Tara (00:51):
Welcome back to another episode of the Art of Estate Planning Podcast. It's your host, Tara Lucke. Today I want to riff a little bit about the marketing ideas I would implement if I was setting up a law firm from scratch.
(01:10):
So if you hate marketing, I actually think this episode is especially for you. I know it feels a bit like a dirty word in estate planning world and can be a little bit intimidating or you didn't get into law to be a marketer, but if you are running your own law firm or if you want to move into a partnership role, marketing is key. You can't avoid it. You have to make sure that you're getting enough work in the door to run your law firm. If you want to be made a partner or get promoted in a firm environment, you have to grow the pie. I got some really good advice back when I was at a law firm where they had 60 partners to one of my colleagues who had recently been made partner. He was only a year or so into the partnership and I was quite junior and he sort of said to me, "The reality is if you want them to give you a piece of the pie, you have to make the pie bigger. You have to at least cover your share and give the existing partnership a bit more as well." And that has always stuck with me.
(02:29):
So look, I am no marketing expert by any means. I have no formal training, but for the last eight years or so, I have been just learning on the fly a lot about marketing, particularly digital marketing, because that is the strategy we use at the Art of Estate Planning to grow our business. So I obviously have the art of estate planning. I would almost call it like a digital products business in the sense that we provide estate planning precedents, community through our TT Precedents Club and mentoring and online courses. But at the end of the day, we sell that through a digital platform. My husband also has a similar business teaching health professionals with shoulder pain. He has a PhD in shoulder pain.
(03:18):
So we have done a lot of experimenting with marketing, particularly even my audience is Australian lawyers. I only serve lawyers. My husband's business, he serves a lot of different allied health professionals. His audience is worldwide, not just Australian. So we've tried lots of different things. And I also obviously was a partner of a law firm a few year back about 10 years ago maybe now. So have been through that process as well. So I just wanted to sort of share not as an expert, as a marketing expert, there's plenty of those around, but if I was setting up an estate planning firm, how would I tackle that? I also just want to say before I dive in to my ideas on this, I do think it's worth working with a professional who knows what they're doing on this front if you're serious about your marketing.
(04:17):
There's obviously a lot of professionals in this space. Also, Caralee Fontanelli, she's been on the podcast recently. Her scalable law programme has a lot of resources to help you track and measure the results of your marketing efforts and set up systems and processes in your business. Firstly, so that you can actually have you and your team tracking the results and making informed decisions. And then also to systemize the marketing. Because when you're sitting there with no new matters coming in and it's been a quiet week or two, it's too late then to go and ramp up your marketing efforts. You really do need to take a systemized approach, have it as part of your regular activities in the business. And for me, the best way to do that is systemized. Make a commitment, have it that you... For instance, I release this podcast every week.
(05:18):
I don't release it when I feel like it. I have to be consistent about it. You tell me, but as the listeners, I think, and I feel like this for the podcast that I regularly listen to, knowing that it's coming out each week means that I think it's part of my routine. I think that I'm going to go listen to it. Tuesday nights when it's my night to cook dinner, one of my nights to cook dinner. And the big small talk podcast like a current affairs news podcast that I listen to comes out Tuesday afternoon. So every Tuesday I usually listen to that podcast while I'm prepping dinner. It's part of my routine. I don't know if that podcast came out sporadically, when would I listen to it? I don't know. It would have to be served up to me in the algorithm. So I don't love recording a podcast every week.
(06:09):
And in fact, I usually batch a couple at a time and record them. But I have it in my diary that I have to record X episodes once a month and usually in a particular week in the month so that it actually gets done. The other thing I would say is work to your strengths. So pick activities that you like. Why not? If you don't like doing it, it's going to be an absolute chore and you'll be dragging your heels. You won't meet the targets. You'll let yourself down and you'll break your promises to yourself. So pick something that you actually know that you're going to like and do. Don't set yourself up to fail. So for instance, I do not like tippy-tappy writing out a blog post or a article or a paper for a conference. I hate that. Every sort of paragraph is drawing teeth for me, but put a microphone in front of me and I will yap on all day about something.
(07:13):
So I have set up my marketing tools to focus on audio. So I've got the podcast, I've got the videos on social media that I do, and I've got a monthly video power hour. And what I also do is where I do need to write with email, and you guys know if you're on my mailing list, we send a lot of emails. I systemize that. So every now and then I sit down and we write a whole bunch and then I automate it so I don't have to write new emails all the time. So I think just pick something that will set you up for success. Now I think there's a few different aspects or approaches you can take to your marketing. There's the old school referral and networking. There's the new digital upwardly mobile online type approach. You can do all of them. You can just pick one or two that work for you.
(08:18):
I don't think you have to do everything. And in fact, when I started at the Art of Estate Planning, I layered things. So I just picked one thing and then every few months I built out a system to layer another element. And now eight years in, I've got the Art of Estate Planning Facebook group with over 3,000 estate planning lawyers, accountants, and financial advisors. We've got all these free lead magnets on our website. We've got this podcast. We've got cheat sheets. I've got a social media presence. We speak at conferences. It was all sort of laid in. We do paid ads, but I didn't start out like that. I just sort of chipped away and every six months or something we created something new. And then now I've ate Yearsy and I've got this big marketing machine ecosystem that is almost on autopilot that does a lot of the work for me.
(09:19):
Fortunately, you can't record a podcast episode for me, but that's okay. I love sitting down and doing this brain dump. Hopefully you enjoy listening to it as much as I like recording. So should we start old school? I think let's start with the old school way. So for estate planning, having your work provided to you through referral channels, French Kiss, it's beautiful. That's a really great way to run your business if you can get it up and running like that. So the best I think referral sources would be accountants and financial advisors. So they have risk that they need to manage through their statements of advice and their general risk protocol to tick off that their clients have been encouraged to get their estate plan in place. So for a lot of them, they're highly motivated to actually get the estate planning sorted for their clients, especially because they put all this work into writing insurance policies and structuring the wealth in a particular way.
(10:23):
They don't want a person's death to unwind all the work that they've been doing. So there's a lot of financial advisors and accountants out there who are passionate about estate planning in the same way that we are. And they're looking for a law firm they can refer to where they know their clients are going to be treated well, they understand the pricing structure, and they just know we can get a really good synergy going where we understand the process, the clients will have a great experience and it's win-win. So fostering those types of referral relationships is a really good way to support and grow your business. And depending on the size of those referral partners, you might only need a few of them as well depending on the volume of referrals they send through. You might have an arrangement with them where you work through the pricing and find a pricing point that is mutually beneficial where they know they can tell their clients what it's going to be.
(11:29):
They can save up for it and put it into the budget. You are comfortable to deliver the service for that price. There might be things about the onboarding or the client intake that they do a bit more work. They've already done a statement of advice and have all of that background material so they can really serve it up to you on a platter. They might expect a discount for that, but you might be happy to give it because it does save you a lot of the fact-finding. So it can be a really strategic approach if you can get some of those referral relationships going. It's obviously also highly risky if you are not diversified because if something happens and you lose that referral relationship, you have a big pipeline just cut off immediately. So how do you build up these referral relationships? The old days, people just used to play golf together I think.
(12:23):
But you could do things like hold events for their clients or the local professionals, go to the local professional networking, go to industry networking events, do things that add value and make those referrals' lives easier for them. So create resources that you can give to them to say, "Hey, do you want something easy to explain to your clients what a testamentary trust is? I've made this video that you can send to them or here's a flyer you can send to them." Just get yourself out there, organise coffee catch-ups. When I moved to the Gold Coast and I was still a partner of the estate planning law firm, I used to buzz up and down that Gold Coast. I'd have three or four coffee meetings a day just getting my face out there, trying to find professionals like - minded, let them know how we work. It's a very high intensive approach, but it does work and you will build those connections.
(13:29):
And the great thing about the referral relationships as well is often once you are in, and it can be a lot of work to prove to an accountant or financial advisor that you are worthy of seeing their clients. A lot of them are very protective. They have invested a lot of time and they're very protective of their clients. So they don't just introduce any professional advisor to them. But once you're in, they will actually do a lot of the selling for you because those clients have been pre-vetted. They understand the importance of estate planning. Their financial advisors told them you have to pay for this. It's literally delivered to you on a silver platter. So that can be one, the old school referral arrangement. What about the more modern approach? Digital marketing. So there's lots of different types of digital marketing. You can start with your social media, podcasts, SEO, the new AI generative, search outputs, YouTube, all of those types of things.
(14:39):
I started... Well, I'll sort of tell you how I started. So they have marketing terminology called top of funnel and bottom of funnel. So obviously visualise a funnel. And the idea is to bring lots of people into your world, raise awareness about you. And as they get to know you, they move through the funnel till you ultimately get to the point where they know you like you trust you enough and you can ask for a sale. So something like social media is a top of funnel thing where they may be suggested, you might be suggested to them through the algorithm or someone might share something through your content and then they start following you and then they get to become familiar, build that parasocial relationship with you. So there's things like obviously podcasts, YouTube, social media, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Facebook groups, showing up in communities, that kind of thing.
(15:41):
So that can be a good idea. Again, if you don't like social media, if you're not actively on social media all the time I don't do anything on TikTok because I don't have a TikTok account because I already spend too much time on Instagram. I don't need TikTok taking over my life any further. So I don't worry about TikTok. It has to be, but I'm always on Instagram. I'm always messaging and connecting with our TT Precedent Club members and our community on there. So it makes sense for me to be posting on there as well. I can manage the comments and it's not hard for me to be on Instagram and Facebook because I sort of intuitively spend time on there every day anyway. One thing that is worth knowing about though, you can't just do your socials and stop there because you do not own your social media account.
(16:35):
So you have to get those eyeballs from your social media into something that you own like an asset. So you need to have a really good website sitting behind that and ideally something that gets them to hand over an email address. So email is the most obvious thing where you can start communicating with people in a channel that you've owned. I mean, obviously you could have a meeting with them, but in terms of scaling it one to many email is the clear front runner. Sometimes you can have substacks and blogs, posts, subscriber things that is also, I probably don't think people are doing that in an estate planning context, but in other sort of industries, yep, that totally works. So you have to usually give away something for free in order for someone to exchange their email address. So usually that's called a lead magnet.
(17:44):
I've got a few, it's like conversation template or a checklist or an ebook, just a PDF of something that people get for free if they put their email address in. So name, email address, and then you email it to them and then they go on your database. So it's very important you actually do something with that content. So a few of our TT Precedents Club members have a really beautiful example of this. They've got a guide about testamentary trust, like an ebook on testamentary trust or an email series about testamentary trust. Or they've got a ebook guide on how to talk to children about death that includes appropriate conversation starters, books about death that you can... Things like that. People go, "Oh, that's actually really handy. I'm really happy to hand over my email address so that I can get this thing." And then you need a customer relationship management system.
(18:55):
I'm pretty sure that's what CRM stands for. And it might be Smokeball or Clio or Action Step that you can do that, or it might be a different email management system that you just use for front-end marketing where you can track all the people who give you their name and email adress, and then you can subsequently communicate with them in a way that gets them to know, like and trust you because that's really what you need to do. You need to build up your rapport with them so that they eventually understand how you can help them and decide that you are the right person for them. And the funny thing about estate planning, it's not the way that we can help them or the fact that people need us is not as obvious as some other types of industries. They don't necessarily seek us out.
(19:53):
I'm like, "I want a new pair of shoes that look like this, so I'm going to go looking around for the shoes and then I'll buy the shoes." For estate planning, sometimes people go, "I need a will. I'm sick of stressing about not having a will." But a lot of the time they don't realise that they really need one. They think it's for older people. They might have a basic will and they need a testamentary trust will, and they don't know that it's even a thing. So we often have to educate our prospective customers, especially when you are doing testamentary trust and you're selling them for a high ticket multi-thousand dollar price, you have to explain the value of what you are offering to them so that they want to buy it. So I think some of the best ways to do that is through an automated email sequence.
(20:44):
So that's where you sit down and you write out your emails. And this is what I would do. I would write out an email sequence. It might be one email a week for six months or something. So 20 emails or 24 emails that I would sit down and write and maybe not all at once, but get down and get stuck in, maybe use some AI to help if it doesn't flow naturally. But can I just say the more that it is you speaking from the heart, I think the higher conversion you're going to get. Jackie from Sun Will Estates on the Sunshine Coast writes the most beautiful newsletters and you can tell that maybe she's been on one of her wellness walks and she's come up with the idea. She's telling stories about her family, her own experiences, very heart-led. And it's very compelling because you know from the way she's writing what your experience with Jackie is going to be like.
(21:48):
So I think that personal element in there is important. If you can get AI to do that for you, beautiful, don't just dump out whatever AI produces and put it in there because it probably won't work. People want to connect with a person. The whole point of this is to get prospective clients to know and trust you so that when it comes to doing their will, their question is, "Oh, am I ready to do my will now?" Not, "Who am I going to choose to do my will?" They're like, "When the timing is right, I know that Jackie is going to do my will." So the other thing I like is these automated sequences. So you sort of build out the experience, you start off by not everyone gets the same email on the same day. They get the same email on their day one.
(22:43):
So they decide to download your lead magnet, your ebook, your guide, whatever it is. And then that's when they get the email and it's like, "Hello, welcome to my law firm. This is what I'm about. This is who I am." And then a week later, maybe some stories about client transformations or risks that people don't know about or myths or things that make people go, "Oh, I've got that too. I have a problem I didn't know about, " type of thing. And then a week later they get another email and they get to know you and how you help people and start to build the case that, oh, they might actually have a problem they need solving. And the beautiful thing about this is you do it one time and it just runs on its own. It's an automated funnel that is set up so you are not worrying about sending out emails every day and who's downloaded what.
(23:41):
The technology does it on its own. You sat down in a beautiful frame of mind and crafted the message that you want to send to your clients and then they just get it automated. So it's a marketing machine that works while you're sleeping. If you are off sick, because the kids, everyone's sick for a week, it just does its thing. The new leads keep coming in. Also, a big thing about us, if you are like me, it's hard to ask for the sale. You've got to be in a pretty confident frame of mind to go, "Today's the day that you need to sign up and join." So especially when it's one-to-one and you'll know who you're talking to. So if you sort of sit down and you're like, "Today I'm writing my marketing sequence," and you ask for the sale there in a low pressure way, then while you are sleeping, your marketing system is asking for the sale because you've got to keep asking.
(24:41):
You've just got to keep asking over and over. And the other thing as well is you think you talk about your topic, estate planning or testamentary trusts or whatever you are talking about over and over and that everyone is sick of hearing it. And of course, how could they not know? People don't pay attention. They need to hear something seven times from seven different touch points. I think I just talk about the tax benefits of testamentary trust and the tax savings over and over. I've been banging on about it till I'm blue in the face for years. And suddenly because they're all the rage after the budget, everyone's like, "Oh, well, how do they work?" And I'm like, "Are you kidding? Nothing's changed. I've been talking about this for years. No one's been paying attention. You're all just go, " Tara's talking about tax and trust again, so what a snooze.
(25:37):
"You have to just keep repeating your message over and over and over. So if you can automate that, because we get sick of ourselves, if you can automate that, then it's going to happen rather than relying on you in whatever's going on in your life, in your frame of mind. If you've got busy matters, if your personal life is blowing up and you just don't have the energy for it, if you automate it, it will work. Hi, it's Tara here. You might've heard us mention our TT Precedents Club membership a few times throughout the episodes now. So I wanted to share a little bit more information about what it is and how it works. The TT Precedents Club is a membership for Australian lawyers. Whether you are an estate planning specialist, an early career lawyer, or you're experienced in another legal area and you want to add estate planning as a compliment to your existing services, it doesn't matter as long as you're curious about estate planning and keen to learn and share in our estate planning mastermind group.
(26:40):
Every Thursday we meet at 1:00 Australian Standard Time or 2:00 Daylight Savings Times and we have a live Zoom call where our members submit their questions in advance. We can workshop your client scenarios, research your tricky questions, or even draught clauses for you. It will make you feel so supported like you work in a firm with 50 estate planning partners who were all there to share their collective knowledge with you. There is no reason to feel intimidated. Our community is so supportive, friendly, and there are no silly questions ever. Not only do you get access to our awesome weekly hot seat calls, but we have an exclusive Facebook group too. And if you thought our free art of estate planning group was amazing, then this Facebook group is on steroids. You also get discounts to the Art of Estate Planning Precedence, a huge back catalogue of training, in - person networking meetups, a will drafting clause library, and tonnes of other practical resources to help you in your estate planning practise.
(27:46):
Your membership is just month to month so you can join for as little as one month and then cancel anytime. There is no lock-in period or minimum join time and it is super flexible. So join me and over 200 lawyers in Australia's best estate planning community. So whatever it is for your top of funnel socials, YouTube, podcasts, you've got to get them into a system where you own it like your emails so you are in control. I had my social media account deleted. When was that? Six years ago, maybe seven years ago. Instagram just deleted it and I never got it back. I had to start from scratch. And it was really annoying, but it wasn't the end of the world because I had everyone who connected with me was on my email list. So I could still reach out to them. I could still make sales through the email list.
(28:42):
And in fact, while I'm recording this, it's actually 30 June and we are having some end of financial year promotions. And I am only talking about that on email. I have not mentioned it on any of my social media channels. I'm only doing, because I don't sell from my socials. I tell people about what I was offering, but I don't really get sales from my social media. It's the email list where people buy from. So that is the same with an estate planning law firm. The other thing I do is paid ads. So I have an incredible agency in Brisbane. It's a women-led agency, all female team. I love working with them. They're called Oh My Digital. We've been working I think for nearly two years maybe, maybe longer. And they're incredible and they run my paid ads for me. Now, if I was doing a startup as a law firm, I'd probably go and do a paid ads online course with someone like the Digital Picnic who are also a Australian agency, also really cool.
(29:55):
And they do sort of more accessible courses and education out As well as do that agency management and I would possibly learn to do it myself. But paid advertising, whether it is to ask for a sale, get someone to book in a discovery call with you, all of that, I would do paid ads for my area. Now behind all of this, and we have talked about it from some time, but I want to mention it again. It's really important that you know who your ideal client is, your customer avatar. Who are you talking to when you're writing your emails, creating your social media content, targeting your paid ads? You have to sort of narrow it down to one person or a handful of people that you know. Like for me, my ideal client is a law firm owner who is a woman. She's got young kids.
(30:56):
She has started her own firm. She's either a sole practitioner or a boutique firm owner, probably mid thirties to mid - 40s who wants to have more time and freedom, loves estate planning or wants to learn estate planning and wants to offer testamentary trust and do fixed pricing. Now I have clients who definitely fall outside of that. We serve 700 law firms around Australia. So there's people who work with me and use our resources who are outside of that. But if I talk to my customer avatar, then it's really easy for me to get my message right and not get lost in trying to do everything for everybody. And there'll be a lot of people who that still resonates. Even though I wasn't crafting it exactly for them, that message still resonates for them and I can still absolutely serve them. So that's really important. And then you can start asking questions like, where do they hang out?
(32:01):
Are they on Instagram? Are they on TikTok? I see a lot of lawyers putting a lot of energy posting in LinkedIn and that is curious to me. I wonder how that works for them. Definitely I think it works if your strategy is to pick up referrals with accountants and financial advisors because I think they're on there as well. But if you are trying to get a busy mom and dad client with kids under 10 to do their testamentary trust will, I don't think they're hanging out on LinkedIn. They're not connecting with you. So you are just like, it's great content you might be creating on LinkedIn, but your ideal client is not seeing it and it's not giving you any traction. And that's where it comes back to, well, you have to actually be able to track and measure and look at the data of the results to check, is this effort actually giving me a result?
(33:01):
And if you are just putting all this effort into marketing to other lawyers and you're all patting each other on the back, I mean, hey, I love that. I love watching it. I love benefiting from all those posts so don't stop necessarily, but what's the point of it? Are you getting clients or not? So knowing who your customer avatar is and what your strategy is just helps crystallise some of that and go, this isn't where my ideal client is hanging out, so I can post on there, but I'm not going to do it thinking it's my main marketing strategy. The same with being a guest speaker on podcasts. I get asked all the time and I'm so honoured that people think of me to be a guest on their podcast to talk about estate planning. And I have to say, who's your audience? Because if your audience is mom and dad clients, I'm not the right person because that is not my audience and it's not a win-win.
(34:01):
I don't want members of the general public contacting me to ask me to do their wills because then I just have to refer them on and it creates more work for me and my admin team and it wastes their time. My client is law firm owners. So I'm actually much better off asking one of our TT Precedents Club members if they want to take that guest spot instead of me because then it's win-win. The clients can get to know that lawyer, the lawyer can share what they do and they can connect and actually work together. Whereas if it's me, I'm like, well, I can do a song and dance about estate planning on your podcast, but your clients are not going to have a direct next step or they might have a confusing next step, which is reaching out to me. So same kind of thing.
(34:52):
I think being a podcast guest speaker, great profiling, but make sure the audience is the same. A lot of lawyers also put so much effort into presentations and speaking at conferences. And again, if you love doing that, go for gold. But if your ideal client's not there, if your ideal client is not reading your technical articles in journals, then it's really just an ego activity, which is again, great profiling. If your ideal client is an accountant and they're going to read that, perfect, go for it. But if it's a mom and dad, you got to show up where the mom and dads are. So things like radio, billboards, sponsoring local competitions, all of that can be excellent as well if that's where your ideal client is. Again, keep coming back to Caralee Fontanelli and her scalable law programme, find a way to have a system to track that.
(35:52):
So on every client who reaches out, can you have your receptionist or your intake form be like, "How did you hear from us?" So that you can track that and then sort of see actually that radio ad, we spent a thousand dollars on it and we got 10 leads. Is that a good return on investment or not? So you're not just running on vibes. The same with... Oh, actually this is full circle. So I was mentioning my paid ads and my marketing agency. So they have set up for me Google Analytics and obviously as part of their ads, they track which ads are working. And we have a combined strategy where we focus on just getting people onto my mailing list with a freebie. And then we know the email sequence, nurtures them and they'll eventually buy. And then we also go straight to asking for the sale on the ads and we can see which one works better.
(36:51):
Do people need more nurturing and handholding and learning about me and our resources before they're ready to buy or are they just ready to buy as soon as they see it? If you're selling shoes, can you tell I buy shoes off Instagram all the time? If you're selling shoes, the shoe sells itself. You're like, "Ooh, I got an ad for this pair of shoes. I love them. Buy it. " It's not quite the same for an estate planning precedent. You have to sort of educate them on why their estate planning precedent might have been out of date or have some deficiencies and what they get out of investing in new precedents and educate them. And estate planning is kind of the same. So I'd be looking, I probably, you could do some hot tugging, like what your kids do if you didn't come home kind of stuff or get people to book an inquiry form and discovery meeting, that kind of thing.
(37:54):
Or you can just be like, "We've got a really good lead magnet about who to choose as the guardians for your kids or who to choose as your executives. Head that over and then we'll nurture you. " And you can do that with the social ads as well. And then SEO comes into it too. So that's search engine optimization. There's the old Google and now the new AI sort of results. And particularly I think if you are working in a local area and they're like Estate Planning Bunderberg, that's where I live. If you are building up your content through your website to be like, "I'm the lead estate planning person in Bundaberg," then that could really work for you as well. Again, a very highly data-driven strategy. I think choosing a strategy, whether you are old school or new school that aligns with your goals.
(38:50):
I don't like leaving my house. I am a big homebody. I have also had two little kids. Okay. I don't know when I can stop dining out on that because my youngest is over three now. I was like, can you still be like, "I've got a baby." He's definitely still a handful for sure. But I don't want to be getting up early to go to networking breakfast. I need to be home at five o'clock because we have dinner at 5:30 and I like being home for dinner. I've got to pick the kids up. I don't want to be going to networking drinks. I don't want to be travelling for conferences and away for days at a time. So for me, the digital process is a no-brainer. So I do 99% online digital stuff, and I can do that from the comfort of my office at home.
(39:47):
I also like it because, and if you've listened to some of my episodes, I really like getting banged for my buck when it comes to my effort, especially because I work part-time. So a lot of the social stuff, you do it once and then it's like a marketing asset that you can keep reusing your email sequence. Some of the emails on my email sequence, I wrote them three years ago. Now obviously when things change, you have to update them, but a lot doesn't change. Or I check in maybe once a year, I subscribe myself to my email sequence and I go, "Oh yeah, I might update that or whatever." But it's a good return on investment for that effort. Same with the socials and especially if you find that people come in and then they get their will done and they leave your social following, you can keep recycling your content.
(40:37):
If you made a banger of a post, post it every three months, every six months.Make that evergreen content so that you don't have to keep thinking of a new post every day, schedule it all in advance. My VA schedules my social media a year in advance. In January when it's quiet, she schedules all my posts. And now I jump into our scheduler every month and I just check in and I'm like, "Oh, I was actually really inspired this month." Or May and June when we had the federal budget potential changes to testamentary trust. I made a lot of new content. So all the stuff we had pre-scheduled just got paused, put back to draught and I posted the new stuff. But I'm going on holidays next week, having a week off at staycation with my kids and I don't want to have to think about what to post.
(41:32):
Posts are still going out. It's been pre-scheduled. It's evergreen content. So that's what I'm talking about, systems that just make it happen when you don't want to show up and do it yourself. You've got clients to actually serve, but at the same time, the marketing has to happen. You don't have a business without new clients constantly coming in the door. So if you are an employee and you're thinking about setting up your own firm, this is definitely something that you have to turn your mind to. If you are running your own firm and you feel like you are always stressed about finding new clients or how much work is coming in the door, building out your systems, tracking your data, getting things working on autopilot could really help with that as well. So that's a bit of a brain dump. It's kind of the way that I would approach it if I was setting up a law firm.
(42:33):
So I would definitely go pretty much what I'm doing now, like social media, email sequence, maybe a podcast, maybe not, YouTube videos, and I'd go hard on the SEO and paid ads as well. And then I'd probably make some connections in my local area with some referrals. So I'd probably do a bit of both, but definitely more on the online. But that suits me. I don't mind having my face on video. I'm happy to do a little video on my iPhone. If that is going to ruin your day having to do something like that, don't put any pressure on yourself to do it. Do something that works for you. Write blog posts that you think will get good SEO traction. And can I just say don't be afraid to work with specialists in this area as well. It is hard, especially if you're a brand new startup.
(43:27):
You might have to do some things yourself and it definitely helps to know how to do it yourself so you know that the contractors you're working with are doing a good job, that you can give them the right instructions and help assess what's working. But there'll be a point when you are on the tools doing your best, shining in your estate planning meeting and delivery and you can't do it all. So work with contractors, especially things like social media, content creation, SEO. There's great agencies. If you can't afford to start with an agency in Australia, then you can also go offshore. I have through Upwork a incredible lady who helps me convert my podcast episodes into written blog posts that are SEO optimised. I am just never going to do that myself. And to be fair, I asked my ads agency in Brisbane to do it for me and they said no, that's not what they do.
(44:29):
So I've found somebody in the Philippines who can do it for me and that's made a huge difference and I don't have the skills for it. I don't have the interest in it. I don't even like editing the blog posts. It's my words because it's my podcast and she's just getting the transcript and turning it into an article. I don't even like editing and reviewing those, but obviously I have to because it's me, but we have to get it done. She keeps me accountable. It's one of my goals. It's made a big difference. So there's lots of different ways that you can approach this. Get the help that you need. Use AI if you need to, if that works for you. But yeah, hopefully that's helpful in terms of some marketing ideas. Again, I'm not a marketing expert. Connect with the experts if you want advice, but this is just a bit of a brain dump about how I would aproach it.
(45:24):
Hope that was interesting and something a litle bit different from our technical estate planning topic. Thank you so much for tuning in.
