TRP 203: How to Market Your Professional Services Firm Online with Travis Hoechlin

[00:00:01] You're listening to The Rainmaking Podcast, hosted by high stakes headhunter, author and professional speaker, Scott Love. You're listening to The Rainmaking Podcast. My name is Scott Love. I'm your host and producer. Thank you so much for joining us on the show.

[00:00:31] We've got a content rich episode for you today. Our guest is Travis Heklin and our topic is how to market your professional services firm online. Now, Travis is the CEO of Rise Up Media. They are a niche marketing firm that specializes in helping law firms generate new clients

[00:00:49] from the internet, increase revenue and help grow their businesses. Now, if you're not in the legal industry, these concepts are malleable. So if you're in recruiting, staffing, investment banking, management consulting, keep listening because you're going to get some great ideas and some tactical action

[00:01:05] steps that will help you in terms of growing your practice. As always, this show is sponsored by Leopard Solutions Legal Intelligence Suite of Products, FirmScape and Leopard BI. Push ahead of the pack with the power of Leopard. And now here's my conversation with my friend Travis Heklin.

[00:01:22] Thanks for listening. Hey, this is Scott Love. I've got our special guest today, Travis Heklin, and our topic title is how to market your professional services firm online. Travis, thanks for joining me on the show. Thanks for having me, Scott. Excited to be here.

[00:01:38] Yeah, I'm excited about getting inside your head because you know a lot about marketing online for professional services firms. That's what we do and I want to find more about that. But our topic is how to market professional services firms online. So let me ask you this.

[00:01:52] If there was one thing, and I'll start with this, if there was one thing that any professional services should do or not do related to online marketing, what do you think that is? We'll kind of start there.

[00:02:03] Well, I think first and foremost, you need to have a website. I mean, that probably goes without saying for most of your listeners, but we still run into law firms that think they don't need a website because they have

[00:02:15] enough business. And I always tell them, listen, whenever we take on a client, before we get into how do we attract folks that don't know them and get a pipeline of business coming in the door?

[00:02:25] It's like, let's make sure we take care of what every attorney has ever told me. All my best business comes from referrals. So let's make sure, let's sure up that we convert the referrals that are already coming your way.

[00:02:38] The number that I don't know and you're in the attorneys probably don't want to know is how much business are they losing because someone did a Google search and they can't find them. Right. Because we tell people referrals typically comes comes in twos and threes.

[00:02:51] Meaning if I get, you know, I get a call and people know that I'm in the lawyer marketing business or no lawyers and they'll go, hey, I'm getting divorced. Who should I call? I always give two or three names.

[00:03:00] Right. And they're going to start probably on their phone or a desktop and do a search. And they, it's a beauty contest at that point. So make sure the folks who are trying to find you can actually do so.

[00:03:12] Yeah. It's almost like you have to make it easy for people to say yes to you. Right? Yeah. I mean, you think, you know, people, my dad's a doctor and you know, many, many moons ago, 20 years ago, when he owned his own family

[00:03:22] practice, it was like, you know, people would turn to the yellow page. Right. 20, 30 years ago. And they're going to go, whoever's in that book. And then at that time in Norco, California, he was one of two doctors.

[00:03:34] So he had a 50-50 shot, whether he was going to get that patient or not. Right. Yeah. Now people can go to the internet and look for a specialist or look all over the place.

[00:03:43] And you need to make sure that they can find you and make it easy for them. And I've seen that over the years, you can almost tell how cutting edge an organization is by what their website looks like.

[00:03:56] The websites of today don't look like the ones 10 years ago, 20 years ago. And so I've seen that just how the website is structured and what it looks like. I think that makes a difference. What do you think about that? A hundred percent.

[00:04:08] Like my wife, I have a five and seven year old. So about seven plus years ago, I'll never forget. I preach this all the time. I've done marketing for attorneys for over 15 years, and I preach this kind of stuff to them all day long.

[00:04:20] And it finally kind of hit me right in the face. My wife was looking for a pediatrician for our soon to be daughter. And she started with her girlfriends. They gave her two or three names. I'm in Orange County, California, and there's lots of good doctors here.

[00:04:35] And I hear her as we're driving down the freeway, her looking up the folks and going, Oh, we're not taking our daughter here. Look at this website. You know, and then she would go to the next one and she like, Oh, look at this one.

[00:04:47] Look at the reviews on this one. We're not doing that. And those could have been Scott, those could have been the best doctors and it's pediatricians in Southern California. But she was making this decision right, wrong or indifferent based on what she saw on her phone. You know?

[00:05:00] So I always try to remind, I don't care how good you are at what you do. People are making that judgment, whether you know it or not. Yeah, that's interesting. That's, I think they're probably about three or four really good business

[00:05:12] lessons that you mentioned just now in that, that story that you shared with us, number one, she's looking at it on her phone. Right there. Have you ever done any research? Do you know how many people choose?

[00:05:23] And I know you're working with smaller firms and solo practitioners, like what percentage of their prospective clients find them on the phone instead of on a PC or Mac website? Well, mobile traffic is plus 60%. You know, just in total.

[00:05:36] So I mean, more and more people are, are going there. I don't know the exact number today, but it's a majority of the, of the traffic that's coming to any website out there is coming through the phone. So yeah, you're, you're right on point there.

[00:05:48] You need to make sure your website is optimized or, or, or put together. So it's mobilely compatible for sure. Okay. That's great. So let me, let me kind of go down that anecdote again, from what you mentioned with your wife. She said, look at these reviews.

[00:06:02] So what do you think she went through? Are there any components that related to her saying yes or no, that we can draw out and apply to other professional services firms and what needs to be on their website? Yeah. So let's go reviews.

[00:06:15] I'll give you some stats that I do now. Like they say 89% of people look at reviews before they make a decision to call professional service. Right. And so there, we know obviously 89% of people are looking at reviews.

[00:06:28] Uh, they say 80, 80 some percent of people would not choose a professional service if their reviews were two star or lower, right? So there's a lot of professional services that decide to take the, uh, you know, kind of like when you're a kid, you know, cover your

[00:06:43] eyes and cover your ears and go, okay, I'm not participating. You can't see me. People are going to leave reviews period. So you either got to get ahead of it or you're going to have to just take what comes right. And so, and we all know, right?

[00:06:55] When you have a bad experience at a restaurant, you're 10 times more likely to go live a review, even if it, or then on the flip side of it, if you just had the best meal of your life, you don't even think to go live a review.

[00:07:08] So you need to be proactive in my opinion, because people are looking at those. And if you're letting it, just letting it kind of go subject to wherever the wind blows, you're risking a lot because people aren't going

[00:07:20] to call you if you have low marks and Google reviews is where it's certainly where you want to start. That's interesting. I liked what you said. If they had a bad experience, they're more likely to leave a review.

[00:07:31] If it was good, they're not even going to think about it. How do you think we can get more of those people that had a good experience to leave a favorable and a positive review for us online?

[00:07:41] They say 60% of the people will leave a review if you ask. And all of us business owners where we screw up is we don't ask. Cause I get it. It's awkward. You're tooting your own horn or you're asking them to to your own.

[00:07:52] I get, I get all that. We, we go through the same, same thought process, but the reality is, is that when you do good work, ask and they say 60% of time people will do it. I, and listen, some people don't listen.

[00:08:04] I have clients that I've had for 15 years and they'd probably watch my kids if I asked them. Right. And I've asked them 12 times to leave a review and they go, and we're on the phone. Oh yeah. Yeah. I swear I'll do it this time. Blah, blah, blah.

[00:08:16] They hang up the phone. Life happens. Email pops up and they forget. And so it's almost a running joke now, but make it easy. There's actually services out there that can send text messages or emails, especially text messages, right? Cause I don't know about you.

[00:08:29] Like I'll read every text message I get. Certainly emails are a mess. Every morning, you know, but you do that. You're, you're better than me. But yeah, there's services that can help you out on that where it

[00:08:44] automates the process and you can remind them to leave your review. Yeah, that's great. Cause I think it kind of puts a barrier where we're not being annoying to them. It's that service that we have that's doing it. I love it. I think that's a great idea.

[00:08:57] So we looked at the websites. We talked about reviews. What are some other things related to online presence that you think someone like your wife, she's looking to make a decision to hire somebody. What are the other things that she's thinking of or looking at online that

[00:09:11] would cause her to say yes or no about somebody? Well, I think there's three other spots on the first page of Google where you have an opportunity to attract more business. Right? It's if you're looking at, if you do a Google search, Denver personal

[00:09:25] injury attorney, what starts at the top is Google's local service ads, where that's their pay per call program. Then below that is another one of their ad sets, which is called pay per click or Google AdWords, where you pay every time somebody clicks your ad.

[00:09:41] And then below that is the maps. That's Google's way of keeping things local. And you show up in what we call the three pack or map pack. And that is another place where you can have real estate.

[00:09:51] You got to look at the first page of Google as like real estate. Right? And the more spots on that first page, the more pieces of real estate you have on that first page, the better you're going to do. Right?

[00:10:03] People aren't just clicking on one result and then making a phone call. So if they see you're repetitively on there, you're going to convert at a much, much higher level. Yeah, that's great. That's great. And so what else do you think contributes to that?

[00:10:15] We've got the website, the referrals, the Google rankings. I think it's visibility, right? How big of footprints do you, are you just taking business in the city in which you live or your business is, or are you going after a county

[00:10:29] or are you going after multiple counties or are you going after statewide? And you have to be intentional about that, especially with your website. In today's world, you know, if you're a family law attorney in New Port Beach, California, you need to also optimize and write content for

[00:10:46] other cities in which you want business to come from. So if you want to show up, if you want your website to show up in Huntington beach, you need to write content on your website, a page of

[00:10:57] content on Huntington beach and so on and so forth, and figuring out how big a footprint you want is certainly something you want to plan out and strategize for. Okay, that's great. And so tell me a story of a firm that you worked with and you don't

[00:11:12] have to mention their name, of course, but you started with them on their journey of improving their marketing and their client development. What were some of the main inflection points that they went through when they started working with you? And then what was the result of that? Yeah.

[00:11:28] So I'll start off with telling you the three types of firms that, that reach out to us and in what, why I'm going to tell you this story or your listeners, this story is it's important to know what are your goals, right? Because certain products online take time.

[00:11:43] So if you need to see money come into your pocket month two, there's certain products you're not going to use. If you have a big pipeline and you're just looking to more of a longer term strategy, then that may involve other products.

[00:11:57] For example, there's three types of firms that reach out to us. One that says, Travis, if I hand you a buck, I need to see five bucks come back next month. Right? That is where we're going to incorporate some type of instant

[00:12:08] gratification strategy, which typically involves Google pay-per-click ads or local service ads, or maybe even social media ads, Facebook ads, where when we light up those ads, the phone has the ability to ring the next day essentially, right? Yeah, right. They're supposed to ring the next week.

[00:12:26] And we have a lot of those folks that come to us. Like, and so for example, I have a client, uh, I had to, to your question, I have, I had a past client that came to me, uh, he did UI cases

[00:12:35] here in Southern California and he goes, Hey Travis, I only got 3,500 bucks a month to spend. I do need to clean up my website, but if I hand you this money, I need money coming back right away. So we incorporated him.

[00:12:47] He had a $2,500 ad spend with local service ads. They ran about $150 a call. He got 17 calls that first month and signed up seven of them. And he, he charges $3,500 for, for DUI cases. And so he, out of that $3,500 spend, he made 24, five his very first month.

[00:13:06] Yeah, that's great. And that was very important because if I wouldn't have listened to what his needs were and what his goals were, and I would have just put everything into like the second group that comes to us goes, you know,

[00:13:17] Travis, we, we have a ton of business. We've neglected our online presence. We'd like to grow our website. We realized some of these young whippersnappers are taking business that quote unquote, we should be getting. And I know they're getting them online. So let's build out our website.

[00:13:30] We don't need to see a return on investment tomorrow. As long as we're profitable the next six, 12 months, we're good. That's where we'd build out a website, right? And get them to show up organically in whatever footprint they're looking to go after.

[00:13:43] Now, if I would have done that with that first client or that client I explained and put them all into a long-term strategy, most likely he would have probably quit have been frustrated very quickly because websites and doing optimization on a website takes time.

[00:13:58] It doesn't happen overnight, but once you get there, it's like, um, it's the best marketing, your lowest cost per acquisition. You could ask for, I tell people your website should be looked at as like buying real estate.

[00:14:11] Like if you and I, Scott bought a piece of real estate, it could be argued tomorrow that it was a bad investment because outside of the money we put down, there wouldn't be any equity there.

[00:14:20] But two years, five years from now, we'd hope that would be one of our better investments because we gained equity. Same thing with the website. You got to look at it. You got to know that that needs to be the expectation going in. That's great.

[00:14:30] When some of these ads, it's like renting, right? You're never going to gain equity, but you get all the bells and whistles and all the positive right away. And you just kind of know that going in that there's not a right or wrong.

[00:14:41] It's just each firm has a little bit different need. Their, their war chest is a little bit different or their, you know, all of us need, um, you know, have a different, different goal. And so if it knowing which products sitting down with a professional who knows

[00:14:56] your, your business and knows how you get paid is super, super important. Okay. That's great. And I liked how you set that up. You had people with an immediate short-term goal, then people build a website, make it more organic.

[00:15:08] Are there any other categories of people in that regard? And then it's the combination of the two, right? That we want to do a little bit of both, right? Where, Hey, I want to build out my long-term strategy, but I can't wait

[00:15:18] for 12 months for business to come in the door, but it's on the meantime, let's supplement it with something that's maybe more instant gratification as my website grows and so let's incorporate both. So we're cashflow positive early on, or at least business coming, you know,

[00:15:32] some of the contingency lawyers, you know, may, um, you know, obviously cashflow is not going to happen day one or month one or whatever, but at least the pipeline is getting full right away. So that that's the third category of folks that typically reach out to us.

[00:15:45] So what do you think of the pitfalls that people fall into? Let's say there's somebody that you worked with. They got excited. This makes sense. We'll do short-term or immediate long-term kind of a combination. And something happens.

[00:15:58] They don't do something they should have done, or they, you know, they didn't do what they should have and they don't get the results. What do you think those things are that really trip them up in this process? 100% the answer is answering the phone. No kidding.

[00:16:12] The average firm answers the phone about 65% of the time. A lot of firms are closed on the weekends, right? These are easy fixes. These are a few hundred dollar fixes. You can hire an answering service. You can hire a chat service.

[00:16:24] You can do these different things, even if it's just at a backup level, right? Your secretary is on the phone and the phone is ringing. And instead of it, because in my world, voicemail is death. People don't leave messages. It's like some 80 percentile of people don't leave messages.

[00:16:41] And what firms don't realize is because most firms have lived off referrals for most of their career and people are typically do leave messages. Like if I was referred to you, they say, hey, call Scott. He's great at XYZ.

[00:16:57] I would call you and I would leave a message because my my alternative is to jump online and talk to strangers. Right. And I don't want to do that. Well, when you're marketing online, most of the time it is strangers. So it's too easy for them.

[00:17:10] We're in a fast food society. It's too easy for them to hit the back button. Right. And go on to the next. So I would tell folks if you could just answer the phone professionally and make sure they're you're stopping the shopping process,

[00:17:24] because that's what people are doing. All right. If you can do that, you're going to I tell people you're going to spend half the money in marketing and get twice the result. This is great. Stopping the shopping process just by answering the phone. They talk to you.

[00:17:38] You ask them questions about their issue. You talk about what you can do and how you can solve it. And this is what I've done with other people like you. When would you like to get started? How about now? Yeah.

[00:17:50] Because they're stopping the shopping because you talk to them. They don't want to tell the story 18 different times. Right. Think of it like whether you're in a business dispute or you're, you know, you got busted for some type of crime or your divorce. Divorce.

[00:18:05] Who wants to go and tell their story seven different times? So it's like 70. I think it's the last number I read was like 72 percent of the time people pick the first attorney they talk to. Wow. Right. Which backs up what I'm saying.

[00:18:20] So if we can just if we can teach our coach, our folks up to make sure they're answering the phone and do an intake and make sure, you know, and listen, we work with a lot of solo practitioners, so they're

[00:18:30] they're the waiter, they're the bartender, they're the chef, they're the whole everybody. I get it. I get I get the the issues there. But if we can get the phone answered and get back to them, you know, transfer to the attorney right away or get back to them

[00:18:42] in a timely manner, your success rate is going to go through the roof. And this is math. We're talking about math. 70 percent. They work with the first person they talk to. You can mathematically give yourself a huge advantage over your competition

[00:18:54] by putting yourself in that place and by doing the things that get them to see you and want to talk to you before everybody else, such as website referrals, et cetera. Sixty five percent. They're answering the phone 65 percent of the time.

[00:19:08] Well, that means 35 percent of all the calls aren't going anywhere. So you can mathematically increase that just by hiring and answering service for what? Couple hundred dollars a month, something like that. They range all over the place. But yes, you can three to three, four hundred bucks.

[00:19:22] It's probably all most of the smaller firms out there would need. Right. But it just makes sure you're not just, you know, leads aren't falling to the floor, essentially. Yeah. This is great. I really appreciate these ideas. These are simple, but they're significant. They're potent, Travis.

[00:19:39] And so let me ask you this, if we want to synthesize some of the things that we've talked about and put them in a step by step format, if somebody could do three things, three steps to make changes and to have some success

[00:19:53] in their online marketing, what would be those three action steps? The first three things you'd recommend they do? Well, I think I think first of all, you need to figure out what kind of budget that you can you can live with. Right.

[00:20:04] And then secondly, figure out what and probably sit down with somebody who does this for a living, I would guess. And a little bit biased there because they do this for a living. But they have a mapped out strategy of what are the clients that you want?

[00:20:19] Where do you want them from? And how many of them do you want more times than not? If you if you express those three things to your marketer, they can figure out what's the best strategy to be about those questions. Again, you're asking who is your perfect client?

[00:20:33] Who is your ideal client or the clients that you want? Right. The cases that you want to see come in the door or matters you want to come in the door. Where do you want them to come from geographically? How big a footprint are you?

[00:20:46] Do you want and how many of them do you want to see on a monthly basis? That's great. I wonder how many people haven't even thought that through. I would say 99 percent. Yeah. Because they're busy. They're busy doing their practice.

[00:20:59] And they didn't go to law school to become a salesperson, right? You know, but they have to be a marketer. They have to do the things, especially if they're small. Some of the bigger firms, they've got whole teams that do all this.

[00:21:09] And I've even noticed some of the big firms, their teams are not even doing what I think they should do. Some of them, you know, and so they have to supplement that on their own just to give themselves an edge.

[00:21:19] And so this is great. Who's your ideal client? Where do you want them to come from geographically? And then how many do you want to see on a monthly basis? And then what's the third action step people should do?

[00:21:29] And then the third is kind of a piggybacking on what I said earlier, is clearly, hopefully the if the marketing agency isn't asking these questions, like, you know, is it a short term? It means instant gratification strategy or a long term strategy or a combination of the two.

[00:21:45] Like if they're not thinking of understand how you get paid and discussing with you those different options to set your expectations correctly, then you're but you need to do that. You need to figure out what is that?

[00:21:56] Like if I'm going to spend, I'll make up a number five grand or 10 grand a month. Can I float that spend? How long can I before I need business to come back in the door and make sure you're incorporating the right?

[00:22:06] If it's only three or four months, well, then you need to do something that's more instant gratification. Right. Then you do a long term approach like there's let's cash flow the business, let's get let's get revenue going.

[00:22:18] And then we can ramp up some of these long term strategies. So you're not renting your whole life. Yeah, that's great. This is great, Travis. And I appreciate the metaphor, the real estate metaphor through the whole theme of our show as well. That makes a lot of sense.

[00:22:29] And so tell us about your offerings, your services. What do you do? What does your company do that you'd like our listeners to know about? We'll certainly mention what we'll certainly put any links that you give us. We'll put those in the show notes for everybody who's listening.

[00:22:43] Go to the show notes wherever you hear this podcast and you'll be able to connect with Travis directly. Yeah. The name of my company is Rise. Our company is Rise Up Media, spelled with a Z. We don't know how to spell over here, obviously.

[00:22:55] But it's Rise Up Media. And I tell people we do five things. We do five things well. We make custom websites, whatever you can dream up, we can make. The second thing we do is once those websites go live, we do SEO work, which is content and backlinks

[00:23:10] to get that website to show up organically on the first page of Google. The third thing we do is we do social media. We do posts and ads. The fourth thing we do is paper click or Google AdWords.

[00:23:21] That's exactly what it sounds like, is you pay every time someone clicks. That's one of the ad sets that Google offers. And then the relatively new, I think we're two and a half years from when it started for lawyers is local service ads or LSAs or Google

[00:23:36] Screen. Those are the if you're if you're your listeners, if they're attorneys, they have them another for dentists and in home services and things of that nature. But when you Google, you know, Denver divorce lawyer,

[00:23:50] those faces that show up at the top, those are the local service ads. That's a new pay per call program, which are very, very cool. But yeah, those are the five things that we do. And we work with about three hundred and fifty at the time of recording

[00:24:03] three hundred fifty plus law firms all throughout the country, all different practice areas. And yeah, we like to think that we roll up our sleeves and give the folks, our clients, the white glove treatment that they they deserve for sure.

[00:24:19] Well, thank you for being here, Travis. Good job. Thanks for sharing some really useful information. And I'm sure we'll be having you back on the show in the future. Thank you, Travis. Thank you, Scott. Thank you for listening to the Rain Making Podcast.

[00:24:35] For more information about our recruiting services for international law firms, visit our website at attorney search group dot com to inquire about having Scott speak at your next convention, conference, sales meeting or executive retreat. Visit the Rain Making Podcast dot com.