Amanda Sexton | Creating Content That Converts

Elise Holtzman: Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman here, a former practicing lawyer and the host of The Lawyer's Edge Podcast, where I sit down with successful attorneys, legal marketing specialists, business leaders, and authors to talk about how lawyers and law firms can grow and sustain healthy, profitable businesses.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Lawyer's Edge Podcast. I'm your host, Elise Holtzman, and today we're going to talk about how lawyers and law firms can get past some of the overwhelm and noise about marketing and create content that attracts your ideal clients.

Before we get started, today's episode is brought to you by the Ignite Women's Business Development Accelerator, a nine-month business development program created by women lawyers for women lawyers. Ignite is a carefully designed business development program containing content, coaching, and a community of like-minded women who are committed to becoming rainmakers and supporting the retention and advancement of other women in the profession. Registration is now open for our 2025 Ignite cohort and early bird pricing is available. To learn more about Ignite, visit thelawyersedge.com/ignite.

I am so excited to welcome today's guest, my friend Amanda Sexton, the founder of FocusWorks Marketing, which uses the power of digital marketing to grow law firms through content that converts. For the past 15 years, she has shaped brand development, created award-winning content, and helped service providers like law firms create successful marketing campaigns.

Amanda has been selected as one of the 40 Under 40 marketing professionals and was named to Enterprising Woman in Commerce. Outside the office, Amanda is president of New Jersey Legal Industry Providers, and she is a director at large for the Legal Marketing Association's Northeast Regional Board. She also speaks frequently for industry conferences, including the ABA Tech Show and the Legal Marketing Association's National Conference. Amanda, welcome to The Lawyer's Edge.

Amanda Sexton: Hi, thanks so much for having me today.

Elise Holtzman: I'm so excited that you're here. You and I have known each other for a while. We got to know each other through LMA, the Legal Marketing Association. You and I show up at conferences all the time and have fun together. We actually don't live that far apart from each other so I get to see you even more frequently, which is great.

I wanted to have you on the show today because I think that there's just so much overwhelm around digital marketing. Things like email marketing and websites and social media and all of that sort of thing. Let's start with your tagline. I noticed that your tagline is “Content that converts.” Why did you choose that for your tagline and what does that mean for law firms?

Amanda Sexton: Yeah, so that's something that I consider near and dear to my heart and I could probably talk for a whole podcast just on this topic, but it's one of those things that for law firms that do marketing, there's the referral side where you're getting leads in from our referral sources. Then there's the other side of marketing where you can get business online or just in other ways.

There's a lot of firms that are marketing, but their messaging and the way that they're doing it isn't necessarily designed to convert, to bring in leads. That's why we're doing all of this. For the firms that are just putting out content, just for the sake of putting out content or posting on social without really approaching it from a conversion standpoint, that little extra thought process and strategy goes a long way toward the actual number of clients that you're getting.

Not just clients, but clients that you really want to work with. That's really important too. 100 leads doesn't matter if 90% of them aren't a good fit client. We'd rather use the right content that converts to get 10 quality leads and clients that we're really excited to work with.

For firms that are actually writing, it's writing, it's all about the messaging. There are firms that I've seen website pages with 2,000 words of copy that people probably aren't going to read through. You're better off with a smaller set of copy that's really well laid out that really speaks to your audience, and that's the difference between content that converts and content that's just out there.

Elise Holtzman: I think that there's a lot of that, especially if lawyers are the ones in charge of writing the content because we weren't taught to write for marketing. We weren't taught to write for conversion. We were taught to write as lawyers. We were taught to write memos and briefs and documents, and we were taught to write law review articles and that sort of thing. It's a good thing to remember.

I mentioned digital marketing can sometimes feel overwhelming for lawyers and law firm leaders. It's like, “Well, I'm practicing law. I can't believe I have to deal with this marketing thing, why do you think that digital marketing can be so overwhelming sometimes for lawyers?

Amanda Sexton: I think part of your question actually answers that also. It's that lawyers weren't taught this in law school, and this is its own area of expertise. For marketing, it’s so broad, there are so many channels, and it can be difficult to know which one to choose, and it changes constantly. Even for us in the marketing world, we're reading about things, and it is something that literally is changing day by day with all of the new technology that's coming out, with all of the shifts, and where people are at, how we're communicating with them.

So to make those decisions around marketing, especially if you're choosing this based on your law firm practice, it's something that often falls to the bottom of the wayside. You have enough to learn about, you're trying to be a good lawyer, provide quality services to your clients. If you're running a firm, you're considering operations, finances, people management.

To learn about marketing on top of that and think about where to invest your dollars can be really challenging, which is why it's so important to have either a good outside partner or an internal marketing team that can do some of that heavy lifting and say, “Okay, here are our recommendations. How does this fit into a bigger strategy that the firm has?”

It can just be very overwhelming given the sheer volume of options. It's not just as easy as sometimes saying, “Okay, we're going to do social media and that's a clear path.” But you have to pick that path and then decide how you're going to approach it as a firm also.

Elise Holtzman: I think this is a really good point about this idea that lawyers need to understand that there's a whole marketing world out there with people with tremendous expertise in this area. It's not that lawyers don't know it, but that's not the world that they live in. I think it would be shocking in some ways for lawyers to see the types of marketing people and how many marketing people, for example, show up at a legal marketing association conference.

I mean, you and I go to these things, and we meet people. It never ceases to amaze even me, the kinds of people that we meet and the kinds of expertise that's there. I mean, without mentioning names, what are some of the kinds of people, let's just talk about, that we run into in the marketing world, the different kinds of expertise that people have?

Amanda Sexton: Oh, there's so many. I feel like over the years, the number of titles in those areas has just grown astronomically. You have your traditional CMO, which is more of that strategy focus, keeping the team on board. We have social media, we have content, we have website developers, we have graphic designers, and that's just broad. There are much more nuances in between each of those.

Then we're even seeing firms that have rules that are around technology. They are responsible for the tech stack at their firm because that is such a big investment. The CRM and all those pieces that go into it, they're responsible just for that. There's a lot of different elements that go into it, and it's almost impossible, even as a marketer, sometimes, to wear all the hats and to know everything about every kind of marketing.

Elise Holtzman: I agree. I mean, sometimes I'll meet somebody at one of these conferences and they tell me what they do to support legal marketing, and I'm like, “Okay, can you explain that to me again,” because I don't really necessarily understand what they're talking about. Also, you mentioned internal and external. You and I see people, we see small marketing departments where they might have one person with some kind of right-hand assistant type of marketing support.

Then we see larger law firms that might have 75 or 90 people in their marketing department, which is amazing, and then we've got all of the outside folks, people like you who come into law firms either to support the people that are already there because they can't do everything, or you become their marketing department. Is that right? I mean, does that happen for you sometimes where you really are the marketing people and they don't really have internal folks?

Amanda Sexton: That definitely happens. I was surprised, the more and more I got to legal to see how many of the larger firms, medium to large sized firms that don't have an internal marketing department. They've grown to 80, 90, 100 attorneys without having an internal team. That's a testament to the quality of work that they do. But I think there's a point where firms say, “Okay, we are ready to make this investment to scale even further.”

Elise Holtzman: So I think it's good for folks to know what's available. There's a lot out there. I think as you say, that's one of the reasons it can be overwhelming, I mean, one is we didn't learn about it. Second is it's changing. The third is there are so many different ways you can be doing this.

Let's get practical now. People, law firms can make reasonable decisions about what's going to work for them, what isn't going to work for them. Do they want internal people, external people? Do they want a generalist? Do they want specialists? What is it that they want? If you are talking to law firms and the law firm, let's say, is trying to decide where to invest their marketing budget, they've decided that marketing is important, they do want to be intentional about it, they do want to do it in the right way and not just put content out there, how do they even know what to invest in? Because there are so many options.

Amanda Sexton: That's where the strategy piece as that initial phase really comes into play. Because a lot of times what I hear happen, we have a lot of law firms that will reach out to us and say, "Hey, we saw so-and-so is bringing in a ton of leads in SEO and search, or we know this firm that did really well on TikTok. We want to do TikTok." And it doesn't start from a place of, "Okay, let's take a step back and look at the big picture of who are we as a firm? Where do we want to be in five years?"

Also the big question, too, of what is our budget? That's the other thing that we get is a lot of firms that—and understandably don't always want to disclose the budget—but might not have one. It is important to know that starting point because that dictates the channels that you could go for.

The firms really need to take a look at, “Okay, where do we want to be? And also where are our clients?” It really depends on practice areas. It depends on your market and where you are. Some markets in some practice areas are just more competitive for certain types of marketing. For example, if you're a personal injury firm in a large city market Atlanta, New York City, Chicago, your spend might be $20,000 to $30,000.

Let's say you have a competitor that's doing really well on AdWords, for you to make that investment, you would have to invest heavily to get that return. Otherwise, it might not be worth it. That might quickly knock that channel out as an option, and you'll have to look at some alternative methods, and it might be more billboards, more community involvement, something that's a little bit more on the traditional side versus digital.

Part of it is looking at the firm as a whole, but you really should look out either to an outside agency to get that strategy or to ask your internal team, "Hey, let's come up with a full-picture strategy and really take a look at the market before we dictate which channels we're going for."

Elise Holtzman: How does a law firm know how much money should be in their budget to begin with?

Amanda Sexton: This is, I would say, a hotly debated topic. A lot of it really comes down to the threshold of both what the firm has, what is your cash flow like right now, what's your profitability, how much money does that look like? If your cash flow is currently an issue, investing in marketing might need to be a ramp-up piece where, hey, we're going to invest in this one practice area first to start, use some of that additional cash flow to then supplement additional marketing for the rest of our team and firm practice areas.

Typically, we see anywhere between 2% to 10%. There's firms that are very aggressive and they say, “We want to grow and we're really heavily going to invest in marketing.” Then there are other firms that use it more as a supplement.

Elise Holtzman: Let's talk even more specifically about the information law firms can be looking at. You mentioned what practice areas do you have? What kinds of clients are you looking to bring in? You raised a really good point, which is that the clients you're bringing in may not be your most ideal clients. Do we want more of the same kinds of clients that we have, or are we looking to, let's say, upgrade our client or shift our client to a different practice area?

Maybe you've got one practice area that's more profitable than another practice area, that kind of thing. What are some of the other kinds of numbers, let's say, that people should be looking at?

Amanda Sexton: I think that profitability per practice area is a big piece of it. For example, we have clients that are trust and estate clients and they were all working off of a flat fee model. Ultimately, that meant a good number of marketing options just wouldn't make sense for them for what they would have to spend. Part of that number is the cost of acquisition, what it would cost you to get a client of that, and then what you would actually make off of it and what that conversion rate is.

Let's say you get 10 phone calls, your firm normally closes four of them. Seven or eight, if you're doing really, really well, what does that translate to in dollars and how many of those leads would you need to bring in to actually make money and make it worthwhile in that particular practice area?

For that firm, they ultimately wound up saying, “You know what, we don't want to go the flat fee model anymore. We'd rather deal with high net worth clients and that's going to be the transition that we're going to take,” because they realized what they would have to spend in the volume that they would have to bring in just wasn't the model that they wanted to work with for their firm.

Elise Holtzman: Obviously, not only do you need to look at this data to make some decisions about what you want to do going forward and where you're willing to invest, but you've got to keep this data and keep taking this data. This is where marketing becomes so data-based.

It's funny, I was thinking about it recently because my daughter happens to be in an MBA program right now and she was taking their introductory marketing class. It was basically all numbers-driven. It wasn't what I thought of being like this soft conversation about marketing. It was really all data-driven. I think that's one of the things maybe that lawyers need to remember.

Keeping that data over time so that you can make some decisions about what you're doing, because otherwise you're just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks.

Amanda Sexton: Yes, and part of marketing is testing that will always be part of that model, but I think to your point, that's where that goes back to where marketing can feel overwhelming. When we come into a firm and we're asking these questions of “What's your profitability per practice area? What's your conversion rate for leads?” most firms if you're listening to this and you don't have that information, do not feel alone.

Most firms don't have that and marketing is notoriously hard to track attribution on to say, “Hey, we got this lead from here, this event generated X amount of dollars for us.” It is difficult to do that. It is an ongoing challenge in marketing that even marketers who deal with this day in and day out have, but setting up some small pieces when we work with firms, we'll say, “Okay, let's install a call tracking system. Let's take some of the pain out of trying to track these leads and let's do what we can, track where we can, and let's start small.”

You don't necessarily need to dive in and have all of the tools and all of the systems in place right out of the gate, you stack those and build them as you're building out your marketing.

Elise Holtzman: Let's go back to the content discussion that we were having before because you were talking about content that converts. The whole idea is to be putting out content that makes somebody say, "Ooh, these people know what they're talking about and I like what this person is saying and I want to call." We can't just do good work and expect the clients to miraculously appear, which is what I think a lot of lawyers wish for.

I know from my own perspective and the clients that I work with, lawyers aren't doing really good work. They're working really hard. They have these areas of expertise. What kind of content works best for law firms? What is the sort of content that law firms or individual lawyers should be putting out?

Amanda Sexton: One of the biggest missed opportunities that I see in law firms is just their website to start. Firms spend so much money trying to get people to their site on SEO, on AdWords, on social media ads, directing people to these sites. But once you get there, it's not really clear about why this firm. Some of that content really is on the website side, taking time to really figure out, “Okay, what makes our firm different?”

A lot of firms I talk to, they're like, “We practice family law, or we work with general counsel.” For them, it's sometimes hard when you're in it to see what makes us different. But when you talk to multiple partners at the firm, it's really easy to pull the thread of, “Oh, this is what makes you a little bit different than other firms. This is your secret sauce and that special touch that you bring to clients.”

So, making sure that that content on your website and on those practice pages really speaks to that and speaks to your clients. Lawyers, especially very good lawyers, are great at communicating with their clients around their pain points and speaking to what they need to hear to feel comfortable in a situation. A lot of that doesn't come across on a website. For most firms, that's a huge opportunity to be able to communicate that.

In terms of content, I think it's about thinking about where your clients are at also. If you deal with general counsel, your content might not be blogs and frequently published content, but it might be more tied to highly valuable client alerts that you're sending out that are different from all of the other ones that everyone else is sending out that are really generic, but being very focused, very intentional, that might be a really high value.

We've had a couple of firms that, for them, most of their revenue comes from 20 different GCs. To have something, it's worth the investment for them to have content to send out individually to each of them. Then for individual attorneys, if you're an individual attorney, LinkedIn is huge. It still amazes me that the personal LinkedIn accounts are free for the reach that you can get on them. It's almost impossible to stay in front of people.

If you're not on LinkedIn, taking the time to post and really coming up with content and a lot of people hear from a lot of attorneys, "I don't want to talk about myself. I don't want to say these things," but you have really unique insights and LinkedIn is a place where you can regularly get 1,000 impressions, 5,000 impressions, which is really impossible to do on a day-to-day basis to contact or call that many people. What you would have to spend otherwise on another channel to get in front of that many people would be thousands.

Elise Holtzman: I want to go back to something you said in the beginning about how you show up differently as a law firm or perhaps as an individual lawyer. Because I think you're right, most law firm websites look pretty much the same. We know what to expect when we get there. What do you say to lawyers who do say, "Well, I don't know. We're like every other law firm. I don't really know what makes us different." What are some of the ways that lawyers can stand out?

I mean, presumably, as you say, talking to the particular clients that they want to attract, talking to them about their pain points, like you said. But what do you say when lawyers say, "Well, I don't know how to make us different. We practice law. We do a great job. That's why we want people to hire us."

Amanda Sexton: That's usually when we step in with the interviews because just having those conversations about, "Hey, what do your clients say about you? What kind of positive feedback are you getting regularly?" All of those pieces, and even looking through the Google reviews, you'd be surprised if you look through the Google reviews for a firm. A lot of them will have similar feedback that are keywords you can pull to say, “This is what makes the firm different.”

Sometimes it is hard to know that yourself, but if you are having multiple attorneys at your firm, I would encourage almost getting everyone together and just having a conversation of, “Hey, how do you approach dealing with your clients? What does that look like for you?” For some firms, it's just “We take out an hour and we listen to them and we get all the information.” For some firms, they only deal with an attorney or they're only dealing with a paralegal 15% of the time. Other firms, it's being incredibly responsive.

We have clients that are hands down, they will answer the call, morning, noon, or night, holidays. They know that what they're doing is incredibly time-sensitive and important for their clients and they want their clients to feel supported in that. Others will take as long as it takes to explain a situation to a client. It depends on what that is, but it's sometimes just articulating that. Even though there might be other firms that are doing it, there are no other firms that are always saying it.

Elise Holtzman: You also mentioned that a lot of lawyers say, "Well, I don't want to talk about myself. I don't want to get on LinkedIn or start writing an article or blog post and talk about myself." What is your response to that?

Amanda Sexton: My response is usually, "I get it because I feel the same way." It was a long time for me to get used to posting on LinkedIn and what I would say to them too is just to not overthink it. I think we think that we don't maybe have things to share or we're talking about ourselves, but the reality is, I mean, personally, when an attorney shares insights into what's going on in the world, I find it really interesting.

It's not a world that I'm part of. I wouldn't know about that otherwise. It's a little food for thought. I would encourage them to think about what they feel like when they read other posts. Do they find them interesting? What resonates with them? What posts feel good to them? What do they want to engage with? And then to share that content.

I think being just yourself is usually the best way to go about being on LinkedIn to not overthink it. Then just to share what you're thinking about day to day. It doesn't have to necessarily be self-serving.

Elise Holtzman: Right. Because it's really not necessarily talking about yourself, it's talking about what's going on in your world and delivering value in some way to other people. “Hey, I learned this really cool thing and I thought other people might want to know about it,” or “I just saw this in the media, and here's what I think it means for the kinds of clients I work with,” rather than like, “Hi, I'm Elise Holtzman and I'm fantastic and here's what's going on in my life and I think you should be really interested in it.”

Amanda Sexton: Yes, yeah. I think it's sharing what you're excited about, what's interesting to you, and other people will also feel that same way.

Elise Holtzman: Again, the idea here is content that converts. When you talk about content that converts, we're talking about, as I said earlier, somebody reading it, hearing it, seeing it, or whatever and saying, "Ooh, this is somebody that I think could be helpful to me and I want to talk to further. I want to know a little bit more about them."

How do law firms figure out really what it is that prospective clients need and want to hear from them in order to go to that next step, make that phone call, send that email to find out more?

Amanda Sexton: That is the ultimate goal to have by the time someone reaches out to contact you, they're already feeling like by the time you call them back, "Oh, we have a little bit of a relationship. I know about this person." To find that out, it's really just asking the questions. I don't think I've ever met with a firm that really did not know that. They seem to know, especially the very big or very great attorneys, they know almost instantly, “Hey, this is the issue that my particular client often faces. This is what they're coming to me with.”

I think the way you can approach it is by thinking about what problem do I solve for them? Then that problem-solving really goes a long way. People always love a problem solved. Who wants an email in their inbox that gives them another problem? But if you send me an email that solves a problem, that feels really good. Thinking about it that way and thinking about too, again, what are the common questions that clients come in with? What problems do they have?

It's not anything brand new. It's not anything earth-shattering. I think that firms are like, "Oh, I don't know how to phrase this." They definitely know. They do it day in and day out. It's just translating that to marketing because, to your point, that's not the typical way that attorneys write or communicate in the written language. But what we really want to do is take that conversational language that attorneys are having with their clients on a day-to-day and then just turn that into marketing without adding in some of the complex language.

Elise Holtzman: I guess to just double down on your point, lawyers don't have to figure this out themselves. I mean, obviously, that's why there are marketing professionals in the world and particularly legal marketing professionals like you who are outside of law firms and some of the internal people.

I guess what I'm hearing is there is not a lot that's new and exciting to have to figure out. It's all about going back to basics and understanding what the basics of marketing are and then get someone to pull it out of you if you're the lawyer so that you don't have to figure it out yourself. I mean, that's what marketing professionals know how to do is they know how to take that content and pick out what is going to be important for the client and help you get it put together in a way that makes sense.

Amanda Sexton: Exactly. I call it the poll the audience approach. If you're an attorney that's really struggling with this, you can Google, figure out your ideal client, find your ideal client persona, what questions to ask, you can Google this and answer those questions yourself. But if you're staring at that piece of paper and you're like, "I just don't know," which again is not uncommon because I know when we go to do our own marketing, we sometimes run into the same thing, it's helpful to have an outside perspective, ask your legal assistant, your paralegals, these questions.

Get everyone in a room. Just talk about it. Ask some former clients, "Hey, what do you think we did really well? How would you describe us?" That pulling the audience and getting some outside perspective, again, makes it easier to see the themes that are common throughout all of those conversations.

Elise Holtzman: That's how the marketing team can help the lawyers. I assume there are things that lawyers could be doing to help the marketing team do their jobs better. I believe that out there, there are marketing professionals that say, "Gosh, we wish our lawyers would do X, Y, and Z."

What do you think if you could put on your marketing hat and representing the marketing community or the legal marketing community, what are some of the things that you think firms can be doing, lawyers and lawyer leaders can be doing to make sure they're helping to support the marketing people and the bigger goals of the firm?

Amanda Sexton: There are a few things, and again, some of the common ones we see. I think one of the biggest is just giving marketing a seat at the table to make them part of those bigger conversations and the strategic conversations that are having. Sometimes when we get that information secondhand, it's missing some context. That context could give us some information about how to approach. Maybe we would do things differently.

Or a lot of marketing, it's about consistency, but it's about a long-term plan. Marketing doesn't work overnight. If it did, we'd all be making a lot more money. It's really about being consistent. It takes time. Where we spend our time with that consistency, having all of the information helps dictate what that looks like. Really including that marketing team as one of those key, “Hey, this is where we want to grow and we're going to let you in on these conversations.”

I know it's a lot of the internal information of the growth path of the firm that doesn't always feel like it's about the easiest to be shared, but it actually goes a long way. Marketing can be almost essential for firms that really want to scale. The more information you can give us, the better job that we can do with that.

Part of it is, for example, we had one firm, too, that they were in one particular practice area, a boutique firm. We created all the website copy for them. We were launching a new site, but what we didn't know is that they were in talks with another partner and another firm that was going to bring over a whole new practice area to their firm, which changed the entire dynamic of it and all the language that we used.

Having that information and knowing that that was coming down the line, we would have approached things very, very differently. That's important. Also, just timeliness, which is a challenge for all of us. But the sooner you can give information to marketers, the more we can do with it, because these things do take time.

If it's, “Hey, I have this speaking engagement tomorrow, it's hard to do a lot with that.” You can put a post on social, but otherwise, it might be, “Oh, hey, great, then give us your client list. We can send individual invites.” Maybe they won't be able to attend, but they feel like it's a gesture or something, a little bit more of a connected thing for them. The more lead time we have, the better job that we can do in maximizing whatever that marketing initiative is.

Elise Holtzman: One of the things that I think about too is simply having respect for the expertise of the marketing folks. What I see sometimes, and I say this with love because I myself, I'm a lawyer and I work with lawyers all the time, but lawyers are so used to being, in some ways, the smartest person in the room and certainly the smartest person in the room about what they do.

But I think it's really important, particularly for some of the people who have been practicing law since there really wasn't legal marketing, because, look, you and I both know, I think we recently had an anniversary, maybe last year for the Legal Marketing Association, it was only something like 20 or 25 years old, there really wasn't legal marketing going on before that.

So for people who are in leadership positions now, they might have started practicing law when there was no such thing as legal marketing. You just did good work and by word of mouth, hopefully, you were going to get your clients. The legal world has changed dramatically.

One of the challenges that I see coming up for legal marketing professionals is that they have the expertise, they understand the market, they know what the data shows, they know how to help lawyers get in front of these potential clients, but the lawyers are still skeptical. Part of it is their history and part of it is the way they were taught and lawyers need to be skeptical to be good lawyers.

But I think when it comes to legal marketing, to really trust your people. I mean, have you seen challenges with that, where the legal marketing professionals say, "Hey, we think this would be a great idea," and the lawyers go, "Yeah, thanks so much. We're not doing that," because they're just not open to it, or they don't know what the legal marketers know?

Amanda Sexton: Consistently. I mean, and I think about it for firms that even have that business development role. I know someone, they had a firm that they hired a BT individual to help. They had already had a preexisting marketing team, within eight months, I'd let them go because they felt like the return wasn't there. But eight months is not enough time to work with all of your attorneys, build a plan, help them see that return.

I think really, to your point, listening to the team, I mean, it's hard because what worked 20 years ago doesn't work today. If you really want to grow people's attention span, I mean, we know this in general, like it's just people, the attention spans are shorter. People are consuming content in a different way. We're all getting a thousand emails, if you have Instagram or Facebook, you're getting ads or getting content, you're getting influenced about your purchase decisions in different ways than ever before.

The ability for people to tune out marketing has also, I feel, increased significantly. It's just harder than it was. I get it too, because I think with marketing, it's not necessarily X equals Y. When marketers come to law firms with a pitch of like, "Hey, we should be doing this," I think, and I know even as a business owner, what I'm looking to hear is very strict numbers. I want to know if we make this investment, what are we getting out of it, and what's our projection or future for this?

For marketing, sometimes that's a little hard. Sometimes it is, "Hey, we've never done this conference before. Let's try it this year. We think it could be a really good place for me. We've spoken with other attorneys that have done it. We've gotten great feedback, but we don't know. We won't know until we do it."

I do think that to your point, that's where trusting the expertise of your marketing team can come in because I think oftentimes, there are a lot of great ideas, but it is so new and it changes constantly that we don't always have, "Hey, this is exactly what we're going to get out of it."

Elise Holtzman: You mentioned several times getting data. We talked about this is keeping data on what's working and what isn't working and that it's hard. It's not like I spend three dollars over here and I get six dollars in revenue from it and I can point to, "Oh, I did this speaking engagement and I got all of these clients," or “I wrote this article and published it in Law360 and all of a sudden I brought in whatever, half a million dollars in business,” which would be nice.

What are some of the regular numbers that law firms can be looking at, if any, to tell that their marketing is working? Like, yes, there's some loosey-goosiness to it, but are there numbers that law firms can be looking at on a regular basis?

Amanda Sexton: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, where their leads are coming from, the number of leads, that's a huge thing. As much as you can separate that out by the channel, so whether it is search or Google My Business Profile, your website, the phone calls that you're getting, billboard, phone numbers, as much as you can figure out where those leads are coming from and how many of them are converting and the dollar amount.

For a lot of firms that can be challenging, it can be almost like a manual process and we've worked with firms to set that up, but that's also sometimes tied to intake, is your intake team trained to put that in there? Looking at that, looking at your cost of acquisition, looking at the leads, again, that you're getting, we also do a quality rating for those leads.

If it wasn't a great client or a good fit, we look at where those channels came from. Some just aren't ones that you want to be investing in and you're like, “Oh, most of the clients we got from there were really difficult and challenging and half of them didn't pay their bills. We don't want them from that channel anymore.” Looking at that too, so if you look at what your actual realization rate is per channel, we find that that can be helpful too, depending on what your billing looks like, just to make sure that that's the right channel for you.

Elise Holtzman: Many, many years ago, I talked to a lawyer, I think he was in California, and he had a very active, busy personal injury practice, which is not something that I've done a lot of, but I have worked with a couple of firms who do that sort of work, and I said to him, “Where are your clients coming from?” And he would talk about that, “Well, we've got billboards and we've got bus benches.” I said, “Where are your best clients coming from?” “Oh, our best clients, they all come through personal referrals.”

Sometimes just asking that simple question had the light bulb go on for him a little bit. It was okay to have the billboards and it was okay to have the bus benches, but he realized that he and his partners needed to ramp up their community involvement because that's where their best clients were coming from.

The other thing is, and you mentioned we talked about this idea that it can be a little bit loosey-goosey, I always ask prospective clients when they first talk to me, “Just curious, where did you hear about us?” And sometimes they know exactly. Then sometimes they say, "Oh, you're just around."

On the one hand, I was like, "Okay, that's great. I'm just around." But it doesn't necessarily help pin down exactly what you're doing well. I think that it's a little frustrating sometimes to try to gather that data, but it's certainly worthwhile to do it because whatever you can get, I assume can be helpful.

Amanda Sexton: Yes. The most we can do is try. There's a lot more tracking restrictions in place and things like that. It also often is multi-touch. Maybe you'll speak somewhere, then you connect with someone on LinkedIn, they've seen your posts for three months, then you sent an email out. We've gotten responses even from our email newsletters and it's like, “Oh, we've known you and been in touch and seen you places for the last two years,” but it's hard to say exactly where.

Elise Holtzman: Right. You mentioned that eight months, for example, was not long enough to have a business development professional at your firm and see if what he or she was doing was valuable. A lot of law firms will tell me, especially those in more sophisticated practices, that they sometimes have a two-year runway for someone becoming a client. They meet someone, they see them at a conference, they spoke on a panel, they sent them some emails, whatever it may be, and that it can be an 18-month to two-year ramp-up for a particular client.

I think that understanding that you're not going to be able to figure it all out exactly, but as you say, asking the question makes a lot of sense. When do you think it makes sense to adjust your strategy? We're talking about how this stuff doesn't happen overnight. What is some advice that you have for lawyers who say, "Okay, we've been doing this for a while. We're not sure it's working, but if we did it for another six months, would we see results? Are we going to throw in the towel too early? Are we waiting too long and spending too much money?" How do you evaluate that sort of situation?

Amanda Sexton: I think part of that is the pre-planning. While you're investing in marketing, we might not be able to have an exact, "Hey, this is the ROI that we expect from this." You should have some kind of, "Hey, this is what we expect to see. This is what we'd like to see what would success look like for us." Evaluating that regularly rather than a set it and forget it and saying, "Hey, is this on track? Is this off track?"

For example, for SEO, we look at, maybe you're getting a ton of visitors, but people aren't converting. Okay, let's look at why, what's going on on the website. Not waiting until six months from now to say, "Hey, what happened?" But really looking at that more regularly, and sometimes along the way, it's just minor tweaks to the strategy. It's not necessarily like, “Let's throw the baby out with the bath water,” but “Let's look at what we can adjust along the way.”

Maybe we are doing a certain sponsorship, and halfway through we have barely made any connections from this group. What's going on? Maybe then it's a personal email to the president of the association, “Hey, we'd love to connect with so-and-so. Is there any way we can get some introductions? Or what can we do to further our sponsorship,” and having those conversations before the end assessment line of “Is this a success?” If it's not tracking along the way, it's, “Okay. How do we adjust it and what do we think isn't working?”

Elise Holtzman: Do you have any ideas for some quick wins that firms can address to help make their marketing more successful, something where we give them a great idea and they can run off and do something and get excited about it?

Amanda Sexton: Yeah, I mean quick wins, for example, I mean, I think one is if you're doing SEO and getting a ton of traffic to your site. You just look at the website and say, “How easy is it for someone to contact me?” If you don't have a phone number at the top of your site, if you don't have a quick get-and-touch button, great, go add those in. Make sure all the pages on your site have some way.

I see a lot of firms with great content, and they rank first, but you get to the page, and there's no contact form on that page. They have to go to another page. It's like that is the quickest, easiest win, and you could increase your conversions sometimes by 60%.

Elise Holtzman: Isn't that crazy? It's funny, Amanda, that you say that, because I was recently on a couple of law firm websites, and I noticed that the lawyer's email address wasn't under their name. It was like their photo was there, and their name was there, and a whole biography was there, and maybe the general phone number of the law firm was there, but there was no email address. I just kept thinking to myself, "Do you not want your clients to contact you or prospective clients to contact you?"

It sounds silly, but that's such a minor thing that turns into such a major. Like, if you're going to make it hard for me to contact you, then I'm going to go contact the person who makes it easy.

Amanda Sexton: Yes. Yeah, we've seen it. I know that there's something like, "Oh, is there spam? Is there something else? We're going to get too much." But we've done it. We've been looking for people to be on panels for certain presentations, but if there's no email address, great. I guess we'll go find someone else and do it that way.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah. That's just an easy one. For all the lawyers out there, it sounds crazy and it sounds like, “Oh, I'm supposed to be getting some major marketing insight,” but that's a big one.

Amanda, as we wrap up our time here together today, I want to ask you a question that I ask all of my guests at the end of the show. There's a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge, where experts sometimes forget that what is so obvious and natural to them is not at all obvious to other people. When it comes to creating content that converts, especially in such a competitive marketplace, what's a principle or piece of advice that may seem obvious to you but is important for lawyers and law firm leaders to hear?

Amanda Sexton: I think being genuine is something that I don't see often in law firms and the firms that do it really well are the firms that I see build that relationship with potential clients almost instantly again before they're having those intake conversations. So if firms can find a way to balance still coming across professionals and showcasing their experience with being people, people like to do business with people they know, like, and trust. That's just the nature of how it works.

For firms that can do that, don't be afraid to do that. Having a personal side is what builds that relationship. Otherwise, we would all just go to a chatbot and have them solve our legal problems. But there's something about having an attorney who can explain it to us and have us feel really good and that we can trust that, that does wonders.

For firms that can balance that and to not be scared of that, which is, I think most firms, it's how we've always done it, to your point. This is how we talk about things. We're a law firm, we can't do it this way. There's nothing that says you can't be professional and still be a person.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, it's great advice. I think it goes back to this idea of content that converts. Lawyers are really good at creating content. They create content all day, every day. It's the question of how do you get from content to content that converts, and as you say, it's being accessible and relatable and a human being. That's what people want to hire. They want to like their lawyers. They want to feel comfortable with their lawyers. Terrific advice.

Amanda, thank you so much for being here today. It's been really great having you. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in. If you've enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. It really helps. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.

Thank you for tuning in. If you've enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.