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Regardless of your marketing methods, the majority of people who interact with your law firm’s website will not convert. What if there was a way to get an additional 40% of those people to reach out and contact your firm – without increasing your spend on traffic? We sit down with Ted DeBettencourt, co-founder of JuvoLeads to discuss the moves he’s been making to help law firms like yours do just that.

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Sometimes it’s easy to focus on big wins. But that’s what your competition is doing all day. Michael Meyer of Picture More Business goes over small tweaks that have made a difference with his legal clients, as well as going into the details of what you need to do in order to present a visual identity for attracting the right type of client with your legal marketing.

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Law firms today are leaving (literally) hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table from marketing activities they’re already doing. We sit down with Gary Falkowitz of Intake Conversion Experts to see how he’s helped recover hundreds of these cases and how you can apply this to your own firm.

The post CFP S1E3: Getting the Hidden Case Files from Your Existing Marketing with Gary Falkowitz appeared first on CaseFuel.

Imagine your firm 10 years from now. How much has it grown? For Michael Sullivan and Associates, the answer was 60 times. We sit down with Michael Bell of MSA for an in-the-trenches look for what that kind of growth looks like, and content marketing strategy that they’re using to continue to grow.

Note: Michael Bell sent us a correction – In the conversation he incorrectly referenced California SB 899 when in fact, it was California SB 863 that was passed in September 2012 that led to the tremendous opportunity discussed in the episode.

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After conducting hundreds of interviews with law firms from solo to large, we learned a lot about the mindset needed to grow a thriving practice. In this episode, learn the five mindsets that are critical for successful growth

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Fears of a robot-controlled future have existed since before the rise of computers, but we live in a time where science fiction is becoming reality. The advantages in data processing and pattern matching afforded by unlimited digital processing power allow artificial intelligence to use brute force to find optimal solutions to almost any challenge that can be represented in bits and bytes.

Some have found solace in problems ‘too complex’ for a computer to solve. One of these was the Chinese boardgame ‘Go’, with millions of potential options afforded by a complex ruleset and open board. But 10 years later, artificial intelligence was able to defeat 18-time world champion Lee Se-dol 100 games to 0, knocking down another domino in human dominance.

The company behind that artificial intelligence? Google.

On January 26^th I went to Google’s Chelsea office for an agency partner’s event run by their automation team. I was open minded but cautious. The last time I had tried out google automation was in 2015 and the results were not good.

In the mean time, some of our campaigns on platforms like facebook were achieving stellar results. Unlike adwords campaigns, which may decrease cost per lead by 10-20% over a year, facebook would often see first leads coming in at $50, get down to $30, and be at $15 by the end of a few months. My reasoning behind this was they had a superior algorithm with more data to process based on the hundreds of data points they had on likes, education and preferences for each social profile. Unfortunately, aside from some applications like estate planning it was not applicable for reactive legal work. I used to joke that no one likes ‘I just got hit by a car’ or ‘I’m divorcing my wife’ on facebook.

Caught between a rock and hard place, I had stuck by active account management with my team for legal clients for those years. But that was about to change.

In the same way that computers went from unable to beat human players to completely dominant within a few short years, the results for optimizing the game of digital ROI had changed since I last tried machine learning for my client campaigns. I was shocked to learn that 70 MILLION data points were being considered for every single search query that happened within the google interface.

The case studies were undeniable. Reduced cost per lead, scaling budgets while keeping costs down and dynamically testing creative were happening at very high levels. The key to this was a combination of more data points (like facebook had all these years) and the raw amount of data being collected across all advertisers.

I’m happy to say I’m a believer and we’re running preliminary tests across accounts in legal using google’s smart bidding. But what does that mean for clients?

First, the important thing to understand about machine learning is that it’s powerful but ‘dumb’. One of the doomsday scenarios in the futurist scene is called the paperclip maximizer. In this hypothetical apocalypse, a superintelligent AI with nanomnufacturing capabilities is set to optimize for paperclip production. With incorrect parameters, it starts manufacturing paperclips out of the factory, the foremen, and eventually the entire planet before building drones to mine asteroid fields and other solar systems until the entire universe is made of paperclips.

The application to digital marketing is to set your parameters correctly. If you’re optimizing for views to your contact page, google (or any machine learning platform) will get you more than you can handle. We’ve been manually optimizing for conversions at my agency for years, but one of the exciting applications of this new technology is to actually optimize for quality leads using a call grading system in tracking software like callrail.

The algorithm will ‘solve’ for maximizing whatever we want. So why not make it quality leads?

The caveat for this, especially at lower budget levels, is making sure the system has enough data. All things equal, the profile of what a good call looks like will be much better with 100 conversions to compare as opposed to 10. Essentially they’re creating a regression analysis (apologies for any flashbacks to high school statistics).

For that reason, we’re encouraging clients to record leads that are promising as opposed to closed retainers unless volume is very high. For comparison, the most powerful features of google’s machine learning within adwords start to take off at around 50 conversions per month.

There are also some changes in expectations to be made as well. My agency’s claim to fame of delivering leads within 72 hours based on heavily tested creative still holds true, but with machine learning in the picture the potential is there for this initial cost per lead to go down quickly and stay down. One caveat in this is the methods they use can only optimize for one variable. If we’re looking to maximize conversions for example, they might do this by getting higher cost per clicks in the searches where people convert. Or allow you to be in a lower position on the page for those that don’t. This isn’t cause for alarm as long as the important variable is selected for and will in fact deliver.

Google has made efforts to incorporate this into all levels of adwords with their rollout of the new interface. Many people in my position are worried for their livelihood being taken over by machines. I for one do not have cause for alarm.

Going back to the chess analogy, there has been an interesting trend since the initial victory of AI. Pioneered by none other than Garry Kasparov, a new sport called advanced chess. The players consist of team of human and AI known colloquially as a centaur, controlled by the human but harnessing the full power of AI to determine suggested options with their database of analysis. The best players can combine both to beat human or AI players individually, as well as other centaur teams.

This is the future of advertising as I see it. At the most competitive levels of adwords, it won’t be enough to set your account to solve for ROI by itself while ‘centaur’ teams are out there. And besides, with default options like search network with display select still available as defaults, I’m not convinced that most accounts won’t solve for ‘get the most money in google’s pocket’.

It’s an exciting time for advertisers and clients alike and those that can figure out the nuances will be able to make some spectacular gains while the rest of the market catches up.

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