Ep. 22 - Show, Don’t Tell – The Marketing Shift That Actually Works

In this episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor Podcast, I’m taking on one of the most overused and least understood pieces of advice in marketing: show, don’t tell. 

If you’ve been throwing money into ads, rewriting your website for the tenth time, and still hearing crickets, the problem may not be what you’re doing - it’s how you’re doing it.

I break down the real meaning of “show, don’t tell” in a law firm marketing context and explain why telling people you’re “the best” is not only ineffective, it’s often impossible (and sometimes unethical). 

Instead, I walk you through how to give prospective clients proof through valuable, relevant, and human content that actually connects.

In this episode, I cover:

• What “banner blindness” is and why most marketing dollars disappear into it
• How to demonstrate value without sounding like a bragging billboard
• Easy ways to create resources and stories that position you as the go-to attorney
• Why being human is your most powerful marketing strategy

If you’re ready to stop shouting into the void and start showing clients why you’re the right choice without gimmicks or hype then this episode will give you the blueprint.

Tune in, and let’s build your marketing around proof, not promises.

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 new listeners, I'm glad you're here. For my returning listeners, it's great to have you back. In my podcast, I share the strategies for growth that have worked for me in 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. So what do you think your biggest challenge is in marketing your law firm? You've probably tried all the social media channels, and that makes sense for a law firm to use. You've run some Google or Facebook ads, you've revised your website content until the thought of typing one more word makes you literally sick to your stomach. You've tweaked and polished and buffed until your head aches, even thinking about it. And yet, you've got crickets. You've shout out money and time and energy, and you've got nothing to show for it. Your phone isn't ringing any more than it was, and your revenues are flat, and the results you've gotten have left you wondering what you're doing wrong. So okay, maybe the problem isn't what you're doing. Maybe it's how you're doing it. You've probably uh heard the old maxim, show, don't tell. Most people take it to mean something along the lines of talk is cheap. But if you want someone to believe you, don't tell them what you're going to do. Show them. Walk your talk. Better yet, let your walking do the talking. In marketing, it works the same way. How many times have you heard this company or that product claim it was the best? Then you tried it out for yourself and found out that they didn't deliver. After all, they said they were the best and you wasted your time and money to find out that they weren't even close. We've all been there. We've all bombard are bombarded by ads and promos. Get this, grab that. Supplies are limited. Only for a short time. We're told that things are the best, the biggest, the greatest, until we almost don't even hear or see it. Everyone's so busy trying to claim that they've got this perfect solution that it causes the people we're trying to convince to buy our services to experience what's known as banner blindness. This is a term that was coined in 1998 as a way of explaining why people ignored banner ads and ad content on websites. The reason was because people got inured to ads and marketing content showing up on the sidebars and in the header section of websites, and they learned to ignore them. They consciously or subconsciously marked the content of those banners as irrelevant, and they moved on with the information that they actually wanted from the sites that they visited. Even if you've never heard of banner blindness, chances are you've experienced it firsthand. You've probably been listening to the radio and heard a jingle for a sub shop that they play 50 times an hour on that station. By the third or fourth time, chances are you aren't going, hey wow, I'm hungry. Instead, you're probably thinking, seriously, how many times are they going to play this stupid song? By the fortieth time, you likely didn't even uh hear it at all. Your brain had figured out that it was irrelevant to anything that you were doing, and it tuned it out. Sure, you noticed it subconsciously, but it didn't even register with your decision-making centers. You've probably had a similar sensation while driving, riding the bus, reading a newspaper, watching TV, you get the idea. You're driving down the freeway with billboards on both sides. You see the ads, they register, and then they just don't. Unless you saw a really clever or unusual one that got your attention. You know you saw them, but if somebody held a gun to your head and asked you what you saw 30 seconds ago, you'd probably say something like, I don't know, the road. That is banner blindness. Even though it was coined to describe an internet-specific phenomena, it happens to everyone, everywhere, and all the time. No one's immune. It's a natural reaction to being constantly bombarded by information and by me from every direction all the time. Your mind just switches off and refuses to process anything except what you're actually looking for. You can test this for yourself right now. Pull up any website, surf around for a minute, see how long it takes you to realize that you don't even notice the ads or the banners. The page hasn't changed. The banners and ads are all still there in the exact same positions, but your eyes and brain just somehow don't see them anymore. I know this sounds like me telling you not to think about pink elephants and purple zebras, but if you try it for yourself, you'll probably find you're more aware of it, and you'll realize that it happens a lot more than you ever realized in your day-to-day life. Now imagine that everyone out there driving that road, reading that paper, listening to that radio station, or viewing that website is feeling the exact same thing. And yet, we throw banner ads and Facebook flashes and buy this, try me, we're the best, into the ether over and over and over again. This year alone, we'll spend enough money on advertising to solve world hunger twice over. That's$426 billion for those of you with a pressing need to know. And about 90% of that money is wasted to banner blindness and marketing to people who couldn't care less. So what do we do about it? Well, it's obviously not enough to say we're the best and leave it at that. Even if we as attorneys could say that ethically, and we most definitely uh would might have issues with that, we'd have to be able to prove it. Okay, so you've won your last hundred cases without a single loss, but case 101 could be that one to break your streak. Now you've basically lied in your advertising, and I don't know of any state bar that has a sense of humor about that. We need another better approach. We need to show our prospective clients what makes us the solution for their specific needs. But short of getting them into the courtroom, or in my case, at the patent office and having them watch us work, how do we do that? Well, a brag fest isn't going to get the job done. I've won a hundred cases in a row. Attorneys for the opposing side beg me to settle, so I won't make them look stupid in court. Or this regulatory body or that registration panel hates to see my name on filings because they know I'm serious about winning for my clients. Yeah, again, we run into the problem of things we can't say. They may be true here and now, but by the time you've even rolled out the ad, it might be inaccurate. Oops. Not to mention uh the fact that uh clients are understandably nervous about someone who says they're the solution before that person even hears the problem. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence, and it shouldn't. Instead, we need to come at this from a different angle. Instead of telling uh potential clients how great we are, we need to show them. We need to market to them by not marketing to them. Wait, what? But John, your entire podcast is about internet marketing for law firms. How do you market without marketing? Well, here's a little secret. I'm doing that right now. I'm giving you something of value and sharing my experience in over 25 years of digital marketing. Something that you can use right here and right now. Even if you leave this episode and never listen to another one, even if you don't take anything else away from it, you now know what banner blindness is, how it works, and you understand a little bit uh about it better. Uh that's what you need to do in your marketing. You give your audience and your website visitors something useful and relevant to them, and you don't ask for anything in return. You don't expect anything. You just lay it out there and wait. But wait, lay what out there? You're probably asking. Uh anything. Maybe you offer your visitors to your site a white paper about a specific legal topic, like in the case of the patent professor, I might do a white paper about what to do if your patent application is rejected. If I was going to do a white paper on this topic, I'd talk about things like the fact that the vast majority of patent applications that they're initially rejected. In fact, over 90% of all patents are rejected on the first submission, and they have to be revised, refined, or include more information for the examiner. I'd explain why a utility patent is more likely to be rejected at 90% than a design patent. I'd describe the appeal process, what the terminology means, and how to increase your odds of successfully prosecuting your patent. I'd also spell out why someone might file a challenge against your patent and what you would have to do to demonstrate to the patent office to shut that challenge down. I could apply the same logic to trademarks, copyrights, or any other area of my intellectual property practice. The point is, by doing this, I'm giving website visitors valuable information. It won't make them an expert on the subject matter, and that's not possible in a short piece, but it will give them some ground level insights and information that they can use to decide whether my firm is the one that they want handling their patent. Now, how could this apply to your practice? Well, you could start writing a blog or an article about a subject you're passionate, knowledgeable, and educated about. Maybe you went into criminal defense because you have a family member who is treated unfairly by the police or the courts, and you want to go into more depth about that. You chose estate planning, for example, because you saw what the probate battle over your uncle's estate did to your family. And you want to try to make sure that this doesn't happen to anyone else's. You picked uh family law because you're passionate about the rights of fathers and uh perhaps disgusted by how you perceive the courts tend to side with the mother in custody disputes. It doesn't matter, but pick a topic and write about it. Use facts and figures and show a little vulnerability and some humanity. Again, be careful what you say because you don't want to come off as having an axe to grind. You can bet your opposition will try to use that against you in court. Now you've opened the door. You could end with something like if you or a loved one is dealing with this issue, click here to download my free in-depth guide to whatever it is. You're the one who knows your field best. You know your ideal client and your needs, their wants, their hopes, their fears, and you know this better than I ever could. So you're the subject matter expert here. You're the one who's best positioned to speak to their needs and tell them what they need to know. And you're the one who's best able to demonstrate while you why you and your law firm are the ones that your client needs to trust with their problems. Here's the thing about showing instead of telling, it takes longer. It is hard work. The ROI you'll get from it isn't something you can easily quantify with clicks or client billings, but it's absolutely uh algorithm proof and it's going to earn you more goodwill, more respect, and more clients in the long run than any number of flashy click me ads that you could ever possibly run. How else can you show what your firm's all about instead of telling? One obvious way would be to showcase the cases that you've won, but that comes back to possibly being read as humble bragging, not a great look. Instead, you could emphasize the pro bono work that you or your associates do, especially if it's work with a community focus. For example, you may have a finance law attorney on your roster who donates time to community outreach initiatives like clean and sober living facilities or nonprofit children's rec centers. You might have a family law associate who works with shelters for women and children escaping abusive homes. In fact, you could even build that into your associate biographies. According to some sources, as many as 88% of consumers will be loyal to brands with social and environmental ethics and practices which mirror their own. 77% are more likely to purchase goods and services from sources which are socially and environmentally conscious, even if they end up spending more for equivalent results. Adding this information into your associate's bio is a quick and easy way to reflect your firm's social consciousness. You could also go even bigger with this. Book an hour with one of your associates and interview them about their pro bono and public service work, or have them interview you. You could even prep them for the interview by asking them to choose some questions at random from a series of prompts, or ask them upright, outright what questions you have about their chosen practice area that they think somebody would ask them. The answers you get might surprise you, and they'll give you more insight into the people you work with at the same time that you're getting crucial social credibility for your firm. And finally, something I want to stress again because I don't think it gets said or heard enough, be human. Everyone knows uh you're smart, educated, and competent. Law school isn't for slackers or people who are content to coast while their peers do all the heavy lifting, but show something about your life outside the practice and your field. If you did a stint as a contestant, for example, on a cooking contest, uh, or you play uh in a band on weekends, or you perform in your local community theater productions, say that. People looking for attorneys aren't just looking for an advocate. They're looking for a person with whom they feel a connection. Shared hobbies, passions, backgrounds, and experiences. These are all great for this. They're intangibles that again you can't necessarily measure with clicks or cash, but they'll pay huge dividends for your firm because the people uh who work there are gonna feel more real to prospective clients. Uh, but what if I do all that and it loses me clients? You might be wondering. Listen, you're never going to please everyone, and it's foolish to even try. And you're not going to anyway. You're what you're trying to do is attract the attention of your firm's ideal clients. About 97% of the people who visit your website won't ever become clients. And that's okay, because that 3% who is your ideal client is your bread and butter, and they're the ones you want to attract. Also, you've got to take the long view here. Sure, your firm may not be right for this person. They don't really need a lawyer anyway. But maybe they know someone who does. So they're doing some homework and they make the connection. Hey, this attorney does community theater and represents felons who are trying to uh integrate into society after being in jail. My friend just got the lead in our town and her brother just got out of the slammer. I'd pass this along. By showing and not telling, you're setting yourself up and your law firm up to attract the kind of clients that you're looking for. Of course, the best kind of showing is when you come through for your clients and ask them to pass your website and contact information along to others who might find your firm helpful. Word of mouth is still king. But how do you get word of mouth? By showing up and doing what your clients are paying you to do. No one's going to recommend the attorney that they're not happy with. Similarly, they're probably not going to recommend an attorney or a law firm that didn't that they didn't mesh well with. Yeah, my attorney's okay, but he was kind of standoffish. Uh, and I always got a weird, uncomfortable vibe from the receptionist when I went to the office. That kind of of uh uh client is not likely to make your phone ring, but showing will always be telling when it comes to your firm's marketing. And the more showing you do, the more likely it is that your clients will tell others about your law firm in all the right ways. Now, before I call it a day on this episode, I want to get your thoughts on showing versus telling. Have you tried this yourself? And what were the results? How would you do it differently if you're in the exact same position in the future? The comments are open and I'm listening. Once again, I'm John Rizby, the Law Firm Growth Professor. Thanks for stopping in today. And before you leave, if you enjoyed this episode, I'd appreciate if you'd shoot me a like, click, uh, and subscribe, and be sure to share this podcast with other attorneys and legal professionals who you think might find it useful. Be sure to tune in next time when I'll be talking about playing the long game and why it matters for your law firm. I'll look forward to seeing you there. Thank you. 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 that is fun and start. If the patent office says your idea is 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.