Decker 00:18:45 The only thing I would add to it is you can also do some simple low cost advertising called retargeting. Right. So you take that list that you're emailing. You also push your, your, your social media content so that they're seeing your stuff every time they log on to Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever. So bottom line, your best clients are always going to come from referrals. Don't neglect it. Take referral marketing seriously. Your digital marketing can help you do that. So all right. It looks like I am about out of time. The timer is actually not working, but I think I'm at 20 minutes. So listen thank you guys. bottom line if you can figure out how to attract not just more leads, but better leads, it's going to fix everything in your marketing is going to make your marketing work better. It's going to make your sales easier, and it's going to make your law firm more enjoyable to own. So I hope this helps. If you guys have questions, you can feel free to reach out.

Danny Decker 00:19:36 To me it's Danny Spotlight branding.com. If you were not able to scan those QR codes and you want those resources, just shoot me an email. I will have my team send them over to you and that's all I got. Thank you guys so much.