Tanner Jones on recession-proofing your law firm for 2024 – find out more with Helm360
Hello, Legal Helm listeners! It is with great pleasure that we inaugurate 2024 chatting with Tanner Jones, VP of Business Development at Consultwebs, a seasoned professional with over a decade of experience in crafting case-driving online marketing strategies for law firms. In this episode, Tanner discusses the key elements of recession-proofing your law firm through a solid marketing strategy. Let’s start the year with innovative insights into navigating the digital landscape, understanding client needs, and staying resilient in the ever-changing legal industry. Welcome our first episode of The Legal Helm 2024!
Your host
Bim Dave is Helm360’s Executive Vice President. With 15+ years in the legal industry, his keen understanding of how law firms and lawyers use technology has propelled Helm360 to the industry’s forefront. A technical expert with a penchant for developing solutions that improve business systems and user experience, Bim has a knack for bringing high quality IT architects and developers together to create innovative, useable solutions to the legal arena.
Our Guest
Tanner Jones oversees all business development opportunities for Consultwebs and their clients. He has the privilege of speaking with virtually every law firm that contacts Consultwebs and working with them to determine how Consultwebs may accomplish their digital marketing goals.
Tanner earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, with a concentration in Management, from Berea College in 2008. His journey with Consultwebs began in 2009, and he now has nearly 15 years of experience consulting with law firms on case-driving online marketing strategies.
Transcript
Bim Dave: Hello, Legal Helm listeners. Today, I am delighted to be speaking with Tanner Jones, VP of Business Development at Consultwebs. Tanner Jones oversees all business development opportunities for Consultwebs and their clients. He has the privilege of speaking with virtually every law firm that contacts Consultwebs and works with them to determine how Consultwebs may accomplish their digital marketing goals.
He has over a decade of experience consulting with law firms on case driving online marketing strategies. And in today’s podcast, I’m going to be talking to Tanner about how to recession proof your law firm by having a solid marketing strategy. Tanner, hello and welcome to the show.
Tanner Jones: Thank you so much, Bim.
Such a pleasure to be here.
Bim Dave: Glad to have you on. Glad to have you on. So, Tanner, it would be great for you to Let our audience know a little bit about you and maybe kind of walk us through your personal journey and what brought you into the world of digital marketing for law firms.
Tanner Jones: Most certainly. Yeah.
First of all, Bim, thank you for the opportunity. [00:01:00] I think very highly of you, and I’ve enjoyed several of your, your prior interviews. So, it’s it really is an honor to be here. My journey, you know, looking back at the digital world, I’ve been, I’ve been in this business now for going on 15 years. And interestingly enough, the topic we’re talking about recession proving a law firm, we were really right in the heart of a recession.
And when the, at the time I jumped into, into the marketing arena. And so, we lived it. That was really my, where I cut my teeth and in the industry itself. And. And lots of lessons in that process. But the journey itself, I went to business school. I was an entrepreneur at a young age starting a starting a business in my local area, more so with my hands.
It was a, it was a, an outdoor business, basically anything and everything where I could help someone outside, whether it be, you know, weed eating, any kind of horticulture work. I was involved in it, you know, trying to fill a need. And it, it really birthed in me at a young age that really, I feel like anybody, if I can do this, anybody can do this, go knock on doors, build relationships, and find where there are needs and fill those needs.
And really as simple as that is, that is the heart of most entrepreneurs. And so that really, you know, gave me a direction of, hey, I want to be able to control a lot of, of my direction and my future. And so, I went to school for business. I worked a couple of jobs, more sales-oriented jobs in the insurance realm, went into a bit of a stint and mediating more of an HR role, and then finally found ConsultWebs.
ConsultWebs at that time was a well-entrenched digital marketing company. They were exclusively focused on law firms and, and being an entrepreneur myself, I loved the power of a niche. In business, you know, knowing your craft, knowing it well, and knowing when to say no, those are, those are powerful things for any business owner.
And, and so that’s what started the journey back in 2009. And as mentioned, you know, the, the recession was full swing at that time. And as they say, the rest is history.
Bim Dave: Absolutely. Thank you so much for that introduction. It’s great to hear about how all of us kind of go on a journey that maybe we started out, you know, thinking we’re going to end up somewhere and then we end up in, in the places that we’re at.
So, it’s, really interesting to learn from you on that. So, talking of law firms and talking of them, the niche that you are focused on, what do you see as the biggest challenges that are facing law firms in marketing themselves today?
Tanner Jones: Yeah, there, there are a number of challenges, but I’ll start with really the core concept here, which is tied to the recession.
And I think that’s more around, mindset of the marketer, mindset of the business owner. And, you know, what do I mean by that? You know, we choose our mindsets every single day in business and any business owner is going to have in most instances a wave of challenges that they’re dealing with any given week.
And they’re also dealt with opportunities and decisions that they’re dealt with any given week and for me I believe mindset plays such a critical role in marketing in that if you are fear based Marketing decisions and how you need to get your brand out there or how frequently you need to get your brand out there You’re immediately starting with Putting an uphill journey in front of you as a business owner mindset, especially when the begins to contract, right?
And you start hearing this fear mongering news online and, on your television, most business owners tend to want to just run. They want to run and go hide in a cave until all of this, you know, flies over. But. The true business owners that are successful during these times and grow out of these types of downturns economies, those are the ones that have the right mindset.
So, what is that mindset? That mindset is its aggressive. It’s progressive, meaning it is you’re looking for innovative ways to continue to push forward. While most competitors in this moment are, you know, cutting their expenses, they’re trying to find ways to be more intentional about protecting their margins.
These other mindsets of business owners are looking to gain more market share in that time. And they certainly will because when the other competition is falling back, it creates more opportunity. So, Bim, while I can talk about a lot of different things within marketing and what’s holding people back from my experience, especially in Times like today, it is mindset.
Bim Dave: for that. Now, the field of marketing has changed a lot. imagine over the years, right? I remember growing up in my dad’s news agency and we used to have paper deliveries, paper round deliveries, and you open up the magazine inserts. They used to go into those papers, and it was just full of adverts, right?
Printed adverts in those days. whAt would you say, like, it’d be interesting just to get your take in terms of how you see, the field of marketing has changed over the years. And what would you say that’s kind of transformed in terms of the marketing channels that you see being the most successful, not just now, but going forward for the future that law firms should be thinking about.
Tanner Jones: There’s no doubt it continues to evolve. I mean, back in the day, it was easy for marketers, you know, for law firms in particular, especially if you were advertising 15 years ago, the yellow pages, that, that was pretty much it., and that was where you grew your book of business. You know, you get a double truck and in particular now you’re really winning and owning the market.
So unfortunately, today, it’s not as simple as that. And in fact, what we’re seeing is that it’s becoming more and more complex, primarily regarding just fragmentation of platforms, right? the past, again, people in their local markets, they would expect that yellow page book to show up at their doorstep and in certain intervals throughout, you know, every year.
So, and so consumers really leaned on that one core place to go find a local business. Today, especially with the invention of a cell phone, a mobile device that’s in your pocket everywhere you go, now you have the yellow pages and more in your pocket. And the challenge that comes with that is that it’s not just one singular website that they’re referencing.
Many individuals are, are visiting dozens and dozens and dozens of different browsers or rather URLs any given day. Could be social media they’re spending time on, but even within social media. Today you have X, formerly Twitter, you have Instagram, Facebook, Tik TOK, LinkedIn. And the fact is there’s going to be more social channels in the future.
Then you look at search, search marketing, you know, just even 10 years ago, it was as simple as do I pay for a pay per click ad at the top or do I invest in search engine optimization and get results to show up there? Well, fast forward to today, now you have local services ads, then pay per click ads, then local maps results, then organic results.
And then there are a number of other strategies outside of that, that compliment your website and overall visibility. I say all of that not to overwhelm or give your listeners heart palpitations and thinking, you know, what’s coming in the future, but to acknowledge that you’re probably not going to be everywhere.
It’s, it’s likely impossible unless you have an infinite budget to be everywhere. And so, then you have to really emphasize who my audience is? What are my core competencies? How do I solve my audience’s problems and then identify ultimately where they are spending their time? If you’re going to focus, ultimately, from our experience, one of the best places to focus, going back to the mindset of the yellow pages concept.
Those are people who are at the very bottom of the funnel, if you want to think of your traditional sales funnel. So, they are actively looking for a lawyer if they’re going online and searching for a lawyer. The same as if they’re picking up the Yellow Pages book and looking for a local business. They have the intent to find and call a business.
And so, from our experience and all the data we’ve collected over the last 24 years of helping law firms with digital, we find that focusing start, start, starting with the bottom of the funnel, people who are looking for practice area lawyer. In your area, that is one of the best places, most profitable places to be as a business owner.
And often that comes through the form of showing up on page one of Google. And while there are multiple places to show up on page one of Google, as mentioned, local services ads, pay per click ads, and Google Maps results. From our experience, most cases coming through a law firm’s website today are funneling through the local MAPS results in Google.
So if I’m going to pinpoint one specific area that I want to be or that I want my clients to be above all things else, it would be for those transactional terms in the MAPS results. So hopefully that helps them. Obviously, there’s a lot to that but singularly, that is one of the most profitable channels to be in
Bim Dave: excellent.
That’s
Good to know. And and how does that how does that play out in future? Like, there’s a lot of talk at the moment of artificial intelligence and the role of generative AI. With regard to things like content creation that obviously ends up as part of, or could end up as part of a firm’s marketing strategy. I’m interested to get your take in terms of, are you seeing are you seeing any early impacts in terms of where you are leveraging any AI technologies to, to improve or enhance? the process when it comes to marketing or being more efficient? And you know, how are you seeing that as, as, as impacting the way that you market law firms going forward?
Tanner Jones: That is the, it’s no longer the million dollar question. That’s the billion dollar question today in the, in the marketing arena. You know, the reality is that it’s here, the technology is here, and I firmly believe it’s here to stay, and it’s going to continue to evolve to make truly all our lives easier if we embrace it in a positive way.
That being said, I think there are two sides here that we can look at. One would be the overall search. The, the search world, how will it evolve? How will the search engines evolve for the individual users? And because that’s important naturally for a marketer to know, how do I need to stay ahead of this?
How do I keep up with this, this constant change? So that’s one piece. The other side would be more in line with what you’re referring to with, what are we doing? to leverage this technology to help our clients market. And that’s where I’ll start. We are firm believers. And I want to state this very publicly that we are not recommending that marketers or law firms alike use tools like chat GPT for, to produce new content for the website. Don’t mishear me in that you can still leverage this technology without having it produce content for you. A few practical examples that we’ve found, very simple. You can look at, you know, let’s say going back to the example, if I want to rank for car accident lawyer near me, that search term in my area.
If you run that search in your area and find three competitors appearing above you, what pages are ranking for that term? That would be a place to start. And it would be as easy as copying that content, pasting it into ChatGPT, and then taking your piece of content and uploading it and asking ChatGPT to identify the gaps in your content and opportunities to improve it to make it more user friendly.
At the end of the day, Google wants to continue to serve the user, the searcher. And, and so will, will Google potentially monopolize some search results over time with generative AI in their search results where they’re essentially giving the result immediately as a, you know, zero position at the top of Google so that a user doesn’t have to continue investigating or doing research.
That’s possible, Bim. And, and I believe that that will most certainly evolve how we optimize campaigns, but the reality is that what that does is it creates more trust and confidence and more users coming back to Google over time, making it almost it is part of their their body that that mobile device and being on them at all times.
And for any marketer, you ask any credible marketer out there, where do you want to be? You want to be where your potential clients are. And so I would encourage anyone who’s looking at this evolution to see it as an opportunity to create even more brand awareness. In the marketplace by creating information, creating value so that as users are going online and doing research, even if it is generative AI, it’s unique to the individual user. If you were the one supplying that content as the thought leader, you are establishing brand recognition. And, and for, for any marketer who’s been, been in this business, brand recognition is a powerful asset to a business. Going back to the idea of, you know, how can you continue to leverage this technology?
Use it as competitive intelligence. Use it as opportunities to improve what you’re already doing. And that’s been really the core component when I teach anyone about AI and how to properly leverage it. Don’t start with this type of technology thinking, what can we create that’s so abstract, that’s so new, that’s so outside of the box that no one has done so that we can take advantage of this technology.
I believe Certainly can be challenged on this, but I believe that’s, that’s the wrong way of looking at this type of technology. Instead, look at it with what are we currently doing that works and how can we leverage this technology to exponentially increase what’s working or improve the process and build more efficiencies into the existing process, leveraging the technology.
And that’s where I believe firms are going to get the most out of it today.
Bim Dave: Excellent. Yeah, I love that. I love that. I think that’s, that’s exactly the approach that can be applied, not just to the digital marketing space, but I think, you know, wherever we’re looking at applying AI technology, see it as an enhancement for the good stuff that’s already happening and in leveraging it in that way.
Bim Dave: Excellent. Yeah, I love that. I love that. I think that’s, that’s exactly the approach that can be applied, not just to the digital marketing space, but I think, you know, wherever we’re looking at applying AI technology, see it as an enhancement for the good stuff that’s already happening and in leveraging it in that way.
So, that’s interesting. So if I’m, if I’m a law firm who doesn’t necessarily have a good starting point for an online footprint, what would you recommend as, as the right starting point for a firm like that? And, and does it differ depending on the size of the firm? So if I’m a solo shop versus, you know a firm with, you know, a hundred partners, do, do you have to think of a different approach when it comes to marketing a firm?
And what, you know, where do you start?
Tanner Jones: Yeah, that’s such a great question but, but yet such a difficult question to, to answer because the, probably all grown tired of hearing, you know, there’s no, there’s no one size fits all strategy and, and that’s the reality to it. You have so many different diverse practice areas within a singular market where they each have unique competitors.
They each have unique potential clients, all with individual needs, problems, and challenges. And so the way I want to look at that is, let’s not look at it as a one size fits all, but let’s look at the marketplace and identify what are your competitors currently doing that is working in your marketplace and build a strategy around that to out position them, to overtake them in that.
And, and so again, it’s not a, it could very well be an, if. You know, this, that, but boiling it down to simplicity. I firmly believe that every business out there should have a high quality website that provides a positive first impression. The truth is that there are not only prospective clients coming on to vet you, to check you out online. Certainly that’s a, that’s an audience you want to cater to, but you also have referring attorneys that may have heard about you, or that may be looking to refer a case out and they just simply want to vet you. This is today’s. business card. This is your opportunity to really highlight your strengths, unique value proposition, and, and put your best foot forward.
And I would recommend in that effort, create, establish a personality of the brand. Who are you? And is that adequately represented? And that, a great way of doing that is through custom, candid photography, or better yet, High quality video that tells a story about your brand and more importantly allows others to talk about their experiences with your brand and your business.
At minimum BIM, that is exactly what every business should start with. Beyond that, I would start a process of building. So a lot of firms see this as like, I’m either all in, Or I’m not doing this at all. And I challenge that mindset all day, every day, because we have seen year after year, firms, stair step their success by being intentional about hitting that first milestone of success.
But then going back to the mindset of once I reached that. That next Bimchmark, what are we doing next? What are we pursuing as our next tier milestone? And by keeping that, that mindset, you can strategically and efficiently grow without overstretching yourself from the very beginning, which can very easily happen, especially in a recession era.
So going back to it, start with the website beyond that, ensure that you have credible properties out there. What does that mean? One would be a Google property. If you have an office address or multiple office addresses, then in that instance, you want a Google listing, a business [00:18:00] listing for every office that you have.
To layer on even more to that, Go out and aggressively pursue reviews from past clients and others within your network who know about your business and can speak to that competently. Social proof is gold online, just like it is in the word of mouth concept of being able to get your brand out there.
If, if friend A refers you to friend B, it’s a lot easier to sign that client up because of the trust that they come in with. That has now transitioned or bridged over into digital, where complete strangers are reading about someone else’s experience of your law firm and growing in trust and confidence in your business.
So certainly that would be a place to continue to build on and make sure that you have a solid foundation. And then naturally from there you can be intentional, depending on where the gaps are in the market, to strategically expand and grow your business.
Bim Dave: Great. Thank you, Tana. That was very comprehensive and insightful.
So, and I do want to drill in a little bit deeper in terms of the, the kind of success element of building that marketing strategy, because one of the things that I remember having some conversations in previous companies that I’ve worked for, where the, the leadership would say, we’re going to spend some money on marketing, right?
And the, the result needs to be, you know, increasing sales or whatever, like whatever the measure of success is. And there was no real way of being able to define like a, a timeline as to when that happens. And for some, some people in leadership, that’s, that is a struggle, right? Because they kind of want to know, I buy something, I spend some money.
I want to see results tomorrow, right? Now, the nature of marketing from, from my perspective is that it, it takes time for some of this stuff to work because you can lay down the roots and then you need to wait for, for really the flowers that kind of come, come up. I would be, I would be interested to get your take on firstly, how do you measure success?
Like what, what is the, you know, what kind of KPIs, what kind of things do you typically recommend people measure? And. How, how long do typically firms need to wait before they start seeing results? And do you see that as being a challenge in terms of, you know, justifying the cost and then kind of figuring out how far that, that journey takes a firm before they start to see the results of their labor?
Tanner Jones: Yes, such a, such a good question to, to ask and for anyone who is considering marketing or who is in the, in the middle of a marketing campaign, this can be a major frustration point. And, and the challenge here is that in many instances, marketers are going off of prior experiences. And, and we’ve just talked about how the web continues to evolve and change.
And so what, what we’re trying to do is skate to where the puck is going an old Wayne Gretzky quote there, which I love. And that’s, that’s really the beauty of, of, you know, digital and being able to stay ahead of the curve. The more you can skate. Ahead the, the more you can keep up with that, but the whole concept really comes down to tracking key metrics that everyone can agree and align on everyone being the law firm who is marketing and whoever it is that you’re working with as the marketer.
So in the very beginning, we are firm believers in getting alignment on what success looks like. What does failure look like? That’s a conversation that doesn’t often come up, but, you know, asking someone, you know, what is, what is worst case scenario? What do you, what do you anticipate? It at least brings alignment to the, to the conversation.
And you, you at least know what you’re working against and what you’re working toward. Now, when it comes to objective metrics, I state objective for a reason, very intentionally. Because it’s so easy to get lost in data. There is no shortage of data when it comes to marketing. In fact, I’ve, I’ve, I believe marketers have dug their own grave in the world of, of chasing attribution and, and chasing all of these individual metrics.
When, from our experience, there are two critical metrics that any law firm who’s investing in marketing should monitor. One would be leads. Specifically, what did you pay per lead last month in your marketing? And you take that by, you take your full investment and whatever it is you, you put your money into.
And based on how many leads came back from that, calculate average cost per lead. That’s a healthy metric to monitor over time because it gives you a sense of trajectory. Are we growing our leads and reducing what we’re paying per individual lead? Or are we dropping our lead count and actually paying a higher premium over time?
These are all red flags that alert marketers. And business owners alike and allow you to make changes more quickly and being more agile. The other metric, which is Much more important would be cases, total number of cases and, and what you paid per individual case to acquire those cases. Now this can get messy and, and I, if you don’t mind, Bim, I’d like to take just a moment to speak through maybe the complexity of this process.
But if you’re calculating your cost per lead. On average, and your cost per case, on average, every single month, again, you have historical data to get a sense of where you’re trending as a business. This gives you the ability to make even better, more informed decisions as a business owner, as to where you want to continue to apply dollars over time in marketing, where you may want to pull back, and, beginning to put scenarios together.
If we double our investment next year, we can expect that we will Double, triple, whatever that may be your caseload, depending on what those numbers are showing you. So it’s great data to inform and make good decisions on. There are, when it comes to the timeline aspect, that’s where it gets complex, Bim, because the challenge here is that no one, has that that foresight to be able to say on month seven is when that return on investment begins to come in. But as a business owner and someone who’s vetting options, it is wise to do due diligence on whoever it is you’re considering to find what are other relevant case studies or examples that you’ve worked through similar to my business and what did they expect.
Or what did they see? And, and was it in line with what they expected? And more importantly, if you’re able to, have conversations directly with those law firms like yours that lived through that era. And, and there are other secondary metrics that you can monitor to illustrate growth and trajectory, even when the leads and the case counts haven’t picked up.
Because that’s the other mistake that a law firm, a lot of law firms will make, Bim, is that they will start into an endeavor. Maybe. Aggressively investing in this particular endeavor and within five, six months, no cases have come in, many of which start getting cold feet. They are ready to back away from this.
They just want to consider it a loss and walk away. I see that as, as, as such a critical error and a failure, not only on the business owner, but just as importantly on the marketer themselves, because clearly they were not aligned from the very beginning. Of that relationship in terms of what you need to endure over a period of time before you actually begin to see results and the truth is that depending on what marketing strategy a business owner is using some, some definitely have a longer ramp up period, but better results in the end, whereas others may have a shorter ramp up period to get results, but you’re gonna constantly pay a high premium on that cost per case.
But if that business owner is informed and has the general expectation, Yeah. And then the metrics, most importantly, to monitor that trajectory and how well you’re trending toward that ultimate first milestone, that’s what’s going to give a marketer’s peace of mind. It’s what’s going to give the business owners a peace of mind and most importantly, a confidence to continue or sustain something if that result has not yet been achieved.
Bim Dave: Awesome. That’s , really helpful on the subject of, of success stories. I think you mentioned that’s a good way to kind of or get an idea or a sense of what like working with a firm could bring to the table, like a specialist marketing firm, like yourselves. Is there any examples that you can kind of draw on today?
To share with the audience in terms of, you know, you had a firm that, you know, engaged with you all, and, you know, what, what did it look like? What did the story look like for them?
Tanner Jones: Yeah, thank you for that opportunity. I mean, we’ve truly been blessed with a number of phenomenal clients across the country who have worked with us in many instances well over a decade.
1 firm immediately comes to mind. It’s a client that. Came on just before the recession really picked up in the country. And so they came in really with a very optimistic mindset and investing in marketing. At that time, 90 percent of their business was coming through attorney referrals.
And, and so that was really their business model. They were not a marketing. And they were not known as a marketing law firm, but they knew the best way to continue to build and bolster the growth success that they’d had previously was to make a better effort into marketing and to build more of a pipeline of their own leads for those of our listeners who may not, be as familiar with you know, various types of, for law firms.
This law firm was a contingency based law firm. And, and so personal injury, civil litigation, in most instances for attorney referrals, they are paying out a third of their third that they’re collecting. And so when you start to calculate how much they are paying to acquire a case over time, it is Shocking to some business owners.
Now, granted, those are cases that have been settled or landed in verdict. And so the risk in most instances, much less, but they found that if they could bolster a pipeline of new leads through their own marketing, margins would be incredibly. Than the other business side. So that’s what they were pursuing.
Now, working through that recession era, naturally they were doing a lot of things to continue to reinforce their own reputation and brand in the market to keep the referrals coming in. And, and they, they’ve been such a phenomenal firm that they did that. But fast forward to today, over 60 percent of their cases.
And their revenue is driven through online search and digital marketing. They still continue to grow their referral based marketing, but they’ve invested heavily into a dominant presence online. And it starts with what we refer to as search engine optimization, or SEO. And that’s continuing to build out a wealth of content related to catastrophic injury topics.
And them being the experts where Google sees that content. They see it continuously being pushed out. They see their reviews and their social and online reputation. And through the work of our, our own search engine optimization efforts, they have won mightily with that effort. And so that that’s a great example of a firm who really, they had every reason in the world just to continue to be comfortable with 90 percent of business coming in through referrals.
But they were intentional about watching, here’s what we’re paying per case that we are closing out. And from a business standpoint, when you start seeing this amount of money going out of your business to acquire cases, you start to ask yourself, how can we be more efficient with these dollars? How can we get more out of these dollars?
And truly that is what has led to their success. In addition to partnering, obviously with consult webs.
Bim Dave: What an amazing story. Thank you for sharing that. That’s extremely helpful to hear real example, right? You there’s just one final bit that I wanted to kind of talk about that you just literally just touched on, which was around reputation management and the role that reviews play in a marketing strategy, because you kind of hear positive and negatives on, on this subject in terms of you know.
Fake reviews, for example, and sometimes the fact that you don’t have control over what people are going to say, right? So, how much of a focus is that for you all when you’re working with law firms and is it an area of concern or is that, if managed right, can that be used to your advantage from a marketing strategy perspective?
Tanner Jones: Yeah, I’m glad you, you brought this up. This is. Hopefully, it’s not as neglected as it, as it was five years ago, but I can confidently say it continues to be neglected by law firm owners. And you’re right, it’s often driven by fear. That’s like a biological response.
We want to avoid fear. We want to avoid challenge and, and ultimately that going back to the mindset in the very beginning of the conversation, it often will create more chaos and struggle for us. So when you think about reviews, I’ve heard this so many times, lawyers like, I don’t want a Facebook profile.
Anybody can leave a. A review about my business and it’s like, well, what’s the harm in someone leaving a review now? Naturally, if they’re all one star reviews, that can be very harmful. But I would argue that if you’re operating a business that’s only generating one star reviews, you’re not going to be operating that business exceptionally long.
And what’s one of the best proactive ways to diffuse or dilute a one star review. It’s to have five, star reviews. That’s just the nature of it. And so I want. Every lawyer out there to take a proactive stance on this BIM and say, listen, we expect a negative review will come. Any business out there has had some poor experience with customer service or dropped the ball on something.
That’s just the nature of running a complex business. But if law firms really began to establish a culture within their office, Every staff member, every front facing team member that’s having some form of dialogue with clients referral partners or anyone in the outside world, they should understand the power of a , singular review.
And, and it should be known, it should be celebrated when these four and five star reviews come in to these properties. Now, when it comes to like, why does that even matter? You can look up any study out there about social proof today and how it absolutely influences decision making from consumers.
You will see the power in the need to have not just a blitz of reviews, but an ongoing strategy so that there’s frequency to those reviews. That’s an indication that your business is active and helping people on an ongoing basis. And so. Definitely do that. Invest in a strategy for getting reviews.
I would recommend you start with your Google property, but one of the challenges there is that someone would have to have a Gmail account to leave a review, and that’s often also an excuse with business owners because they just keep hitting a wall there. But I would encourage you, if you have someone who’s willing to leave a positive endorsement about your business, even if they’re not able to leave it publicly online, have them write it up, send it over to you, have them record it on their phone and leverage that content in other places that you can control.
Like your website, like your testimonials page. If someone’s speaking specifically to a truck accident that you helped their family member through, you better have that truck. Testimonial on your truck accident webpage, because anyone that lands on that page is the most relevant review they can read today.
So those are ways that you can really maximize, take advantage of anyone willing to leave a positive endorsement, whether it be on a public profile at Google or whether you harnessing it and using it in other places that you can control.
Bim Dave: Thank you so much, Tanner. That’s been very, very interesting and lots of food for thought for my audience.
I have a couple wrap-up questions I ask all my guests, and it starts with this. If you could borrow Dr. Who’s time machine and go back to Tanner, 18 years old, what advice would you give him?
Tanner Jones: What a question.
Don’t let fear of failure stop you from pursuing the next initiative. You know, that, that’s such a, that’s a deep topic, and I’m sure we all wrestle with that to some degree. But you know, looking back, this is so cliche to say, but we all learn from failures. In fact, I would say just looking back, I have learned so much more from, you know, stumbling and scratching my elbow than in the victory and the highlights.
And so from, from that end I would. Try to convince myself to be more relentless in pursuing failure and, and, and being okay with that.
Bim Dave: Great, advice. And the next one is really about productivity and how do you remain productive, during the day? Are there any. Tools, tips, tricks that you follow that allow you to get stuff done during the day.
Tanner Jones: Surround yourself with people smarter and better than you are. That’s tip number one, and that’s served me well for a long time. You know, that I, have found that, there’s value in understanding yourself and very Intimately with respect to, you know, here are the things that, that hang me up.
Here are the things that get inside my own head that, that forced me to stall, to be inefficient, or here are just the drudgery areas that I absolutely despise and I’m not productive in them. It’s wise to be introspective in that because that’s ultimately where you can grow. There are people out there, I promise, that can fill those gaps and that they can do it a heck of a lot better than you can, and for me, that’s been No doubt.
One of the best productivity hacks that I’ve leveraged is just to find people that are better than me in my weak areas and allow them to, to, to bring me up. Now, in terms of just some simple hacks, if you’ve never heard of a software called start dot me I I’m certain there are a lot of other similar, quite simple startup widgets like that.
But the idea with that is that. You can control your entire day, everything that’s in front of you on one dashboard. You can have your tasks running, your notes, et cetera, and have it there in front and center. Again, there are a lot of tools out there that can do just that, but having some organization to your day and your week.
Spending time in advance of your week identifying, what are my top objectives. If I leave this week with anything accomplished, it will be these three core areas. And then last thing I would add is find an accountability partner or partners to that. So if you’re living inside your own head and you’re organized, I can confidently tell you, because I’ve been there, something’s going to get in the way, something’s going to tell you another idea is better, but if you’ve stated it, you’re accountable to it.
And you’ve brought in someone that you trust, someone that, you will allow to speak truth back into you. I have just found that that. increases the likelihood of being able to accomplish whatever’s in front of you.
Bim Dave: Great tips. Thank you, Tanner, for sharing. Any closing thoughts or advice that would Bimefit the legal professionals in our audience today?
Tanner Jones: I will close with this and it’s, it’s somewhat of a a redundant topic, but I want to hammer the importance of accountability and measurement. As we’re talking about The future, you know, it’s, it’s the fall of 2023. Now half of all the top economists out there in the country are predicting that a recession is coming and it’s likely to come around mid, mid year, next year, 2024, regardless of whether you believe that timing timing is accurate.
It’s not a question of, If it’s a matter of when we’re going to work through this again, that’s just the nature of the cyclicality of, of the economy. And so, being accountable to what marketing dollars are going out. I’m not suggesting that you be frugal. In fact, hopefully you’ve heard everything opposite of that today.
Now is the time to really gain more ground. and grow your market share. But you have to do that with accountability in mind, measure what matters and be, and any partners you’re working with, ensure that they’re aligned with you to measure what matters and know what success looks like, but more importantly, know what failure looks like too, so that you have a peace of mind, you have clarity, essentially those guardrails that are to give you confidence, even when things don’t seem to be going the way they should, you know, if it’s on the right path.
And that’s what’s going to give business owners, marketers alike, the confidence to be able to not just survive, but, thrive through a downturn in the economy.
Bim Dave: Dana, that’s fantastic. And I want to thank you very much for coming on the show today. You’ve shared a lot of wisdom some really interesting stuff around digital marketing strategy, which I’m sure will be really, really Bimeficial for the audience.
So yeah, really appreciate you and thanks for coming on.
Tanner Jones: Thank you, Bim. Grateful for the opportunity.
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