Ep. 29 - What if the problem is not your agency and it is you?

In this episode, I wrap up my three-part series on digital marketing agencies with the toughest question of all: What if the problem isn’t your agency… what if it’s you?

It’s never fun to look in the mirror and ask, “Am I standing in the way of my own firm’s growth?” But sometimes, even when an agency is hitting the KPIs, showing the receipts, and doing everything they promised, your marketing still falls flat. 

Why? 

Because your message, your involvement, or your expectations might be off.

I share the common mistakes attorneys make, like giving vague direction, expecting unrealistic results, or shutting down expert advice because it’s uncomfortable to hear. I talk about times I’ve been the problem in my own firm’s marketing, how I had to eat crow, and the lessons I learned.

This episode will help you spot whether your agency is truly underperforming, or whether you’re unintentionally sabotaging their efforts. And most importantly, it will give you the tools to reset, re-engage, and actually partner with your agency to build lasting success.

Tune in now and learn how to stop blocking your own marketing and start fueling your firm’s growth.

Want to learn more about how our agency can help your law firm grow? Speak with John Rizvi ☎️

Transcript

John Rizvi 0:00

This is Pod Populi, podcast for the people. That's my name. Hi, and welcome. I'm John Risby, the Law Firm Growth Professor. And for my regulars, welcome back to the show. For my new listeners, it's always good to have you. In my podcast, I share the strategies for growth that have worked for me and growing my law firm from a startup with just me, a laptop, and a cell phone operating out of a spare bedroom to where we are today. A team of 60 professionals generating over 10 million a year in revenues from our 10,000 square foot headquarters in Coral Springs. Now, in this episode, we're going to wrap up our three-part series about digital marketing agencies and what you should expect from them and what they should expect from you. We've seen what doing it right and wrong looks like. We've nailed down some red and green flags you should be looking for. But today, we're going to get into a topic that's really uncomfortable. How do you know that you're not the problem with your firm's marketing success? See, nobody wants to have this conversation. Nobody wants to think about it. Nobody wants to admit that this may be a conversation that you need to have. But there's a point where you have to stop and say, okay, if I'm sure that my marketing agency isn't screwing me and they're making all the right moves and they're hitting all the KPIs that we specified and stipulated together, then what's the common denominator? You are. Whether you're doing it consciously or not, you're getting in your own way. Something about your marketing or about your firm's image is not resonating with your intended ideal client the way that you need and want it to. And why is that? Is it a personality thing? Are you too abrasive? Are you too demure? Are you too meek? Are you soft-spoken when they uh need and want somebody who's not afraid to get loud? Are you getting too loud when they need somebody who's a little more toned down and buttoned up? You're not going to please everybody, and that's okay. You're not trying to please everyone. Uh what you're trying to do is target a specific person in a very specific field and demographic and location. That is your ideal client. You're not talking to everyone around them who is not them or should you be. You want to be having a conversation specifically with your ideal clients. But what if your message isn't landing? Your marketing agency is doing everything they said they would do, and they've got the receipts to show it and the stats and the data. If that's the case, then it's possible that you're the problem. Now that's uncomfortable, and that's uh something that nobody wants to hear. Nobody wants to think about it. I've done that myself. I have been the problem, and I've had to have somebody check me and say, no, John, wait a minute. You need to consider this and this and this, things that I didn't take into account or that I thought I had uh already handled. Why? Because I thought I had this whole thing on lock, and as it turned out, I was mistaken. And again, being sincerely mistaken is not the same thing as being maliciously wrong. But when you're standing right in the middle of it and you're trying to get your firm's uh phones to ring and you're trying to get clients in the door, and you're trying to get retainers in your firm's bank account, it could be hard to tell the difference. So you've got to start asking yourself some uncomfortable questions. What am I doing that's contributing to my firm's marketing not working? What can I do differently? How can I approach this differently? Am I too involved in what the marketing agency is doing? Am I trying to steer this thing in a way that they've already told me isn't going to work? Believe it or not, you can do that, and you can do it with the best of intentions. Again, being honestly mistaken is not the same as being maliciously wrong, but it's still hurting you and it's still damaging your firm, your marketability, and ultimately over time, it is damaging your ability to effectively market your firm. None of these are good things. So you need to really think about that and you need to take it seriously and consider that as pleasant as it might be to contemplate, you might be the problem. Here's some questions you might ask yourself. When my marketing firm tells me I need to do this and this and this, am I listening to them? Or am I just shooting it down because I'm the expert on my own firm and what it needs? When my marketing agency tells me something I don't want to hear, do I take it in because they're the subject matter experts on marketing? Or am I dismissing it because I'm the client and I'm going to get it my way, even if my way is not the best way to get it done? Again, this is an awkward conversation to have with yourself in the mirror. It's even more awkward to have this conversation with your marketing team when you realize that you're the one blocking the door to your firm's marketing success. Even when you've tried to uh they've tried to tell you this is not the way to do it. Now, this is not a bad thing in and of itself. Every once in a while, an ego check uh and having to eat a helping of crow does all of us good. I've been told I was crazy, I don't know how many times, by I don't know how many people, including attorneys, that I really respected and looked up to. I've been right more often than not, but I have been wrong quite a few times. And as often as not, when I was wrong, I was spectacularly wrong. And when I was spectacularly wrong, I was lucky that it didn't blow up in my face any more than it did. Because it could have. And I'm painfully aware of that, and that's why I'm telling you this now. These are things that you need to be cognizant of with your marketing. And you need to consider that if your marketing firm's doing it right, they're hitting all their marks, and they're doing everything they said they would do, and you've rubber stamped it all, then you need to ask this question what is going wrong? Is it possible that maybe uh you're the problem? Maybe uh uh you need help figuring out if it's you. Well, one of the classic errors that people make when hiring a marketing firm is having no clear direction. This isn't limited to attorneys, by the way. People from every industry do this and it drives marketers insane. They come in with a vague goal like increase my ranking on Google, but they have no idea how they want to achieve it. They don't know or understand what the marketers need to know in order to make that happen. And they get out of it exactly what they put into it. Nothing. You see, marketers aren't mind readers. Telling your marketing team that you want to get to page one on Google isn't helpful. You and every other lawyer and their dog is gunning for the exact same thing. If you're just starting out and you don't even have a website yet, how are you going to measure success? Anything is better than nothing, but you have to have something to build from. And in that same way, maybe you've decided that you need a website revamp. You tell your marketing team they have carte blanche to do whatever they think is necessary. They try to pick your brain and you tell them to just do it and make assumptions. Maybe you give them a vague list of ideas and generalities for things you didn't want and you tell them to run with that. So they do. And then you hate the results. The color scheme's all wrong, the text is unappealing to you, and you're wondering who created this mess in the first place. You told them that you wanted it in blue, okay. What shade of blue? Do you want the font in a nice readable text? What does that mean to you? You're almost certainly not going to use Comic Sans for a legal website. But if you if they've used Times New Roman and you wanted Aerial Font and you wanted Royal Blue, and they went with Aquamarine, who's ultimately to blame? You are, because you're the one who didn't give them the guidance that they needed. And the only thing marketers hate more than being told what they that they have to redo their work is being blamed for not uh having been given sufficient instructions. If they gave you exactly what you asked for, it's not their fault that you got it. And if they're good at what they do, they asked you for input and buy-in. They sent you mock-ups, they told you what they were going to do, they put in all this time on a result you hate because you didn't tell them what you did want. Another error people often make is on expecting unrealistic outcomes from their marketing. If you think every single person who visits your website should convert to a consult and then a paying client, then I'm sorry to say this, but you're delusional. If you get eight out of a hundred visitors to your website to convert to a retainer paying client, you're absolutely crushing it. Or maybe you think that SEO is a magic bullet, and if your marketing team does it right, you'll be at the top of Google by the end of the week. It's not going to happen like that. Now, in very rare cases, you or your team might produce a page or a piece of content that shoots to the top of Google and ranks for a keyword literally overnight. But if this happens, you've probably got three things working for you. First, you or the writer who created your content drafted something that hit at exactly the right time and exactly the right place to launch your link to the top of Google. There are very good, very talented writers out there who specialize in this type of work, and even the best of them only expect to rank probably once out of every 200 pieces that they produce. Anyone who beats these odds is insanely lucky and astronomically good and an incredibly rare resource. Next, you or they picked exactly the right keyword and fleshed it out just right. You hit the magic SEO proportions without keyword stuffing. The content was useful and engaging, people reacted positively to it, and Google took notice. This is a function of skill and experience. But again, you can't count on this happening every time, or even most of the time, or even half of the time, because if you're chasing a keyword or search phrase, chances are every single law firm in your area and your field is doing the same. Finally, you are lucky. You cannot overstate the role that luck plays in marketing. Google changes an algorithm and suddenly XYZ law firm who is dominating in your geographical area is now at number three and you shot up to number one because of a fluke of numbers. If you get all these ingredients together and you create a perfect storm, that's great and you should be pleased. But the mistake here is expecting lightning to strike twice, five times, a hundred times. It can, but expecting it, or worse, demanding it is a surefire recipe for disaster. Which brings me to the next mistake people commonly make. You need to keep your expectations reasonable. Remember, you're not running a sprint here. It's a marathon. You're trying to build a brand that is going to outlast any Google algorithm changes or sudden shifts in public tastes and trends. If you're not in it for the long haul, but expecting fast results and an increase of five or ten times ROI on your marketing budget every month, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. And it gets worse, even worse than that. In any field of law, word gets around about unscrupulous clients. They're experts on everything under the sun and they fire attorneys and law firms on a regular basis because they're not happy with the results they got. Even when the facts and evidence don't support their arguments, they demand a perfect outcome and they take it out on their attorneys when they don't get that to happen. What happens then? Well, uh, like people in other fields, attorneys and paralegals talk. Hey, did you hear Miss John Doe fired blah and boring because she didn't like how the custody battle turned out. Now she's heading your way. So no one wants to take her calls anymore. They certainly don't want her on the client roster because they don't want to be next to be fired because she's got unreasonable expectations. Mrs. Doe is a tire kicker and she wants the right answer by her lights, not the one that actually applies to her case. Marketing is the same way. Just like word gets around about problem agencies, problem clients tend to develop a reputation that makes it hard for them to find help. No one wants to be the Mrs. Jane Doe. Don't be Miss Jane Doe. Final point to remember is that as the client, you need to pay attention. Just like we as attorneys expect our clients to pay attention when we tell them what we're doing or what the options are and why. We need to remember that our marketing agency is trying to give us important information that will help us decide what to do next. After all, if our marketing isn't up to par, we ultimately pay the price. After all, our firm name is the one that people will remember. They don't know or care who does our marketing, and they only know or care what our marketing didn't land for them. And they go somewhere else. The good marketing agency will do everything they can to work with us and help guide us to our goals. But we have to do our part too. That means when you engage a marketing agency, you need to make sure that you're engaged with their reporting and asking meaningful questions. When you're presented with options, really think about them and weigh the pros and cons before making a decision. If they tell you there's a problem, before deciding it's all the agency's fault, stop and consider how many moving parts you're trying to juggle. There's 14,000 signals from Google, and that's way more than any human can deal with. If your agency is following the plan and it's going wrong, they'll be looking to you for direction because they're backing your success, and that means they're going to back whatever play you decide as long as it's ethical and within their power. Blaming them for a Google algorithm update that set your website back three slots in the search engine results page isn't fair. It's no one's fault. It's just part of being in it for the long haul. Now, as long as your marketing trajectory has been largely upward, it doesn't make sense to pull the plug on your agency because of a single bump in the road that no one could have predicted. And that brings me to one more really important point. You need to remember that ups and downs happen. Great content can lose its place to newer content, and algorithm change can temporarily raise or lower your SERP ratings until things level out. If the trend is always downward, you need to partner with the marketing agency to figure out why. But that's severely abnormal, and generally a good marketing agency will be able to course correct if you give them time to do so. The point is, marketing a law firm is not easy. There's a lot to do and a lot of different factors you have to consider. If your marketing has stalled or it's not giving you the results you're looking for, you need to ask yourself why. And before you blame your marketing team, take a few minutes to reflect on whether you're helping them help your firm or you're getting in the way of your own success. If your agency is doing something wrong, then it's time to have a discussion. If they're doing everything right, then you need to partner with them and see what else could be done differently. And keep in mind that you could very well be the obstacle to your own uh messaging. And whether you realize it or not, the problem could be you. Now, before I close out this episode and this mini-series, I want to open up the comment section for you. Can you think of a time that you did something that got in the way of your marketing working the way you'd hoped? Uh what did you what did that look like? What did you learn from it? What did you tell others uh when they find themselves in the same situation? And how do you do things differently now? The comments are open and I'm listening. Once again, I'm John Risvie, the Law Firm Growth Professor. Before you leave, if you liked this episode and found it helpful, I'd really appreciate it if you'd click the like button. If you haven't already, please subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. And be sure to share this podcast with your friends and colleagues who may like it as well. In the next episode, I'll be talking about how to brand or rebrand your firm and what you need to do to protect that brand, both publicly and legally. Thanks for tuning in today. I'll talk to you next time. So when a new idea pops into your brain, call the patent professor. That's my name. I'm a law school professor. An engineer too. I think math is fun. If the patent office says your idea's not new, that's just red tape. That will cut right through. So when a new idea pops into your brain, call the patent professor. That's my name. That is our cool.

unknown 18:08

That is our