Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Strategies for Amplifying Your Law Firm's Digital Impact | Kevin Daisey
Ever wondered how the David of law firms can compete with the Goliath-sized budgets in digital marketing? This episode uncovers the David's slingshot—strategic digital marketing tailored for legal eagles. Join my enlightening conversation with digital marketing maestro Kevin Daisey of Array Digital as we break down why a one-size-fits-all approach simply won't cut it in the legal field. We dissect the critical elements of crafting a marketing strategy that considers both geographical nuances and practice specialties, proving that even the most modest firms can make a mark in the crowded digital realm.
Get ready to unlock the secrets to enhancing your firm's online footprint. We lay out the essential tools and strategies that can propel your law practice to the forefront of potential clients' searches. From the power of a well-orchestrated content calendar to the fine art of website optimization, we're here to guide you through the maze of content marketing. Moreover, Kevin and I tackle the delicate dance of managing client expectations—offering a glimpse into how balancing expertise with client input leads to a harmonious and result-driven digital marketing symphony.
Interested in joining the GLM Tribe? Book Your Discovery Call with Brian Today.
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
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Welcome back into life beyond the briefs, where we help lawyers live happier, healthier, wealthier and all around better lives. Today I'm talking to Kevin Daisy of array digital. Kevin and I are talking all things digital marketing, but before we do that, have you heard of the GLM tribe? At great legal marketing, we help lawyers live their best lives and the GLM tribe is where our members come together to uplift each other, help each other out and share the best tips, tactics and strategies for making more money in your law firm and having more control over your life. Check us out at the GLM tribecom and, if that seems like something you need in your life, use the scheduling link in this show's description and book a discovery call with me. All right now on with the show. What's up guys? Welcome back to the show. Today I have Kevin Daisy of array digital. Kevin's digital marketing firm provides SEO, ppc and other services to law firms in need of more clients. Kevin, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Hey Brian, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Hey, man, I'm happy that you're here, and I'm curious because, as we roll into 2024, almost every law firm that I know of has the goal of more clients, more money and most of them also less time working on cases. But we'll leave that third one aside for a while. So, focusing on the more cases, more money. A lot of people are going to be thinking about SEO and how to increase their digital awareness on the internet, and so what should firms be looking for when they're looking for an agency to do this for them?
Speaker 2:I appreciate that Good question and excited. Brian was on my podcast and we've got to know each other pretty well, so again, thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, and this is a big topic and a big deal and I run a company, just like a law firm might or owner might run their company, and so I look at the same things a law firm owner should be looking at as far as marketing, SEO and how it fits into the whole plan. So some of the big things that this year should be thinking about as we're looking at agency, you want to really make sure that. Do they have a process? Do they run their agency? What do you expect your law firm to run? Do they have processes and systems? Are they profitable? Do they have things in place so that you know they're going to be around and they're running their business effectively? Right, that might be hard to notice at first, but how they interact with you, how they're showing up to meetings, how they're prepared, that's important. Other, are they going to build a strategy that's really custom for you? Because if your law firms in Maryland or Virginia or California and based on what practice areas you're going after, if you're hypernitched a lot easier than if you're a general practice covering everything from family to personal injury to estate planning totally different clientele there, and you need to know that. Is there a strategy custom for what I'm trying to accomplish before we start to do any services?
Speaker 2:And I think the biggest problem I see out there is packages. Here's a package A, B or C and that's going to work for you and it's going to work for the other guy and that's just not how it should be done, because Easter geographic location has different search volumes that has different types of folks living in those areas. So what is the goal of your firm, what brings in the most money, what's your average client worth and whatever practice area you're trying to grow and what's the strategy to grow that? And then what's the opportunity before we spend all this money and make sure it's even viable. If the competition is too steep, you can just sit there and throw money away and never come close because they're spending 10 times what you are.
Speaker 2:Is it viable? Is there a strategy in place? And that's the biggest thing that we do here is we go to plan, we strategize, we do research. Then we say here's what will work and here's how we're going to execute that over 90 days, 12 months and so on, and so on. So I think the strategy is like the biggest thing for us is make sure that's done.
Speaker 1:That question about the eight hundred pound gorilla in your market? Because I was down at National Trial Lawyers in Miami maybe two Januarys ago now, and I heard Jason Hennessy on stage and somebody asked him OK, in a major metropolitan area, what should I expect to be spending on SEO? And he said which one? So I'm in Dallas, fort Worth, and he quoted him 35 to 40 thousand dollars a month on SEO, and so for most small law firms that's not going to make any sense at all. But it sounded like you just said if you're not going to play with that scale, you've either got to not play at all or have a different strategy. And so how would you tailor your strategy if you were a firm operating in the one million dollar revenue range, playing in a market where your competitors are spending thirty five to forty thousand dollars a month just on keeping up with the Google updates?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. So I will say for everyone listening if you're in a law firm, there's hope and there's room for you as you get going. So it's not OK, don't do this at all, don't do Google ads at all, don't do social media at all, because you're too small and you can't do it. There are cracks, there's weaknesses, there's things that we can exploit, right, and if you have the right plan and strategy and are consistent, you start to gain some of that market share, and so that's what we have to do. We have a lot of small clients, right, and here's the funny thing I have a one million dollar Dallas, fort Worth family law client.
Speaker 1:Perfect, we didn't discuss this before we got on here.
Speaker 2:He didn't exist online at all. He's been working for us about a year or more. I'm not going to say who he is, but they're spending 7,000 a month, and we're doing SEO pretty much exclusively versus say, 30, 45 a month and their spenders are out there, but it didn't start that way. We've edged him up and, as we've gotten results. What you want to look at, though, is where they're not actively spending their time and money, and that's the cool thing about SEO is we can look at the main, the value, the backlinks, the strategy that they've put in place for the last five or 10 years, before you got started, but Google has made so many updates and changes that it's becoming more difficult, and a lot of those bigger players are getting penalized and losing traffic, losing ranking and allowing some of the people that come in and do it right to gain some of that market share.
Speaker 2:So take an old website that's been around for a long time, with lots of articles, keyword stuff with lots of keywords, writing all these articles that are redundant about the same thing Dallas Family Law. You only can rank one page for one keyword, and so you can have all these pages out there that cannibalize each other and Google's saying, hey, no, we're gonna rank this one page, and not to mention, all the content was written for SEO, keyword stuff. Like I said, it's not very useful. If you read an article you'd be like, oh, this is long-winded and repetitive and it's not helpful at all. So Google's cracked down on that. It wants helpful content written by humans, by their experience, which AI can't do right now, and so-.
Speaker 1:How is Google differentiating? This article is written by a human versus this article was written by a large language model AI.
Speaker 2:The honest truth is Google's not keeping up with that very well. It's not penalizing necessarily for AI, but they want to know that there's a human touch, oversight and added experience to the situation, to the content itself. If you just go use AI strictly and just publish it, you're gonna get dang the words. It's not gonna perform. We have a few test cases where we did AI content. It gets ranked really quickly in traffic and then it drops off completely Interesting In the same 30 days.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah, you're preaching to the choir. So we updated our website, moved to a new vendor within the last two years and we had from 25 years of building our firm's site, I think 14,000 pages of content, which was like all right, we had a good idea for an article, so you wrote the article. Six minutes later it's up online and then it gets forgotten about it. So nobody ever calls through and takes out those insurance policy liability limits or updated, for instance, or that case that was interesting one time because somebody called is not actually of interest to the general public, where it's attracting cases that you don't want. So, without having a real strategy to oversee the entirety of your website portfolio, you can get lost in this.
Speaker 1:For us, it was like we looked at what we had posted and it was all stuff we didn't want. It was like why slip and fall cases are hard? Our best performing website page for a long time was how hard can you hit your child before it's child abuse? Well, we don't do criminal law. It's interesting, but it was getting a bunch of traffic from Southwest Virginia for people that ultimately were never hiring us, and so I think the intimidating thing, kevin, for lawyers is when you say, all right, spend $6,000, $7,000 a month for somebody, to quote, do SEO For us. It's like all right, that's inside of a black box and I don't understand what it is that you're doing on a week to week, month to month basis. So can you walk me through what a good agency would be doing for one of their clients in an average month?
Speaker 2:Sure, that's a good question, and I think the other big thing too is education. For us we've figured that how much do you wanna know as a client and how deep you wanna go down the rabbit hole? Cause we're here to educate and talk you through how this all works and how the process is. And honestly, in the sales process I educate pretty much the whole time because most aren't really sure, and that's the biggest problem. And I don't want a client signing up for us to be like I don't know what you guys are doing, but I guess here you go. That's not what I want, so it needs to be like oh yeah, that makes sense, I want that. Now let's go through it and educate along the way.
Speaker 2:The law firm should know what's happening, understand this stuff and take that with them if they leave at some point. Right, what they should be doing is one, obviously, the strategy and having a plan for the months ahead. You should have a content calendar that's completely flushed out for probably 12 months out. You can do 90 days if you want in chunks, but what are we writing about every month and how many articles per month? And here's the topics, here's the research, here's the key words and that way you're clear on what's coming and you signed off on it and then we have a plan to follow, so we're not scrambling every month to figure out what we're gonna do. Again met the planning and strategy the most important thing you also gotta keep in mind. That's gonna change right. 12 months out is pretty far out in the life of a business to know okay, we don't want to do that anymore. For some reason, the law changed.
Speaker 2:We want to focus down on that or hey, we brought in some new hot shot attorney that is a family attorney.
Speaker 2:We've never done family law. Now we need to send some leads to this new practice therapy. So things will change, but being able to adjust and change is important, but on a monthly basis. You should be doing continued optimizations on the website based on an audit that was done at the beginning of the relationship and when an audit basically a database of every page that you've ever had on your website and notes and actions for each of those pages keep it, rewrite it, delete it, forward it, redirect it, whatever right, every page should have an action that's constantly updated to know the inventory of what's out there. And then that way we could kill it right or say, hey, you're getting traffic from this and you're like, oh, that's terrible, I don't want that. So you got to constantly go to that audit and say, okay, what are we to work on next? So you should be automizing the site constantly through that audit, adding new content every single month and then working to get really good backlinks and I'm not talking about directory listings or hundreds of back every month.
Speaker 2:You need a couple really high quality backlinks that, honestly, you have to pay for or ask for. You can't just do some like cheap way of doing things and I'm talking like Forbes, like big backlinks that have lots of DR, that are not easy to get, and you got to do it in a way that Google doesn't see it as a bet. You're trying to do it that can penalize you, and then you have to have a meeting to discuss performance and changes and what's going on next month, what happened last month, and make sure that you're on the same page about where we are, where we're going and nothing needs to change.
Speaker 1:What is your? Yeah, and so I'm curious what your largest frustration or point of friction is with law firm owners who come in and don't see immediate results or constantly like for me. If I have a client who's constantly telling me how to do my job, that becomes like I want to work together, but I want to be able to do my job. So what are your frustrations with law firm owner clients?
Speaker 2:Oh man. So again, I think there's a two way street right, so there's one. Let us do what we do. You hired us, we literally.
Speaker 2:I have a very talented, expensive team that I've spent years building, that we rebuilt over the last couple years, like we know what we're doing. We're not fly by night, and so if we go in with confidence with that and then also on a client that that feels we're a vendor if you call us a vendor, that's cool, but we're not, we're not. I die here. And because what we do is so fragile, right, and for a vendor and there's a lot of other ones and you go in and mess with your website as an owner, you're literally compromising everything we're doing, and that's too risky for all of us. And so if we have a client that's just too willing they want to get in there and they want to do stuff, or they won't listen it's just not going to work out for either one of us. And but so we had let us do what. We need your feedback, we need your approval, so we need you to be able to be available as well. So that's another thing. So, one, let us do our job. Number two we need some availability right From the attorneys to approve, because it's legal content on a website and so we need a little bit of availability.
Speaker 2:And then I think the other, the biggest frustrations outside of that would be lawyers that are scrambling. They're not running a good firm themselves, they don't show up, they're late and they reschedule. That's obviously a big problem. They probably talked to you and your dad if that's their problem joined the tribe. And outside of that would be outside consultants is the biggest problem we have which get replaced often and come in wanting to stir things up just because they're new, right? So outside coach, new CMO, and then we don't get included in any of these conversations.
Speaker 1:Because they're talking about you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I get it, they're trying to have some kind of oversight, but we're better to be like, hey, we're going to do this and cool, let us be part of that decision and process, because we want to be more than just a vendor. That's your SEO. So there's a couple things that we see as red flags, and we might not even sign a client that's got those signs, if you will.
Speaker 1:So you've talked a couple times about business structure, both with you, but we're also expecting it of attorney clients, and then you were talking about building the team that you have over the last couple of years, and so I'm curious, kevin, what the structure within your organization looks like. Is everybody remote or people down in Southwest and Virginia Beach with you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, good question. So we had me and my business partner, our two owners of the agency, and I started my first one in 2006. And we started a red digital together in 2017, as we started an itch into law and really figure out what we do best. As far as structure, we have Gary, our president, so me and Eric are owners. We fill the different roles, but we have a president that runs operations and I think we're about the 20. 21 or 22 full-time for a rate digital.
Speaker 2:And as far as employees because we do have two other agencies that focus on different niche areas we've got 36 people full-time. I think. We have about eight locally and a building here, headquarters in Virginia, and then the rest are remote. So we have three employees in California, we have eight in Florida, all around the Midwest, and so mostly remote company and that's worked out really well for us. We have a daily huddle every single morning at 9 am. If you're in California, that's 6 am and so when you come on board, hey, 6 am, you're gonna be able to do this or not. So we have a daily huddle every day. So, outside of that, we have Gary the president, and then we have head of SEO, head of advertising, head of content and that kind of stems out from there.
Speaker 1:We have a pretty big web team, so I can imagine that remote digital marketing positions can be isolating, so I'm glad to hear that you guys are doing some kind of a daily huddle. What are you doing to keep your people up to date on all of the changes that are happening in Google and in SEO at large? What do you pay attention to know when things are changing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we really, as a team, do that. So, from a Google perspective, we have Wyatt, who is up our SEO team. He's constantly keeping up to date, learning and things like that, more so than the people under him, although the people under him will post. We have Slack, so we have channels for SEO. We have a channel for every client and, as we notice things and learn things, we definitely are very big on sharing and having meetings and constant communication.
Speaker 2:So everyone on that team is doing their own research here and there and, honestly, if they're not, they're not really following our core values. Which passions one of them. If you're passionate about what you do, you're gonna learn more about it and continue to learn, and so we everyone contributes. So some from the content team like hey, by the way, this is a new thing, I just read. If I'm reading stuff in the morning, I'll post hey, this just came out, it looks like this change might be happening here. So we're all contributing and we're not. Side of that. We have, after our daily huddle with the whole team, which is quite a bit of folks, we break out. So there's an SEO huddle, there's a content huddle, there's a sales huddle, there's a web huddle. So what projects we got going on. And so, with that, everyone here is supposed to be learning training. Everyone gets a $1,000 training budget every year to use, so that's just part of the job.
Speaker 1:And I know that you're also operating in the HVAC space. Have you found that space easier or harder or just different than law firm marketing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's based. Our company's called Rival Digital Easier. As far as SEO and results and just everything, I don't know why. It's just simple. Law firms spend a lot of money right, and law firms have been in SEO for a long time and they write. Lawyers like to write, they can produce content, and so I feel these back owners are not doing any of that stuff.
Speaker 1:There's only so many different ways you can talk about how to fix an AC unit.
Speaker 2:Here's the problem. What I've seen is there's it's been not so good of work Like the websites and the SEO.
Speaker 2:They tend to have hired local or people that are just they're not niche in the industry and so for us to come in and be like we understand this and the team I have there the guy who worked at Neighborly and helped build Mosquito Joe and so we have people that understand that space on that team. When you come in and organize and your focus, it's actually as fairly easy as for us to get results, compared to what has been out there and then happens with law firms as well, as some times. But obviously the big firms have been around to displace them or to come in and help them be better. That's the difference.
Speaker 1:Results is gauged by what? Because and I'll tee this question up with I suspect you have the same frustration that many SEO companies have, which is I can make your website great, but when people call, if you suck in answering the phone, then I can't convert them into clients. So same thing for law. I have to imagine same thing for HVAC. Right, answer the phone, get the guy to the house on time and keep it under budget or at whatever the budget is. So, howard, what KPIs are you paying attention to most? Because you don't actually have control over conversion into clients.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a big one there. That's a gray area and it gets really difficult. But on the HVAC side we've actually tied into some of their systems a little bit better, which is, but they all use kind of the same system. But what we can see is, hey, you got chat leads, you got these leads and that they haven't followed up on. We can see that and say, hey, by the way, we sent these leads that came through our system and they haven't been touched. Now with law firms we can't see as much of that as it's harder for us to gauge it.
Speaker 2:And that's the conversation we have. Hey, we sent you all these calls, all these forms. And here's the biggest thing. You can't have a dashboard for a law firm or send a PDF every month. You have to have a conversation. You have to present what all happened and then say hey, brian, here's all the calls and all the forms. How was the month? How did it feel? Do you have more clients? Do these convert? Because if you don't have that conversation, you're just hoping everything's all great. And what I found out real quick. You can't say, hey, brian, I got you this many new clients. So they're like wait, no, you didn't. These didn't convert, this one was crap, this one was not the right fit, and so you have to have those conversations. How is it going there? Have you seen an increase since we started? Or let's track back these leads. Here's 10 right here. How many of those became clients? Right? And so the more we can sync up with the law firm and say, hey, can we get a report on that? Can you tell us if these converted?
Speaker 1:And then we now do a survey every month to every client. Are you having those conversations primarily with a lawyer, or with a marketing director, or even a fractional CMO?
Speaker 2:All of the above the smaller firms is usually right with the lawyer. We can get some bigger firms that the head lawyer will usually just be on these calls. But of course we have some firms that have marketing directors and we have outside CMOs and stuff like that might be on the calls. We typically don't only meet with them. We'd like to have the attorney there, but we have some cases where the attorney is just not involved at all. So whoever's going to have the information and the marketer is going to look more at the metrics or the owner's going to look at how much money am I making. So we get a gesture. Both the metrics are great but they're just. They're leading indicators but at the end of the day the owner wants to know how many new clients that I sign up. Where they quality. Is my average case going up?
Speaker 1:All right, I want to ask you about your managing partners podcast. So you're running a podcast along with Eric Olson, your partner, and you all are talking to the guys and girls that are running law firms, or is that only in a niche or is that across all subject matter areas?
Speaker 2:Sure, I appreciate that. Yeah, so the Managed Partners podcast we started probably almost three years ago and we've had about 300 managing partners on the show, which is awesome because I get to learn how they run their business, which I apply to my own business right.
Speaker 2:I don't think myself as a marketing agency as much as I do a business, and so that's a lot of the conversations around business. So we don't niche in any practice area. So we've had orders on from pretty much any practice area you can imagine. One's I've never heard of before international, so I've had folks on from around the world and so we really don't focus necessarily on tell me about personal injury law, brian, and how you do it. Well, it's almost exclusively on how do you run a business and help people with their injuries and how are you making sure that you're running a proper business to give them the best service possible.
Speaker 2:How are you marketing? How are you getting more clients? What's your culture like? How are you building your culture? What is your plans for the future? And so we more is more about that. So I'm looking for in that show, people like yourself. Your dad was on the show. I've been glass. Of course, people have a story. See people that came from hey. I started my firm in COVID and then now I'm sitting open my second office. And how did you do that? That's what I want to know.
Speaker 1:I like that because, at the end of the day, all of the business success ideas are really industry agnostic. Like it doesn't. What works in PI also works in criminal, also works in family, also works in HVAC, also works in operating a dentist office, right, the thing that the smartest business owners do is they rip off and duplicate things that they see in other industries. And you, and it's especially with legal, like, if you go out into the world and find a good customer service Hactic and you bring it to legal, it's like fire to a caveman, right. So good for you for getting out in front of other other business owners and not worrying about the nature, about it has to be digital or has to be SEO. What else do you pay attention to? For yourself, for business, education and personal growth?
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the things I'll add there is I've had a couple of competitors on my show like direct competitors, and we have a great conversation and I've been on their podcast and people like, why would you do that? There's plenty of business out there and my client might not be their client or ideal fit. So, again, that's another way to learn Talk to others, even if they're down the street. What are you doing with them? It's okay, maybe you don't get into too much detail, but there's a learning experience and all that stuff. The other thing is I read, listen to podcasts, ebooks, constantly learning from anyone I can. And I think, outside of that, the podcast has been just so helpful to talk to people one-on-one and I make notes like constantly. That's a great idea and they're my guests on my show. So that's just been for me one of the biggest things.
Speaker 2:And also that is our clients, our employees, my new president, gary, who's been with us for a while he's just become president Full of knowledge and experience. My business partner constantly is consuming and learning new stuff. We just learn from each other constantly. So I think, surrounding yourself with amazing people you're all the tribe, the group that you guys have or great legal marketing. Go out and hang out with people that have done it or haven't done it. Maybe you share something with them. But and then you remind yourself I don't know how many times I'll get talking about something and I'm like crap. I just told them a tip and I never even applied it to my own business. I know I should.
Speaker 1:Take your own advice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and sometimes that's hard to do, right, there's so many things coming at you. Yeah, if you can come back from a conference and apply one thing, then I'd say that's successful. I think just having those conversations resurfaces things that you should be doing, that you just didn't do.
Speaker 1:That's really why I started a podcast. Do people find it interesting? Yes, but does it give me permission and the capability to talk to people that are way smarter than I am? Also, yes, that's the unlock. Like all, right now you have a nationwide capability to talk to people and go to lunch or have coffee effectively with them and ask them all the questions about how they run their business, and then learn a little something in the meantime. So, kevin, I appreciate you coming on today. Where can people find out more about you and about Array?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I appreciate that very much and appreciate the conversation. You can go to thisisarraycom or araydigitalcom. I think we bought that.
Speaker 1:Finally, we're gonna pay us something before we got it.
Speaker 2:Or LinkedIn. I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn. I do a lot of posting there and follow Brian and a bunch of other folks, but that's just my name, kevin Daisy on everything is consistent on Instagram and stuff like that as well. Yeah, reach out. Happy to answer any questions, point your direction. If we're not a fit, we can. I can point to someone like this Awesome, I appreciate you coming on.
Speaker 1:We'll make sure we link to all that stuff in the show description Kevin, daisy, everybody.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Thank you, brian.
