The Biggest Problem with Marketing and How to Fix It with John Hinson

Allison Williams: [00:00:12] Hi, everybody, it’s Allison Williams here, your Law Firm Mentor. Law Firm Mentor is a business coaching service for solo and small law firm attorneys. We help you grow your revenues, crush chaos in business and make more money.

 

Allison Williams: [00:00:25] Hi, everybody, it’s Allison Williams here, and welcome to another edition of the Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor Podcast. And today I am talking to John Hinson of Spotlight Branding, and John and I had a really good conversation. We talked about marketing, but not from your usual perspective. In fact, one of the things that I really like about Spotlight Branding in particular about John is the fact that their approach to marketing is not anti SEO, but it is a different take on SEO. And you know, it’s not about building landing pages and keywords and a lot of the strategies that I’m sure we all have heard, talked about. And by the way, I employ a lot of those strategies, so I am definitely not a zealot for any one form of marketing. My attitude is always find what works.

 

Allison Williams: [00:01:12] But the beautiful thing about my conversation with John was that he talked to us about marketing funnels and how to fix the problems in your marketing funnels. Keeping in mind that you might have a strategy for SEO that’s going to have to fit with that. And I think a lot of times when we, as law firm owners, want to solve a problem, we literally want to press a button and poof our marketing works, or we want to hire someone that we can just hand them a check and say, here, you go do the marketing thing while I go practice law. And that’s how my business will grow.

 

Allison Williams: [00:01:47] But John actually teaches and promotes a way of being more strategic with your marketing, fixing things that are kinks in your funnel. Really, a lack of nurturing for kind of little, a little heads up, there a little spoiler alert part of it, we talked about was with nurturing, and he comes at it from an approach that really will save you a lot of time and money if you employ the strategies that he gives. And at the end, there is a special nod to some free resources that they have available to help teach you this stuff. Even if you’re at the place where you’re not ready to hire a marketing company, but you just want to start getting some traction. So with that, I’m really excited to introduce and bring up our, our guest for today, John Henson.

 

Allison Williams: [00:02:34] All right, John Hinson, welcome to the Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor Podcast.

 

John Hinson: [00:02:38] Thank you for having me. Really, really glad to be here.

 

Allison Williams: [00:02:41] Yeah, and I’m thrilled to have you too, because one of the things I love about your, your style of marketing, and your company is that like branding is that you guys have some what I consider to be somewhat of a different approach to marketing, and I think it’s a really enlightened approach. It’s not what you typically hear when we have marketers on the show. So I think a lot of our guests are going to get some high value out of it. And we’re talking today about fixing marketing, not just doing more marketing. So first thing I want to ask you is why have traditional marketing funnels failed?

 

John Hinson: [00:03:13] Yeah. So, you know, if you’ve been familiar with marketing in any capacity or you’ve had these conversations with marketing companies, they likely talked about marketing funnels and it’s, you know, you can visualize it exactly how it sounds. You know, it’s this funnel and up at the top, it’s pretty wide, you know, you’re kind of maybe you’re casting a pretty wide net, you know, just trying to generate a lot of leads, however you’re doing it, you know, maybe it’s paid ads, so search engine optimization, maybe you’re doing a direct mail campaign, whatever it is, you’re doing. All right. And the, the leads that are up at the top of your funnel, they’re really cold. All right. They’re aware that your business exists. You know, they’re not really sure if you’re the person that they want to work with or not. So they’re really cold. But as your marketing campaign continues, maybe you have some drips, maybe you have some additional mailers and email sequence, whatever it is you’re doing. Those typically are designed to move people down the funnel and make them go from cold to, you know, lukewarm to warm to where they’re just on fire. They are hot, they are ready to work with you and you alone. All right, that’s the goal. That’s the ultimate dream of every marketing company, every business owner who wants to generate leads and generate more business and all of that.

 

John Hinson: [00:04:41] From there, though, that’s where we kind of found that there’s this really big problem. All right. And it’s that you have a starting point and you have an ending point. But what happens to all of those leads that you generated? Maybe you spent hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars on those leads, and the campaign ends and they did not make a buying decision, or alternatively, what happens to the people that did make a buying decision and you ended up working with them? What happens to them after the fact? And so that was kind of the big aha moment for us like there’s a huge problem there that’s not really being addressed in current marketing and that was something that we really wanted to set out to fix.

 

Allison Williams: [00:05:26] Ok, so when we talk about, you know, top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel, well, it sounds like you’re saying it’s not just once you get a client, you know, obviously you need to continue to market so that they can continue to remain a client. But then that middle of the funnel section, so that middle of the funnel section, I would imagine that most people would say, well, the way that we nurture those people is through drip sequences and we stay in contact with them. Are you suggesting that that is insufficient to be able to get people from cold to warm?

 

John Hinson: [00:05:54] It can be, but I think where a lot of people go wrong is that they kind of get done with one campaign, and then they just go and start something else. And a lot of those people that are still in that middle of the funnel, they just kind of get forgotten and they’re just kind of left in this weird marketing purgatory where like, yeah, they’re in your system, you have their contact information, but you’re not doing anything with it. And there’s still so much opportunity there that you can continue to market to those people, you know, and continue to nurture them along, even if the, the original way that you got them into your system isn’t what you’re continuing to do anymore.

 

Allison Williams: [00:06:35] Yeah, you know, I think that’s a perfect point. Ironically, I was just talking to a client about this, actually several clients about this in our Facebook group just yesterday, because even though this is a marketing concept, it’s also a sales concept, right? Because, you know, if you don’t stay in contact with people and you kind of set it and forget it and you engage with them and they don’t make a buying decision, a lot of people just move on to the next prospect and say, All right, well, I’ll get the next one. But you still have opportunity to turn the dirt, if you will, with the people that got into your ecosphere in the first place.

 

John Hinson: [00:07:05] Yeah, you know, and just because someone decides that maybe whether they made a decision to go with someone else or they just never ended up making a decision, it doesn’t mean that there’s not still value in that relationship, you know, maybe OK. So maybe you weren’t the lawyer that they needed, you know, maybe they came in with some incorrect preconceived notions. Maybe, you know, their legal issue wasn’t the kind of case that that you specifically worked with. But man, you know, if you can continue to nurture that relationship, they can become a referral source, you know, and one of the things that we, we hit on this study a whole lot with, with a lot of our marketing that we do and a lot of the talks that we make. Texas Tech University actually did a study several years ago, and they found that about 80 percent of your customers or your clients or whatever. They’re willing to refer business to you, but only about 30 percent actually do. And I mean, for starters, that means that you, everyone out there pretty much has the opportunity to double their referrals and they’re still not maxing out. And I mean, how much would doubling referrals just change your life and change your business just off the back right there. But also, you know, there’s just not a lot being done right now to focus on referrals, especially when it’s so much easier to market through referrals. They’re a lot easier to work with, it’s a lot more cost-effective. It’s, I think it’s like five times more expensive to generate new leads than it is to market and generate business from current and past clients.

 

Allison Williams: [00:08:46] Yeah. Well, you know, that’s a very scary study when you think about it, because a lot of you know, we talk about this all the time that lawyers when they say, don’t have enough, this is the first thing that they do is think, let me go, spend some money and buy some leads, right? So they go to the hardest place to be able to generate more business rather than really reaching out to the people that are most inclined and have historically referred them business and touching on those people that you say we’re neglecting that are kind of in the middle of the funnel and not really getting enough attention.

 

John Hinson: [00:09:13] Yeah, exactly. And there’s just so many opportunities because like, you know, I kind of hear it out there, it’s like, well, we send birthday cards, we send Christmas cards like, that’s kind of our referral strategy. It’s not enough anymore. You know, we, we really live in a world where, you know, reaching out to someone once, maybe twice a year to be like, Hey, don’t forget about us, you know, this is how we can help you, that’s not enough. Because we’re so bombarded like I don’t even remember, like, I have to really sit down and think like where I went for lunch yesterday because like, you know, it’s there’s so much content and so much information being thrown at us on a constant basis. You know, whether it’s, you know, Hey, watch this show. Look at this new clothing item. Listen to this new song! Watch this new viral video. It’s easy to be forgotten, and that’s why we kind of have this focus here on, on content to kind of bury the lead a little bit, but you know, and really making sure that, that law firms are able to keep in touch with everyone, whether it’s past clients, current clients, people who are like in that marketing purgatory that I mentioned earlier and do so in a way that really goes and works towards maximizing those referrals that you’re supposed to get. That really makes it obvious where your expertise lies and really goes towards making creating just a consistent marketing ecosystem that does so much more than just desperately goes out and tries to generate leads when you’re kind of in that in a peaks and valleys sort of situation where you’re kind of struggling to find new business.

 

Allison Williams: [00:10:57] Yeah. Well, I love that you mentioned the birthday because I tell people all the time I get thousands of pings, posts, emails, texts, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram messages for my birthday. I honestly don’t remember who said something about my birthday. I mean, there’s just there are so many people and the whole day almost gets soaked up, just trying to acknowledge people that I’ve gotten to the point now where I just literally turned it off and say, All right, if something comes in, that’s fine. But I’m not really going to give much attention to it because it’s just such overwhelm, right? Yeah. So since we’ve been talking about, you know, those missed opportunities you, you’ve referenced earlier, the missed opportunity with people who are in the funnel… middle of the funnel. They’re not cold, they’re not warm, they’re in a sequence and they don’t make a buying decision. But you also reference people that are outside the funnel because they became a client. So how do you fix the problems with funnels that you know, that are created by virtue of a campaign just ending?

 

John Hinson: [00:11:51] Yeah. So that was kind of the light bulb moment that we had. And what we ended up doing is we came up with the concept of the content loop and what was funny. What was funny about it is like it wasn’t, it wasn’t like this new revolutionary thing. You know, this was kind of how this was our strategy. This is what we had been doing for our clients for 10 years, but we just had not figured out a good way to conceptualize it and sort of present it in a way that visually made sense. And then we finally figured it out. And honestly, since we figured it out, I’ve seen some other marketing companies kind of come out with their own version of it. Clear, clear copycat stuff. So that, that was really validating for us and like, OK, we, we really hit on something here. But the, the entire concept of a content loop, you know, if you want to, if you want to stick with the original funnel image that we had, essentially the content loop is just basically attaching a hose to the bottom of that funnel and then, you know, extending it back up to the top. And so now you just have this continuous loop and people are just coming down. Ok, cool. They made a buying decision. That’s great! Well, we’re going to put them back up in the top of the funnel and we’re going to continue to nurture them along the way so that maybe they become repeat clients, you know, family law, you know, maybe criminal law, maybe, you know, maybe you initially think, OK, well, I don’t want repeat clients there. You know, we don’t want people getting multiple divorces or getting rearrested a bunch of times.

 

Allison Williams: [00:13:27] But think for yourself, you know, some of my best divorces are the clients that are on their third one. So we don’t discourage people from finding their happy outside of the relationship that’s not serving them.

 

John Hinson: [00:13:40] Well, there you go. But, but even then, you know, like, you know, they can still be good referral sources and you’re still, you know, that’s kind of the overall point, though, is, you know, you’re not just, you know, getting them in and out the door as, as efficiently as possible. And then, you know, hope that they just have a good rest of their life, like you want to continue to nurture them and continue to remind them of who you are, how you can help other ways that you can help. We see this a lot, especially with our clients who start doing this. They’ll start sending out an email newsletter, for example, and the content will be, you know, take like an estate planning lawyer, for example. You know, they write up a will for someone and then maybe their newsletter is talking about a specific trust or something. And then, you know, past clients will reach out and be like, Oh, wow, I didn’t know you did that too. Let’s talk and I think I might need this as well. So there’s a ton of opportunities there for repeat business. There’s a ton of opportunities to get referrals from, you know, other outside referral sources and other people that you may not have immediately considered as referral sources. And so that was just generally the basic concept of the content loop was just to not just make it a start and stop point A to point B thing, but to make it just a continuous, never-ending cycle of marketing and nurturing along the way.

 

Allison Williams: [00:14:58] Yeah. So that’s a beautiful concept, and it really does keep lawyers in a very different frame of mind in terms of how we approach business, because you’re right, a lot of us do think it’s one and done right. I got you in, I solved your problem, I got you out, I got my review and I’m done. Versus trying to keep an ongoing, you know, I’m your lawyer for life. I’m your relationship person. So when you have a problem, if I can’t solve it, I can get you to someone else. Or if you know someone who has your problem, if you’re hearing from me regularly, you’re more inclined to send that referral.

 

John Hinson: [00:15:28] Yes, absolutely.

 

Allison Williams: [00:15:30] Yeah. So let’s talk about what happens when like, so let’s say we get the concept right, and I know a lot of people are going to be inclined to reach out. You’re going to obviously let people know how to do that at the end of the show. But let’s say somebody is just starting out and they say, you know, I want to create my own content loop. How does one go about the process of doing that?

 

John Hinson: [00:15:49] Yeah. So that’s that’s kind of the beauty of what we’re doing here at Spotlight Branding is we’re not, we’re not necessarily just like, Hey, come work with us. We’re, we’re really focused on giving out all of this information. And if you want to handle it yourself, we’re more than happy to let you handle it yourself. And I think that’s also something weird to hear from a marketing company. It’s like, Hey, you don’t have to work with us. We’re just going to show you what you need to do. But if you want to try to do this yourself, you are absolutely, totally capable of doing it. It starts with creating just a consistent, ongoing system of content. All right. What is content? What, what constitutes content? You know, it’s your basic stuff. You know, your blog posts. If you want to do videos, do that. Podcasting is a great form of content that you can put in your loop, emails, social media posts and then also your website also really feeds into this and almost really kind of acts as the central hub for where a lot of your content is being generated from. And you know, you can, you don’t have to have all of those pieces. I would for sure say, you need a website, obviously, but also at the very least, have a blog and a regular monthly email newsletter that goes out.

 

John Hinson: [00:17:09] We’ve seen a lot of lawyers have really good success with that. You know, you just pair your blog and your newsletter together. Your blog title should be the subject line of the email. Don’t just put the name of your law firm in the subject line because people aren’t going to necessarily remember. They’re not going to necessarily associate the name of your law firm with your practice area, especially if they’ve got a whole bunch of other businesses and a whole, you know, all these other distractions out there. And so your blog, you know, surface-level content, you don’t need to dive deep into the weeds. I know lawyers, you guys tend to be perfectionists. You want to make sure you cover all the bases, even if the answer to every particular situation is it depends. Like you want to, you want to make sure, but you don’t have to do that, cover the surface level concept. And just it makes it so that people understand, OK, this you’re the lawyer for the job. This is what you cover. This is how you can help. And we’ve seen that just doing that, that simple little strategy right there. You know, our clients come back to us. Every email they send out multiple requests for new business or repeat business or referrals or anything like that every single month.

 

Allison Williams: [00:18:22] Yeah. Well, I think what you’re saying right here is just pure gold because I think a lot of lawyers don’t start the process of content marketing because they think, OK, great. Now I have to sit down and download my brain and write a legal treatise, and they want to put five thousand details in. And I always say less is more here, right? You’re not, you’re not speaking to a judge, you’re speaking to a person who just needs to know that you know what you’re talking about. So a high-level surface conversation can spark interest, can give value, can have people start questioning whether or not they’re doing what’s necessary to protect their rights or to vindicate themselves or whatever it is that they need to do. And then they have a reason to come in and see you as opposed to, you write all this information that they can’t digest. It overwhelms them and then they turn away from it.

 

John Hinson: [00:19:05] Right? Yeah. And I mean, there’s two primary things there. First, like, don’t, you’re not writing to impress your other lawyer, friends and colleagues, you know, like they, they know independently of your blog post that you are competent and you’re capable. That’s totally fine. You’re writing to reach your ideal client. Whatever it is, they look like, whatever demographic, socioeconomic status that is your wheelhouse, that’s who you’re writing for. And those people, first of all, don’t have the patience or attention span to go to your website and see just this massive, you know, forever scrolling giant blog with giant paragraphs. It’s, you know, short paragraphs, bullet lists, you know, headline, subheaders, stuff like that. Five paragraphs, that’s all you need, and that that you can get more out of that and more value out of that than you would if you’re trying to recreate something out of a law school textbook that, you know. Sure, it encompasses every single aspect and really demonstrates that you are worthy of your juris doctor. That’s fine, but it’s not what your audience wants from you. And that’s what’s most important, right?

 

Allison Williams: [00:20:28] And you know, the other thing is, I always tell this to lawyers, right? There’s a whole lot of lawyers that are very resistant to video. And, you know, video gets a lot more attention, even when you put it in the subject of an email, right? Just knowing that there’s a video coming, people are more inclined to open it. So when we start talking about how to create content, if you don’t even use the video, at least get the thoughts on screen so you can get them transcribed. I mean, now there are so many tools to get cheap transcription just with artificial intelligence. It’s really like a no brainer now.

 

John Hinson: [00:20:55] Yeah. If you want to talk about hacking your way to just creating a content machine, start with a video, you know, because like you said, you can get you can get the audio transcribed. So now your video becomes a blog post, you can rip the audio. Now you can create a whole podcast series out of it. So even if you don’t necessarily use the video, that’s fine. But you can at least generate two different content mediums out of it, and you can use that, you know, to create a whole new marketing ecosystem. Because people, you know, we all consume things differently, we all prefer to consume things differently, some people read, some people prefer to watch, some people prefer to listen and that’s fine. And the more you’re able to diversify that, you know, the the bigger that your reach will be and the more, you know, robust your content loop will end up being.

 

Allison Williams: [00:21:45] Right. Because you never know if your blog post that really appeals to your ideal client who doesn’t need your services right now won’t pass that along, and it contains a video that’s going to be watched by someone else.

 

John Hinson: [00:21:55] Absolutely, yes.

 

Allison Williams: [00:21:57] Yeah. So we would be remiss if we talked about content without talking about the big sexy animal or the big pink elephant in the room that everybody always goes to, right? Everybody kind of knows you’ve got to have a website if you’re in business now, but SEO, right? That’s kind of the thing that people think about. So I know that you are a big proponent of creating content. How does that fit in with an SEO strategy?

 

John Hinson: [00:22:19] So the good news here is that it doesn’t necessarily have to if you don’t want it to, it can fit. If you still think that it’s important for your marketing strategy, it’s totally fine. What a lot of what we’re seeing now is that search engines are placing more weight and more importance on quality content, not necessarily quantity. You know, a couple of years ago, it was all about let’s get 20 blog posts on your website every week. We’re going to have this certain number of keywords in it. We’re going to have this certain number of links in it. Who cares if it’s readable? Like, we’re not worried about human beings actually reading this. We care about crawler bots indexing it and pushing you up the rankings. And the downside of that, is that it creates a bad user experience on your website. And our whole, our whole philosophy and our whole focus is we’re focused on the human beings that are going to hire you, not the bots that are crawling the website. You know, if your content is, is focused on the humans, those keywords are going to end up appearing naturally anyway. You don’t have to try to force them in. You don’t have to try to force LinkedIn or anything like that.

 

John Hinson: [00:23:28] So that that in and of itself is is going to be more than enough. But to your point, if you’re doing a video and you’re uploading it to YouTube, Google owns YouTube. There’s inherent value there. You’re putting the blogs on your website, those keywords are going to show up naturally. You’re sharing that stuff on social media. So now all of those links, especially if they’re being pointed back to your website, they’re, they’re, you know, contributing to the website reputation aspect of SEO. So there’s still some benefits there. It’s not, it’s not the primary focus that we care about. It’s more of a background thing. And you know, to that point, you know, that’s kind of, you know, you mentioned up at the front, you know, we were kind of different from other marketing companies in that respect. And that’s kind of the core. This is kind of the core area as to why, like, sure, there’s SEO benefits there, but that’s not our main focus. That’s not really what we care about, because a lot of you know, a lot of your clients, you know, a lot of other lawyers out there, your small businesses, you don’t necessarily have a marketing budget that will justify going to an all-out SEO strategy because especially depending on the city you’re located in what your practice area is, you’re probably going to need to spend upwards of a thousand dollars or more every month just on that, just for the hope of being on page one, because that’s pretty much all that matters. That’s where the huge majority of people are going to stop looking anyway.

 

John Hinson: [00:25:03] And so that’s why, you know, you focus on content, you’re going to have those SEO benefits in the background, but the focus is really going to be on nurturing, continuing to nurture the people that are in your system, building those referrals. And that’s where your leads are going to come from and continuing to elevate your expertise to where now you’re taking on the cases that you really want to take. You’re not being a door lawyer anymore. You’re really setting yourself up for niching down, really actually enjoying doing all of the cases that you’re taking and being seen as the family lawyer or the estate planning lawyer, whatever it is that you do in your city and it starts with having that good concentrated content loop.

 

Allison Williams: [00:25:46] All right. So John Hinson, you have given us a wealth of value today where you’ve talked a lot about marketing funnels, what is wrong with them, how to fix them, getting that content loop created and how that can work with an SEO strategy if that’s the area that a lawyer wants to go in. So my real question that I know everybody is waiting to hear is how do we get ahold of you if we want to learn more about Spotlight Branding and a lot more about this content loop and how to create one?

 

John Hinson: [00:26:11] Yeah. So the easiest thing to do is go to SpotlightBranding.com/solo, s-o-l -o. It’s going to take you to a page that has a ton of free resources. We’ve got an anti SEO report that kind of goes into some more of the reasons why we believe what we believe about SEO, but then we also have a lot of other great stuff. There, I think there’s a resource there about just an ideal client checklist where you can really create that ideal avatar of who you are really trying to market to. There’s information there about how to work with a marketing vendor, how to work with a website designer, all kinds of stuff there that’s really designed to just help you create a marketing strategy and create a content marketing strategy that you can implement directly in your firm. And look, if you want us to handle it for you and take, you know, open up that free time for you. We’re happy to do so, but definitely just start by checking out some of the resources SpotlightBranding.com/Solo.

 

Allison Williams: [00:27:11] All right, you guys heard it here. We always bring you the best. We’re bringing you John Hinson, today. Thank you so much, John, for being the wealth of knowledge that you always are. And for those of you that are curious to learn more about Law Firm Mentor and the way that we help lawyers across the country to grow their revenues crush chaos in business and make more money, check us out on our website.

 

Allison Williams: [00:27:31] All right, everyone, I am, Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor and thank you for tuning in to The Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor Podcast. See you next time!

 

Allison Williams: [00:27:55] Thank you for tuning in to the Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor Podcast. To learn more about today’s guests and take advantage of the resources mentioned, check out our show notes. And if you own a solo or small law firm and are looking for guidance, advice, or simply support on your journey to create a law firm that runs without you, join us in the Law Firm Mentor Movement Free Facebook group. There you can access our free trainings on improving collections and law firms, meeting billable hours and join the movement of thousands of law firm owners across the country who want to crush chaos in their law firms and make more money. I’m Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor. Have a great day!

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