LinkedIn For Lawyers

Allison Williams: [00:00:05] Hi, everybody, it’s Alison 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 and business and make more money.

 

Allison Williams: [00:00:31] This week we’re going to be talking about LinkedIn and in particular, some strategies you can use right now to dramatically improve your results on this social media platform. So let’s dive in.

 

Allison Williams: [00:00:49] So the first thing I want to tell you about LinkedIn and the reason why I chose this topic is that I think it is a golden opportunity and it presents the opportunity that a lot of lawyers are seeking to up-level your clients. Meaning depending on the service that you offer, whether you are a business attorney or a family law attorney or a personal injury attorney or a criminal defense attorney. You may be thinking that LinkedIn is really for professional networking and where you go to get a job. It’s, it’s where you kind of put yourself out there if you’re doing public speaking and things like that, but it really does present an opportunity for you to get in front of your ideal target market. Now, for some of you, the ideal target market may not be on LinkedIn. But for a lot of us, and I probably say statistically, the majority of us, you can find clients there just as you can find clients on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or all these other social media platforms. But the way that lawyers tend to use LinkedIn is counterproductive for achieving that objective. So today we’re going to talk about three different aspects of LinkedIn that I think will help you to be able to be more effective on that platform.

 

Allison Williams: [00:02:00] So the first thing we’re going to talk about is optimizing your profile for search engines. And what that means is that a lot of times what we put on LinkedIn is kind of the name rank serial number stuff, right where we’ve previously worked, what jobs we’ve held, what our, what our title was. And we’re actually talking about how to optimize your profile and your pages. Those are the two other areas we’re going to cover. But I wanted to start with optimizing search engine, optimizing your profile for search engines because I want you to recognize that of all of the social media platforms, LinkedIn is the only one that gets crawled by search engines. So when you are putting data on LinkedIn, I don’t want you to think of it the same way that you would think of what you put on Facebook or what you put on Instagram. Those are closed universes where the data that you put there is discoverable, meaning, depending on how it ultimately is, is compiled and the audiences to which it is promoted.

 

Allison Williams: [00:02:59] Ultimately, it can be found, but it isn’t going to be found by a search engine, right? You’re not going to put, you know, had dinner last night at Wolfgang Puck’s. And all of a sudden, anytime someone goes to search for Wolfgang Puck, your Facebook status comes up, right? It doesn’t, It doesn’t work that way. So you’re missing a golden opportunity if you’re not embedding in your LinkedIn profile the words that are necessary for a search engine to find you and associate you and your brand with whatever topic it is that you’re speaking about. And this presents a golden opportunity so that when you are ultimately putting data on LinkedIn as a profile, people that are searching for specific keywords are more likely to find your profile than others.

 

Allison Williams: [00:03:46] The other thing I think is really important to think about when we talk about optimizing your LinkedIn profile for search engines is the idea that you can create content that is not just about you, but is specific to the topic that you want to promote. And there are lots of different ways to do this, so you can create a newsletter. All right, we’ve talked before about using newsletters as a means of staying top of mind in front of your, your prospects. These are people that have already had some form of contact with your website, with your law firm, and they’ve already authorized you to communicate with them.

 

Allison Williams: [00:04:23] But you can get people to subscribe to your newsletter by simply putting it on LinkedIn. You can actually invite people that follow you and people that are connected to you to subscribe to your newsletter. And the great thing about that is that what you might want to do is give people an opportunity to learn more not just about your law firm, but learn about your expertise in the area that matters to you most when you’re promoting your law firm through your newsletter. And of course, if you are actively promoting your newsletter, you’re more likely to get people that would say, Ah, this is a person who is invested in this topic right there. A thought leader, right? That’s something that you can start to build a brand around because they’re talking about this, because they’re immersed in this topic, because they are constantly feeding us information about it. So for some services that are not urgent, you’re more likely to get a build-up of a repository of information where people can kind of binge your content to learn about you. And then there are other times where even when it is an urgent matter, right? Even when it’s something that a person knows that they need to do something about, they’ve been served with a divorce complaint or they’ve been sued by a neighbor, or they could have an eviction pending, right? They know it’s urgent, but they may have, for whatever reason, resistance around solving the problem, right? We all know those clients that walk through our door where it’s like two days after their deadline and they say, Can you help me? And you might have a legal recourse to be able to buy them more time or get them into the courthouse doors or, you know, extend an arbitrary deadline imposed by a demand letter. But however, you ultimately do that. It wasn’t that the person didn’t realize that they had a time pressure. It’s oftentimes that people choose to delay when they feel emotionally scared, shut down, etcetera.

 

Allison Williams: [00:06:19] So the more opportunity that they have, I know I’ve had several clients tell me and members of my team that they were served with a complaint. They knew that they had to do something, but they were just overwhelmed with how to choose the right person and so they just started going online, seeking out data, and they started bingeing content that we had available on our various different platforms. So never miss an opportunity to create a digital imprint because here with again LinkedIn being the search engine that’s going to be called, pardon me, the social media platform that’s going to be called by search engines, you’re going to have the greatest opportunity there to really get people who will know about you, will know your voice, know what you stand for and will come in typically more qualified than they otherwise would be if they came in cold, not knowing anything about your law firm.

 

Allison Williams: [00:07:11] Another thing that’s a really great strategy from LinkedIn when you’re talking about optimizing content is video marketing. And video marketing has taken on, you know, it’s been around for obviously some time, and more and more lawyers are using it. But it’s taking, taking on certain new iterations if you will, because I see a lot of video marketing now where people are using captions and they’re actually having their videos transcribed so that when the video is posted, all of the words that you were saying in the video are available and posted with the video itself so that if someone wanted to search online for certain topics, your words in that video now in a transcript on the platform would be searchable and would be discoverable. So one perfect example of this and I, you know, I’m a very big proponent of video socials there, my video blogging club and I talk about them often. I’ve actually had the pleasure to interview both of the co-owners. I think I interviewed Vikram Rajan in our Facebook group community, the Law Firm Mentor Movement, and I interviewed Mark Bulloch actually here on the podcast, one of our early episodes. So I might want to go back and check that out if you’re interested in video content.

 

Allison Williams: [00:08:25] But the beautiful thing about video socials is that it’s a club and you get to go and record a quick video every week. And now they have the technology where when the video is created, you can automatically have it caption so that all of the words that you say in the video are transcribed and posted with the video. So literally with like two presses of a button, I get to have my video posted on LinkedIn automatically with a transcript, and that transcript is something those words are something that can be found by a search engine. The beautiful thing about that is you can talk about whatever your particular, particular area of law is, but you can also talk about your perspective. So you can kind of embed into the video the words that you know are going to be found while also giving that nurture feeling right? Of letting people know who you are, what you stand for contemporaneously with the appropriate keywords in that same communication. So it’s kind of like a double whammy, right? People can find you and they can get warmed up to you in the same message, not just here is my ABC strategy for handling this particular legal matter.

 

Allison Williams: [00:09:39] And then the final thing I want to talk about with optimizing your search engine, optimizing your LinkedIn profile for search engines is to make sure that you are posting your website right? So LinkedIn is not particularly fond of sending people off the platform, so there’s a way that you have to do this, you would really do it in the comments as opposed to in the post, but you want to give people an opportunity to know where they can go if they want more information about you. And obviously, you want to get that double hit right? You want to have them find you on LinkedIn and thus have that for SEO value, but you also want to send them to your website so you have more organic reach on your website, which is likely to drive up your rankings on a search engine without any paid content. Ok, so strategy number one is to optimize your LinkedIn profile for search engines.

 

Allison Williams: [00:10:27] Strategy number two is to really optimize your profile, and I’ve seen a lot of content creators talking about LinkedIn profiles and how to get your profile to really pop. But I had a conversation recently with a lawyer who is at a place in his career where he wants to kind of rebrand himself if you will. And one of the things that he talked about when you talked about his LinkedIn profile is that he really wants to be known for a particular niche within his practice area. He wants to focus on a particular business type in trademark law. And so when we started having that conversation, one of the things that I said to him just looking at his LinkedIn profile is I don’t really see you associated with your niche in your LinkedIn profile. I see you associated with the practice area, you’re clearly a trademark lawyer. But I don’t see the niche. So, you know, the niches are in the, you know, the riches are in the niches. How do we get to you having more presence with the niche? And the easiest way would be to ultimately change the profile, change the, the words that are used change the way that things are structured. So one thing that I’m a big fan of when we look at LinkedIn profiles is not just identifying skills, but also identifying results. And results marketing is much more effective than simply name, rank serial number. So when you start thinking about how do we get someone to see our profile and say, Ah yes, this is the person that I want to hire or this is the person I want to work with or refer to the easiest way for a person to clearly identify you as associated with a niche is that you start to talk about your results within that niche.

 

Allison Williams: [00:12:15] Now, I highly recommend results marketing no matter what right? A client, a prospect is going to be much more excited by reading that you were, that you have one more than a dozen trials with verdicts over a million dollars. That’s much more impressive than we’ve represented hundreds of people with great results, right? The more specific the outcome and the more desirable the outcome, the more clarity that a person has that your outcome is also the same as their desired outcome.

 

Allison Williams: [00:12:46] Now, of course, in different jurisdictions, you have to be careful. You do need to make a note that this is attorney advertising. A lot of jurisdictions require that, so please check your bar rules to make sure that you are including that proviso if that is required. But if you don’t put the result out there, right, even if you say something like results, not typical right, some jurisdictions require that as well. Not all of them, right? Don’t put it there in which you have to, but you really want to be stoking the fire of the emotional response of the person when they’re reading your profile. And so often, I think lawyers forget, even though we are engaged in an analytical process, right? You’re, you’re putting out data and information for someone. We often forget that that data and information still needs to evoke an emotional response. So when we come back, we’re actually going to talk a little bit more about how to get that emotional response. And we’re going to talk about how to ultimately move yourself from simple resume to results.

 

Allison Williams: [00:13:46] We’ll be right back.

 

Allison Williams: [00:13:53] 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 follow our step-by-step approach to building your marketing strategy, you’ll have a roadmap to transform your marketing.

 

Elise Buie: [00:14:08] 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: [00:14:36] 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 oh 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: [00:15:08] All right, now, we’re back and we’re talking about moving your resume to a results-focused document on LinkedIn. And so one of the things I want to give you to really help you focus this in is to think about powerful outcomes, right? Powerful outcomes and powerful people. So LinkedIn has features on its profile built in where you can ask people for recommendations. And oftentimes we will just go to a prior client or we will go to industry leaders in the area and ask them to give us a recommendation. But I want you to think about having a person who already has a highly optimized profile and who has some level of status relative to what you want to market to be able to speak for you. Right? So if the person that you invite is a person who would be highly benefited to use a trademark attorney right in the example that we used earlier, then that person is going to probably have more cachet, be more persuasive, be better able to impress your potential audience than John Doe, who says wonderful, glorious things about you, but who no one really knows right or who doesn’t have anything on their profile. So all you can see is John Doe works at ABC company for 15 years, but you don’t know much else about him or her. Right? So you want to have that. You want to have both the powerful person and the powerful outcome kind of married together when you think about marketing for your, your intended audience.

 

Allison Williams: [00:16:43] OK. The next strategy that I want to move to and we’re talking, when we’re talking about optimizing your, your presence and your outcomes on LinkedIn is to talk about creating a business page. Now, this might be somewhat common sense. I think a lot of people, as soon as they decide to launch a business, I certainly see, you know, lawyers all the time saying, Hey, I’m going out on my own, I’m really excited. And then they will have a Facebook page that they ask you to like, and share, and follow. And people don’t do that as frequently on LinkedIn, and I’ve always wondered why. I don’t know if it’s because they see LinkedIn as kind of a professional to professional place, and they don’t necessarily think about the page as having much opportunity or if it’s something else. But it really is critically important that you recognize how significant a page can be for you on LinkedIn. Your page is kind of the, the personality of your business, right? I want you to think about actually three P’s when we talk about promoting your business page as a person, you need to think about its personality, you need to think about the people, and you need to think about the purpose.

 

Allison Williams: [00:17:56] So the personality is pretty obvious, right? You need to have something on there that connects the humans that you would ultimately be serving through your business with your business persona, right? You might have a really funky individual personality, but your business may not exude that same energy, right? You may have decided, for whatever reason, that you want to have a more tempered personality in your business based on who you’re serving. Or it could be that you have a really subdued personality, but your business is kind of like bright colors and flashy lights and a lot of personality, right? Think about, think about what your business signifies like, what does it look like? Feel like, say to you, the marketplace on your website, and then give a similar feeling if your website is what you wanted to say. But if it needs some work, then don’t necessarily copy and paste it over to LinkedIn. But assuming that it doesn’t need work, assuming that you’ve got a website that really speaks to who you want to serve speaks to how you move through the world, what your values are, your mission, your purpose, all of that. And then take that same branding and bring it over to LinkedIn. Because when people see powerful images, when they see a lot of activity, a lot of energy that draws the eye, that draws the connectivity that a person would experience with your brand. Right?

 

Allison Williams: [00:19:15] So your brand really should be thought of as a person that you are offering to the marketplace, and that brand is most powerfully felt through the entity of your business. Now, the second P is for people, right? The people that work in your business need to get top billing, i.e. people buy from people they don’t buy from businesses, even though they might associate the purchase with a particular business at some point a particular, particularly in the, in the professional services realm, you really want your people to be thought of as the greeters, those that are going to usher a prospect over the line from meeting you to ultimately becoming a paying client. So the people should be on your business page, right? They should, you should ask your employees some, some, some places. Well, actually require employees, I don’t know if you can do that in every jurisdiction, so you definitely want to check with your bar on that, but some people require that every employee has to identify that they work at the company and has to like the page and follow the page. But even beyond that, you want to have their headshots somewhere on your page. You want to feature them periodically. You know, America’s next top receptionist, you know, have that have that person really be there as the smiling face that a prospect would receive would be greeted by when they call your office. So you want to have that there and, and palpably so, so that people can really start to create personal connections with the individuals.

 

Allison Williams: [00:20:46] And then finally, the purpose, right? So everyone thinks that the purpose of their business is relatively evident. You know, we are a civil litigation firm and we help people resolve lawsuits, right? That might be kind of the super super super basic punch line. But when we say the purpose of your business, this is really what caused you as the entrepreneur, the business owner to create this business, right? What is the purpose of life being fulfilled through your business? Right? Who are you helping? Why did you choose this entity? Why did you choose this area of law? Why do you choose this particular niche within the area of law? Because I’m sure we’ve all heard it before, and many of you are familiar with the work of Simon Sinek. You know, the kind of the infamous TED talk now Start with why? Right? And one of his, his successor book written with a business partner of his. Find your Why. Right? People will buy your why more than your what. Right. So when you start thinking about why someone chooses a professional over another professional, it is not typically because professional one has a more impressive resume than professional two. I mean, sometimes you get elitist people, and that’s really what their motivation is, but far less than you actually believe. And more often than not, even when a person decides upon a lawyer with a very impressive resume, there’s often something else that’s drawing them in that they may not even be able to speak to.

 

Allison Williams: [00:22:17] And it typically is the purpose, i.e., people want to know that you’re going to fight the good fight for them, or that you’re going to push the strong agenda for them based on the fact that you believe it as fervently as they do.

 

Allison Williams: [00:22:29] All right, everyone. This week we have been talking about LinkedIn for Lawyers. I want you to give some serious thought and consideration to optimizing your LinkedIn profile for search engine optimization, improving your profile overall, and creating a business page. And if you need help with that, if this is something that from a marketing perspective, you intellectually understand what to do, but you don’t know how it’s going to integrate with your full-on marketing plan. Reach out to us here at Law Firm Mentor, this is definitely something we can help you with. I’m Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor and I’ll see you next week.

 

Allison Williams: [00:23:09] 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!