Lawyers Competing in Saturated Markets with Danny Decker – Personal Injury Marketing Minute #30

Danny Decker is a business coach and marketing consultant. In this podcast, Danny explains how lawyers can tailor a marketing plan.

Danny explains that business owners and attorneys need to identify their vision and the three Ms – market, message and media. The three Ms define who you’re targeting, what you’re telling them and how you’re delivering the message.

Danny may be contacted here https://dannydeckermarketing.com/.

Get Danny Decker & Rjon Robbins’ book “The Automatic Marketing Machine” here: https://automaticmarketingmachine.com/.

Danny’s previous book “Marketing Simplified” is available here: https://www.amazon.com/Marketing-Simplified-Built-Seven-Figure-Business/dp/1483493199/.

See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/.

Transcription:

Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. I’m your host, Lindsey Busfield. Between social media, SEO, paid advertising, video ads, commercials, and so on, it can feel like there are endless ways to spend marketing dollars. In some markets, you can bring in a full caseload through a well-placed TV ad. In other more saturated markets, it seems as if you can spend thousands of dollars a month and only see a case or two trickle in. We will be focusing on those frustrating situations today. Danny Decker knows how to cut through the noise and saturated markets. Danny literally wrote the book on simple marketing strategies at work. Thank you so much for joining us.

Danny:

Thank you, Lindsey. It is great to be here. I’m a big fan.

Lindsey:

Oh, thanks. Well, tell us a little bit about your background and what you do.

Danny:

Yeah, so the short version is I actually started a marketing agency back in 2011 and worked with small law firms all over the country in kind of a wide variety of practice areas, family law, immigration, some personal injury, broad range of practice areas, but grew that business with a partner. We grew it to a seven-figure business, and in 2018, I sold my ownership to him because I really saw a need for strategy and education for law firm owners and business owners in general. There are lots of really great marketing agencies out there who can handle a lot of the execution, but I saw a gap, not only for lawyers, but for most small business owners of not really understanding kind of the strategy and the principles behind marketing, and so the results weren’t as good as they could be.

So, now, I do a lot of speaking, workshops, podcasts, wrote a book back in 2019, and then I just wrote a second book and released that called The Automatic Marketing Machine just a few months ago. So, I’m really passionate about helping law firm owners and small business owners understand marketing, know how to work with their marketing agencies, know how to make a marketing plan, track their return on investment, and all that good stuff.

Lindsey:

Well, congratulations on a couple of successful book launches, and education in marketing, especially for lawyers, is a huge deal and there is a need there, and whether a very small solopreneur law firm is attempting to take on their own marketing, or if they’ve grown a little bit beyond then and have hired a marketing agency, it’s important to be able to ask the right questions and get the traction and to be able to look at the right metrics to see if your marketing dollars are paying off, and there is an educational gap there because great lawyers are out there doing great lawyer things and not necessarily up to speed on the ever changing marketing initiatives that are going on.

Danny:

Yeah, they don’t teach marketing in law school, right?

Lindsey:

That’s exactly right.

Danny:

That’s not one of the things that law schools conquer.

Where should lawyers start when they’re making marketing plan?

Lindsey:

That’s exactly right. Well, where should lawyers start when they’re making marketing plan?

Danny:

Yeah, so I love that question. And so, really, I’m going to answer that in two ways, and the first is very high level, before we even really get into talking about marketing, lawyers need to decide what they want their law firm to look like, right? How big do they want to grow their law firm? What types of cases do they want to pull in? How big do they want their team to be, right? And these are questions that you really have to answer first, and it’s funny because a lot of lawyers and a lot of business owners in every industry don’t actually really sit and think about what they want their business to look like in the long term, and the truth is it’s that information that allows you to tailor a marketing plan to those goals, right?

I work with law firm owners that have high volume, almost a factory level setup, right? They can handle so many intakes and so many cases at any one given time, and that’s the way they’ve chosen to build their business, and then there are others that want to keep their team small, and want to be a more boutique experience, and want to work with a small number of clients. And guess what, neither one of those is better or worse. What’s important is that you as the owner of a law firm are clear about what you want, right, and what you want your business to look like. Once you’ve made that decision, then you start building your marketing plan to serve that vision. So, that’s kind of the first piece of it which might sound obvious and simple, but you’d be surprised how many business owners in all industries actually don’t really do that, right? And so, that’s kind of number one is let’s get clear about what your vision is.

The 3 M’s – Your market, your message, and your media:

Then when it comes to putting together your actual marketing plan, there’s really only three variables you have to be clear on. It’s the three Ms. It is your market, your message, and your media. Market just means who is your target market. Let’s get really clear specifically who we’re targeting, what gender, what occupation, what income level, what zip codes. Let’s get really clear on who you want to attract into your law firm. That’s your market. Then two is message. What are you telling those people? What message are you conveying that’s going to get them to take action and contact you, right? And the messaging is really important. We could spend a whole episode just talking about messaging. A lot of lawyers get it wrong because they talk about things that they care about which aren’t necessarily what their clients care about, right?

So, not going to tangent too far on that right now. But then third is, okay, you figured out your market, you figured out your message, now what media channels are you going to use to take that message and put it in front of your audience. That could be anything from radio, TV, SEO, paid advertising, local service ads, Facebook ads, right? There’s any number of different channels that you can use to deliver your message to your target market. But fundamentally a marketing plan needs to answer those three questions. Who are you targeting? What are you telling them? And how are you delivering that message?

Lindsey:

Yes, exactly, and I am so glad that you started with the goals in mind because we speak with a lot of potential clients who when we talk to them and ask what are their goals, well, their goal is to get more clients, and we encourage them to take a more analytical approach and be like, “Well, what clients exactly are you wanting? Are they coming from a specific geographic location? If it’s a personal injury law firm, are you trying to attract certain types of injury cases?” And so, there’s a lot of thought that needs to go into the I want more clients conversation than just the dollar signs coming in, and from there, exactly, establishing what your goals are and making a roadmap, so to speak, on how to get there.

Danny:

Yeah. I’ll jump in real quick because a lot of the lawyers that I talk to that makes sense to them, but they’re not sure how to go about it, how do I actually define my ideal clients, and one of the really simple exercises that I like to prescribe to people is take a look over the clients you’ve worked with over the last three, five years, whatever, and write down the names of your top 10 favorite clients that you’ve worked with over the last three years, five years, 10 years, whatever. Top 10 favorite clients, just write down their names, and these are the people that if you could clone them and bring them back over and over and over again, you would be thrilled. These are the types of clients you want to attract to your law firm.

And then once you’ve jotted down that list of 10, then sit there and say, “Okay, what do they have in common?” Right? What trends emerge? Do they have kids? Do they not have kids? What industries are they in? How much money are they making? Where are they located? How old are they, right? And you’d be amazed at how quickly trends start to emerge, and that’s how you, all of a sudden, you have a kind of a sketch of these are the types of clients I want to work with.

And then you do the opposite as well. You go back over the last five years and you say, “Who are the 10 clients that I’d never touch again with a 10-foot pole? I never want to work with these types of people again.” We’ve all had them, right? Everybody has had those clients if you’ve been in business, and then you do the same thing, you say, “What are the characteristics of those clients? Why did I not…” It doesn’t mean they’re bad people, by the way. It just means they weren’t a good fit for your law firm, and why not, and then you make a sketch of the types of people you don’t want to attract. You spend an hour or two running through that exercise, and all of a sudden, you’ve got a pretty clear picture of the right types of clients to attract your law firm.

Lindsey:

Exactly, and then with that information, that can inform how your message is, as you said, that the second M in there where once you’ve identified the types of people that you want to attract, how do you talk to these people, what kind of conversations are they going to want to have, are they going to want to have with you, as opposed to you talking about everything that you care about. What do they care about? What’s going to be their pain point and how are you going to help them out?

We could spend an entire hour talking about messaging, but I want to get into a little bit more of the meat of this because the first two things that you talked about don’t cost people a dime where you identify your target market, you figure out how to talk to these people, and then getting into the media portion of the Ms where you can spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in some super saturated markets and not be able to reach that target market that you’re talking about. And so, the more saturated the market is, obviously, the more lawyers struggle to get noticed. So, what are some strategies for cutting through the noise in these super saturated markets?

Danny:

Yeah. No, it’s such a good question, and the funny thing is the answer really lies in the first two Ms we just talked about which is you have to know your customers really well, and as you alluded to, Lindsey, you have to know their pain points really well. You need to be able to speak directly to their pain points. I know you do a lot with personal injury, right? So, car accidents, when someone’s in a car accident, what are the top pain points, right, that they’re worried about? Are they going to have to miss work so they have to replace that income right away? Are they worried about the insurance companies? I’m sure there is a list, right, of the top three or five pain points.

You have to know those things really, really well because in my experience, that’s how you make the media campaigns work in a super saturated market. You can’t afford to try to compete with the eight-figure law firms out there, right, that have this massive budget that they can just advertise anywhere and everywhere. You need to really pick your spot. So, you need to know who your audience is and where can you find them, right? And sometimes that means a little bit more gorilla approach to marketing as opposed to something like Google Ads where cost per click for personal injury keywords is insanely expensive, right? But what other places do your target audience spend time and how can you get in front of them?

And then you have to be offering them something relevant, right? That’s another big way you cut through the noise is, listen, if I have the worst headache in the world and there’s a hundred people yelling at me but only one of them is handing me Advil, right, that guy’s got my attention because he’s going to solve the problem. So, it’s leading with not where you went to law school, not how fancy your office is, but Hey, Mr. Potential client, I know you were just in an accident, you have a lot of concerns. You’re physically in pain. You’re worried about your finances. I understand. I’m here to help. Here’s a free resource for you that’s going to help you get started. And when you approach it in that way, you have a much better chance of cutting through the noise.

Lindsey:

Absolutely. No, I 100% agree with that. And then one thing that I would like to get your thoughts on would be an idea that popped into my head while you were talking is you’re not going to be able to go toe to toe for all of the clients in a super saturated market. What would you think about niching down and focusing on a very targeted, specific type of client to be able to focus that messaging on?

Danny:

Yeah, such a great point, and the more specific you can get, the better for multiple reasons. One, because like you said, it’s impossible for a small or a mid-size firm to go toe to toe with a big PI firm everywhere, right? You just can’t match that spend. So, yeah. So, segmenting down and going after a smaller niche, whether that’s a very specific type of injury or a very specific geographic location, that’s helpful just because it reduces the playing field and you can compete, but also the more specific you get, the more tailored your messaging can be. I work with, or I shouldn’t say I work with, I see law firms all the time that their advertising as like, “Hey, if you have been arrested, or if you need a divorce, or if you need immigration help, or if you’ve been in a car accident,” and it’s like that type of advertising, it’s so ineffective, right? But if you can be like, “Hey, were you in a truck accident?” When you get real, real, clear and specific, not only does that narrow your focus, but you also have a much more compelling message.

So, even for the firms that have a number of those niches, I’m a big fan of don’t do a one-size-fits-all, right? Do a campaign for people that were in car accidents. Do a separate campaign for people that were injured at work. Right? You’re able to get much more specific, and therefore, much more relevant to their pain points.

Lindsey:

Absolutely. I’m just, I’m thinking about other legal sectors where if you had a divorce lawyer that was the divorce lawyer for lawyers or the divorce lawyer for doctors, and really targeted down. If you are in a super saturated market, you’re obviously going to have a huge population segment and be able to pick up that piece of the pie, so to speak, if you really target in on a large segment, but a very narrowed and specific segment. So, I think that could be something interesting to explore down the road. And we talked about looking at that target market, and with all these things in mind, what are some action items that lawyers can do today that will help them generate more meaningful leads in these super saturated markets?

Danny:

Yeah, I love that question, and I really do think it comes back to the better your ideal clients, the better everything else works. And so, a super practical action step, that list of your 10 favorite clients, right, that I just told everybody to make, well, what if you spent three hours and call every one of them and have a 15 or 20-minute conversation, and just say you want to pick their brain, you really appreciated working with them, having them as a client, and you just want to ask them some questions. You’re not billing them for this time. Don’t worry. And you just ask them, “How did you feel when you were in the accident?” or whatever the situation was that led them to reach out? How did you feel? What were your top concerns? What were the most practical things that you needed help with? And have that conversation and really get to understand their psychology and what was going on in their minds as they were considering hiring a law firm.

You’ll be amazed at how much you learn from those conversations, and you might learn that the motivations you thought people had weren’t really the motivations that they had, and I promise anyone who’s listening to this, if you have this conversation with your 10 best past clients, or even five of them, you’re going to learn a lot, and you’re going to be able to sit down and say, “Okay, now I can hone my messaging much better. I can create a better offer, a better free resource.” So, that’s one of the best sort of practical action steps that I can put out there is really, really get to know your clients at a deeper level.

Automatic Marketing Machine

Lindsey:

I absolutely love that idea, and I am really hoping that listeners today will go and try that out once they get done listening to this podcast. But if they would like some additional assistance on developing and executing marketing plans, or have any marketing questions, or want to pick up a copy of your book, how can they get in touch? How can they read more?

Danny:

Yeah, I appreciate that. So, our book which just came out in April is called Automatic Marketing Machine, and it’s available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and all of the standard places. But the best thing is just go to www.automaticmarketingmachine.com. You can order the book right there. We also have a ton of free resources, worksheets, video lessons, just tons and tons of totally free giveaway content that you can use to grow your law firm, make your marketing plan whether or not you even buy the book. So, that’s where I would send everybody is automaticmarketingmachine.com.

Lindsey:

Great. Well, we will be sure to put a link to that in the comment section. Well, thank you so much, Danny. This has been so insightful, some great ideas, and I will look forward to having you back to talk more about marketing messaging sometime in the future.

Danny:

Sounds great, Lindsey. It was great to be here. Thanks for your time.

Lindsey:

Thank you.