Batching Law Firm Content

Allison Williams: [00:00:05] Hi, everybody, it’s Allison Williams here, your host of The Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast, Law Firm Mentor is a business coaching service for solo and small law firm attorneys. We help you to grow your revenues, crush chaos in business and make more money.

 

Allison Williams: [00:00:34] Today we’re going to talk about batching your law firm content. Now, batching is a very common nomenclature in the world of marketing. I’m sure many of you have heard the phrase batching before, but if you haven’t heard about it, we’re going to talk about what it is and we’re going to talk about how to do it and for your benefit. But the one thing I want to share with you as we start this conversation is to really talk about the importance of consistency in your marketing.

 

Allison Williams: [00:01:07] Now, I don’t want to sound like I’m lecturing to you because I need this to hear as much as you do. But the reality is that we are all busy professionals and it is so easy to prioritize the things that are natural to us, instinctual to us, and frankly, the stuff that we enjoy. And for a lot of lawyers, we don’t enjoy marketing.

 

Allison Williams: [00:01:28] Now, there are some of you who enjoy marketing, but even as you enjoy it, you know that there are other things. Or at least you perceive that there are other things that are pulling at you as more important. So we need to make sure that when you are thinking about your law firm marketing strategy, that you are approaching it from the perspective of creating the outcome that you desire, not simply marketing because you enjoy marketing and not simply choosing to market when it’s convenient, but really making a process around your marketing. Right? Here at Law Firm Mentor, we always talk about the importance of systematizing, right. Everything in your business should be systematized, and marketing isn’t different. So when we think about what is to be achieved by marketing consistency, the thing that we have to really recognize is that your audience is being primed to warm up to your message, right? A lot of times I think lawyers think about marketing as I’m putting something out, and if someone needs me, they will reach out to me. But here’s the thing even if you are in an urgency-based practice, right, someone got arrested over the weekend, they need a criminal defense lawyer. Someone was served with a complaint for divorce, they need a family law attorney. Someone is about to be evicted from, from their home. They need a landlord, tenant attorney, right? That, that feeling of something has to happen right away and you can’t make something happen in that person’s life. That person is going to seek you out because of a trigger.

 

Allison Williams: [00:03:02] Well, that may very well be true. But here’s the thing. If a lawyer pardon me, if a prospect has been consuming your marketing messages, even if they don’t need you at the time that they are, that, that your message finds them there, that doesn’t mean that there are familiarity with your message has no value. To the contrary, they are more likely to pass along your message to someone who needs the service that you offer. They are more likely to reach out to you when and if they need your service and if they happen to have hired someone else, they are more likely to reach out to you. If they ultimately made a decision that they say, I regret this, I need to go elsewhere. Where do I go? Your messaging being in their face is going to increase the likelihood that you’re the chosen one. So it’s important from a logistical standpoint that you recognize that marketing is very much a numbers game, just like sales is a numbers game. You want to get a certain number of leads who are viable into your funnel so that they can ultimately convert into a paying client. And the challenge for a lot of us is that if you are the typical solo or small law firm attorney, you have quite a bit of your time taken up by actual lawyering, or overseeing others doing lawyering. And then the time that’s leftover is time that you are paying the bills, and overseeing the schedules, and keeping up with the software licenses, and dealing with payroll, and all of the logistics of running a business.

 

Allison Williams: [00:04:34] So as those things are happening, marketing feels like it is less urgent because marketing today does not lead to clients tomorrow. Marketing today could lead to clients three months, six months, nine months a year down the road. So we oftentimes think of it as less urgent, so we don’t get around to it. It becomes easier to put something on the calendar and say, Ah, you know, I’m tired, or I need to work on this motion, or I got this prospective new client coming in, or whatever it is, and then marketing falls to the wayside.

 

Allison Williams: [00:05:07] So recognizing that very human, very common likelihood, that tendency that a lot of us have, myself included, we have to come up with strategies that are going to make us be more effective at getting our marketing done. So I want you to think about large law firms for a moment, right? Most of you that listen to this podcast are members of a small law firm or you are solo owners or desire to be solo owners of a law firm. But if you’ve ever been to or worked at a large law firm, you know the concept of a brief bank, right? Every time that some legal document is filed, if a legal memorandum was drafted on that particular issue, it is then saved not only in the client file, but also in a database that includes nothing other than organized legal briefs, right? Organized by topic, organized by jurisdiction, organized by judge could be any number of ways that you organize it, but basically it’s a database, right? I need a brief on the topic of X, Y, Z. I go into my database, I can pull the brief on X, Y, Z. So I want you to think about the value of that, right? A lot of, a lot of lawyers think about the brief bank that they would be losing if they were to lose if they were to leave a law firm. From that perspective, like, you know, that’s an asset. It saves time that you have all of that law compiled that you have the arguments compiled that you have the information all in one place and the same thing goes for your marketing.

 

Allison Williams: [00:06:42] So I want you to think about creating a marketing bank for your business. Your marketing bank is going to be a strong asset so that you have reams of content available to cross purpose and repurpose and share with prospective people when they are in your sales funnel and get people engaged with your information so that just by virtue of the sheer numbers of people that are consuming the content and having it available to pass along to their friends when their friends are in need of your service and having it in their awareness when they personally need your service, you are more likely to get more people coming through your door simply by virtue of doing that by creating that marketing bank.

 

Allison Williams: [00:07:26]  [00:07:26]All right. Once you’re bought into the idea of it, and I think a lot of lawyers, if not most of us get it, marketing has become a very, a very systemically promoted value for the law firm owner. There is still resistance that comes up for a lot of us because we are so busy. So instead of trying to remember or honor the calendar that every Tuesday at 3 p.m., you are going to record a series of videos and promote them on the various social channels. I want you to think about batching your content. Batching your content is really creating a lot of content at once on a schedule. So instead of every Tuesday, I record for two hours. You oftentimes will instead say two hours every Tuesday over the course of a month would be eight hours old together. You create that eight hours in one fell swoop. Right? So instead of two hours every Tuesday, it becomes one day of the week that you’re going to create the content and then you just create a lot of content during that time period. Ok. That’s generally the concept of batching. And then there are three different ways that I want to show you and share with you how you can batch your content more easily. But before we go into that, we’re going to take a little break. And when we come back, I’m going to share with you the three strategies for batching your legal content. Be right back.

 

Allison Williams: [00:08:58] In the world of marketing, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and distracted by all the flashy new things, the possibilities can feel endless. So where do you start? Once you followed our step-by-step approach to Building Your Marketing Strategy, you’ll have a roadmap to transform your marketing.

 

Elise Buie: [00:09:14] My name is Elise Buie and I run Elise Buie Family Law Group in Seattle, Washington. Allison is able to teach us all about what we need to do, how to work with our marketing funnels. I mean, she does a phenomenal job of educating. Her materials are thorough. I know nothing about marketing. I mean, I market with networking, but there’s all this online marketing that I needed to learn digital marketing. And Allison is kind of like a super ninja when it comes to marketing.

 

Allison Williams: [00:09:42] If you’re interested in learning the ins and outs of building a marketing system that works for you. I invite you to sign up for our Online Accelerator Course text Marketing to nine eight two nine two three five two four. Once again, that’s nine oh eight two nine two three five two four. To get pricing information and to start learning how to build and execute your marketing plan to get your law firm where you want it to go.

 

Allison Williams: [00:10:13] All right, welcome back. And now we’re going to dive into the three strategies for how you can more easily batch content in your law firm marketing process. So the first thing I want you to think about is actually scheduling a video day. Ok? Video Days are wonderful. These are days where you block out everything on your calendar. You have to communicate to every person who has access to your calendar that you are unavailable on that date because you have a video day. Ok, so that means if your secretary or your paralegal or your office manager are used to being able to go into the calendar and just stick a meeting on there, or if they are used to seeing you unavailable, quote-unquote, and thus feel that that time is accessible to them, I want you to make sure that that is not the case, which means you’ve got to do things like, put it on the calendar and tell the people who are involved in your business that, that time is sacrosanct. It is not negotiable, right? It’s just like a court appearance. They need to know that so that they don’t ask you later, Hey, John is calling or John is called today and would like to see you on Friday. You have a video day. Can I squeeze this in, right? Everyone needs to know that question is not even an appropriate question to ask. Right. Video Days are just like court if I have court before judge one. No. When Judge two calls and asks Can we add something else to the calendar on that day, you say, sorry, I’m before judge one right here. You say sorry, I have other plans.

 

Allison Williams: [00:11:41] The video day has to be honored, but here’s what you do. You book the day and what you’re going to do is you’re going to bring five to six changes of clothes for that day. Ok. And by change of clothes, I mean everything that goes with it. So depending on how delicious you are, you might be changing your glasses like I do, or you might be changing your hairstyle or your makeup or your shoes or whatever. You’re going to make yourself into a completely different version of yourself as if you had gotten up and change clothes that morning. So you’re going to have five or six changes of your outfit and then you’re going to ultimately have your content ready as well.

 

Allison Williams: [00:12:15] So on your video day, that’s the day you’re going to just come in and bang out the recordings. You’re not going to write the content on video day. So you want to have the content pre framed and we’re going to talk about how to create that content is one of the next strategies that we go into. But you’re going to record that day.

 

Allison Williams: [00:12:33] Now there’s a few things that you can record, you can do long form where you talk for an hour at a time about one specific topic leaving regular pauses in between or going down a list of numbers, top 10 strategies for X and you pause in between each of those because the value of long form content is not only the hour that you spend delivering the content, but also the clipping right. You’re going to clip these videos at some point or someone on your team is going to clip these videos at some point and the clipping it is then going to allow for multiple pieces of marketing data to go out into your marketing ecosphere. So if you personally are doing it, not my recommendation, but I recognize at different stages, at different price points, you may have to do it yourself. You can use something like Wistia or Vimeo, right? You can use these online services to be able to edit your video, but you want to have the long form content and the multiple pieces of short form content that you create by virtue of having this all in one.

 

Allison Williams: [00:13:46] Now, the converse to that is the short form content. These are typically three minute fake videos, right? You don’t want to go much longer than three minutes, but these are question answer type videos, right? The question might just be raised across the top of the video or the bottom of the video, or it could flash the question on the screen before it fades to black and then you come on the screen. But the goal is obviously to present a question and to have you answering. And these are typically questions that you get in the course of legal consultations or questions that you might have answered on your website about your substantive area of law. But the idea is that if you are conscientious, you can create a hundred videos in the matter of a very short period of time. In fact, I know this only because I personally did this many, many moons ago when I was new to owning a law firm. I want to say this was in 2014. I, I was I was creating video content. And what I did was I hired a service and the service blew up from where they were located to my office and we had a six hour day together. They came at 10 o’clock or a little before 10 o’clock, but they set up so that we could start shooting at 10 o’clock and we went straight through to four o’clock.

 

Allison Williams: [00:15:09] Notwithstanding the fact that we took lunches and or took a lunch, and notwithstanding the fact that I had to change clothes several times, we were able to get through 100 videos in six hours. Ok. That includes me having to stop a couple of times because the fire truck in the neighborhood decided it needed to go out with the sirens on. A couple of times there was some loud commotion outside that caused us to have to pause and reshoot. But for the most part, I just got into the habit of question, answer, question, answer, question, answer, pause, go change clothes. Come back, question, answer, question, answer. And the beautiful thing about that is that in one day I had one hundred videos. Now the one hundred videos had to be edited to include our contact information at the end of the video and the question at the beginning of the video. But those very small nuances were very easy to create. And once it was created, I had that database that we still use today, even though I look very different than I did in two thousand fourteen. I still use those videos, and those videos have a life of their own, in fact, if you go on to our YouTube channel for my law firm, you’ll actually see the videos and you’ll see some of them have one hundred views. Some of them have a thousand views. Some of them, I only have a few views, right? And so they have a value to our marketing because we send them out often and people find us through the videos because they are keyword optimized.

 

Allison Williams: [00:16:39] All right. Strategy number two, in batching content, I want you to seriously consider your data. Ok, now for your data. I want you to think about what you what you regularly deal with in your law firm in terms of information about your substantive area of law. And this usually would again come from a legal consult, right? So if somebody were to call and schedule an appointment and say, Hey, I need to talk about X, if you’re having an attorney, do the consult and you have not yet transitioned over to a sales conversation versus a legal consult, which is something I talk about often you would probably go through some of those FAQ’s that we talked about before. But the great thing is, is that when you think about it from the perspective of a consult, you now have data available to you that you can readily go to in order to communicate with the marketplace. And I want you to keep in mind that even though you know your practice area very well, very intimately, you are one hundred percent the expert of your domain. Other people, clients don’t know anywhere near as much as you know.

 

Allison Williams: [00:17:49] So you can take a relatively small concept and expand it out and flesh it out and grow it into very easily multiple pieces of content. So I want you to think about this from the perspective of using your client’s needs, concerns, values, issues and substantive legal matters and using that information in order to speak to your ideal client.

 

Allison Williams: [00:18:19] Now, one of the most popular ways that you can do this is by creating an anatomy of the case series. By virtue of having a series, we’re talking about taking something of a consultation, and let’s say your consultation is 30 minutes. Ok. You don’t have to in that 30 minute time period cover any and all things that would ever relate to the area of law. But there are some things that are implicated by the different factual scenarios presented in your consultation and the more comfortable you get personally with saying, OK, here is the topic at issue today. So we’re only going to share this information because the information that the person is asking for may not be relevant or the information that the person doesn’t know that they need is over here within my knowledge base so I’ll share that. When you share that type of information, you also have a repository of additional information to share. Right, right. You obviously would not conceal or would not disclose anything about the prospects or your clients who have consulted with you. But you can certainly string together a variety of miscellaneous facts to create a composite scenario that can be discussed without disclosing any information about a client. And the great thing of it is that once you realize the vast universe of different topics that you will encounter in the course of your daily sales process, then you can start to create really, really small pieces and expand it out.

 

Allison Williams: [00:19:49] So I’ll give you an example. As many of you know, I am a matrimonial and child abuse attorney, and so sometimes people will come in and they’ll say to me, Well, the agency accused me of child neglect, What is that? And I tell them, I’m going to give you the textbook definition, and then I’m going to tell you what it looks like, what it means, what it sounds like in the context of a child welfare investigation, right? So there’s actually various pieces of content in what I just shared with you. The very first thing is that the person was accused of child neglect, and there’s a difference between being accused and being found culpable. That’s one video. The next part of that is that the person needs to understand what is neglect according to the statute. Then the next part of this third is what does it mean in real time? What does it mean? Well, how is the judge going to interpret the statute based on the facts of this situation? The great thing about that is that you can create a series and by virtue of creating a series, what you’re doing is one, increasing the amount of time someone has to consume your content to get the entire message and two you’re drawing people back to the location where you’re going to ultimately present your series.

 

Allison Williams: [00:21:08] So if you’re streaming it on something like StreamYard or be live TV, what you’re going to do is you’re going to schedule a time to go into each of those series. The data points if you are pre recording it also fine. You can now stream prerecorded videos, at least in StreamYard. So I know that, that capability is available even if you are not doing it live. But the great thing is that when you decide to do a series, even if somebody finds the series years after you’ve done it, if you house it on your YouTube channel or on your website, then a person has to consume more of those pieces of content as a part of getting the whole. And when you do that, you’re giving them almost forced, almost forcefully more opportunities to consume your voice, your message, your style, your approach and of course, to actually get warmed up to you as they are simply consuming content.

 

Allison Williams: [00:22:07] The other thing I want you to consider about series is that a lot of the time in your series will be about framing the series. So at some point you get to say you get to kind of pre frame the before, right? Hey, guys, I’m launching a series where we’re going to be talking about X, Y, and Z. Today we’re going to talk about X. Next time we’re going to talk about why, and at the very end, we’re going to talk about Z, right? Then when you’re actually in the video, you’re going to talk about whatever the issue is that you’re going to talk about, you’re going to tell them. All right. So this fits nicely with our next video, which is going to be about why today we’ve covered X. If you have any questions at all about X, call to action, call to action, call to action, please reach out to me at phone number or fill in web address. And then finally, your kind of encapsulation the, the future casting for your series, right? So you’re going to end with all right guys. Today, we’ve been talking about why now we’ve already covered X and today we covered why. And the next time we’re together, we’re going to be talking about Z. And it’s really important that you show up for us to talk about Z because I’m going to have a special offer at at the end of that, just for you. You’re putting them on notice, right, you’re asking them to look forward to what’s ahead, which is going to be your invitation to have them call you or you call your office to schedule a consultation.

 

Allison Williams: [00:23:34] All right, third and final strategy, we’re going to talk about with batching law firm content and that is your content formula. Now, I know a lot of lawyers when I talk about the need for you to get on video, get out there, get your message to the world. What comes up is, Oh my god, I wouldn’t know what to say, I don’t know how to start this. I don’t know how to frame this. I don’t know what this looks like, right? And so this idea of feeling very much like you are paralyzed by what to say, more so even than the idea of saying it in the first place. Right. The idea of even getting yourself out on video or putting something new on your website is very common. And a lot of times lawyers will want other people’s video, and they won’t pick up on the fact that there is actually a very specific formula that is being played out over and over again when you are listening to the lawyer videos.

 

Allison Williams: [00:24:31] So I’m going to give you a couple of lawyer content formats. The very first one I want you to think about is question three points called to action. Ok. Question three points called to action. Beautiful thing about ensuring that you are using this formula is that it’s really simple. So the question would be how do you handle X, Y, and Z in my legal practice area? The call to the three points would be Today I’m going to cover with you three ways to handle X, Y, Z in my legal practice area. And then at the end, you’re going to say now if you have a question about X, Y, or Z in my legal practice area, reach out to me at this number. Right? Very simple. It’s a telling them what you’re going to tell them. You’re going to then actually tell them in the three points and then you’re going to sum it all up with a call to action that they do something to address their concern.

 

Allison Williams: [00:25:32] Another formula, very, very common formula is concept example, call to action. So this one is where you introduce an idea and then you illustrate the idea through something that’s happened where you are the hero of the story. So this could be you tell the concept, you share the concept of this is what we are doing. This is what we typically encounter with prospects to our law firm. Right. They they’re scared about A, B, and C, and there are some very, very specific things that you can do to handle that. But here’s how we generally help people with that. And then you move over to the example you tell them where you have this problem present before a problem not unlike a lot of your prospects might be experiencing. And then you say to them simply, and when this person came to me, they were hopeless. They didn’t know that there was an answer. They didn’t know how they were going to get through it. And yet we were able to fill in the blank. Here’s how we were able to help solve the problem. Here’s how we were able to create more opportunities for the client. And then once you get to the end, it’s the same call to action. Now, if you or someone you know is struggling with this type of problem, we can help you if you don’t know if you have a remedy. Let’s get a consultation on the book so we can help you with that exact problem. You can reach me at, fill in the blank. Ok.

 

Allison Williams: [00:26:57] Again, concept usually involves a little bit more than question because you’re going to have to flesh it out a little bit to let people know exactly what you’re talking about. But then you’re going to illustrate the concept through a previous success story, whether it is a previous prospect that ultimately signed up and became a client and got the resolution they wanted. Or you can do the converse of that right? They did not hire you, and so they had a negative outcome. Right. So the illustration would be Steve consulted with me, went with a cheaper lawyer down the street, and here’s what happened to Steve. You don’t be like Steve, right? The whole idea is you really want to get them thinking about how you can add value versus the first formula, where you’re really giving out data points and you’re giving them enough information that they understand that you have a solution and they’re willing to explore with you if, if your solution is the one for them.

 

Allison Williams: [00:27:55] All right, everyone, I’m Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor. Today, we have been talking about batching your law firm content. If you were someone that you know needs help in your law firm to create a strategy around your marketing, which could and likely would include batching your law firm content, just reach out to us, here you can speak with a growth strategist by virtue of going to our website. I am Allison Williams, Your Law Firm Mentor everyone. Have a great day!

 

Allison Williams: [00:28:29] Thank you for tuning in to The Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast to learn more about today’s show and take advantage of the resources mentioned. Check out our show notes. And if you enjoy today’s episode, take a moment to follow the podcast wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating and review. This helps us to reach even more law firm owners from around the country who want to crush chaos in business and make more money. I’m Allison Williams your Law Firm Mentor, everyone. Have a great day!